The Family

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 12: 12 – 31a

January 26, 2025

As we were growing up, there wasn’t much room for delicate things in our house. 4 active kids, all big and rambunctious, spelled the end to many a picture or knickknack in our home. But as we got older and moved out, my mom installed a card table in the family room that always had a puzzle on it.

She loved big, complicated puzzles that displayed a variety of country scenes. The table was covered in felt so the pieces couldn’t slide around. Each piece was turned right side up and the edges of the puzzle were always completed first.

If things were slow during a visit at home, I used to like to sit and work her puzzles. She never minded who helped to complete the picture, but she always wanted to at least be there when the final piece was put in place.

She always finished the puzzles, even if she had grown dissatisfied with the picture. But the worst, the absolute worst, was to go through all of the work of completing the puzzle only to find that a piece or two was missing. Oh, what a tragedy! The injustice of it all just screamed at us! It didn’t matter that it was a 5,000-piece puzzle and you had put in place 4,999 of the pieces. It didn’t matter if the piece missing was just a piece of blue sky or some other inconsequential piece that didn’t really matter.

The puzzle was incomplete, forever incomplete and never able to function as designed – with a piece missing—because it was less than it was created to be.

Paul is writing to a church in Corinth that was going through a number of growing pains. Sometimes we read Biblical letters written to churches and marvel over the things that they were fighting about. But we forget that, at their time, it was all brand new. Jesus had just died 20 years or so ago earlier. The New Testament had not yet been written. There was not 2,000 years of developed theology to help believers understand what they should be.

The Corinthians were struggling with the notion of spiritual gifts. If you remember from last week, we talked about these gifts having been given by God through the Holy Spirit for the building up of the church. They weren’t for personal glory; they weren’t meant to set up some kind of religious hierarchy in the church with special privileges going to those who exhibited the more prestigious gifts.

And yet, that was exactly what was going on in the Corinthian church and in many churches since then. Paul began with an explanation of the variety of gifts available. Teaching, encouraging, administration, prophecy, discernment – these are all gifts given by the Holy Spirit for the building up of the church. Then, in a direct rebuke to the self-anointed prestigious in their midst – and ours, Paul reminded his readers that each member of the church is given one or more spiritual gifts. Each member!

Paul then moves on in the second half of 1st Corinthians 12, to use a metaphor that was well known in the ancient world. The body was often used as a metaphor to describe the workings of a community or society. But of course, in Roman and Greek society, the parts of the body that seemed more consequential or respected were reserved for those on the higher rungs of the social or political ladder.

Sight, the ability to hear and speak, the head – representing wisdom and knowledge – it was always the rich and powerful who were represented by these body parts. The farther one went down the sociological or political ladder, the lower the body part became your representative part.

And yet Paul turns this entire notion upside down. In today’s text, Paul takes a familiar cultural metaphor to describe, not the privileged representation of the rich and powerful, but instead the critical need for the entire body. Paul writes in verse 22 of our text, “On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be the weaker are indispensable.”

Friends, last week we described a church, filled with spiritual amateurs, worshipping, singing, praying, and serving with all that they have and are. If the original meaning of the French word “amateur” meant something done simply for the love of it, we talked about a church worrying less about particular preferences and more about vibrant, exuberant, even outlandish expressions of love for Jesus.

This afternoon there will be two football games. One will be played in 40-degree weather, the other will open at around 32 degrees and it will get progressively colder. Inevitably, at some point during the game, the cameras will find people in t-shirts and no shirts, on their feet, cheering like the outcome of the game is directly connected to the decibel level of their cheers. We will look at them on the television and collectively say, “They are nuts!”

Meanwhile, we will allow the “chance “of rain to keep us from coming to worship.

But then there will be other gatherings – much smaller, located, not in freezing weather, but gathered in heated living rooms centered around big televisions. There will be cheers, moans, groans, couch cushions thrown in the air in celebration and thrown to the ground in disgust. The celebrations will be loud and exuberant.

In both cases, absolute strangers will be giving each other high fives and hugs in celebration for the teams both parties adore. Strangers will look at each other and shake their heads and share their tears when their teams lose.

Amateurs in love with a game and a team. Amateurs expressing their hopes and dreams simply because of their love for their teams. Amateurs, at a particular time and place, seeing themselves as an integral part of their team’s success or failure. Connected. Exuberant, Passionate. Living into their role as fans. Living into their part of the Eagle, Commanders, Chiefs, or Buffalo Bills body of believers.

Beloved Ones, we are no less a body, no less a family. Each of us have been gifts – spiritual gifts – gifts given, not for our glory, but for the building up of the church and God’s kingdom. Like with my mom’s puzzles, when you are not here, when we are not experiencing the faithful expression of your spiritual gift, then the picture of who we are or who we could be is incomplete.

Each of you has gifts and abilities that are critical to this church family living into its full picture. Each of you has been given spiritual gifts by God through the Holy Spirit. Let’s also be clear about this. Yes, we collectively have personal gifts and abilities, spiritual gifts given to us by God, but we also need to be attentive to our spiritual reservoirs and take breaks when we need them. Jesus routinely left the ongoing active ministry to go off into the wilderness to pray, study, and refresh. But Jesus always came back. Jesus always re-engaged. Sometimes we want to take our spiritual breaks and turn them into lifestyles.

Each of us also has passions and a variety of ways that we show what is important to us. But we are, together, united at our collective heart as spiritual amateurs, each of us in love with the same thing – Jesus Christ.

We need each other. We need you here – a physical, tangible, huggable member of this church family. We need you here, living into and expressing that spiritual gift that makes each of you a critical member of this church family, of this church body.

We need stakeholders, not spectators; we need family members and participants, not absentee loved ones. We need YOU in all of your giftedness and glory to make this church body complete. We are the body of Christ, one in Him, full of love for Jesus and one another. What a picture that would be for the world! Amen.