1 Corinthians 12:12-31a | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

3rd Sunday after Epiphany | 16 January, 2022 | A Sermon on 1 Cor 12:12-31a | by Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS |

12 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. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. 14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” 22 On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our un-presentable parts are treated with greater modesty, 24 which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it,25 that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. 26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. 27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. 28 And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of heal-ing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. 29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? 30 Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? 31 But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

HOLY BAPTISM: ONE BODY IN THE LORD

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are blessed to have four readings from 1 Corinthians 12-14 in these Sundays after Epiphany, which occur in ordinary time (numbered Sundays not located in seasons of the liturgical year). Our parish has begun the third year of preaching on epistle (New Testament) lessons with an overall preaching emphasis on Holy Baptism, the second of Martin Luther’s Seven Marks of the Church. Where you find these marks, you find the Church. [https://wolfmueller.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Work-on-Councils_100618.pdf]

Last week, we read the opening eleven verses of chapter 12, in which St. Paul continued to address spiritual pride, the tragic flaw in the Church at Corinth. In this unit (chapters 12-14), he speaks God’s Law (God’s No) to any notion that a Christian can be a free agent living for him- or herself without regard for the Church, which is both the Bride and the Body of Christ in the world. He wrote that the things of the Spirit, what most translations call spiritual gifts, come from and belong to the Triune God. They are given for the common good, yes, for the upbuilding of the Church. The things of the Spirit (pneumatikon) and the gifts of grace (charismaton) are not the possession of those in whom these things, these gifts, are manifested. Therefore, there is no room for spiritual pride, and, indeed, failing to acknowledge Who owns the totality of the Christian life and the Church’s life together, including the time, talents, and treasure Christians manage from day to day, invites disaster. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Ps. 24:1).

τὸ σῶμα ἕν ἐστιν (The Body Is One)

The Lord Jesus Christ has only one Body. Yes, that part of the Body that we call the Church Militant gathers with Him in many places even in the same community, but the Body of Christ is one. Some gatherings call themselves non-denominational and some claim to be the truer part of the Body, but such gatherings are no less scandalous by avoiding responsibility for the fracturing of the one Body. All Christians bear responsibility for the on-going fractures in Christ’s Body.

Martin Luther did not want any part of the Body to be called by his name, since he colorfully described himself as “poor, stinking, maggot fodder” (1522). Christ’s Church, he wrote in “On the Councils and the Church” (1539), can be known by the Holy Word of God, Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, Holy Absolution, the Holy Ministry, Holy Worship and Prayer, and by possession of the Holy Cross (suffering). How did Luther come up with such a list? From the written Word of God and the Holy Spirit led experience (the Great Tradition) of the Church through fifteen centuries.

St. Paul is speaking to a particular part of the Body in the micro sense, a body in which spiritual pride runs rampant. The image of the body politic would have been familiar to Greeks, but here Paul speaks of the one Body into which the Corinthian Christians had been incorporated through their Baptism by water and the Spirit (cf. John 3:5). Divisiveness in any body is deadly, so much more in Christ’s one Body, the Church, for whom He poured out His own life blood on the cross.

οὐκ ἔστιν ἓν μέλος ἀλλὰ πολλά (… Does Not Consist of One Member but of Many)

St. Paul uses the analogy of the uniqueness and indispensability of all the members of the body to make the point that no human body can be a body of one member or even of a few. When one member or a few members act as if they matter most in the Body of Christ, nothing good will come of it. Christ’s one Body has one Head and not several, although Paul talks more about that in his letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians. [Those who reject Pauline authorship of those books do not change the essential authority and Word-of-God-ness of those letters; But I digress.]

True ecumenism among the Body of Christ in the macro sense does not consist in crafting carefully worded academic papers that say little more than, “Why can’t we all just get along?” As some of us Lutheran pastors in Dallas TX learned in a marvelous year of dialogue with Roman Catholic priests, our studies on “The Eucharist as Sacrifice” did not result in the sharing of the Eucharist at each other’s tables. A monsignor and seminary professor poured quite a bit of cold water on our enthusiasm when he reminded us that, for Rome, the validity of the Sacrament of the Altar depended upon a pastor/priest being in union with a bishop who was in union with the Bishop of Rome. He never quite got around to explaining how a dying Roman Catholic soldier could receive absolution and the Blessed Sacrament on the battlefield from the hands of a Greek Orthodox priest, whose bishop was definitely not in union with the Bishop of Rome. But Eucharistic hospitality was out for Lutherans and Roman Catholics… even though many of our various members continue to commune in the parishes of their Lutheran or Roman Catholic relatives… which is more a problem for Rome.

St. Paul is, again, addressing the problem of spiritual pride in the Body of Christ that meets at a particular place. I doubt he would ever be able to fathom just how far things have devolved in the centuries since. But, as the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they stay the same). Each local parish consists of members of the one Body, who are, in Luther’s words, “poor stinking maggot-fodder.” Jealousy over who has what and who can do what is one problem. That some think their excrement smells like French perfume is quite another. Some longtime members may have a misbegotten notion of tenure and, thus, of greater control. A few newer members may have a misbegotten notion that God has placed them in the Body to be its Savior. Occasionally, the pastor, whom some think of as that particularly odious unmentionable part, actually has to cause some gastric pain for some of the more precious members. Everyone counts.

There is one Body of Christ that is more than the microcosmic portion meeting at a particular place. Every member of the Body is needed. Every member is valued. In the healthy Body, in both the micro and macro sense, all suffer when one suffers. All rejoice when one is honored.

ζηλοῦτε δὲ τὰ χαρίσματα τὰ μείζονα (But Earnestly Desire the Higher Gifts)

Each pericope in chapters 12-14 leads into the next, and so we will begin next week where we left off today as St. Paul exhorts the Body at Corinth with Law and Gospel (judgment and grace).

Whose Body is it? Christ’s Body. Whose members are we? Christ’s members. Whose opinion matters most? Christ’s opinion. And, what ought all the members desire? The Holy Spirit’s gifts.

Where does that leave us members? Under God’s judgment against sin, we are “poor stinking maggot-fodder.” Under God’s grace and mercy in His Crucified Son Jesus, we are, the baptized children of God, who are every one of us more precious, lovable, and valuable than Christ’s own life.

When we act contentiously, arrogantly, divisively, and as if we are more beloved than the other members of the Body in the micro or the macro sense, we stink in the nostrils of God. When we are drowned and raised again through confession and repentance and fed with the true Body and most precious Blood of Christ at His table, then we use God’s things for the well-being of the neighbor and model the cruciform life of the Servant King Jesus. We look and act as His own.

For the past two thousand years, it seems that a major fracture in the Body of Christ has occurred every five hundred years. Instead of more entrepreneurial congregations exporting more division to the Body of Christ in the world, which after the first decades of the 21^st century seems hard to imagine. Might the Body more humbly desire the higher gifts and seek to be as St. Luke described in Acts 2:42: “They continued in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the Breaking of the Bread (the Holy Eucharist), and the prayers (the liturgical prayers of the Temple)?” It’s His Body. Not ours!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Ev. Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA