A band-aid on my wedding ring figure reminds me of a cooking accident I had recently. As I chopped vegetables, I had a thought that I might harm myself with that knife. I did. Melanie said I almost hit my head on the ceiling jumping up and down. I can be dramatic. In my own defense, I really like my finger attached to my hand. You might say my finger belongs to my body. I know I have seven other fingers but I am partial to this one because of the wedding ring and all that.
Of the many images of the church in the New Testament, Paul prefers the image of the body. All parts of the body belong to each other. The foot should not sulk because it is not a hand. Both are essential. The eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” As my friend Allyson reminds me with one of her favorite verses, every part of the body is “indispensable.” As the great poet John Donne reminded us, if one part of the body were gone, the whole body would be diminished by that loss.
You and I may be as different from each other as an eye is different from a foot. But we still need each other. None of us is complete in and of ourselves. For this reason, we must fight against everything that divides us. I knew a pastor once who sometimes celebrated when members of his church left. “Divine subtraction,” he crowed to his staff. If they opposed him they needed to go. Between us, I think he missed them more than he knew. Maybe he should have been jumping up and down with the pain of loss.
Remember that Christians don’t just go to church. We belong to the church. When we walked out of the waters of baptism, we left behind the differences that divide us. In the ancient world it was Jew and Gentile, slave and free, all united by the same Holy Spirit. What would Paul write to Christians today? In the church of Jesus Christ, different political parties, different cultural backgrounds, different perspectives on global uncertainty are submitted to the sovereign source of our unity, the Spirit. We were all baptized by the same Holy Spirit. We find our unity in the truth of who Jesus Christ is. What God has joined together in one body, let no one separate!
