Lovingly Stuck

Lovingly Stuck--May 21, 2018

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6)

I can’t get Gerry Rafferty’s voice out of my head singing the refrain of the Stealers Wheel song:

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right—here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a very complimentary way of describing the community of God’s people, the community we usually call “church.”  But if Paul is right that we belong to the body of people who share one faith, one baptism, and one God who is named Father of us all, well then, part of being a Christian means being… stuck with each other. 

One body... one Spirit... one community of stinkers and sinners and often hard-hearted mess-ups with jagged edges on our souls with which we jab at others.  And part of what the Spirit does among us is to absorb some of the force from all of our self-centered elbowing each other and still holding us all together.  The Spirit, you could say, is the One whose powerful love holds us together like the "strong nuclear force," as particle physicists call it, that binds otherwise repellant protons in the nucleus of every atom of the universe.  The Spirit, in a sense, is the divine Culprit who makes us stuck with one another.

That might sound like complaining—I do not mean it to be so.  I mean, rather, that if Paul is right (and I think we ought to take that as a default assumption here), then we can’t “opt out” of belonging in this body of believers.  We can’t decide to stay home and phone it in or just watch from a distance.  And we can’t just adopt a “I’m taking my toys and going home” attitude and go off looking to do this faith thing on our own.  To be a Christian is not only to be in a relationship with God through Jesus—it is to be drawn into a relationship with everybody else claimed by God through Jesus, too. We can’t separate ourselves from the rest and say, “I don’t need you—I’ve got Jesus, and he’s all I am interested in. The rest of you can just go home.”  We are stuck in the body… with each other.

For that matter, the Spirit is not just here for my personal religious self-improvement, or to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.  The Spirit is not simply here to give a thumbs-up to how I already think and believe.  In fact the Spirit is the One who keeps pulling me outside of myself and my own little insular world to recognize that I belong in this larger communion of people who are just as beloved, just as precious, and just as graced as I am.  Recognizing that is hard enough, and then living it out with one another is even harder.

But that’s really a good thing.  In fact, it’s a grace thing. 

It’s a grace thing because it means that the Spirit doesn’t give the option of us voting someone off the island—or of someone else voting ME off the island—and out of the body, just because we don’t get along.  Grace means that I belong, and I belong alongside everybody else who belongs, in spite of my rough, jagged edges, or careless words, or my failures.  And there’s no second-class-citizen status, or leper-colony-on-the-outskirts-of-the-church where I can be banished because I don’t fit in. There is no "Island of Misfit Toys" for the broken and bitter, the selfish and sinful, while the "nice, respectable Christians" (you know, the ones "like me) get to be under a steeple somewhere else.  Or maybe, we could say, the whole Christian community is made up of nothing but misfit toys, and the Spirit holds us all together.

To belong in that Spirit-bound community means to belong fully, completely, and wholly.  There is no “bronze level” for newbies and then a “silver” and “gold” and “platinum” level for the better connected Christians.  There is one body.  There is one faith.  There is one baptism that washes us and claims us all.  So even when I’m the joker or the clown, I have a permanent place at the table. We are all blessedly “stuck” in the middle with each other… because Christ himself is committed to sticking it out with each and all of us. 

We live in the age of the paid-membership—where you can belong in a community, but only for so long, and only if you pay your dues to stay in the club.  We are taught, then, to think that all relationships are temporary, and that all belonging is conditional.  But the Spirit brings us into something new: a love that won’t let us go.  He says to us, “You are mine, and I will not leave you or vote you out or get tired of you.  I will see this through with you.  I will stick it out with you.”  He says it to you—but he also says it all of us, not just some imaginary “diamond-level” Christians who have racked up enough God-points. 

The edge to all of this is that it means there are going to be other members of the body that you don’t particularly like but still are bound to in love. 

The grace to all of this is that it means that even if nobody else in the body thinks you are worth keeping around, even on the days you feel like just dead weight, the One Spirit of Jesus says you belong, and he is the only one who gets a say.  Claimed in the waters of baptism, you and I are part of the one body.  Christ's one body.

Looks like Jesus has chosen to be “stuck”—lovingly stuck—in the middle with you.

O One Spirit who makes us One, enable us to believe that we belong, and enable us to love all those whom you insist belong alongside of us, too.