Visible faith and inclusion in the Body of Christ

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

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. 28 And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. 29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work powerful deeds? 30 Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? 31 But strive for the greater gifts. 

Luke 4:14-21

14 Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,    because he has anointed me        to bring good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives    and recovery of sight to the blind,        to set free those who are oppressed,19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

I don’t really like mission statements, and you may have noticed that, to the extent that we have one, it’s unconventional: “Belief made believable, Faith made Faithful, Truth made True, Word made Flesh”.   Still, this both communicates who we are and, I hope, gives shape and inspiration to who it is we want to be.  

I don’t imagine that Jesus was the kind of God-man who would’ve been interested in workshopping potential mission statements.  Instead, he was content to adopt one that had been around for centuries.  While visiting his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61 and declared that he is its fulfillment.  At the outset of his ministry, this passage functions as a kind of mission statement.  

Next week we’ll look at the fallout from Jesus’ pronouncement - the people in his village tried to throw him off a cliff - but for now it’s enough to consider what this tells us about who Jesus is, and, in that light, who we should be.  

By reading this passage and declaring it fulfilled right then and there, Jesus announced that he was the anointed one, the messiah, appointed and empowered by the Spirit to bring the kingdom of God.  This sounds like the sort of thing we expect Jesus to say, but to the folks who knew him before he could walk and talk, it’s quite the bewildering claim.  “Who does this guy thing he is?” Of course, anyone can claim to be the Messiah - and many did - but Jesus did not merely declare his identity, he went on to demonstrate it, to bear the fruit of the Spirit, actually to fulfill the passage he claimed to fulfill.  

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,    because he has anointed me        to bring good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives    and recovery of sight to the blind,        to set free those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

These are the very things that the Gospels testify Jesus did in his ministry.  He proclaimed the good news of the coming kingdom, especially to the poor and for the poor.  He healed the sick and the lame, he opened the eyes of the blind, he cast out demons.  In him these words became flesh.  

Again, we know all of this - and yet, if Christians, including us, were asked the question, “What was Jesus all about?” - I’m confident many would give answers that look different than Jesus’ own.   Despite the fact that the Scriptures were written some 2000 years ago hardly prevents Jesus’ identity from being contested by people inside the church as well a outside, that people seek to enlist him in particular causes, to conform him to their own image and desires.  Which is why a simple, fundamental objective of worship is to force us to encounter and comprehend Jesus was he actually was.  And this passage from Luke, where he declares his fulfillment of Isaiah, is among the most important in this task.  

Even when we do attend to this passage, we tend to read Jesus’ fulfillment of this passage in more spiritual/allegorical terms rather than literally.    

That is, when hear about release of the captives we think of “spiritual” captives, that he saves those who are unsaved, or something like that.  When we read that he opens the eyes of the blind, we think of spiritual blindness, as in the line from Amazing Grace, I “was blind but now I see”, not people whose literal eyes don’t function.  When we read about freedom for the oppressed, we think about spiritual oppression, those who labor under wrong thinking or false religion. 

Now, this kind of interpretive move has a venerable history and is entirely appropriate,  but it seems to come just a bit too easily to us, exactly because it is our tendency to move the action from the visible realm to an invisible realm, to make religion about an inner, private experience rather than about outward, public manifestation.  And, if I’m honest, this is because we tend not to see anything like the visible fulfillment of this passage - we don’t see the Spirit doing these things - so we lower our expectations to hope that the Spirit is working where we can’t see. 

One place - possibly the place - the Scriptures tell us that the Spirit is at work is within the church.  The same Spirit that was upon Jesus and which raised him from the dead, now dwells within the the Body of Christ, as Paul called it.  This is a simple but powerful metaphor, naming not only our individual identification with Christ but that our true identity is realized via inclusion into a new community that he makes possible, that the foot or the hand realizes itself only as part of a body.  And this body is entrusted with Jesus’ ministry, the ongoing earthly manifestation of his enteral presence.  And just as Christ himself was humble yet exalted, within this community those who would ordinarily seem humble, even worthless, are exalted to the highest place, essential to who the community is and what it’s about.  To all who feel useless and unimportant comes the proclamation that they are indispensable, and to all who would deem others without value then marginalize or exclude them comes the proclamation that you have it exactly wrong.  

The church emerged in a world where the divisions between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor were taken to be immutable facts of life, but the church managed to overcome these divisions and create a new kind of community where every other identity, though not eliminated, was subsumed into the new identity in Christ.  And so the church itself offered a living testimony to the very message it proclaimed; it was not just idea they floated, it was an embodied, visible reality that anyone could see and even join.  And in those early days it was, if Acts is to be trusted, the conspicuous nature of their communal life that “proved” the Gospel and convinced outsiders to become insiders.  

A core tenet of this community is that if the Gospel really is true, if Christ really is who we say he is, if the Spirit really is at work among us, if we really are the Body of Christ, then it must make an actual difference in lives, but even more so in the life of a community, and this difference is not just an invisible one we have to convince ourselves is there even if we can’t see it, but a real visible difference manifest in actual human lives.   

The temptation in this age is either to give up on anything supernatural and just focus on social justice or go overly spiritual and assert truths that never seem to make any difference in the actual world.  Either way, you don’t really need church - hence the decline of the church.  But there is another way before us.

If we’re supposed to be about the things Jesus was, then an essential measure of church ought to be whether we bear the same kind of fruit he did.  Now this sounds rather fanciful, even defeatist, if you think you need to perform miracles.  But consider the possibility that church really could be a place where the Spirit is upon us to do do the the things he did, not to care for disembodied souls, or for soulless bodies, but to attend to the needs of actual human beings.   

We could in fact preach good news to the poor, a Good News which is especially good news to the poor in particular.  Imagine that the poor - the literal poor - might have neglected needs met, that is, that we might meet them, that the economic justice imperative cannot be avoided by spiritualizing the passage.  Imagine that those who are defeated and despairing, who are lonely and forsaken, those victims of abuse and trafficking - that is to say, all those who are captive and oppressed both literally and figuratively - might experience release, freedom by not merely receiving a message, but by participating in a community that practices what it preaches, that the overcoming of the power of sin and death in our lives doesn’t happen offstage as some column in the heavenly spreadsheet is zeroed out, but front and center in the flesh and blood realities of life.   

The question that both inspires and haunts me is, “What kind of community do we need to be in order for people - including ourselves - to actually experience the Gospel?”  And an essential aspect of the answer for the early church and for our church is that the the Body of Christ must be a radically inclusive place, where the very people excluded in other contexts are deliberately invited, welcomed, and esteemed.  

Inclusion is a loaded word these days, but to the extent that it’s problematic it is because inclusion itself has become the goal over and above the mission or purpose of whatever it is people are people included in.  To be included in the Body of Christ is to receive a new identity in the Body of Christ; it is to discover that your individuality finds it place not in self-expression but in mutual self-giving, that all our diversity finds its meaning in the One.