You are the Body of Christ

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:12

The apostle Paul employs the analogy to human body to the church in a new way. Instead of going with the familiar approach of his time that likened the hierarchy of social status found in the human community to the hierarchy of importance in the parts of the body, Paul uses the compatible and necessary functioning of each part of the body to the compatible and necessary functioning to each part of the church.  No one part can claim superiority.  And, no one part can claim superiority because what holds the body together, its unity, is the same for all-The Spirit of Christ among everyone.

The unity of the church universal as well as any congregation is our organic connection to Christ. Our connectedness is a gift even when parts do not all function together.  However, instead of turning our attention to how we support one another in sorrow and in joy, instead of turning our attention to how we balance our functioning together within our congregation,  instead of looking at our congregation in the compassionate ways we compensate for one another, let us turn our attention how our connectedness functions to benefit all.

Connected as a body, our congregation literally spiritually supports hundreds of thousands of lives each week.  We gather to worship, pray, serve and share in the spiritual nurture of the church community. That spiritual nurture feeds its members.  And those members go out into the world.  Our community nurtures a drug counselor in one of the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore, a social worker who finds community homes for the mentally ill, CEOs who employ thousands of people, teachers from graduate level to elementary school, teachers from the gifted to the learning disabled, carpenters, those who are oversee national security, physicists, researchers, doctors, all who use their spiritual nurture from our congregation to touch people's lives with their gifts.

In the Epiphany season when the church universal and our congregation remembers that as the Body of Christ we bring Christ's life and love to the world, we can ask what difference can any one congregation make?  As the Body united to one another so that we function as a church and are thereby nurtured and sustained, we make a lot of difference through the lives we live.