ALL HAVE A PART
Author: Fr. Michael Byron January 22, 2022
Anyone who has ever been to Target
Field for a baseball game has seen that iconic mascot hoisted on the wall over
center field: it dates back to the early
days of the Twins coming to Minnesota now some 60 years ago. It’s actually not one mascot; it’s two. It’s a cartoon guy named Minnie, who is
standing on the west side of the river and who is leaning in and offering a
friendly hand shake with a guy on the east side of the river named Paul. They’re the twins, which makes perfect
sense. Somewhere along the way Minnie
and Paul got pushed aside in favor of a mascot named T.C. Bear, and I’ve never
been able to make any sense of that. What does a bear have to do with Twins? And for how many is the first thought of the Twin Cities a bear? Or maybe they are twin bears, though I don’t
know how you’d tell that, and besides, there’s only one T.C. Bear. The point is, Minnie and Paul told us and
others something meaningful about who we are. And by having both of them on that large screen on the logo, it was
saying, in effect, we need one another. One or the other of those guys, Minnie and Paul, if they were to
disappear, would leave the other one left as “the Minnesota guy who couldn’t
possibly be a twin because he’s all by himself.” A lone person – like a lone bear –
communicates nothing about being a twin. You can’t be a twin apart from necessary relationship.
Well, now that I’ve gotten all
that off my chest – and if it’s not too much of a stretch, I think that this is
exactly what St. Paul is trying to tell the Corinthians today in his first
letter. Clearly the great danger that he
saw looming in this new Church is the peril of disunity. They have dared to call themselves
Christians. They made it their public
face – their logo is supposed to be reflective of who they think they are and
how they are striving to live. And the
first thing to know about the Christian life is that it can never be an
endeavor of any single, solitary person. Minnie and Paul need each other in order to be a Twin. The Corinthians need each other in order to
be Christian.
But the Corinthians have taken it
a step further, which for Paul is cause for even greater alarm. Not only have some believers tried to carry
out their mission alone, but they have actually gone so far as to teach that
some others among them are unworthy and unwelcome. Why? Because their gifts are different from mine. “The body is not a single part, but many,” he
tells them. What God’s holy spirit has
given to many, for the benefit of all, none of us has any right to declare
useless. And if we can’t figure out
exactly why that is, why all those others are here with us and what they have
to offer, then that’s our problem, certainly not theirs, and certainly not
God’s. If you are an ear on this body
and you cannot understand why there’s a foot on this body, or a hand, or an
eye, or a nose, then go find out. But
don’t dare to say, “I am a Christian,” and then exclude all of those who are
different and have equally important gifts simply because you are too slow to
understand what that banner, that flag that says “Christian” actually
means. A Minnie without a Paul is not a
Twin. It’s a contradiction in
terms. A Christian community that judges
and excludes and lives by the motto, “me-first” is not a Christian community at
all. It too is a contradiction in
terms.
All of us baptized people have
inherited a great and noble and difficult responsibility, namely to work to
keep the Church together as best we can with the help of God’s spirit. Today in the year 2022, our Church is
polarized and divided no less than the Church was in Corinth so long ago; there
are people in our community working diligently to speak and to act across the
battle lines, and there are others, sad to say, who seem to take some perverse
pleasure in perpetuating the battles. And that’s inside the Church! It’s no wonder that it seeps out to infect the greater world of which we
are a part.
Paul writes, “The body, though
one, has many parts. It is in one spirit
that we were born into one body. It is
God who has placed these parts.” And it
is our responsibility to be creators of communion in this body, and to call out
the sinful behaviors and ideologies that actually threaten that great effort
today. Not a simple task, but absolutely
necessary if we live up to our claimed identity – not Minnie and Paul, but
Jesus of Nazareth.
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