Last Sunday's Sermon, by Mo. Storm
From the Sermon on Paul's Metaphor of the Body:
Paul wrote these words for a church. One of the earliest churches, in the Greek city of Corinth, sometime around the year 50 AD. Today, we hear it still, as a message to the church. Timeless, it never fails to amaze me how much it continues to apply to all the diverse communities of Christians that make up our parishes.
But Paul’s reading is useful in other contexts, too.
Consider these words in the context of our present national life. We’re reaping the consequences today of decades of saying to each other, to quote Paul’s eye to the hand “I don’t need you.” You don’t look like me, you don’t sound like me, you don’t think like me, I’m going to get as far away from you as I possibly can. We’ve been at this as a country long enough that our geography has been shaped by it, a whole population clustered according to our views. Someone I was talking to this week referred to the political map of our country, rimmed in blue and filled in with red. She said it with a note of despair in her voice. I feel that way, too, when I look at those maps. That’s the real effect of years and years of distancing and removing ourselves from each other. Sometimes I think how amazing it would be if somehow someone just shook the whole map and rearranged us, and we all had to live among, and cooperate with people unlike us. We’ll find we barely know each other. But living side by side might change that pretty fast, and for the better.
Paul didn’t write this for states or countries, but it could be a powerful metaphor for them...
