In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Cor. 12.27)
In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul expounds the principle of interdependence that is a hallmark of life in the communion of Christ. This is a theme that is currently being taken up, in a very public way, by the Anglican Communion – the worldwide communion of churches of which the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Diocese of Dallas (and therefore Holy Cross, and therefore you and I) are members.
On Sundays before mass here at Holy Cross, in the parish hall, we are looking at the text of the recently-released Anglican Covenant, which attempts to enunciate in a concrete way some the principles of interdependence to which St. Paul speaks throughout his epistles, and particularly in 1 Corinthians, as we have heard today. Anglicans have not done a particularly good job of living-out these principles in recent years, and our very public – and very scandalous – divisions and lawsuits are evidence of that failure.
The church at Corinth, in Paul’s day, suffered from divisions and conflict too, and therefore Paul’s letters to the Corinthians make particularly helpful reading for us. In the opening verses of the section of 1 Corinthians we heard today, Paul reminds us of the objective unity that we share in the Body of Christ: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are ONE body, so it is with Christ. For by ONE Spirit we were all baptized into ONE body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and all were made to drink of ONE Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12.12-13)
The unity of the one Catholic Church – and our “commUNION” in that Body – has its source in the inner life of God. As we say in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in ONE God…” And this solitary fact is what separated the earliest Christians, and our elder brothers in faith, the Jews, from the majority of the world’s peoples, who believed in many gods. Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians Paul makes this point more explicitly: “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” (1 Cor. 8.6) We have our very being – our existence – only from and in the one God. And our calling, our destiny, our salvation, consists in our emergent conformity to the likeness of God in this and every other respect – a conformity that is God’s gift to us through the outpouring of the one Holy Spirit of God.
The very first paragraph of the Anglican Covenant makes this point explicitly, and points out that this emergent conformity to the likeness of the one God is not an abstraction. It takes concrete and tangible form in the life of the Church. Our interdependence in the communion of the Church is therefore not something coincidental; it is not merely a pleasant byproduct of being a Christian, something that just happens, expressing itself in an ability to get along with one another. It is rather a discipline, something we must work-at as individuals and groups within the one Body. It is a task that is not always pleasant, but requires humility, patience, longsuffering, forbearance, and a willingness now always to get one’s own way. But this work is important because it is the only way by which we approach salvation itself – the beatific communion that is nothing less and nothing other than the inner life of God himself.
The Anglican Covenant, drawing, among other things, on 1 Corinthians, puts it this way:
God has called us into communion in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1.9). This communion has been “revealed to us” by the Son as being the very divine life of God the Trinity…. St John makes it clear that the communion of life in the Church participates in the communion which is the divine life itself, the life of the Trinity. This life is not a reality remote from us, but one that has been “seen” and “testified to” by the apostles and their followers: “for in the communion of the Church we share in the divine life”[1]. This life of the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shapes and displays itself through the very existence and ordering of the Church.
Therefore, to return to the biotic metaphor St. Paul uses in today’s epistle: no part of the body can say to another, “I have no need of you.” (1 Cor. 12.21) To do so is to turn away from the only way to the everlasting life that is the one God’s proper self-possession, and his gift to us in his one Son, Jesus Christ.
After having said that our interdependence in the communion Christ’s Body is no mere abstraction, it begins to sound rather abstract. So what does it mean, in concrete terms? It means self-emptying humility – and so it means, again, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who emptied himself in great humility, and empowers us to do the same. Again concretely, this means that we must be willing to forsake anything and everything for the sake of Jesus and the communion that is ours in him. As he himself has said, “whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14.33)
It is important to say that when the Lord says that we must renounce “all” things, he means just that. We must be willing to leave everything to follow him to the communion of divine life that is our inheritance in him. This means, first of all, that we must renounce sin. But the point is that any created thing may become sin if we allow it to become an impediment to our communion in Christ. At every level of our life together, we must be willing to abandon things we hold dear – possessions and even relationships, and particularly our opinions and agendas – for the sake of our divine calling to communion in Christ.
It was the Corinthians’ refusal to do this that earned them a very stern rebuke from St. Paul with respect to their presuming to approach the blessed sacrament– the source and summit of our communion in Christ – in a state of selfish alienation from one another. Paul says, “Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks WITHOUT DISCERNING THE BODY eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another…” (1 Cor. 11.28ff)
The do-it-yourself culture of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism on which America feeds, runs absolutely counter to the teaching of the Gospel on this point (and many others). We will be saved TOGETHER, or we will not be saved. And the culture of American self-sufficiency manifests itself under pious, religious guises as well: in the American tendency to “church shop” – to look for a community of faith that meshes with our own opinions and agendas or aesthetic sensibilities; or as in the case the Episcopal Church generally, to cling more tenaciously to our own understanding of justice (or this or that) than we cling to the brothers and sisters to whom God has called us into communion. But let us be clear: there is no justice apart from communion; there is no peace apart from communion; there is no goodness apart from communion; there is no SALVATION apart from communion – because all of these things come to us by, with, and in Jesus Christ alone, because they belong properly and only to him who has received them from his Father.
In the communion of God’s inner-life, bestowed on us in Jesus Christ, and made living and active by the power of the Holy Spirit, we learn the difficult lesson that communion is a discipline of love, and that, as St. Paul says, “love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor. 13.4ff) And so must we, for the sake of love, and so for the sake of our communion.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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