Bodywork

By Colin Gibson in Sermons

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, speaks of Christian unity as one body with many parts

BODYWORK

A sermon preached at Mornington/Glenaven on Sunday 17 January 2010

Readings: St Paul, 1 Corinthians 12: 4-25
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice III. i. 53-57

If there was one thing St Paul knew about it was bodies. After all, he had owned one for something like 45 years.

He had watched with the usual surprise and embarrassment as it grew and stretched out and broadened and sprouted hair in funny places.

As a Jewish boy he had lost a small bit of it very early on, though the shock of that fairly brutal operation had been long forgotten.

He knew his body as a seat of pain and discomfort, too. Most or all of his life he suffered from what he himself called a thorn in the flesh-not an obvious physical disability, because that would have disqualified him from becoming a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish intellectual elite. Perhaps recurring bouts of nausea or migraine?

He also knew how physical abuse felt. In a famous passage in 2 Corinthians (11: 23-9) he talks about the many beatings and floggings he had suffered at the hands of local magistrates. These were times of shameful exposure and intense physical pain, leaving scars and weals on his own flesh that were with him for the rest of his life. And then there were the memories of a cold storm-lashed sea, that on three occasions had smashed the boat in which he sailed and left him half-drowned and exhausted. And other memories of the many times when he had gone without sleep, been hungry and thirsty, and without food, clothing or shelter.

Paul had seen the things that human beings did to others' bodies, too. He had watched slaves, men and women, stripped naked for sale. He had walked past roadside crosses carrying the slumped and decaying bodies of those the Roman authorities had executed in this most barbarous and torturous of ways. It would be surprising if this most travelled of men hadn't come across the usual range of bodily accidents that still befall travelers on roads, modern or ancient,: fractures and dislocations, deep bloody wounds, crushed and broken limbs and bodies. Did he still remember that he taken his own share in the brutalizing of the body? He had watched the stones thudding into Stephen's unresisting form while he held the cloaks of the stone-throwers.

He had also seen the beauty trade in action, for Roman society (in which he lived as a member) was as conscious of the body as a scene for display as we are today. They and the Greeks before them admired the body beautiful- in their case the oiled and muscled bodies of gladiators and athletes, the supple near-nude bodies of circus contortionists and dancers, the sexy, pampered bodies of courtesans and prostitutes. The Romans had their manicurists, their hairdressers, their perfume manufacturers, their fashion industry. Modern plastic surgery was beyond them, but lipsticks, face creams, plucked eyebrows, wigs and bras, bikinis or see-through clothing could do much to catch or deceive the eye of the beholder.

Yes, St Paul knew a lot about bodies. After all, hadn't he committed himself to follow and learn about that charismatic figure, Jesus Christ, his senior by only ten years. He most certainly knew many of the stories still circulating about that remarkable man's work with bodies. Leprous bodies, bleeding bodies, hungry bodies, crippled bodies, bodies deprived of eyesight or hearing-even apparently lifeless bodies.

Paul had thought deeply about the recorded words of this Jesus. And hadn't Jesus, in his own vivid way, talked about hearing with one's ears, and cutting off hands and feet if they offended, and even plucking out eyes. And then there were all the exact harrowing accounts-still fresh and circulating among the Christian communities-of the painful execution of Jesus, whose body had been brutally flogged and spat upon, and through whose flesh the nails had been driven.

No, Paul had no illusions about bodies; no romantic view of bodies young or old. He knew them for what they were: what they were capable of and what they could suffer. He knew they could be maltreated, diseased, sick, disabled, objects of shame and desire-and above all, that they were formed from the dust of the earth (as his scriptures told him) and destined to return to the dust of the same earth. He knew of many philosophers who believed that bodies had no value or significance: that they were mere carcasses, vehicles for the precious souls within them, souls that would survive and return to their divine origin when their bodies were abandoned and left to rot in the grave.

And so it is really quite astonishing that this mature, life-hardened man should choose the human body as a metaphor, an image, for anything, let alone as the symbol of that intangible thing, the indivisible unity of the Christian community. And yet, that is what he does, in great detail, passionately, over and over again.

This body, our body-made up of nothing more than a frame of bones supporting a bag of flesh filled with cells and chemicals, an astonishing quantity of liquids, one beating heart, a pair of lungs, an elaborately engineered brain, a complicated network of nerves and sinews, vents and tubing of every conceivable kind, plus a host of resident bacteria-this body, this frail, self- perpetuating, self-destructive organism is Paul's image of a community of faith!

Why?

We need to remember that the apostle is sending a letter from Rome to a Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth had once been small like many of the towns and villages throughout the Roman empire. It had been a local city, a tribal city, a place where you knew your neighbour and your neighbour knew you; a comfortable city where people lived and worked all their lives, a city of Greeks, speaking their own language to each other. A place where foreigners were rarely seen.

Now Corinth was different: more like the cities we know. Much larger, a busy trading city, dealing with far away places and distant cultures. A city in whose streets Greeks now rubbed shoulders with Jews and Romans and Syrians and Egyptians. A busy city where you could hear the strange sounds of many languages; a multi-cultural, multi-faith city, where the pagan gods of the Greeks had to compete with the exotic gods of distant lands. A city of citizens and aliens; a city of aristocratic families, and middle-class traders and peasants in from the country, a city full of the hopeless poor and many, many slaves.

And the Christian community in Corinth reflected the diversity of the whole population. No longer a comfortable little in-group of Christian Jews, talking and singing in Hebrew, but a gathering of Jews and Greeks and foreigners of many races; a gathering where the upper-class mixed uncomfortably with the middle and lower classes. Where slaves, and desperately poor widows and orphans and the disabled might be found...all in the same group of worshippers. Equality had never been a feature of Greek society: now a remarkable mix of people was being asked to behave as if they were all of equal worth before God. Can you imagine the tensions and problems for men and women, freeborn and slave, local citizen and the immigrants and refugees?

To these people, to this Christian community, Paul declares with all the vehemence he can muster, stop thinking about your old bitter differences. Start thinking about the new world Christ has brought into being. Respect each other, honour each other, love each other as you are loved. Recognise that you are dependent on each other, that each of you brings to this community your own special gifts. Work together, different as you are, individual as you may be, in the same way as the utterly different parts of the body work together in our bodies to make us who we are.

In a world of rampant individualism, of economic systems that ignore the interests of all but their directors and shareholders, of social behaviour that praises and celebrates uncomformity rather than communal values, Paul's message is as relevant today as it was for the Corinthians. Get it together if you want a life; get it together or you will destroy yourselves.

Shylock shows us what happens when Paul's message is forgotten. I am a human being just like you are, he screams at his persecutors. But do you admit my humanity? I am useful to you as a money-trader (a filthy business you would rather not handle) but you revile and persecute me for carrying out my trade. You give me no honour, even as one of the lowest members of your Venetian society; your 'body' rejects me. You boast your Christian values, you regularly attend mass to show your piety, you use your Bible to justify your behaviour, but in practice you demonstrate supreme arrogance and your profound racial hatred. Well, I will prove just how alike we are. It's not just our bodies; it's how we behave, too. If you wrong us we will take revenge just like you do.

So the man whose membership of the communal body has been rejected, whose whole personhood has been grievously wounded, will try to revenge himself by literally cutting into the body of his enemy. 'The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. Shylock might be a modern terrorist (or freedom fighter) justifying his own behaviour by the behaviour he has learned from other human beings.

Fortunately, the body of Christ doesn't always tear at itself apart, any more than the human community always rejects Paul's vision of a harmonious whole and opts for civil war. The Haitian disaster demonstrates that we are still able to feel the ties that bind us to each other; that we can respond with ready sympathy to the sufferings of a shattered, crippled part of our world body, however distant and unlike our own.

'Christ is like a single body which has many parts. It is still the same body, even though it is made up of different parts. In the same way all of us, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether slave or free have been baptized into the one body by the same Spirit, and we have all been given the one Spirit to drink.

Paul's astonishing metaphor for Christian unity has rung down the ages, expanding in significance as the centuries pass.

A thousand years ago the Byzantine Church celebrated the unity of God with all created things; during the ferocious struggle for civil rights in America in the 1960's people sang ' We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity will one day be restored, and they'll know we are Christians by our klo9bve, by our love, and they'll know we are Christians by our love'; later at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, a Swedish poet wrote of the walls that keep us all divided, and prayed God to take us all as far as the divine compassion wanders among the children of the human race; in 1998 a Methodist Conference bitterly divided over the inclusion or exclusion of gay and lesbian people from congregational life rose and sang for the first time, 'We are many, we are one, and the work of Christ is done when we learn to live in true community.'

We are learning, still learning to understand the breath-taking scope and implication of Paul's words to the Corinthian church: 'There is no division in the body, but all its different parts have the same concern for one another. If one part of the body suffers all the other parts of the body suffer with it; if one part is praised, all the other parts share its happiness. All of you are Christ's body, and each one is a part of it.'

Amen.

--Colin Gibson.