Yesterday at church the sermon was about this passage from I Corinthians 12, about the body being made up of many parts. I'm sharing the Message paraphrase version of it today.
I
want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not
less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s
all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together.
If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I
guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said,
“I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a
place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the
body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As
it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right
where he wanted it.
But
I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from
getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you
are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous
eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have
is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper
place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling
Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re
fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice
it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and
therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not
without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned
with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or
clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is,
without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower
parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good
digestion to full-bodied hair?
The
way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives
together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the
parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts
we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt,
and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into
the exuberance.
Jeannie, I thought about this passage yesterday while helping with a service project at church. We moved in harmony -- as one body -- swiftly, eagerly, and without complaint. People from all walks of life came together in a spirit of love. I wish we could do that every weekend! I feels so good to be significant -- "not for who I am, but for who I am part of." Thank you for sharing this!
ReplyDeleteThat's an AMAZING project you were working on, Adriana. It's wonderful to see that kind of harmony and unity.
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