"The Ship of Theseus"--June 25, 2019

"The Ship of Theseus"--June 25, 2019

"Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.... All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.  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." [1 Corinthians 12:4-7, 11-12]

This is the humbling truth with which I am grappling lately: I am replaceable... and that is okay.

In fact, in the end, it is deeply good news for the people of God that I am replaceable and that the body of Christ does not depend on my permanence.  It means there is Someone who holds us all together even when I can no longer hold onto my own life.

But let me back up for a moment. I was reminded recently of an old paradox among philosophers--and when I say "old," I mean, old, like back to the ancient Greeks.  The Greek philosophers like Plutarch, Aristotle, and Plato had a running thought experiment sometimes called "The Ship of Theseus," and it goes something like this:

The old hero Theseus returns from his naval voyages, and they decide to preserve his ship for public display to commemorate all his and his crew's glorious adventures.  But over time, pieces of wood begin to rot and need to be replaced. Eventually, you have not just one or two planks replaced, but eventually the whole ship is made over again with new wood, and you have a pile of old rotten wood that used to be part of the ship.  And the paradoxical question the philosophers posed was this: which ship is Theseus' ship?  Is the restored one still Theseus' because it looks in appearance most identical to the vessel he actually sailed in?  Is it the original planks, even when they no longer look like they did at first... or even if they no longer look like wood at all because they have rotten into compost?

Well now there's a good head-scratcher.  Different philosophers, from different schools of thought, have offered up different answers to the question, too.  Some say it depends on whether you focus on the "form" of the ship (what "looks" most like the original boat) or the "material" of the ship (the actual atoms and matter that made up the boat Theseus sailed in). Others say that the concept of "ship-ness" is all in our heads anyway, and that there's no giant cosmic dictionary in which true "ship-ness" exists anyway, so it's all a lot of pedantic nonsense.  And still others say you have to conclude that since both make a valid claim to being "the Ship of Theseus," what you've really got is one ship in two places, or two ships that are connected across time and space.  You can insert your own answer to the paradox here, too, along with the litany of others.

You can imagine, I'll bet, how this offers a window into the life of the people of God, too.  After all, we are constantly in a state of change and flow.  As much as we like to imagine that there was some past moment at which "the church" was unchanging and fixed, it just ain't so.  From day one, there have been constant changes as people come to faith, become a part of the community we call "the body of Christ," and live their lives. Every congregation of Christians over the last two thousand years has done the very same, as people are born and die, as they move across country or have babies, as they get divorced or get married, as they raise up new leaders, and as they say goodbye to old ones.  It is part of the inescapable bittersweetness of life that we keep living in this constant flux... and yet we are convinced that something remains the same about us, too, even though the faces of one congregation a hundred years ago will be completely different from the faces in their directory a century later.  It's the Ship of Theseus all over again, but with people.  As time passes and dear saints go to their rest, while new disciples are baptized into the community, at some point we both are--and are not--the same congregation we used to be.  My goodness, sometimes even the name changes or the building moves, and yet we have this abiding conviction that there is something that remains constant, something that endures, even when all the individual parts have changed and new voices are singing the old, old story.

As he wrote to the Corinthians, Paul uses a similar metaphor--the image of a body.  Now, Paul didn't have a microscope, so he only gets down to the level of organs and limbs.  But at a deeper cellular level, the tension of change and constancy is even more visible.  After all, at every moment of my life, cells in my body are dying, and dividing, and reproducing, and changing.  The physical "stuff" that makes me up is constantly changing, meal by meal and breath by breath, as the air I breathe and the food I eat becomes incorportated into the new cells of my body, the cells that are, in a fundamental sense, me.  And yet, even though I am made up of different matter this morning as I write than I was when I went to bed last night, and even though over time, all of the raw material of me is slowly being replaced, I am convinced that somehow my identity, the "me-ness" of me, continues, and I believe myself to be the same person I was when my head hit the pillow.  Our bodies are unavoidably like this--always changing their make-up, and yet always somehow in continuity.  And yeah, that is exactly what it is like to be the "body" we call the church, the "body of Christ."

Now, it seems to me to be very good news at an individual level that I will still be "me" when I wake up in the morning, even though some of my body's cells will have died and new cells will have been produced, between one day and the next.  But that also means something rather humbling for each of my individual cells--they each belong to the body, but the body continues even when there is change, even when old cells die and new cells are "born."

I watch this happen in the life of the church all the time, and sometimes the paradox is startling.  Between Friday and Sunday last week (an interval of time that we Christians know can make a world of difference), I buried a dear and good saint whose smiling face I will not forget, and I also baptized two new saints whose lives are just in their childhood.  And in the wider life of the church I serve, we have just come through the transition of a bishop at the verge of retirement and the election of a new person to serve in that role.  And despite the change, the community called "Church" persists.  It changes, of course.  And it watches transitions come and go.  But somehow, we dare to believe, we are still the body of Christ.

The humbling thing about all of that is where I started here: it means that I am replaceable.  Whatever my part in the life of the church, whatever my role in the body, and whatever kind of "cell" I imagine myself to be, I will come and go in the two-millennia-and-counting lifespan of this body, and when I am gone, another will be raised up.  I don't always have to like that reality, because each of us, myself included, likes to think we are indispensable and that the world will fall apart without us.  But it is the truth.  I am replaceable.  My job is not to last forever, but to be what I am called to be for the days I am given, to spend myself as fully as I can, and then when the time comes for me to decrease and another to increase, as John the Baptizer puts it, to let that happen, too.

It is much like the poem of Mary Oliver's entitled, "In Blackwater Woods," whose lines end thus: 

"To live in this world

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal,

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go."

What we dare to believe as the people of God is that while the Ship of Theseus paradox may have no tidy solution, the mystery of the Body of Christ does--we dare to believe that it is none other than the Spirit, by whom Christ is present, holds us together both in time and in space.  And on the days when one among us moves across country, or starts a new chapter of life of which we cannot take part, or goes to their rest, we feel the loss, but we also trust that the Spirit of God holds us together.  

There will come a day when I draw my last breath, and when it happens, the church will continue.

There will come a day when the people whom I love dearly at this moment have taken their leave from my life; when it happens (as it happens, slowly, perhaps, loss by loss), the Body of Christ will endure because the Spirit holds on to each of us, down to each cell in the body, throughout time and throughout space, and preserves them into eternity.

The hope I have, and that each of us has, then, is not that there is some way for me to last forever, but that even when I can no longer hold onto my own life, or even as the people and loves that have made up my life right now have each taken their leave, that the Spirit of God ensures that the body of Christ continues.

I am replaceable; that is Good News.  The world will not fall apart without me.  The Spirit will not let go of any of us.  And that is enough.

Lord God, give us hope that you will hold us constantly even while everything in life changes--both the world outside us and the life inside us.  Be our constant, and let your Spirit hold us together.