A Healthy Body
But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. –1 Corinthians 12:24-26 I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. –Ephesians 4:1-3 May is the month in which our new Council will begin to review the 2020 Long-Range Plan, to determine what next steps we will take to continue to grow in our life together at Calvary. Many ministry tasks remain on our To-Do List, from developing new ministries to renovating building space. But before we do any heavy lifting—before we take on any new responsibilities—this may be a good time for a checkup: How are we doing in our life together? How is our “body”—our health as a church? When athletes enter a new season of play they are expected to go through a physical examination to establish a baseline for their health, and verify their fitness for play. So let’s take a look at ourselves. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (quoted above), he says that a “healthy body” is a church in which people practice empathy: when one person is in pain other members hurt with him, when someone is honored others rejoice with her. Members of a healthy body see each other’s challenges and joys and say, “I am with you.” But in order to practice this empathy, we also need to allow people room to be vulnerable enough to say when they are suffering, and enough latitude to divulge when they have something to be grateful for. This is what a healthy body looks like. So how are we doing? Paul takes this practice of empathy so seriously that he calls each of us to give greater honor to the “inferior” members of the body. Paul doesn’t name who is inferior, he simply puts the onus on each of us to behave with care so that the body of the church is working together, not being fractured. To act with care we serve each other—whether we are Council members or churchyard gardeners, janitors or doctors, mechanics or on disability, we are called to serve each other with equal compassion. Our calling is not to “step on toes,” but to wash feet. So how are we doing? In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul has more to say about what a healthy body of Christ looks like. Being the body together, he says, involves each of us practicing humility, gentleness, and patience. Acting humbly is related also to what Paul said earlier in 1 Corinthians: None of us should think that we are more important, or more essential to the body of Christ than another; in fact, we should measure our importance based on whether we treat other members with dignity and respect. For instance, are we more intent on being heard than listening? Do we ask questions of others only so we can have our own convictions heard? Or do we engage our brothers and sisters—asking, “How are you?”—with the actual purpose of listening to their honest (perhaps even uncomfortable) response? Gentleness and patience are a part of that humility, because as we behave gently and with patience we tell our neighbor that we are as concerned for their welfare as our own. So how are we doing? As pastor of this congregation, I can tell you that newcomers to this congregation perceive this congregation to be a friendly and welcoming place to worship. That is great feedback to hear—and all too rare in some people’s experience of going to a new church. And I can share my personal impression that we are a pretty healthy congregation, but that we can always improve. But here is the truth about examining the body of Christ, as a whole: The only way this question, “How are we doing?,” can be answered thoroughly is for each of us to examine our own personal behaviors and motivations as we come together as a body at Calvary. In other words, the real question I am asking you to seriously and prayerfully consider is, “How am I doing at contributing to the health of the body of Christ?” So in this season when we are getting ready to do some “heavy lifting,” and take up new ministry responsibilities, I implore you (as Paul begged the Ephesians) to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called”: Spend some time reflecting on and praying about how you can be a more humble, patient, kind, and caring member of this body—for the sake of the least among us, and for the sake of encouraging the healthy ministry that we all want to do. Our “body” health will not only attract others to join us in faith, it will encourage those newcomers to be healthy members of the body also. Your sister in Christ, Pastor Lori Cornell
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A friend of mine asked a provocative and slightly disturbing question this past Holy Week: If the story of Jesus ended with Good Friday and Jesus breathing his last breath, would that be enough for us to call Jesus our Savior—our Messiah? The immediate, anxious, and pious response we want to give is, “No! Jesus can’t be our Messiah without the empty tomb! Jesus isn’t the Christ without resurrection.”
But consider this question more carefully, for the thoughtfulness it’s intended to evoke: What do we see in Jesus on Good Friday, that makes him a different kind of Messiah? Lutheran Christians are notable (some might say “notorious”) for our insistence that we can’t simply leap from the “Hosannas!” of Palm Sunday to the “Hallelujahs!” of Easter (though that is the practice of many church traditions). Nor do we believe we should linger, in maudlin fashion, on the bodily sufferings of Jesus, as if understanding the gruesomeness of his suffering will help us get into the mind of God and appreciate the pain he endured for our sake. Instead, Good Friday is profoundly connected to Easter, because of what it confirms about Jesus through his death on the cross. Jesus rules with love, not force No sooner is Jesus arrested by the soldiers and the Jewish police, than his side-kick Peter decides to defend Jesus violently. Jesus’ response? “Put your sword back in its sheath” (John 18:11). Jesus refuses to attempt to win hearts by force. (And, truth be told, no one actually ever has.) This is not the way Jesus’ kingdom operates. Instead, Jesus asks the authorities to listen to the people’s testimonies, “I have spoken openly to the world.… Ask those who heard me” (John 18:20-21). Jesus’ kingdom is a matter of the heart, not a matter of the sword. “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over...” (18:36). Jesus asserts his authority by serving. In John’s Passion narrative, Jesus is disturbingly silent. He is whipped, scorned, mocked, and abused, and speaks few words in response to these cruel rejections. But after he has been forced to carry his own cross all the way to Golgotha, and is raised up on it, suffering while soldiers cast lots for his garment, he looks down on his mother and is (strangely) concerned for her well-being: “Woman, here is your son,” he says pointing to his disciple John; and to the disciple he says: “Here is your mother” (John 19:26-27). Jesus may have no power over what others do to him, but he cares about the future of his mother enough to turn away from his own dire need to prepare a future for Mary. We shouldn’t be surprised by this gesture: This is the very same Jesus who demonstrated the power of his kingdom by washing his disciples’ feet (John 13:2b-8); who said, “Unless I wash you, you have no share in me.” Jesus knows that it’s in receiving his humbling compassion that his followers learn the power of ministering out of that same compassion. In Good Friday we see the compassion of God embodied in Jesus’ own love and compassion. We see the Son, who knows the Father, and is close to the Father’s heart, turning—not away from humankind—but toward us. What a Messiah God has given us! And, if Good Friday were the end of Jesus’ story, it would still be worth telling. But Jesus’ compassion and love don’t simply prove his worth while his body remains in the tomb. If that were the case, we might have concluded: “He was a decent guy, who died an unjust death. Oh well.” But Easter pronounces a different verdict: Jesus’ compassion and love survive his death to change us! We Lutheran Christians linger long enough in the days before Easter to understand that Jesus’ death, and our human culpability, frailty, and divine need, are irrefutable. Good Friday declares an end to human pretensions and excuses, and makes the necessity of God’s intervention (Easter) brilliantly apparent. Celebrating Easter On Easter Sunday we reclaim the practice of singing “Alleluias” after having buried them for the season of Lent and especially Holy Week. We sing those “Alleluias” loudly—not to outshout or deny death, but because we’ve walked with Jesus from the reality of death into a new resurrection life. We celebrate the radiance of Easter, the height of God’s love and compassion, because we have also witnessed God in the depths of his compassion and love on Good Friday. Easter is God’s assertion that neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come, will be able to separate us from God’s love and compassion in Jesus Christ. And we know that to be true because Jesus really died, and now has risen for us. Risen from the grave, Jesus brings from the open tomb the very love and compassion in which he died, to share with the world. Jesus, who invited Peter, now invites us to “have a share” in him. He offers us his life (his compassion, his love) in his resurrection, and our hearts are moved to faith. Unselfish in death, Jesus is unselfish with his resurrection too. And we, who now sing “Alleluias” to him, find ourselves re-created by his Easter to live lives of … you guessed it: love and compassion. Alleluia! Christ, who descended to the dead, is risen. And we are raised with him so that this world (in our here and now) may be a place of deeper compassion and love. May you be richly, deeply blessed by Christ’s compassion and love. Pastor Lori Cornell 25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Luke, chapter 10. How do we make sense of the Commandments, if we know we can’t treat them as a simple ten-point To-Do list? Jesus’ conversation [above] with the lawyer (which prefaces the parable we’ve come to know as “The Good Samaritan”), gives us an important clue: If you want to condense the law down to its most essential elements, remember this: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. The fact that this devout Jew (“a [scripture] lawyer”), who specialized in the reading of the Torah, offered this summary so readily to Jesus, gives us a clue about its importance in the Jewish and Christian traditions. A faithful life includes both our relationship to God and to the world we live in. Jesus communicates this message in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels; which further emphasizes how much the love of God and love of neighbor are at the center of our Christian life. One way to visualize this two-pronged relationship to God and neighbor is in the way the Commandments are displayed on the two tablets that Moses carried down the mountain: On the first tablet are Commandments I through III, on the second are Commandments IV through X. Commandments 1, 2, and 3 are about loving God; Commandments 4 through 10 are about loving neighbor. Even Saint Augustine of Hippo, a 4th-century bishop and notable sinner-saint in his own right, knew this formula when he wrote about Christian ethics in his Confessions: “An evil-living person transgresses your Decalogue of three commands with our duty to you, and seven with our duty to our fellow human beings” [emphasis mine]. Maybe ultimately the question this idea poses is: Why bother to condense the 10 Commandments down to this two-part calling? Well, a first response might be if you know the two, you’ll remember the 10 better. If you remember that God created you to love God and your neighbor, you can then unpack what that looks like by giving the Top Ten their proper attention. Thinking of the Commandments in terms of the two tablets, also invites you to think of the Ten Commandments more as a description, more than a prescription—the Commandments are finally about loving God and neighbor well. But maybe the most important reason to think about the commandments in these terms is because love of God and love of neighbor is what Jesus’ cross embodies. Jesus was obedient to God even to the point of death on the cross (love of God), he became sin who knew no sin, in order to love us back to God (love of neighbor). Ultimately, this two-pronged approach to the Commandments leads us back to the truth that truly saves us: Jesus inexhaustibly loves God and loves us. And, with that gospel news as our starting point, we are empowered to love God and love each other. Thanks be to God. The Old Self Wrestling with the New If you want to know what the Christian life is about, read the church’s baptismal liturgy (from Romans 6): In Baptism, each of us is joined to Christ’s death and resurrection; from that time forward we live under God’s public promise of forgiveness, life, and salvation. God says, “You are a new person born in the waters of Baptim, sustained by my promises.” “Through these promises,” God says,”you are alright with me; you don’t have to do anything to fix our relationship. I’ve taken care of that already in Christ.” But there’s a hitch: The old self in us (see Romans 5-7) is determined to get a second hearing after God has spoken. So the old self lingers at the edges of our heart questioning whether faith in Christ is enough. The voice of that old self is distinct, saying things like, “Listen, I can handle this on my own.” Or, “Okay, so I don’t have to do anything to please you, God. But you don’t really mean ‘nothing,’ do you?” The old self doesn’t trust that God’s promises alone can effect the change in us that God desires. So the old self pokes and prods at God’s commandments and promises, saying things like, “Sure you are the Lord my God, but I still have to make sure I have no other gods. See, I told you I had something to do.” And the old self takes jabs at the new self–raised up in the waters of Baptism: “Don’t just sit there trusting that God has fixed the problem between you and him. Prove your faith to God by your actions.” The old self wants you to believe that God’s promises are good, but you’d better do your part too. The new self, on the other hand, trusts that God will fulfill God’s promises. And, just as Christ told his disciples that he would rise from death–and he did, so we can trust Christ’s promises that we will also be raised from death. We don’t have to–in fact, we can’t–do anything to receive God’s salvation. It is pure gift. And what God wants us to do is simply trust that he’s taken care of things. Over the weeks of Lent, as we listen to each of the Commandments, you are likely to find a wrestling match being fought in your conscience–between the old you and the new you. The old you will use words like “should,” “ought,” and “must” to motivate you to action. The old you will want you to believe that the Commandments are the To-Do list that you not only should, but must complete for a good relationship with God. But the new you–the you whom God is creating through Christ and his Spirit–will be offering a different, faithful approach to the Commandments. The new you will ask, “What can I do, now that I don’t have to do anything to have this relationship with God?” And, gradually, as you continue to hear Christ’s promises of forgiveness and new life with God, the voice of that new self will grow stronger, and the voice of that relentless old self will fade. |
Rev. Lori A. Cornell
Calvary's Pastor Jake Schumacher
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