Baptized into the Body
“My ox is in the ditch”
I’ll never forget the first time I heard that very agrarian and also very biblical phrase uttered by a Kentucky friend who was explaining to me why he’d missed worship with the church for a few weeks. The proverb comes from Jesus who asked, "Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?" (Luke 14:5). He was explaining that works of necessity and mercy are not a violation of the Sabbath. My friend’s house had flooded and he had to put every spare hour into its repairs for the sake of his family, doing that with the help of nearby neighbors when they were also available. For a few weeks, Sunday was a day for reclaiming his home from disaster rather than gathering with others for worship. Several church members had given time to assist him too, the right thing to do, showing how the Body of Christ does its work for one another.
‘Necessity and mercy’ are fair descriptors of why people don’t attend the regular and Christ-summoned gathering of a congregation to pray, hear God’s word, and worship. Sometimes we can’t attend. But “can’t” is not the same as “can’t be
bothered”, and when the exception becomes the rule, we’ve lost sight of the beauty of Jesus’ mission to create, cleanse, and work through his Body, the Church.
That’s happened to a lot of people over the past couple of years. Yes, people have dropped out for some legitimate reasons I’ve already noted in previous posts, abuse among them. Yet even this rejection of a toxic situation should not end with a wholesale permanent rejection of our commitment to the community of Faith called ‘the Church’. When we come to grips with the reality that the Church’s creation is one reason Jesus came to be our Savior, that he shed his blood for the Church (Acts 20:28), then we can’t help but engage with our brothers and sisters - imperfect as we all are - in committed bonds of holy love and service in the Body of Christ. If the Church is worthy of Christ’s sacrifice, then the Church is worthy of our service.
The Grace of Community
Paul wrote that ‘we were all baptized in one Spirit into one Body’ (1 Corinthians 12:14). Baptism is about being joined to another. We are baptized into the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18ff) and Israel was ‘baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea’ (1 Corinthians 10:1ff). The first grace the Spirit brings to us is new birth, together with faith in Christ. In that moment he
baptizes us - he joins and unites us - to Christ and his Body. This grace is deeply personal and interpersonal because sin devastates humanity individually and communally - it isn’t just our hearts that are shattered by sin but our relationships as well. That makes Christian community a grace in our lives.
In Robert Zemekis 2000 film Castaway, Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a man washed ashore on a desert island after an airliner he was on crashed in the ocean, spending four years in an isolated struggle to survive. During that ordeal he ‘befriends’ a volleyball on which he paints a human face, naming it by its brand, ‘Wilson’. The ball becomes his personified companion, the face looking back at him in an otherwise desolate faceless environment. It was a way to avoid going insane. We feel the pain of Noland as he loudly grieves Wilson’s eventual loss, the ball drifting away from him in the tossing waves of the ocean where Noland’s raft floats in a desperate attempt to be rescued. The face had become his friend, and its loss was a death in Noland’s soul.
Why is it necessary that we have faces to relate to? We are made in God’s image and God is himself a community of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we read God saying “Let us make man in our image”,(Genesis 1:26), we can’t help but note the plurality of the persons in the being of the Creator. To be in God’s
image is to be made for and to dwell in community. It’s an essential dimension of humanity and why our violence towards, abuse of, and estrangement from one another is so disastrous. It is also why Jesus establishes us in community as he saves us. Christian community is the first gift of the Spirit. Belonging to the Body of Christ isn’t an optional extra for us, it is the hallmark of new life in Christ.
Healing the Disconnections
The Corinthians were a church riven by divisions and in his letter Paul was pointing out to them their essential union with one another in the Body of Christ. The new community into which they’d been baptized by the Spirit meant that they were ‘members of one another’, that no matter what member they might see themselves to be - a foot, a hand, an eye - no one could say to the others either “I don’t need you” or “I’m not needed”. This was a massive adjustment in their perspective for the rich who thought they were more important than the poor, for women who’d been taught they were of lower social worth but suddenly found themselves as gifted members of the Church for the good of all, and for servants who’d thought they existed as mere utilities, abused sexually and in work by Masters. Being in the Body of Christ changed everything for them. They discovered that in the Church, the first were last and the last were becoming first.
They were beginning to see that the Church was a colony of the Kingdom of heaven, a living breathing preview of a world yet to come fully into view.
Being in the Body of Christ humbles our pride because we discover we are in need of others. In doing so it also restores our gratitude for the gifts God gives us in others. This also delivers us from the self-imposed prisons of despair and isolation that come from thinking we are not needed. Envy of another's gift & contempt for another's need are both enemies of the fabric of community in the Church. We can say neither, "I'm not needed" nor "I don't need you" to others in Christ's Body.
The remarkable British scholar and author CS Lewis describes his realization of our need for Christian community and gathered worship in his little book “God in the Dock.” He wrote, My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that this meant being a target. It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early to go to Church. It doesn’t matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to Church it’s very selfish of you and you upset the house. If there is anything in the teaching of the
New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to Church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on, I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.
At the end of the day a healthy Christian congregation creates deliverance from a prison of solitary pride and despair. That begs the question about what a healthy Christian congregation actually is and what to do to help nourish such a community. It all begins with the Gospel and we’ll dig into this question next week.