A Feature, Not A Bug--January 29, 2025

A Feature, Not A Bug--January 29, 2025

"Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?" (1 Corinthians 12:14-19)

Just to be clear, the inclusion of diverse people with diverse gifts in the church is not a failure or a flaw to be fixed--it's a feature designed by God's intention.  So, if we have a problem with that, Paul advises us to take it up with Christ himself.

The New Testament says so: it's right here in this well-known passage from Paul's correspondence to the Corinthians that many of us heard aloud in worship this past Sunday.  The community of Jesus' followers is intentionally diverse, with members as different from one another as eyes are from feet or gall bladders are from nose hairs. Each of those parts of our own body belong, not because of their uniformity, but precisely because in their difference, they are each able to contribute something different and necessary for the life of the whole.

Now, when Paul makes his rhetorical point using the analogy of a human body, it all makes perfect sense, and it all seems pretty simple.  After all, in real life, feet don't talk, and therefore they don't go bullying the hands or trying to kick them out (pun intended!) because they look a little different.  And in real life, the ears are not overwhelmed with self-doubt that they think about dropping off the sides of your face because they don't feel important enough to belong.  The eyes don't tease the lips that they're unimportant. And the crossed arms don't get to hold a special vote in conjunction with the furrowed brows to get rid of the organs don't understand much about because they're on the inside, like the intestines or the kidneys or the spleen.  When it's all inside the body, typically the parts all get along pretty well for the most part. After all, they are designed to cooperate, and they are not intended to function in isolation.

The hard part for so many of us is when we make the leap from a single human body to a collection of us in the community we call "church."  That's where we start to get uncomfortable with the idea of difference.  That's where folks sometimes fall into the mindset that SOME people don't really belong because they are different.  It's really easy to start dividing ourselves into little cliques or factions, all of them fracturing along fault-lines of difference.  The people who live in one neighborhood all hang out, but the folks from across the tracks?  No, they aren't really "our kind of people..." right?  The ones who all watch the same TV channels and get their news from the same talking heads, they all decide that they are the "True Church," but the ones who watch, read, and think differently, well, they aren't really members of the community.  The people who went to school with you and go way back in the same town, well, they are ok--but these new faces? We're not so sure.  Early service versus late service... contemporary versus traditional music... red states versus blue states... high church versus low church... loud and outspoken versus quiet and reserved.  We could go on and on with the different dividing lines, from the serious to the ridiculous.  But you get the drift--and my guess is that you've lived through conversations where one group of like-minded folks decides that some other group that doesn't fit their cookie cutter doesn't really belong.  

In those times, the differences across the whole community are talked about like they are problems to be solved or flaws to be fixed. We tell ourselves that the way to make everything harmonious in the church is just to make everybody the same--the same in their thinking, the same in their perspective, the same in their approach to living out their faith. And once we are in that mindset, we start to see anybody who stands out, whose gifts don't fit our preconceived places to use them, or whose life experience is different from our own, as people who need to be pushed out of the circle or compelled to conform.  But again, for the apostle writing to the first-century church, the differences across the community called "church" are not mistakes, but blessings.  They are not weaknesses, but strengths.  They are not bugs in the software, but features God has intentionally set in place.

As Paul saw it in the very first generation of the church, God certainly could have required uniformity within the church, but instead had deliberately chose people from diverse backgrounds, different cultures and languages, and a variety of points on the spectrums of class, status, gender, and ethnicity. And in addition to that, God gave each member of the community different gifts, abilities, and strengths, all of which are needed--but all of which also bring slightly different perspectives, understandings, and ways of making sense of the world.  Rather than force us all to see things all the same way or all approach questions from the same vantage point, God has deliberately given us a community in which some are immediately practical, some deeply relational and emotional, some philosophical, and some (often the poets) are out in left field making you wonder why they are even invited to the table, until they say something that completely reframes the situation and makes everyone see new approaches.  We need all of those voices, and our communities of faith would be impoverished if we were missing any one of them.  How much worse it would be if we insisted everyone see things all from the same vantage point all the time?  

The only catch to receiving the gift of all these diverse voices, gifts, and perspectives... is that we really do have to make the space for each of them and to honor them rather than shut them down.  That means each of us will be asked to go beyond our comfort zone and to see the world from someone else's vantage point--or at least to listen to them when they tell us how they see things and why.  It will mean considering the possibility that MY way of seeing things is not the only way, and that in fact it may well be GOD who has put the others with diverse perspectives in my life, so that they can catch the blind spots I don't even realize I have.  I won't lie to you--doing that consistently is hard work, and it is often easier to slip back into the old model of forcing everyone to toe the party line.  But it leaves us shriveled and dying as a community--the same as a body would die if it were all feet or all ears, but no heart, lungs, or stomach.

So today, perhaps the most important way for us to live on the edge of our comfort zones is to look around at the diversity of the people of God--in your congregation, in your community, and around the world--and before the impulse to make everyone homogenous kicks in, to see each of those different, diverse, varied sets of gifts and perspectives as a blessing worthy of being included.  What if we dared to see our differences as God-given features, not failures or flaws?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to appreciate the value of each other person in the body with us--not only the people whose perspectives are similar to our own, but the ones most markedly different.  And teach us what we have to learn from all of them.