Sermon manuscript:
Our epistle reading today picks up where our epistle reading
from last week left off. Last week, if you remember, Paul was talking about
spiritual gifts. One and the same Spirit gives different gifts to Christians.
Among the gifts that he mentioned were the word of wisdom and the word of
knowledge. Faith is given by the same Spirit. Then he talked about gifts that
were more common at apostolic times like miracles, prophesy, and speaking in
tongues.
In my sermon last week I mainly spoke about how we should understand
these unusual gifts and not be led to false conclusions about them. If you missed that sermon, you can look it up
at the website listed in the bulletin. The reading today picks up where we left
off last week.
The final verse in last week’s reading was that the Holy
Spirit distributes spiritual gifts to each and every Christian, howsoever the
Holy Spirit might wish. One Christian is given certain gifts that are not given
to another. The gifts that are given to another may not be given to one’s self.
This is like the different parts of our body. The eye is a part of the body
that has been equipped to do certain things that a hand cannot do. Likewise
there are things that the hand is able to do that the eye could never do.
With this discussion of how the different members of the
body of Christ are necessarily different from one another, and yet members of
one body, Paul is addressing a problem in the Corinthian congregation. The
church at Corinth was very vibrant and energetic. God gave them many gifts.
They were excited to use the gifts that God gave them. But it also appears that
they were seeking after glory for themselves with the gifts that had been given
to them. Thus they were especially coveting the flashy, unusual gifts that
would bring them glory.
With Paul’s discussion of how the members of the body are
necessarily different from one another, and yet members of one and the same
body, he would have the Corinthians understand that Christians are not meant to
be in competition with one another. A body works together. A body cannot be
made up of members that are all the same, otherwise that is not going to be
much of a body at all. As Paul says, “If we were all an ear, where would our
sense of smelling be?” Ears should not wish to be noses; noses should not
wish to be eyes. The different members of the body are essential for the body
to function because of the different abilities that are given to each member.
Whether a member of the body is an ear or an eye is
something that God determines. Paul says, “God has arranged the members in
the body, each and every one of them, as he desired.” No matter how much an
ear might wish to be an eye, there’s nothing that an ear can do to make itself
into an eye. In a sense, this is what the Corinthians were trying to do. The
ones who had not been given the gifts that had been given to others really
wished that they had those gifts. They wanted the glory that would come along
with that. But whatever gifts there might be, if they are genuine, are from
God. His intention is that the gifts should be beneficial to the body of
Christ, to the fellow members of the body.
There are also parts of the body that God has put together
that are thought to be weaker. Paul doesn’t specifically say which members of
the body he is talking about, but he does contrast these so-called weaker
members with the eye, the ear, and the nose. They eye, the ear, and the nose
are sensitive members. They are very special. The eye, especially, is not only
very useful, but it is also very beautiful to look at. What is some other slab
of flesh compared to the eye? “But,” Paul says, “the members that are
thought to be weaker are necessary.” Why? Because God made it so. He is the
one who has put the body together the way he wants.
Here I’d like to pause in my explanation of Paul’s words to
point out something that I think is important. Paul is speaking here in a way
that is very different from what comes naturally to our sinful nature. We are
not naturally content with the lot that God gives us in life. Sometimes, in
fact, our teachers explicitly teach us to be discontent with who and what we
are. The rationale behind that is if we are discontent with who and what we
are, then we will want to become something better.
For example, our kids are generally taught that it is better
to be a leader than a follower. They are taught that it is better to be good at
sports than not good at sports. They are taught that everybody is supposed to
have super high test scores. Everyone is supposed to be the best, and the only
way to be the best is to be discontent with the way that one happens to be. The
result of all this is self-loathing on the one hand wherever we supposedly do
not measure up, and a drunken euphoria over achievements on the other.
This is such a standard way of thinking about life, that we
all assume that this is just the way that it is supposed to be. We are all
taught these slogans, and they appear to us to be true, and even pious: “Be the
best that you can be.” “Shoot for the stars.” “Never give up.” “Nothing is
impossible,” and so on. But you will not find any of this taught by the Bible.
It’s true, there are a few passages that get torn out of
their context and get put onto plaques and paintings for wall art. If you
actually look up what is being talked about in those passages, you will find
that they never, ever are talking about digging deep within one’s self in order
to get up to the next and higher plane of existence. What the Bible does say is that this striving after
personal glory can hardly be done without sin.
Just think of the very first sin. Adam and Eve became
convinced that the way that God had made them was not quite good enough. They
were truly, exceedingly wise in their own way, but certainly not wise in the
cynical, scoffing ways of the devil. They believed that they could become
better by setting God, God’s designs, and God’s law aside. They would reach out
and take for themselves what would bring them glory and happiness.
When they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil they did become more knowledgeable in a way. They learned first-hand the
horror of evil, the terror of alienation from God, and the sadness of
self-loathing. But they did not become wiser. They become much
stupider—particularly in understanding the meaning of their lives as God’s
creatures. This stupidity has been passed down to us through original sin.
So what is the alternative to this way of living that we are
all so accustomed to? It is being content with God being our creator and we
being God’s creature. We are finite. Not all gifts have been given to any one
of us. We should not covet what has not been given to us. We should be thankful
for what God has given to us. We should seek to fill our lives with
thanksgiving to our Creator—hymns of praises.
Nowhere in the Bible do you ever find God commanding us to
hate ourselves. It is not God pleasing to hate ourselves. It is not God
pleasing to hate our bodies. How common it is for people to hate their bodies
because they do not look a certain way! Sometimes people can whip up such a
hatred for their bodies and for themselves that they will be propelled to harsh
action to change it. But where does the Bible ever say anything about doing
this? If anything the Bible warns against strange measures being taken with
food. Instead of hating our bodies, we should give thanks to our Creator for
our bodies. Who cares if you don’t look like a model? God’s gift to you of your
body is something to thank and praise God for, even if it is thought to be way
down there on somebody’s scale of what a body is supposed to be like.
It is not God pleasing to hate our minds. Some people have
been given a gift for cleverness or complex reasoning. Maybe you have not been
given such gifts in as much abundance as has been given to others. So what? You
don’t become any cleverer by hating the good gift that God has given to you.
Instead of coveting what has been given to others, be thankful to your Creator
for giving you what you have.
Perhaps we could sum up the difference between the way that our
teachers have taught us to live to the way that the Bible teaches us to live by
where our focus lies. The way that we have been taught to live is that we
should be obsessed with ourselves. We should scrutinize and evaluate, hate our
short-comings with a white-hot hatred, and love ourselves to death for whatever
is supposedly good about ourselves.
There’s another way to live, but very few people ever even try
it—that our focus should be on the Creator who gives us gift after gift instead
of upon ourselves. We should thank and praise him for filling our lives with
good things. Instead of hating what he has chosen to give us, we should thank
him for it, because it surely is not as bad as our evil spirits and the evil
advertisements make it out to be.
When God blesses us with glory or success, we should thank
and praise him all the more, because it certainly came from him. Earlier in
this letter Paul asks the Corinthians: “What do you have that was not given
to you?” That’s the truth. Whatever we have or don’t have is according to
God’s choosing, blessed be he! What unnecessary torture we put ourselves
through with our incessant coveting! Turn your eyes away from yourselves and
from other people and look up to your Father who is in heaven.
We’ve taken a good long pause here to consider how things
are among us, but this hasn’t been entirely beside the point. The Corinthians
were cut from the same cloth that we have been. They had the same desires and
foolishness that we suffer from, even if it might not have been so extreme and
overwhelming among them as it is among us. They, too, thought that they could
transform themselves into being an eye, when they were in fact—let’s say—a
hand, and coveting only brought with it sadness and backbiting as a result.
The truth for them is the same as the truth for us. God has
made us members of Christ’s body. He has apportioned to each what is proper and
good. Those members that are thought to be weaker are, in fact, necessary and
good. God is deserving of thanks and praise also for those members who do not have what is thought to be the
shine and shimmer of others.
Let’s sum up: Just as God has joined together the members of
our own body, so he has joined together the members of Christ’s body. To each
and every member of the body of Christ God has given different spiritual gifts.
None of us are sufficient on our own, just as an eyeball lying on the ground is
no longer beautiful, but completely repulsive. It is repulsive, destructive,
and divisive to brag one’s self up and to look at others and wonder, “What’s
wrong with them? Why aren’t they like me?”
The way that we all are has been brought about by God. He is
the one who has shaped and formed us, incorporated us into the body of Christ,
and thereby given us life. We have not become members of the body of Christ by
virtue of our own striving or accomplishments. It is something that God has given
to us.
Thus we should thank God for putting us into the body of
Christ and thereby giving us eternal life. He has also given us whatever gifts we
might have. There is no gift that we have that did not come from him. And as
far as how we should look at the follow members of the body of Christ: We
should love them, which we will hear about next week, with the continuation of
our reading from this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment