I read today's first Corinthians 12, 12 through 27. The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some of our Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free.
But we have all been baptized into one body by one spirit, and we all share the same spirit. Yes, the body has many different parts, not just one part. If the foot says, I'm not a part of the body because I'm not a hand, that does not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear says, I'm not a part of the body because I'm not an eye, would that make it any less a part of the body?
If the whole body were an eye, how would you hear? Or if the whole body were an ear, how would you smell anything? But our bodies have many parts, and God has put each part just where he wants it. How strange a body would be if it had only one part.
Yes, there are many parts, but only one body. The eye can never say to the hand, I don't need you. The head can't say to the feet, I don't need you. In fact, some of the parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary.
In the parts we regard as less honorable are those we clothe with the greatest care. So we carefully protect those parts that should not be seen. While the more honorable parts do not require this special care, so God has put the body together such that an extra honor and care are given to those parts that have less dignity. This makes for harmony among the members so that all the members care for each other.
If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it. And if one part is honored, all the parts are glad. All of you together are Christ's body, and each of you is a part of it. This is God's Word and it is true.
Thanks for your time. So how many of you all enjoyed the Super Bowl last Sunday? How many of you enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show last Sunday? My favorite thing is that you're all talking about this in church, Chad.
You're going to talk about snoop right now? I'm not going to cripple across the stage. I can't do that. My favorite thing about anything necessarily is not what's going on, but I'm a big fan of whatever memes happen afterwards.
And we had some really, really good memes, but also had some moments of realization. So we'll start from the kind of funny to the most eye opening. Let's do this. I saw this one pretty early on.
I just say, if the halftime show was made for those who recognize these items, do they remember the difference? You'll have the friend who had the actual real Sony cassette thing, not the generic one from Walmart. How is it the generic one? Bring your tape thingy.
I saw this one. This was really, really good too. If you enjoyed the halftime show, it's time to use eye cream. And this is the one that scared me.
This is the last one. If you're enjoying this halftime show, it's time to schedule your next colonoscopy. I was laughing. We were at the Youth Super Bowl party, and I was talking with Alan Martin, and we were realizing how all of the commercials were deeply nostalgic.
Then we realized we're at the age where they're now directly marketing to us. But nostalgia is kind of a cool thing. I tend to be very sentimental and very nostalgic. Anybody else in here nostalgic?
That kind of a person. No, nostalgia is interesting because you go back. I think music for me is really nostalgic. I can listen to one song or a whole album, and I maybe go back to a certain place.
I think back to this. If I listen to the Todys Rubberneck, I go back to the summer of 1996. That's there. If I hear Metallica's black album, I remember the summer of 1992 when I was the Boy Scout World Jamboree in a storm for three days, but my teammate had a CD player and beat tons of cool CDs.
What we had is nostalgic is this fierce thing. I mean, nostalgia is not just this random emotion. I kind of, that was the thing Sunday night with the halftime show. It was nostalgic.
It all brought people in my age. It was born in 1980. It brought us back to a place. It's funny as the memes were also realized.
We're getting old enough to where that was a decent distance back. I started digging around with the idea of nostalgia this week. Like I said, it's not just an emotion. Andrew Abaita says this.
Nostalgia reduces the negative psychological impact of loneliness. The reason that our brain wants to go beat nostalgic is because it brings us back to a different time where we might not have felt as just lonely or isolated as we do now. Christine Batcho says this, nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies. In fact, what's really interesting, we've been talking about spiritual communities last few, which is really, really interesting is the time in our life where some of us would call almost the most traumatic ever is also normally the time where we are the most involved with other people and is that the idea of adolescence.
You think it's middle school, which I never want to repeat? High school, depends on what you say. Post high school, it depends. It's wild, it's as weird, it's kind of as frustrating as those times can't be.
There's something that happens inside of us that is significantly deeper than what the average person experiences an adulthood. One of the reasons we become nostalgic about those times, one of the reasons that when we saw Dr. Gray doing his thing, I didn't even listen to that music when I was in middle school, but it was just fully present. It's because we had the ability to be in community in a way that significantly easier is out of lessons than we do as adults.
It's this disconnection that I want us to think about today because nostalgia breaks the power of disconnection just for a moment in our mind. Zigment, bowman, that's a name, he was a Polish social scientist. He was a Polish Jew and his family lived through and escaped Poland during World War II escape from the Nazi party. They moved to Russia, they experienced persecution in Russia, and they moved all over Europe down to Israel for a few years.
He finally settled in London in the 1970s. They were always escaping religious persecution, but also the loss of deeply embedded community. What he wrote about for most of the 70s and 80s until he died in the 1990s was the disconnection between community and how quickly it fell apart in the 20th century. He really liked to connect the idea of how industry and the desire to make money, it changed the Western world from a foundation that was based off of shared relationships and responsibility and into an individual desire for a material gain.
And bowman in his work describes three different types of community. Fit community is where mutual goals by a group of people are worked together and there's the safety of the whole and the wholeness of the whole and these long relationships lead towards everyone thriving. This is what he calls fit community and the majority of the world, especially the Western world, live like this up until the 1920s or 1930s. Then he goes into what he calls thin community and this is the community of the middle of the 20th century.
This is the community of rotary clubs and garden clubs and junior leagues and this sort of thing. To where you're still connected to people but you don't need them for safety and security. You still have a common purpose but there's not a common layer of protection. And then we lead into late modernity, late 20th century is what he calls peg communities.
Peg communities are really what we've shifted into now. These might be sporting events, they might be concerts, but what a peg community is is it's groups of people doing the same thing at the same time at the same place but not being together. There's no mutual responsibility for each other. There's the actions that you were doing that are really just there for your pleasure and not for the protection and the growth of the whole and peg communities give false connection and they fail to enhance the whole.
Now we become nostalgic because we think back to those times as awkward and as frustrating as they might have been when we were younger and we had a shared sense of purpose and security together. As humans, the good thing is we've always struggled with this sort of thing. It's not just us in the 21st century or back when we all grew up in the 80s and the 90s. Even the best community in the world, it pales in comparison, falls well short of what God's goal for what life together is made to be.
Even in the scripture we find dysfunction just in individual relationships but also in communal relationships. Delia read for us from 1 Corinthians this morning and both of Paul's letters to the church in Corinth, 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. Both of those letters really are Paul trying to wrestle down the bare of dysfunctional community and how it's getting riled up in the city of Corinth. Instead of jumping this off, I want to talk about what I call the Corinthian conundrum.
What is this space that Paul keeps on having to talk about? So Corinth was a Roman colony and it was originally settled by the Romans and they sent a bunch of retired Legionnaires and army veterans to a strategic place in Greece. They came in and said we're going to establish a city here that's going to look like the absolute best of Rome and it is here for this purpose and they sent folks there and they started making tons of money and commerce and shipping and it was a great place to live for some folks. Estimates around a third of the Roman Empire were slaves and the Roman world was really made up of a very deliberate and distinct social stratification of the extremely wealthy of a merchant class of these retired army veterans and Legionnaires of the poor and then also of slaves and it was a very distinct lines between all of them and inside of this situation we find Paul coming to this town with some of his workers and we see a church growing rapidly made up of all sorts of different type of people.
Paul spent a couple of years there now we find him writing letters back to them trying to do the tough work of resetting their understanding of what meaning is of what worth is and of the value of each other. He does this in our passage stage a couple of different ways. The first way he talks about baptism, he leads up talking about baptism. He talks about how baptism isn't just symbolic but that it is an act of initiation into a new community and it's an action of equality.
We think about baptism in our world now and a lot of times when I meet with people the first couple of times they come to foundry basics, they ask questions, they say, Chad, what's the difference between a Methodist church and a Baptist church? I talk about baptism. I don't talk about baptism, the fact that yeah well, baptism has babies but really from the fact of in our tradition that goes back hundreds and thousands of years that baptism is not something we do. It's something that God does.
It's the way that God brings us into this family of Christ that we have a thick community view of baptism. That baptism is not just this individual act that you do, this disconnected from the larger church. Not a peg community thing but it's a thick community thing. It's called baptism, baptism, baptism, baptism because there is a level of equality that's going on in the first century church that doesn't exist anywhere else in Roman Empire.
The church was the most equitable and diverse organization in the entire Roman world. That's one reason that we see it begin multiplying rapidly is because everyone was on equal footing there. Like I said, this diversity wasn't just a peg community of people being in the same place, the same time doing the same things. It was one where men and women and the rich and the poor and the slaves and the free.
They all stood on equal footing and all shared the responsibility together of protecting each other as they walked and believe in this different world but also bringing others into this place. It was one of remarkable differences but it made the church change. The world verse 13 of our passage earlier, it says this, but we've all been baptized into one body by one spirit and we all share the same spirit. Baptism is the act that did this.
It's the feeling of the Holy Spirit and the freedom that that provides. The second thing that we see in what Paul talks about is this necessary uniqueness. Paul is on this whole thread throughout 1 Corinthians where he talks about how the presence of Christ comes to each individual person and remakes them and then sends them into their own unique place in the world with unique responsibilities because of the access that they have to God. What that means is that each one of us brings a completely different flavor into Christian community.
That's one of the things I talked about earlier in our mission and giving time. I talk about it every week because we are a different group every time we gather because the people that are in here and the gifts that they bring, the submission to Christ that they bring, the good side and the bad side of who they are, we bring it together. We become stronger. Verse 18 through 20, what deal you're remembering again, it says this, but our bodies have many parts and God has put each part just where he wants it.
How strange. A body would it be if it only had one part. I can never say to the hand, I don't need you. The head can't say to the feet, I don't need you.
And here's the bigger change. We're not doing this by our own power. We can't do this by our own power. As humans, even at our best, the best of ourselves, we can't self generate this type of unity and we can't self generate this type of attention to each other because of sin.
It's impossible, but because of Jesus and the sinning of the Holy Spirit, it is a supernatural connection that sometimes makes absolutely no sense in any other way than us to say the Holy Spirit has changed to me and the Holy Spirit is changing me and the Holy Spirit is now changing all of us. The Roman system has said this, it was through virtue and us keeping each other separate that we become strong. And Jesus said it is because of love and the Holy Spirit that we become strong. The last thing that Paul's doing in this passage is counter formation.
So if you've been around church for a while, we've all heard what Delia read for us earlier, right? The whole body analogy? We've heard this before. You might not have heard this before, and yeah, that sounds kind of weird.
What did I stumble into today? This would have sounded deeply familiar to the people in the early church too, but not because Paul is making it up. This is actually this 500 year old fable that was created by a guy named Marcus Agrippa. And the way that Agrippa talked about it, he used this analogy of the body and having different parts.
But what Agrippa said was, well, you know, the hands are the slaves in our community, in our culture, and the mouths are the poor in the workers, and the slaves take the food, and they feed it through the mouth, and the stomach is the ruling elite. And he used this analogy to talk about why everyone has a certain place and a certain thing, and nobody should drive about their situation in life because it all boils down to we have to support the ruling class or the whole world will fall apart. 500 year old story, we find Seneca talking about it, multiple Roman philosophers and Greek philosophers, they use this analogy as a way to control everyone. So imagine you're sitting there, you're getting this letter read to you, you're in the church of Corinth, like I said, diverse men, women's slave, free, rich, poor, whole nine yards, and Paul goes off on this analogy that you've heard before, the rich folks in the room, I'm going to be saying, all right, I know what this means, I can not deal with this.
You know, the slaves in the room or the poor might be saying, you know, I thought this Jesus thing was too good to be true. This is now just the same thing I've heard forever and ever and ever. But instead what Paul does is he takes this story that formed the way so many people thought and he flips it on top of itself. He subverts this idea of how things come together and he flips it and he says a framework that everyone understood, but Paul speaks about the function of something radically different.
He invited people to break from the old and to step into the new. And what Paul did is also is this, all this sounds so simple, but I'm telling you, it's just so important. He does not invite them into what should be, but Paul invites them into what is. He calls out the way that our sin can cloud us and can keep us trying to work in the broken systems of the world.
And what happens when we bring the broken world into the church? And Paul said, hey, you've been remade by Christ. You've been filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. So you come into here into this safe place with all sorts of people who are so different than you and you work out all these things together alongside each other, not in clothes or hiddenness, but in openness with each other in true relationships.
And then you begin to step out into the world and bring this transformative way of thinking into things that through our baptism, all of our human-made distinctions are broken down. Verse 27, we read this one, we're going to read it again, it says this, and all of you together are Christ's body, and each of you is a part of it. So what I want to kind of wrap things up with today is this. I want to talk about how we can train wreck this.
Because I'm not going to pull that apart anymore. I'm not saying you can pull it up. This is not what could be. This is what it is.
It's just up to you to realize it. But what I do want to talk about is how we can train wreck this, if we're not aware. We're going to go another one of Paul's writings in Romans, chapter 14, another way that Paul is writing to a large church and a large influential city and is speaking to them, but Romans 14, couple verses from it. This is what Paul writes.
Except the one whose faith is weak without quarrelling over disputable matters. One's person's faith allows them to eat anything but another whose faith is weak eats only vegetables, talking about holiness codes and that sort of thing. But the one who eats everything must not treat with contempt, the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything but not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant to their own master servant stand or fall?
And they will stand for the Lord is able to make them stand. Therefore, let us stop passing judgment on one another instead. Make up your mind to not put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of our brother or sister. Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification.
Paul's talking about eating food sacrifice to idols and whether or not people have the moral stomach and complexity and just spiritual ability to be on the edges of things. Guys, we don't have like some weird grocery store where there's sacrifice at stakes we can go buy and cook. That's what Paul's talking about here. But instead we do realize, okay, what are these ways of expressing faith and sharing faith and being faithful that we might get judging about?
What does it mean to be judging Christians really is what we're asking about? It's not the way that we allow our own personal hang ups to simply get in the way. That when we see things that we don't like in someone, even in church, we start to judge. And when we start to judge, especially inside of Christian community, what we start to do is we put them then outside of our span of trust.
We're saying, I don't trust you. I cannot be in this deep community with you. I am better than you. You are worse than me.
We start stepping into that spiritual stratification that layers right there. Remember how much we talked about trust last week and how often are those things that we are judging about someone the ways they're different from us? And we're not talking about like serious moral things going on. Let's go back to that community, thin community, peg communities.
When you're around 100% of people, everyone you're around is 100% just like you. There's no differentiation. There's no places of different thought, different conviction, different passions. How easy it is for us to take someone like that and to begin then judging their worth.
And what happens when we do that is we begin blocking the power of the whole community and protecting our own false selves, our own broken selves in the process. Now we are only as strong as the ways that we are different. And identifying us spiritually in our hearts. And let's begin to break away from seeing people simply as, hey, what can you do for me?
And to instead, what can I do for you so that our community can increase? Because of your unique contribution by your presence being here. Paul, in a lot of his work, he provides a counterbalance by talking about how the different parts of the body need each other. Us sticking into peg communities full of people, even in peg communities inside of churches, what that means is that we're walking around with 13 arms and no fingers.
Sounds a little weird. We're frightening. And it can't be functional. When we bring these broken relational habits of the world into the church, that's what we start doing instead of us realizing Jesus is remaking us and is now sending us outside of things.
So where do we go with this? How do we begin to wear this? David John Ferguson or two brothers that passed her in the Chicago area. And this is what they said.
Whenever a group of friends comes together for the cause of Christ, leave behind the consumeristic thinking that the community exists for me and move towards a eye exist for the community and the community exists for the world. There you have biblical community. So a couple of questions just to ask and think about this week. Also encourage you to grab a home sheet on your way out or go to myfoundry.life and you can find that digital home sheet there.
And to take that time to work through this personally, this week, because here's the thing, the level that we are doing personal work with Jesus, anything that's concerned, is the level of strength that we bring inside of this. Now if churches can function as a peg community, as a Sunday morning only entity, and if a church exists as a Sunday morning entity only it is not going to have or see spiritual power in their community or world. It's going to be there to have the best, least worst option for an hour on Sunday. It's going to be foremost and void.
So the work that we do on the week by ourselves is the power level that we bring into this. A couple of questions. Like I said, I encourage you to grab one of those home sheets, take that home. But first is this, what places of healing and need are we insistent upon others meeting that we have not first brought to Jesus?
If we have places in our lives that are broken and where we are hurt, where we need healing, if we're expecting other people to do all that work for us and we've not gone into Jesus to bring that to him first, we're going to be consistently disappointed with others because we're essentially using people for our own gain. That's how we can come into community and just continue to tear and break things apart. Bring it to Jesus. We bring it to others.
That drives us into this. We care that Jesus offers us. We'll be ten times better than what someone else can. But when we do come together on these things and we feel together and grow strong together in community, we do this by prayer with each other, by supporting one another in these moments and by providing the tangible spiritual assistance.
We attach ourselves to each other. We can provide our own splints when we're in times of need. We have to bring it to Jesus first. That's the realization that I can't do this myself.
The community gets both the benefit but also provides the rehabilitation. The second thing we have to do is where are we just not trusting of others? Now, what is that one thing that you will not let anybody else help you with? Have you ever thought about that?
What is that one thing you will not let anybody help you with? What if I told you that I've been discovering what those things are for me and I'm realizing that is the weakest part of my life? Those places we think we're absolutely strong enough to not need anybody is actually the very thing that will destroy us. What do we need to let others help us with?
The third thing is this. How many arms do you have right now? Who are the people that you're in spiritual relationship with? You might not have any.
You might have no arms. Kind of funny looking. Or you might look around and realize, okay, I've got 14 arms. They're all exactly the same because everybody who I have Jesus conversations with is exactly like me.
We have the same stickers on our vehicles. We vote the same. Our kids go to the same school. We complain about the same things.
We all have the exact same order wherever restaurant we walk into. How many arms do you have? Who are the people that you're in spiritual relationship with and how do you allow them to be different than you? Are we that body with 13 arms?
Or are we decently diverse enough to actually look like a real person? How can we grow through our own dysfunction and want to include others? Ages? Gender?
Race? Belief? Political systems? Do we really believe that the body of Christ is better than the body of the world?
And our relationships really show us the answer to that. Last thing is this, am I attentive enough to my own spiritual formation to offer wholeness to the body? This is going to be quickly practical because we don't have the time to go into this. But I'm going to tell you one of the things that we can do.
If you want to figure this out, I'll tell you what you can do. Go to my foundry.life. There's a digital home sheet. You can take the bottom of that to a test that talks about apest.
It's a five-fold gift of the spirit that Paul talks about. The functions of the Church of apostles, prophets, evangelists, of shepherds and of teachers. Go take that. Figure out where you are.
Because what you might find is the frustration you have had in spiritual community is you thinking you're supposed to be doing something that you're just not wired for. That's just a quick level of discernment that can happen. And the last thing is this. I talked about this last week.
But if you were here last week or you, I posted a video inside of our Facebook group. But I talked about how we've got really three buckets of life in this Church. We've got the people who do not really need or want spiritual community. They've got it handled on their own.
We've got the people that want spiritual community. And we've got the people that really need it desperately. Paul and all of the first Corinthians he's talking about how they had rich folks and poor folks and they were taking advantage of communion of the Eucharist back then. They called it a love feast.
It was like literally out a big banquet they would have together once a week and how they were eating a bunch of food and leaving and all the poor folks didn't have any food. That's the equity of the people that Paul was talking about in this. But I really think that if Paul was right, you don't want to be the Church and Chorers. You don't want Paul to have to write you a letter.
It's not good. It's like when you're in elementary school and a concert break space comes to the office and the whole class goes, ooh. That's what happens when Paul writes you a letter and you're in chorus. But if Paul was going to write us a letter to all of us, not just here, but to the Christian Church now, I really think that he would be talking about the equity of relationships.
And of us realizing the body is only as strong as the people that don't need it or don't want it because they can provide it for their own, the people that want it, they just kind of don't know how to get it or the people that need it and they don't have the ability to. That there's an economy of spiritual relationships and strength that happens there. And I really do think that Paul was going to write us a letter, or rent the newsletter right now. I think what Paul would be getting a little rough on us would be us understanding the value of other people and how we all are at different relational spots and how all three of those different relational buckets need to be poured in together for the mutual benefit of the whole.
Next weekend we're going to talk about spiritual friendships. We're going to go into the Old Testament and do a fun story. But I'm just going to ask you to do the same thing we've been doing last week. Prayerfully just be going to God and asking yourself the tough questions about where am I going to invest in other people in the spiritual community of my Church.
And what does it mean for us to grow with Jesus together? Let's pray. Holy Father, God, we open ourselves up to you. God, knowing that there are things that we cannot self-generate on our own.
God, each one of us probably has a weird arm coming off of our back somewhere. God, these places where we want to maintain control or we don't want to grow. What are these places of judgment where we think, you know what? I can't learn from somebody like that.
Why don't you let us be in a relationship with them? We've got, in your word, you say that at the end of all things, every nation, every tribe, every tongue, every people, and every language will come together in worship. God, it's in worship that we find the kingdoms in worship that we find out who we are. God, it's in worship that your people become who your people have always been called to be.
And what does we, as we transition into the final movement of our time together today, God, let us see your glory with open eyes. God, let us see your glory with holy eyes. God, let us see your glory with the message of your Son, Jesus, who calls us higher and deeper and bigger and to be continually focused on you. And this is the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit we bring.
Amen, let us stand together and continue in worship.