Apr 17 2005

(Untitled)

April 17, 2005 Dave Dustrud, Director of Youth Ministries

Our scripture this morning comes from I Corinthians 12, beginning with verse 12-20 and then verses 26 and 27. I’ll be reading from the NIV.

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body…If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

One learns early in life that it is easier to take things apart than to put them back together again. One of my first experiences with this came when I had the opportunity to take a shop class in 9^th grade, middle of the winter, industrial arts they call it. This shop class happened to be small engine repair. Now this appealed to every male piece of me; engines, power, gas. The only familiarity I had with engines was our lawn mower and I wasn’t particularly fond of that because of what it meant I had to do. But maybe if I could gain some new knowledge, who knows where this might take me? So I wandered in wide-eyed the first day and sure enough in the classroom there are 10 different single-engine motors around the classroom bolted to tables; thirty guys, sorry there were no girls, thirty guys – 3 people to a motor – and the charts came out and the lecture started and we began to learn about every piece of a 4-stroke single-cylinder motor. We even then got to begin to take it apart and as the course went on, we could take it apart, name the pieces, and put it back together. On the final day, they broke out the fuel and the oil and we put them all in there and revved them all up. Ten motors – it was reverberating down the hallways of the school…fumes and clouds and boys cheering “Yes, we’ve done it!” Testosterone and gasoline is a potent mixture, you know. It’s a wonder no one has bottled it. I went home just flying – “Yes, I know something now. I can do something now.” But, what would it be? Eager to display my knowledge and contribute my value to the household, I noticed my beloved lawn mower sitting in the garage. I was smart enough not to just start on my own. I waited until my dad got home and I explained all that I had learned. I said “Look at our dumpy mower, trust me, if you just let me I can recondition this thing. I can take it apart and it’s going to be the best mower on the block.” Well, I persuaded him and that night we picked up the mower and carried it downstairs to the basement and I eagerly began to take the thing apart. “There’s the cylinder, dad, I know what that is. There’s a piston right there and a gasket and piston rings and a butterfly valve” and about thirty or forty other things that I had never seen before. Well, I wasn’t going to stop at that point so I just kept going and took all of these different pieces and spread them across the ping-pong table in the basement. I began to clean and well, in the way that 9^th grade boys have of doing, I lost interest in my lawnmower project and there wasn’t a lot of ping-pong played that winter in our house. Spring rolled around, the snow melted, the grass started to wiggle and the neighbors started getting their mowers out. In the way that fathers have, my dad renewed my interest in our lawnmower project and so I, as quickly as possible, began reassembling, trying desperately to put back into place the mower that I had so freely pulled apart a few months before. I got as much of it together as I could but I’ll confess that there were a handful of parts that I didn’t quite know where they went. So I put them in my pocket and called my dad and said, “I’m ready, let’s go.” So we carried it back up the stairs and I still was convinced that this was going to be the best mower on the block. It was going to run so powerfully, not only would the blade spin but it might fly. We might have to put bricks on it to keep it down. We put it in the garage, put the gasoline in it and oil, moved it around a little bit to loosen it up, and I began to pull. Nothing. My dad – 10, 12, 15, 20 pulls and still nothing. About two hours of tinkering and pulling and finally I think we knew what had happened. And what we learned that afternoon was that price-wise early spring is not a good very time to buy a new lawnmower. And we also learned that in lawnmowers, like in many other things, every part matters.

In about 54 A.D., the apostle Paul wrote a letter to his church in Corinth. I call it his church because he had started it about three years prior. He spent about 18 months there…a year and a half. The book of Acts, in chapter 18, only has 17 verses dedicated to Paul’s time there but actually there was only one town in which Paul spent more time than Corinth and that was in Ephesus. Corinth was deep in Paul’s heart. It was a fascinating place and many people were surprised that a church could even begin there. I have a hubris of modernization, there is a tendency to look back and assume that people in the past were more simple than we are. When I read about apostles going to towns and starting towns in the New Testament, my first image is to think of little stick villages with people that are just desperate for anybody to talk to them. “Here comes Paul with the gospel and we’ll believe anything because we’re so lonely out here.” This was not Corinth. In Paul’s time, Corinth was over one-half a million people. It was the wealthiest, and arguably the most important, city in Greece of its time. It held key geographic position with two seaports, east and west, that were almost connected, a four-mile stretch of land that rather than sail all around southern Greece, sailors would actually put their ships on rollers and drag them to the other side. And so it was an international seaway. And to the north and south this land-bridge was the only connection between southern Greece and northern. And so every product, every idea, every pleasure that existed in those days made its way through Corinth. And there was every kind of option available…pick a religion, pick a pleasure, pick a business and it was there. Paul somehow and with God’s help pulled together not just a tiny fledging church but a strong church. A year and a half he spent building it and he went on to build other churches from there.

This letter is occasioned by trouble. Paul receives word that this church he had taught about their value to God, about their call to serve Jesus Christ, was coming apart at the seams. This church, in fact, was as divided as my lawnmower on the ping pong table. They were focused on their individual status and their individual beliefs, clinging desperately to their differences, and boy, they had them. There were some who had been idol-worshippers who felt like it was still okay to do that. They disagreed about whether you could eat meat offered to idols or not. Some had visited temple prostitutes and were finding a way to work that into their newfound faith in Christ. Some argued about which group they belonged to within the Christian church, they fought over who was more important and who was more significant. They got drunk at communion, they binged at communion. They couldn’t even take an offering. And Paul has his heart broken as he hears this news and he writes a letter to his friends, his church at Corinth to try and re-track them into God’s direction. First, he deals with the arguments, some one by one and then, in the blink of an eye, Paul delivers a metaphor that instantaneously transforms this community into something they had not been, into something they will now be, something that transformed Christ’s church from then to now and something that it was always going to be. “You are the body of Christ”…this is not just a clever metaphor that Paul delivers. Notice that Paul doesn’t put it in as part of an argument, like “Please try to be like a body of Jesus. And if you try really hard, maybe things will go a little better.” Paul declares “You ARE the body of Christ.” And in the way that God works with his gospel, the church is transformed. The gospel brings about change, faith is created and the body of Christ is created. And so the people of Corinth have a new vision for who they are and what they will do.

How far have we come from Corinth, would you say? Certainly we are somewhat more advanced; we have taken their commercial success and multiplied it. We don’t have to wait for merchants to wander through town to see what’s popular although I read a quote that the Mall of America in 1999 drew more visitors than Disneyland, Disneyworld, and the Grand Canyon combined. We are in a way at the center. But you don’t have to go to Bloomington; you can open your computer and have international commerce, every idea, every philosophy, every religion, every pleasure right at your fingertips in your own home. We’ve gotten more sophisticated that way. How are we doing with our divisions? I don’t have a sermon today about divisions. I’m actually going to let you at lunch today, if you choose, talk about what divides the church today and have arguments about that. I do want to say that we’d be foolish to ignore the fact that Christians are disagreeing with one another around the world. There is a tendency and a temptation to separate ourselves, to modify the statement “I’m a _______ Christian” and to separate ourselves. This sounds a lot like Paul and Apollos to me. There are issues that divide us. Pastor Chris mentioned just last week that the Presbyterian denomination is shrinking like many others. And yet we’re having critical arguments within this body that threaten to divide even further. It’s not just Presbyterians, it’s every denomination. There are divisions global and local that cast a shadow on our unity and weaken our witness. But we know that there’s something more. Those of us who are gathered in this faith body, at Faith Presbyterian, know that there is something more and I would say our main stumble is not that we don’t know that we’re the body of Christ. Our stumble perhaps might be in recognizing when we are the body of Christ. We love being together and when we’re in worship, when we’re on spirit-filled retreats, when we’re on mission trips we feel great and we know that God is in our midst and we are the body of Christ. But why is it then that so many of us when we’re not here wander through our work-day, wander through our school day, wander through our home life as if we’re having an out of body experience? Why do we feel so disconnected from ourselves? I think that the church has contributed to this, not just Faith Church, but churches around the country. We have reinforced the notion that for you to grow in your faith you need to be more involved in your church. If you want to grow in your faith, you come and join a committee. If you want to grow in your faith you become a part of another program…that this is the place where you come to grow your faith. And yet, we have people who are busy in church wandering and still feeling disconnected in the rest of their lives. I’m not just making this up…there are books and conversations going on out there that would astound you. One book is called Stuck in Half-time by Bob Buford and he published with another guy a book called From Success to Significance. John Maxwell also wrote a book The Journey from Success to Significance that is targeted at forty and fifty year-olds who have suddenly stopped in their tracks and say, “I’ve believed in God and Jesus all my life and yet the work I’ve piled up is over here and my faith is still over there. What does it all mean?” And these books are flying off the shelves as people desperately try to reconnect themselves with their faith. You don’t have to wait for mid-life to have a crisis either. There’s another book published by Alexandra Robbins called the Quarter-Life Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. Some of you are laughing but if you have college kids or younger, sixty percent of them are going to come back and live in your house when they graduate. I’m not making that up. You might be chuckling because you think you know why and you might be partly right. But in this book, a perfect example of what is going on there is given by a man named Steve, twenty-two year old from Omaha, Nebraska. Steve has moved home after graduating from college and he is bouncing from job to job, from activity to activity, nothing seeming to satisfy what he’s looking for. Well, you might say that’s just laziness, that’s just lack of focus, that’s a kid who needs to strap his boots on and get out there. But you’d miss something. Listen to Steve in his own words say what’s going on. I think this will speak to a part of every one of our hearts. Steve says: “I think that I do not want to be mediocre.” I think that I do not want to be mediocre. I want to be special. I have talents, I have passions, I have faith and I want them to all come together. And why hasn’t he heard it?

I think what we could be more aware of is that as a lawnmower is not built to sit in a garage, the body of Christ is not built to sit in a church pew. The body of Christ connects us to one another so that we can be connected to ourselves so that we can be in God’s world representing the love of God in Jesus Christ. Ironically on the facing page to Steve’s comments, we see it all come together in a wonderful simple statement by another twenty-two year-old Andrea from Portland, Oregon. This is not a Christian book, this is a secular book but it’s in there that Andrea happens to be a Christian and she says: by being a part of the body of Christ, “I experience a new kind of freedom, the kind of freedom to never again have to wonder whether I am somebody because the living Creator of the universe says that I am. The freedom to never have to wonder again what story I am part of…the freedom to never wonder to whom I ultimately owe my allegiance…the freedom to do things that are hard for little in the way of way of material success or recognition because I know that material success and recognition do not determine my worth.” Being part of the body of Christ reconnected Andrea. Being part of the body of Christ reconnects you to yourself when you believe it and it connects all of us together as one. We have 17 young people joining the church this morning. One of them said in a paper I had them write, “I’m excited to belong to the church. The only thing I’ve ever belonged to before was a magazine subscription.” Isn’t that the truth? Wouldn’t it be great if they had more to look forward to a lifetime of committee meetings and pot-lucks? If the body of Christ didn’t only live here in the pews, but moved out into their world, connected their world wherever they went so that God can accomplish His purposes once and for all time, to unite all of God’s people into one body that gives Him glory. You are the body of Christ and every part of each of you is part of it. Amen.