ALL HAVE A PART

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.