"Holding Together: Bodies"

 The First United Presbyterian Church of Loveland

“Holding Together: Bodies”

Rev. Amy Morgan

January 31, 2021

1 Corinthians 12:12-27

12 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. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. 14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.

 15 If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?

 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.

 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be?

 20 As it is, there are many members, yet one body.

 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." 22 On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24 whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, 25 that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.

 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. 27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches / Had bellies with stars. / The Plain-Belly Sneetches / Had none upon thars.”

In 1953, Theodor Seuss Geisel published a children’s story about an imaginary race of silly creatures obsessed with their bodies. In “The Sneetches,” bodies determined social status and restricted movement and activity within the community. Some bodies were shamed while others were worshipped. 

Seuss’ message, though disguised as fiction, could not be missed. The story was published in the midst of a society obsessed with bodies. Contraceptives had just been developed, giving women a level of control over their physical reproduction they had never known, and Alfred Kinsey published his study on female sexual behavior. The Korean War was raging, subjecting the bodies of American soldiers to the atrocities of that conflict. The advent of color television invited a new level of scrutiny of human bodies. Jim Crow laws governed the bodies of black Americans, even as Hank Aaron’s baseball career began and Brown vs. Board of Education started making its way through the court system. The polio vaccine was slowly diminishing the terror that disease inflicted on children’s bodies, and James Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of human DNA, a discovery that would eventually lead to scientific proof that there is virtually no genetic difference between Star-Belly Sneetches and Plain-Belly Sneetches. 

New Testament scholar Ray Pickett asserts that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Christians “can be read from beginning to end as concerned primarily with what individuals do in their bodies and how it affects the social body.” Paul addresses concerns in the Corinthian church regarding what to put in their bodies, what to wear on their bodies, sexual morality, the body as God’s temple, and the final resurrection of the body. The church in Corinth had attempted to divide themselves by the stars in their crowns based on spiritual gifts, and Paul employs the metaphor of the body to address this division within Christ’s corporate body.  

The metaphor of the body was not unique to Paul and would have been familiar to the Corinthians. This metaphor was employed liberally in Greco-Roman society and politics. Body metaphors encouraged unity, but only within the hierarchical structures of society. The head was regarded as better than the feet. Parts of the body that were cleaner were more honorable than those that collected grime. 

Paul’s imagery in this letter subverts the well-known body metaphor by insisting all members of the body are essential, honorable, worthy of care, and even that some deserve special attention because they are not well-respected. Moreover, Paul insists that his body imagery is not a social construct but of divine design. God has arranged the Body of Christ in a way that is unique and distinctive. It is a body that lives and moves and behaves differently than the body politic of Greco-Roman society. And it does so with sacred purpose. 

Author Barbara Brown Taylor insists that “Matter matters to God…God cares about your nostrils…and the body makes theologians of us all.” What we do in our bodies, how we perceive our bodies and the bodies of others, impacts our understanding of God and affects the metaphorical body of the community. Paul understood this when he used the metaphor of the body to address conflicts within the Corinthian church, conflicts that are no less prevalent today. 

If we imagine that divisions within the body do not affect our church, we are not paying attention. Paul addresses those in the church who disregard the gifts of others, and people who devalue their own gifts. There are plenty of us who think we are too inexperienced to lead or too old to be useful. Some of us imagine we are too busy to devote time to church activities or that our financial gift is too small to make a difference. This disregard for our own gifts makes the body suffer just as much as devaluing the gifts of others. 

In that department, we may soon find ourselves feeling that those who aren’t vaccinated don’t have as much to offer the church body, or those who attend in-person are more useful than those who worship with us online. Perhaps we already discount the gifts of those with physical disabilities or mental illness. We place heavy emphasis on new members and perhaps forget about the contributions of those who have been a part of our church family for a long while. There is often talk about the desire to attract younger families to the church, which can sound dismissive of the older adults who form the backbone of this congregation. The church body, like the culture around us, is guilty of elevating some parts of the body and devaluing others. 

Our social body is shaped by the dismissal of some bodies and elevation of others, by the determination of which bodies matter, or at least which bodies matter more. Some bodies have rights that others do not. Some parts are honored and others are disregarded. Black and brown bodies, female bodies, transgender bodies, gay and lesbian bodies, have been dishonored, often in the name of the Savior Paul proclaims. The bodies of laborers, soldiers, and prisoners, have been disrespected and taken for granted. Bodies with disabilities and bodies without homes to live in, bodies suffering from mental illness and bodies holding trauma are dismissed and overlooked. 

And much of this dis-ease in our social body stems from what we do in our individual bodies and how it effects the social body. 

What we put in our bodies today, in the way of food, depends on a complex matrix of labor and production, some of it sustainable and fair, and some of it relying on the oppression of other bodies. What we put in our bodies effects other bodies more than we know. The same goes for what we wear on our bodies. 

The battle over abortion and reproductive rights has been, more or less, couched in terms of murder vs. personal sovereignty. These mutually exclusive claims have done little over the last four decades to care for any of the bodies involved and have reduced our body politic into divisive, single-issue loyalty and intransigence. What if, instead, we viewed this issue in terms of choices men make with their bodies, the choices women make with their bodies, and the impact these choices have, not only on unborn fetuses but on the larger social body - families and neighborhoods, educational systems and judicial systems, medical systems and economic systems? What if, instead of arguing about who is right and who has rights, we showed concern for all members of the body, and maybe showed special concern for those most disadvantaged members? I can’t say what the policy outcomes might be, or even should be, but at least we could work as one body for the health of the whole body instead of tearing the body apart. 

At no time in my life has this idea of individual bodies effecting the social body become more apparent than during this pandemic. Individual rights concerning wearing masks, social distancing, and vaccination may, in fact, be individual rights under our laws. But they also have an impact on other bodies, especially on the most vulnerable members of our social body. The suffering of those vulnerable members, Paul insists, causes all of us to suffer. And so, if we must take special care to show concern for those members, it is to the benefit of us all. 

In working with folks who have a variety of disabilities or social vulnerabilities, I’ve often heard the refrain, “Oh don’t go through all that trouble just for me.” And I have to explain that it is never “just for them” that we make accommodations to be more inclusive. 

When I would take my son, Dean, to class with me during my last semester of seminary, I was eternally grateful for the accommodations made to the campus for those with mobility impairment. While my legs and feet worked just fine, the ramps and elevators added on, at great cost, I’m sure, to ancient buildings, enabled me to get a stroller from the dining hall to my classrooms. 

When the church I served in Michigan transformed all 19 of its bathrooms into non-gendered facilities, our society was going through the debate about which bathrooms transgender folx should be allowed to use. While I hope the changes to our church were helpful to the few transgender individuals who used them, I loved that I could use any bathroom nearby and that it was a private facility. I really didn’t need going to the bathroom to be a communal event, and because we wanted to be more inclusive and accommodating, I no longer had to share a bathroom.  

That church also experimented with changing all the titles in the worship bulletin to language that could be easily understood by children. While some adults found the new wording to be silly, the shift allowed everyone to understand the movements and meaning of worship better. When we improved our sound system with those who have hearing impairment in mind, guess what? Everyone could hear better!

When our nation has expanded voting rights and access to include women, people of color, and people in poor or rural communities, those moves have increased voting across all demographics, including white men, wealthy, urban, and suburban voters. When our nation has supported the work of small farms, all of us get access to food that is more abundant, sustainable and healthier. When doctors and scientists study diseases that effect a small portion of our population, it often leads to discoveries that improve the health of many of us.  

Recognizing that we are individual parts of a corporate body, that when one suffers, all suffer, and when one rejoices, all rejoice, we realize that we don’t have a choice between individuality and community. God has arranged the body so that each part has a unique and individual purpose and value, AND so that all parts are interdependent and connected. We can use our individual gifts to disregard others to our own detriment, or we can use them to build up the body in love. Being part of a single body does not diminish our individuality or our personal rights. In fact, it increases our personal responsibility to each other. The head must think about what the ear needs, and the mouth must speak up for what the feet need. The feet must go where the heart needs to go, and the hands must hold what the stomach needs to be filled with. We must care for all our parts if we want the body to hold together. 

For Dr. Seuss’s poor Sneetches, the lesson that they were one body was hard learned. A swindler arrived on the scene with a machine that put stars on bellies and took them back off. He convinced the Sneetches (without too much trouble) to part with every last dime they had to preserve their division, to maintain their obsession with their individual bodies. It wasn’t until their bodies were so mixed up that they couldn’t tell who belonged to which group, and all their money was gone, that the Sneetches “got really quite smart,” as Seuss says. 

“That day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches / And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. / That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars, / And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”

There are plenty of swindlers who would sell us remedies to maintain the divisions in our bodies. Politicians who would convince us that compromise is concession. Advertisements that entice us to believe we deserve all we have and more. Profiteers that proclaim you are what you own. 

May we learn our lesson, before we become so mixed up we don’t know who or what we are anymore, before we are drained of resources that could benefit the whole body, before we end up in worse trouble than the Sneetches. May we be a body that is unique and distinctive. May we live and move and behave differently than the body politic around us. May we do so with sacred purpose. Let us be the Body of Christ in the world and individually members of it.