The Body of Christ and its Bickering Members

It was a once in a lifetime moment that just happened for the second time. Rachael Seager Smith discovered a previously unknown type of pottery from the end of the Roman occupation of Great Britain. As if that wasn’t amazing enough, years later, she discovered a kiln, with that particular pottery still inside! The long running series, Time Team, which follows a group of experts from a wide range of disciplines on archaeological digs, was recently on location at Wytch Farm, in Dorset, where Rachael’s discovery was made. The camera caught her as she was coming to terms with the immensity of the find. She paused for a moment before she tried to explain to her colleagues what had just happened, her voice quavering a bit.

“James Gerard wrote it up but I was the first person who identified this stuff. I’ve now got the first kiln. Sorry. That’s overwhelming. That is more than I can cope with.” Someone engaged in their vocation, fulfilling it, being happy in it, is a real-life miracle we got to witness.

It was while watching it that I finally understood the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer, “Shield the joyous.” As she started to talk, I tensed up, feeling oddly protective of her. What if she was met with shrugs or eye rolls from the rest of the team? Why did I suddenly care? I recognized something.

There is vulnerability in joy.

The joyous can’t shield themselves when their heart is open. It’s a moment where great pain and damage can be inflicted. To share your happiness, only to have it rejected or mocked, destroys something. It’s like missing the arm of a chair when you go rest your elbow on it. That feeling of shock and embarrassment. Something you thought was load bearing, structural, solid, wasn’t. Except, instead of wood or metal, it was in the form of a person or people. I’m not talking about a random stranger, but folks whose opinion matters to you. Trust is broken in that moment.

I’m sure you’ve experienced that moment of disappointment. I know I have. Ironically, it’s happened to me several times. In church.

I have an odd place within the church. I’m not clergy; I’m part of the laity who often finds myself in hybrid positions between the two. Not because I am confused about my role as laity, but because of a particular perch from which I’ve been able to observe the church.

I’ve been reflecting on 1 Corinthians 12 lately, particularly how Paul uses body parts to describe the ideal of our unity, and the absurdity of disunity. If you’ve been a part of a local body, you have had plenty of opportunities to observe both. At its best, we get to see, as verse 18 puts it, “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” There is great joy and beauty in the perfection of God’s arrangement. But we love to gene edit. That usually (always) doesn’t turn out well. Here is one of those stories …

It was a church that had a reputation of periodically biting its own face off, which is always an attractive look. As they tried to pick up the pieces that were left after the latest outburst, faithful folks in the congregation prayed. Soon God generously brought replacements for what had been lost. It was truly a miracle to witness; God supplied the lack. The congregation was moving towards wholeness. What wasn’t taken into account was that the body would soon reject the miracle, those newly grafted limbs. Again. It was like a dramatic recreation of 1 Corinthians 12:21: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.”

Folks there would be shamed for being mere feet or eyes, sometimes from the pulpit, sometimes even from those closest to them. And folks would then grumble, after they had gnawed off their own limbs, that they couldn’t walk or see anything like they used to. Doing some quick math, this self-amputation had happened so often over the years, you could have made three or four new bodies out of the left over parts. As a matter of fact, several unintentional church plants were created as a result.

How did this keep happening to them? They didn’t protect each other when vulnerable, either in joy or in pain. They couldn’t feel either one, at least not as a whole. It was like a type of nerve damage.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it. (1 Cor 12:25-26).

The folks who were lopped off bear the wounds, still. They feel the pain, for themselves, and the body who abandoned them. Many have trouble reattaching to local bodies, because of what they experienced.

I remember, not long after I had been repeatedly rejected by a church, I was sitting in a car on the way to the airport, to catch a flight to New York City. Pouring out my pain to God, quietly in the back seat, I asked why all this had happened. “Why would You reject me? Why would you let them reject me – it’s Your body!” God answered with a question; “Where are you going?”  I answered with what I knew. “To give a talk at the Mockingbird conference. To be with Your people.”

There it was. I wasn’t detached from the body. Ever. Because no matter how many times the church cut off its nose to spite its face, the body of believers does not belong to the church to excommunicate or shun. The body is the body of Christ, and nobody can cut us off from that reality. Realizing that doesn’t heal, Christ does. Nothing is dead in a resurrected body. We are already one in Christ, even when we can’t feel it. That’s grace.