Missing Pieces

Now you can listen too!  http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw

1 Cor. 12:11-26  

I’m sure many of you have been through some sort of surgery in which they put you out. So you don’t really know what’s going on while you are in the operating room. I mean those doctors and nurses could be talking about anything. Well I want you to listen to this scenario…(Operating room setting.  A patient is on the gurney being operated on.  Behind are a doctor and a nurse.  The sound of the heart monitor is in the background, definitely loud enough for the audience to hear.)

Doctor:  Scalpel?
Nurse:  Scalpel

Doctor:  Suction?
Nurse:  There’s a bleeder here doctor.
Doctor:  Suction?  (slurping sound)  Cautery?  Thank you.
Nurse:  You’re welcome sir.
Doctor:  Clamp?  Suture?   Mayo scissors?
Nurse:  That’s pretty good work doctor. 
Doctor:  Well, That should do it for his appendix. 
Nurse:  Would you like me to close him up?
Doctor:  No, No!  Let’s take a look around! 
Nurse:  Doctor?
Doctor:  Well, he didn’t need his appendix.  Got to be other stuff he doesn’t need, like, this thing. 
Nurse:  Doctor!  That’s his kidney! 
Doctor:  Ahhh,, he’s got another one.  (clip and toss)  And this, why on earth anyone needs a pancreas I’ll never know! (clip and toss)
Nurse:  Doctor, I think that was important!
Doctor:  Nah, he’ll never even know its gone.  This is ugly!  (Clip)
Nurse:  That doesn’t mean it’s not important!
Doctor:  Oh, and look, I doubt he needs this!  (clip, sound of flat line)  Woops, my bad!    Ah, nurse, you wanna sew that up, quickly? 
Announcer: Ever feel like you’re not important?  God made you and that makes you important!  (A skit by Life Line Productions.)

Now that’s really more of a recap of last week’s message. But I thought it was really worth sharing it today because Paul really gets into the body parts analogy today. 1 Cor. 12:12-26 has got to be a favorite text for preachers, easy to illustrate, as you just heard, and used often in churches down through the centuries, so I am sure you heard plenty of sermons on this text before. And that poses a challenge for me. What could I possibly say that would make it fresh and relevant for you today and not put you to sleep because you’re heard it all before. Well how about this? Paul’s teaching here is really about healthy conflict management.

You will remember, and I even mentioned this again last week, that Paul started out his letter to the Corinthians by letting them know he was upset and dismayed by the divisions and factions that had arisen among them. One says, “I follow Apollos.” Another says, “I follow Peter.” And another says, “I follow Jesus!” While it is certainly good to follow Jesus and he is the one we all ought to be following, Paul’s way of quoting that line makes it sound like the ones who were talking that way were actually boasting about it, lording it over their brothers by putting on an attitude that said, “I’m better than you.” Certainly all these different factions were competing against one another to be the biggest most respected group. And they weren’t going to stop until there was only one group left that came out on top after everybody else admitted defeat.

I hear echoes of that in Paul’s talk about body parts. “If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.”  What’s that really about? Isn’t that about the ways we humans tend to compare ourselves to each other? We are all different. Our differences are what cause us to be concerned. In Corinth speaking in tongues was getting a lot of attention, and as we will see in a later part of the letter, the Corinthians must have thought that everybody who is spiritual ought to speak in tongues. To put it simply, they wanted everybody to be the same.

People were looking at each other and seeing the differences between the gifts each one had and they were saying things like, “He’s better than me because he can do that and I can’t. Or worse they might have been saying, “I am better than him because I can do this and he can’t.” So in two ways the body suffered the loss of gifts being used for God. Either somebody felt inadequate and useless, “I do not belong to the body.” So they stopped offering what they had. Or else they were kicking people out for not being good enough! “The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” So they weren’t allowed to offer what they had.

Paul was trying to get them to accept each other and celebrate their differences with the realization that “God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, or all the same, where would the body be?” In fact do you know what happens in the human body when one group of cells starts demanding that all the cells be exactly the same? That’s cancer! These tumors grow and they are all of one kind and they try to take over the whole body! That’s bad! We need each other to be different in order to meet different needs of the body.

Aren’t you glad that the great physician who assembled the body of Christ isn’t like the silly doctor in the skit? God doesn’t cut things out of the body of Christ thinking that they are unnecessary. He is the exact opposite, with perfect understanding of how each and every part, down to the smallest bit is important and necessary to the perfect and harmonious function of the whole. The only thing God cuts out is the dead stuff.

Now let me expand your mind and thinking a bit. Let us realize that this congregation is just a small and really very tiny fraction of the whole body of Christ. We are aware of course that there are other Christians in Cadillac. They are part of the body of Christ with us. They just happen to meet in other buildings, sort of like your left hand is at the end of your left arm, and your right hand is assembled in a different place, at the end of your right arm. There is a physical separation. But they are still part of the same body.

Now take the global perspective and see that there are billions of members of the body of Christ spread all over the world. That’s what we are a part of. And when one part suffers the whole body suffers. So let me tell you a story about one of our brothers in China. Brother Zhang, a young medical doctor and preacher in Zhejiang, China, refused to join the government Three Self Patriotic Church. He was arrested and spent eighteen years in prison eating poor food, being beaten and drowning in the stench of cellmates. He shares this testimony:

“The eighteen years were a tremendous spiritual challenge, which brought great blessings I never before thought possible in my life. Prison officials ordered me to empty the camp night-soil pit, the prison’s cesspool. While I had little experience of physical labor, its hardship and suffering did not frighten me. Although most of the other prisoners dreaded night-soil pit duty as the most difficult task in prison, I accepted this assignment without complaint. The pit stored all the human excrement, both liquid and solid, from the entire camp. Once the pit was full, its human waste steeped until its foul contents were ripe enough to be used as fertilizer. Not only did I walk into this disease-ridden mess to remove it, but I had to breathe its stench as I scooped away each successive layer and dropped hundreds of shovel loads into collection buckets for others to carry to the fields.

“The night-soil pit’s pungent odors lingered with the digger at least three days, literally surrounding him with an almost maddening stench. All the guards and other prisoners avoided the night-soil pit digger to escape being overcome by the lingering odor. One reason I could enjoy working in the night-soil pit was the solitude. Surrounded only by foul air and human waste, I could sing music of praise to God as loudly as I wanted. And the guards were never close enough to protest this otherwise objectionable behavior!

“One of my favorite songs during those days was ‘In the Garden.’ My Chinese night-soil pit was hardly the garden that the composer of that hymn had in mind! But God delivered great happiness to me to be able to sing His praises in such earthly misery.”

Think about this, that brother in the Lord suffered in the body of Christ. Our hearts should go out to him and to others like him, praying for relief from their torture and suffering and praying that we find ways to help them. And there are ministries that connect us to them. I know these stories because I get an e-mail every day from one of those ministries through Biblegateway.com. And we are encouraged to pray for specific people. We can write letters of encouragement to them. And if we can afford to send money we can pay for comforts, relief, supplies and Bibles to be given to our less fortunate brothers and sisters in far away lands. Though they are far away, we are connected to them. They are with us in the body, connected to us by the one Holy Spirit who is in all of us and unites us.

I noticed that this particular brother functioned much in the form of a kidney. Now your kidneys don’t normally come to the front, pop out of your skin and demand attention. They only demand attention when something is wrong and they can’t work like they are supposed to. Normally they just do their necessary work, removing the dirt and toxins in your body. And guess what? Healthy kidneys are happy to do it! Just like our brother Zhang was given the spiritual gift of being able to endure the stench of his prison and sing praises to God in a place where nobody would stop him. I’m sure glad I have kidneys.

But my kidneys have cried out to me in the past. I had kidney stones a couple of times. Kidney stones happen when the kidneys hang on to stuff they should have gotten rid of and clump it all together into stones that are too large to pass unnoticed through the tiny tubes. I’m sure some others of you have had kidney stones too. It is no fun!! I will tell you plainly that in those moments my kidneys controlled my whole body and took over all my time as I sought the remedy! Sometimes I think about this. Shouldn’t the suffering and pain being endured by our brothers and sisters in Asia, Africa and the Middle East control the whole body of Christ and take up our time to seek a remedy? Lord show us what to do and how to help!

Now think of other seemingly insignificant parts of your body and their relationship to each other. Your pinky toe nail may never ever speak to your pinkly finger nail and it’s possible that they might never even meet each other. But aren’t you, the owner of both of them, glad they are both there! In the same way, God is glad to have you as part of his body.

Every part of the body no matter how small or how hard to see, has an important role to play in the work of the whole body and God is delighted when his body hums along harmoniously, all the parts working together smoothly, with no rebellion, no resentment of other parts doing things differently and no dejection in parts that can’t do everything.

This is where it comes down to us, to you and me. As I said last week, everybody has a spiritual gift to offer to the body. Now a lot of people tend to fall into that side of Paul’s concern that says, something parallel to a foot saying, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” That translates into something like, “I don‘t know what my gift is so I don’t think I have anything to offer.” Or it translates into something like, “I am not good with words so I can’t pray in public.” And so you don’t even offer your prayers.

Thus a lot of us don’t even offer what we can offer because we feel it is not good enough. But God wants us to offer whatever it is we do have. Otherwise the body is deprived of being blessed by what he gave you. Here’s an example. You don’t know how many times it has occurred when I have visited other churches, or been to conferences to hear other preachers, that I have at times been so blessed by what they offer through their gifts that I have occasionally told someone, “Wow. I want to go to your church!” See, I know that there are better preachers than me. But that’s not a good enough reason to not offer to God and to you what I can do. And can I say I am sorry you didn’t get a better preacher? But I’ll keep working at it. And you keep praying for me and things will develop.

We should all encourage each other to keep on doing all we can together. I want to finish up with one more word for those of you who don’t know what your gift is. That’s a lot like thinking you don’t know what God has called you to do. I have learned that the key to getting through that uncertainty is to just trust God and be the best follower of Jesus you can be. Exhibit concern for his Word and learn it the best you can. Love the church and love the fellowship and offer whatever you can. You may not know what God has actually called you to do until after you have done it.

This would be just like Joseph who was sold as a slave in Egypt and that whole story of his time in prison and everything that he endured until he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and got to be second in command of Egypt. Even after all that, using his gifts to do his best for the Lord, he still didn’t really know what God had called him to do or why God had put him through all those tough circumstances in his life until his brothers showed up to buy food from him. It was only after Joseph revealed himself to his brothers, and after they passed their test, that he could say to them, “You intended it for evil, but God meant it for good so that I could save all of you and my father from the famine.”

So even if you think you don’t know what your gift is, don’t despair, just do your best to love and serve the Lord and His body. It will turn out that you are indeed using the gifts he has given you.