Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ

A Sermon at the Diocese of Dallas Convention, November 4,^,2023

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
—1 Corinthians 12:12-13

Corinth was a really wealthy and socially diverse city. Perhaps it was much like any big city in the United States, maybe Dallas. In Corinth, there were people with much wealth and power. But it also had those on the margins, “of no regard” in the eyes of that society. As the apostle Paul indicates, there were Jews and Greeks, slaves and free.

The community at Corinth was, thus, a reflection of the diversity of the city. In this context, Paul appeals: “Just as the body is one and has many parts, but all its many parts from one body, so it is with Christ” (v. 12). Essentially, Paul is reminding the ekklesia, diverse as they may be, that “in Christ they are one.” Paul borrows a stock metaphor from ancient Roman politics, comparing the body politic to a human body.

In Latin literature, the metaphor was used by the elite to persuade the poor to sacrifice their bodies for the sake of the whole, headed by the wealthy and powerful. Paul’s use of the metaphor is radically different. He decolonizes the metaphor from imperial usage and argues for an egalitarian spirit among the members of the body politic, such that the ostensibly superior do not claim greater honor, while the inferior receive greater honor for their indispensability.

Like the community at Corinth, our natural tendency is to congregate with people who are like us. Our social networks very much reflect our outlook. We find it easier to trust people whose life experiences are like ours. With such people, communication tends to be more natural.

For this reason, it might be that not many of our churches convey the ethnic, social, and economic diversity of our neighborhoods. Some of our churches reflect the hidden lines that divide our communities.

In Africa, especially in rich neighborhoods, large numbers of people are employed in domestic service. At one of our Cathedrals in Kenya, where I served as attached clergy around 2001, there was this particular worship service that stood out among all the rest. It was attended mainly by domestic workers — the cleaners, baby sitters, and drivers in the rich suburbs of Nairobi. The service was conducted in Swahili, our national language. However, there was an earlier-morning service was attended by the kind of people who employed them, and was run in English.

In this text, the apostle Paul offers something richer: since the church is meant to be a foretaste of the final reconciliation of all things that God promises, it should start acting in that way. It must reveal the future reality as clearly as possible. This is an important part of witness to the gospel — that diversity within the Church or society is not a problem to be avoided, solved or managed, but a gift of God’s grace and a sign of the Spirit of Pentecost, when people from different nations were gathered, spoke in their own tongue, lived in their own custom.

It is the late Kenyan Anglican and scholar of African traditional religions, John Mbiti, who reminded us so compellingly that a person’s humanity flourishes in relation to the other. Thus, he stated, “I am because we are,” and “Because we are, therefore I am.”

When we have been baptized and professed our faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins, we are ushered into a new life in Christ, a life of being one in Christ. In the whole of chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul reminds us that Christians find their common identity in baptism (vv. 12-13). In baptism, you and I overcome the divisions that the powers of this world nurture and by which they are sustained (cf. Colossians 2 on the dividing wall of hostility).

Paul writes to a community in which members were competing against each other based on their culturally defined values. Some were weaponizing the variety of gifts God had given them, instead of deploying them for the common good.

The gifts of the Spirit, Paul says, are like the functions carried out by different parts of the human body — the parts are interconnected, but they also should be operating at the direction of the most important part, the head, which directs and harmonizes their common work.

Being diverse yet members of one body speaks to our interdependence as God’s family. God has given my wife, Brenda, and I three beautiful children, all now teenagers. They all have different gifts, but we love and cherish all of them. The human body is an intricate and interconnected wonder. There are whole systems in place, like the nervous and respiratory systems, and different parts of the body and organs interact to accomplish specific tasks, often without our knowledge.

The idea of body brings to mind a living reality. The church is a living body, which acts and walks in history. And this body has a head — his name is Jesus — who guides, nourishes, and sustains the body. So the church needs to remain connected to Jesus in an increasingly intense way for him to empower us, through daily prayer, listening to his word, having fellowship with one another, and receiving the sacraments.

The problem is that the body of Corinth was not working in unity. Some people competed with each other over gifts. Some underestimated their colleagues’ gifts, others overvalued their gifts.

The Corinthian letters, in certain respects, can be anti-imperial and decolonial in the way they depict an alternative society as a counter society, a Christian egalitarianism different from the normative Roman society. Isn’t an alternative ordering of society what we earnestly need today?

The words and vision of “mutual responsibility and interdependence” are beautiful. The phrase is derived from the Toronto Anglican Congress of 1963, and the powerful effect it had on the development of the Communion — it meant a transition from a colonialist system to one in which local leaders would be recognized and given authority. It led to the creation of new structures for coordinating mission and holding one another accountable. The dramatic growth of the Church in East and West Africa is partly a result of this language.

Just as in the days of the Corinthian church, this epistle comes to us in the context of a vulnerable human story. This vulnerability is seen in global notions of isolation and security, based on resources, social status, custom, and so forth. It explains how our sinful normativity ought to be decolonized.

Our vulnerability is evident in our beloved Anglican Communion, continuously hurting over disagreements. There are sincere disagreements about matters of sexuality and marriage. There also seems to be a spirit of competition and impatience with one another, a lack of mutual trust, a fear of being stretched to understand these questions from the perspective of the other.

Yet Paul’s letter is an invitation to embrace and to fulfill our interconnectedness. The kind of community that Paul envisions is one in which everyone needs everyone. Gifts given to one are given to be shared with all: a community in which your loss or failure is mine and your healing and prosperity is mine as well. Essentially, Paul is talking about a Christian community in which no one is forgotten. No one is deprived, and the knowledge of God becomes concrete and real, not just as a program of action but as something deeply, fundamentally affecting everyone.

It might be helpful for the church in Dallas, and back in Kenya, to begin asking: What in our context corresponds to the culturally divided pairs mentioned in verse 13? In penitent response, we need to reach out to one another, across our divisions, and in doing so inspire greater creativity and earnestness in our local mission. We can help one another learn how to do this better.

The world in which we live, and which we are called to love and serve, even with its contradictions, demands that the church strengthen cooperation in all areas of her mission.

The notion of mutual responsibility and interdependence is not without risks.

The first is formalism. It could be reduced to an extraordinary event, but only externally, like admiring the beauty of a cathedral without getting inside. If we would speak of mutual responsibility and interdependence in a manner that is incarnational, we need content, means, and structures that can enable dialogue and interaction within the wider family of God. But we also need to name our role in the power games of this world and its damage to God’s household.

A second risk is intellectualism, turning reality into abstraction, a study group offering learned but abstract approaches to the problems of the world, without great depth and spiritual insight. We need to ask ourselves: Who do we really feel with? Are we really immersed in the life of the body? May I invite those you who are able to consider visiting the Diocese of Mumias, to learn from our context, just as I have come to learn from yours.

The example of Christ in creating the deepest unity of the body is seen in his embrace without reservation of the appalling suffering, the helplessness and voicelessness, to infuse into it his own compassion.

The end result of the body metaphor in Paul’s hands is not the same old hierarchy, or even the inverse of that culturally expected pattern of domination with new people placed at the top, but a deep unity of the whole body, with each part cared for by the others. Christ creates a better way of life together.

At Pentecost there was renewed mutual responsibility and interdependence, a foretaste of the great new thing God is doing in Christ. May we all be open to this invitation to fellowship and greater interdependence.