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Sermon - January 21st, 2007
The Illusion of Our Separateness
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12
The Apostle Paul was inspired when he compared the Church to the human body and we are still growing into that image of ourselves. It is a powerful image. For me to hold my morning cup of caffeine, it is not enough to have an arm and four fingers. Without my opposable thumb, it is difficult and without my elbow it would be really hard to drink it. And do not even think about walking when your inner ear is all messed up. You need more that legs and feet that work. You need your inner gyroscope that tells you which way is up.
There are all kinds of parts inside our bodies that we need without thinking consciously about them, at least not until one of them gets sick and has to come out. Few of us get up in the morning and thank God for our pancreas, our collarbones, or our mitochondria. Most of us don’t even know the names of half the things that keep us alive, but that does not bother them. They go right on keeping us alive in spite of our alarming ignorance of them.
In general, we are happy to have two of everything we are suppose to have two of and one of everything we are suppose to have one of. More or less of any of these things tends to put us at a disadvantage, either physically or psychologically. Babies born with too many parts or not enough of them are usually scheduled for surgery and those of us who lose part of ourselves as adults find ways to live without them, but we rarely stop missing them. We have this built-in sense of wholeness that will not go away.
Paul knew he could get people’s attention by talking about their bodies. Greek and Roman orators before him had used the same image to explore the nature of the state, so the church at Corinth was used to thinking metaphorically about the human body. What Paul and the politicians were all trying to do was to persuade people that what was true inside their own skin was also true outside of it, that wholeness was a matter of many different parts all being themselves and doing their jobs. Unity and diversity were not contradictory terms, in other words. They were two true words for one paradoxical reality, namely, that our survival depends not on our sameness but on our infinite variety.
Now that works just fine when it is my kneecaps you are talking about. I rejoice in the difference between them and my elbows. And I would not want the knees to try doing the elbows’ job. I count on all my parts to maintain their independence, their boundaries while they are working together. Truthfully, I don’t even think about them very much. It is all me in here, and I am largely unconscious of the intricate cooperation required to keep me alive and healthy.
The problem begins when you put me in community with other people who look, smell, think, talk, and act differently from me. One is perfectly cheerful but she can talk for thirty minutes straight without stopping to breathe, while another has been so beaten up by life that everything he says comes out as a sneer. One speaks so intimately of God that everyone around her feels like a spiritual slouch and another is a complete imposter, who prays big hot air balloons on Sunday mornings and then goes home and acts like a jerk to his family. “Now you are the body of Christ,” Paul writes, “and individually members of it.”
It was much more comfortable when I was talking about livers and kneecaps. Why? Because we do not handle the infinite variety outside of us as well as we handle the infinite variety inside of us. Because other people challenge our established routines. I start doing something one way and suddenly I get lots of advice about doing it another way, or several other ways, until I’m in danger of losing my appetite for doing it at all.
You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. You join a community looking for—what? For closeness, support, some measure of safety—and nine times out of ten what you get instead is this holy struggle to live and work with people who are just as strange, and imperfect as you are. The brain wants everyone to act like brains and the heart wants everyone to act like hearts and there is always a hangnail who brings out the hangnail in everyone else. Welcome to life. Welcome to the church.
Parker Palmer writes about community in his books. He defines community as “that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” In his book, The Company of Strangers, he writes, when a person moves away someone else always moves to fill that empty place in the community.
Maybe our problem is that we still have a romantic notion or naďve hope to be part of a community of people who get along perfectly. That notion gets in the way of finding true community because the real purpose of community is not to retreat someplace with like-minded folks, but to give ourselves up to the working of the Holy Spirit by learning how to live with people we may not like at all. What better way to learn about the reconciling power of Christ than to test it in a body of infinite variety!
One difficulty with Paul’s metaphor, for me, is that I cannot feel it, not the way I can feel my fingers and toes. He says that when one of us suffers we all suffer together, and when one of us is honored all the rest of us rejoice—but it does not always work that way. Oh, we FEEL sorry for each other or glad for each other, but if someone hits you in the nose, MY nose does not bleed, and when one person gets a raise or promotion at work, our standard of living does not go up. For all of Paul’s good intentions and excellent theology, his metaphor really does not work that well. One member suffers and the vast majority do not even know about it, much less feel it. One member is honored and the rest of us may applaud or say “Thanks be to God,” but we rarely experience the joy as if it were our own.
What if Paul was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote about the body. What if he was speaking metaphysically instead—not making a comparison at all but stating a solid reality? After all, he did not write, “You are LIKE the body of Christ.” He wrote, “You ARE the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Whether we realize it or not, whether you feel it or not, whether we like each other or not, you/we are the body of Christ and there is nothing we can do about that except act like it, or don’t act like it.
Quantum physicists tell us that we have been living under the illusion of separateness for at least 300 years now, ever since Isaac Newton proposed that the universe worked like a great clock. According to Newton’s physics, the world is a collection of individual gears and springs that act in predictable ways. You can take them apart and put them back together again with no effect on the whole. To understand the whole clock, you need to understand the parts, which behave in regular and reasonable ways.
It was not until the discovery of subatomic reality in the 20th century that this illusion was dispelled. In fact, we have learned that the universe behaves much more like a body than a clock. It is not possible to understand the parts without understanding the whole. We cannot even observe an electron without changing the unfathomable web of relationship. It has its own beautiful order, but it is never entirely predictable, because every time a butterfly beats its wings in the web, every time a cat yawns or a baby sneezes, the whole web shifts to accommodate it. Quantum physicists call this “chaos theory.” I’m not a physicist so I don’t really understand it. But I do understand Paul and he called it the Body of Christ, or that great mystery of God that binds us together whether we know it, feel it, like it, or not.
Since Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday became a national holiday, many communities plan events to remember him and his dream. Barbara Brown Taylor tells this story of the North Georgia Peace Council that sponsored a walk through Clarkesville, Georgia. It was the ninth annual Martin Luther King, Jr. walk that really put Paul’s theology of the Body of Christ to a test. It wasn’t a big parade. That year the parade included all the Mainline Churches plus some BaHais and Quakers and some secular humanist folks. The black Baptist preacher was there with his two little girls. Some people in t-shirts that said Americorps which is a national service league devoted to caring for the developmentally disabled.
The walk was to go from the Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church to the other side of the town square ending at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. An easy walk, no problem. However, just before the walk began, participants got word that the Ku Klux Klan was waiting for them at the town square. This news affected the marchers. There were plenty of police around, so they felt quite safe from violence. But the fear for Barbara Brown Taylor, who was then the priest of the Episcopal Church, was the fear of her own reaction. The KKK were famous for their hatred. They called themselves Christian, just as she did. She said, “I think I feared for my soul—not only for what they might do to it, but for what I might do to it myself by returning their hate.”
The walk began with singing. The organizers of the walk always put the clergy at the front as buffers between those behind and those ahead, human air bags in case of collision. For better or worse, the clergy had an unobstructed view of what they were walking toward. The parade turned a corner singing, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” Around the corner, they were there. Several men and women in white robes and pointed hats, with some other people standing around them in regular clothes.
They did not hide their faces. They just held up their signs so they would not be missed. One featured Dr. King’s head with a rifle viewfinder zeroed in on it. “Our dream came true,” it read. “James Earl Ray made our day,” said another, and a third one proclaimed, “CHRIST is our King.”
“He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands.” That is what the walkers were singing as the clergy walked past them. “He’s got you and me, sister, in his hands.” Barbara Brown Taylor was not afraid anymore. “He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands.” She was mystified. “He got the whole world in his hands.” Why? Because if the song was right and if what Paul said was right, then they had just walked past some members of their own body. “They were part of our body,” she said. “They were as hard for us to accept as a cancer or a blocked artery. Yet if we do not accept them--if we let them remain separate from us the way they want us to—then we become one of them, one more of them who insist that there are some people who cannot belong to the body.”
IF the song is right, and if what Paul said is true, then God is not waiting for any of us to decide who is in or out of Christ’s body, not even you or me.
This truth is beyond our consent or liking. We are the body of Christ and individually members of it. Whenever anyone laughs, cries, lives, or dies in this web of creation we are all affected by it whether we know it or not. When one suffers we all suffer and when one is honored all the rest of us rejoice, if only way down deep in Christ’s bones where only Christ knows it is happening.
Most of the time we live as though this is a fond illusion, but there is a distinct possibility that it is our separateness which is the illusion instead. There is an old Sufi saying that goes like this: You think because you understand one, you must understand two, because one and one make two. But you must also understand AND.
You know who our “AND” is? The creator of all our parts, the author of our wholeness, the lover of complete imposters, the Lord of electrons, the one who’s got the whole world in hand with room left over, turning you and me and them into us.
Amen.