March 23, 2015

“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. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 12:12ff

“I don’t know when it was that I first had my attention called to the combination of precision and magic that words contain. As I reflect back, I still remember how, as a child of about seven or eight, when I couldn’t really understand all of the exalted language, I nevertheless listened week after week to my father as, in a beautiful voice, he read the order of worship. And I remember how certain phrases stuck in my mind. I didn’t know exactly what father meant when, reading the liturgy at the Communion, he said, “And therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven,” but I knew it was something very big. Paul talks about the body of Christ. But the prayer (for All Saint’s Day) in a perfectly gorgeous image, talks about the body of Christ and each one of us in it.” Joseph Sittler (1904 – 1987) “For All The Saints” volume III

We don’t really know how connected each part of the body is to another, and within another, until one of them is not working right. I know, in my recollection, that if my knee is hurting, I don’t only feel it in my knee, but also my back, and my side. If my shoulder is hurting, the pain often runs down into my hand, and up into my neck. A single body part cannot exist on its own, and all our body parts work best when they are all functioning together. Joseph Sittler goes on to say in his devotion that “If you’ve watched someone knit, you’ve seen how each stitch is interlocked with every other stitch in such an integral way that if one stitch is dropped, the whole line ravels apart.” In other words, what keeps the knitted sweater together is the integral way that all the parts are connected. It is “one sweater”, yes, but that individual sweater is made up of hundreds, thousands of individual stitches. Paul is saying that if one of us, who are members collectively of the body of Christ, if one of us suffers, the whole body suffers. Paul will go on to say that G*d has knit together the body of Christ in the mystical body of Christ. This gives us another meaning for what it means to be “In Christ”. Not only is Christ dwelling within us, and us in Christ, but we dwell together with all the members of the body of Christ. Therefore, if one of us is hurting, we all are hurting. If one of us is incapacitated, we all feel it, we all miss their presence, and we will not function as well as we could without them. This should encourage each one of us to be aware that if one of our “members” is hurting, or missing, or in need, we should be ready to care for them – just like we would care for ourselves.

Pastor Dave