"I have a cold in my nose" - when I was a kid that was a favorite TV ad. It featured a huge cartoon nose, red, swollen, stuffy - and it was covered with a mitten. The ad was for some cold remedy, and the huge nose asked the narrator "Is it better than a mitten?" Of course the ad wanted to say "yes" the remedy was much better than a mitten, but for me that image of the nose, raw and oversized, has always stayed with me when I have a cold. I've long forgotten the product, but I cannot have a cold without the picture coming to mind. I feel, like the cartoon, that my entire body is dominated by a huge, stuffy nose.

And that's the thing about having a body. Whenever something is wrong with any part of it - we are acutely aware of the injured member. A hangnail or a headache, tennis elbow or runner's knee, a slipped disc or sciatica - when one part of our body is hurting, the whole thing suffers. The body is an organic unity - wired together with a central nervous system. So as Paul says from our reading this afternoon - when one member suffers all suffer together. When you have a cold, the whole body feels the suffering of the poor stuffed up nose.

In his first letter to the church in Corinth Paul used the analogy of the body to capture the Corinthian's attention about the life of their community. As a founding member of the church, Paul had taught and baptized many in the community. As such they had heard his proclamation of the Spirit of Christ that they put on at their baptism, and the mind of Christ to which we are all called. For Paul the church experienced this Spirit, this presence of God in Christ, in its worship and common life. While you cannot see this Spirit, you can feel it - and the Corinthians had felt it. They had experienced the bonds of Christ's unity that make the divisions of class, race, and sex fall away. But they had come to forget - and as Paul writes in the first chapter, he had come to hear that there were divisions among them. They were splitting off into factions, led by different leaders. They were divided by economic circumstances and cultural experience. They were embroiled in a conflict as to what gifts of the Spirit - speaking in tongues, prophesying, teaching, healing -- were the most important. Paul uses the body analogy to remind them of the deep and real connections they have to one another in the Spirit of Christ.

This analogy was not Paul's invention. Ancient Vedic hymns of India's religious traditions imagine creation as a divine body of which humans are a part and in which they each have their separate roles and stations in life. Paul's most likely source for the idea has a long history in Greek and Roman political thought. Plato's Republic opens with a metaphor of the body and the analogous health or sickness of the city-state. The Stoic philosophical tradition developed the metaphor as a means of calling for cooperation and a sense of proper role among the different parts of society. Paul would have known these references. And in this letter he appropriates the analogy of the body in order to speak of unity and cooperation in the church.

What's new in Paul's recycling of this idea is the argument that not only is the community an organic unity, with all its parts relating integrally, but there is no hierarchical order of privilege to the parts. Each member of the community, as each part of the body, is important and plays a vital role. One should not be lifted up over another. In this Paul takes a metaphor that had been used traditionally to say: "Everyone has their proper place" to argue that in the body of Christ: "everyone has a place" period, end of story.

There are many members, yet one body - Paul tells the Corinthians. "The eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable . . . ."

And for Paul, as for us today, the demon in those details is that little verb "seem." The literal translation of this verb relates to "thinking." There are members of the body, Paul notes, that we think are inferior, but they are not. We think they are inferior because we are persuaded by the categories the world offers of power, privilege, class, sex, and culture. But that is bad thinking. It is even sinful thinking. Life in the body of Christ is always about resisting such divisions and their related privileges, and exploring the true bonds of our unity.

You see the church is not essentially Christ's body. Or if you want to argue that it is - Christ's body is not literally a human body. It does not have a central nervous system. It is not hard wired - as a human body - to integrally relate the members. We, the members of the body of Christ, are related to one another not through tissue and nerves and cells, but through feeling, through experience, through the Spirit. And like it or not, this Spirit does not coerce us to make us one. It does not bind us through force. Rather it compels us through our experience to know that despite that which seems to separate us in terms of age, gender, class, and culture, in the Spirit of Christ, we all belong to one another.

So life in the church is constantly life in discernment of what seems to be the case and what is the case. To belong to the body of Christ is to be engaged in a struggle to remember (in spite of all the world's brutal evidence to the contrary) that we all belong to God and that we all belong to one another.

This afternoon we celebrate not only a call and the beginning of a ministry for Julie March, we mark the vocational discernment of this congregation, Trinity Presbyterian Church, to a shared ministry of discerning the body of Christ. Julie's call here is to be a minister of "equipping" the church. That model of ministry does not presuppose that Julie brings the good stuff from her excellent theological education at Eden Theological Seminary (though of course she has that) or her years of experience in the church, or her special giftedness to serve this community. The equipping model understands that Julie's role will be to work to lift up this invisible but powerful network of connection and shared ministry that is the gift of the Spirit of Christ in this body. Julie will use her gifts and resources of theological education, imagination, and administration to help nurture the awareness of Christ's Spirit as it gifts the individual members and the whole body of Trinity Presbyterian Church. Her role, along with all those engaged in the equipping ministry team, will be to recall for this church that we all belong to God and we all belong to one another.

We all belong to God and we all belong to one another.

Communities that know this and live this out are communities that think beyond prospective members as potential pledging units, and yearn for the surprise of what it will mean to have you, in all your quirky, particular, mixed bag, and peculiar giftedness belong. What surprises are in store? What new directions of God's life and purpose will you bring? What new conflicts will arise? How will we grow, and change, and live out our calling to be the body of Christ because you are here?

We all belong to God and we all belong to one another.

Communities that know this and live this are demanding of their membership. They are bold in the Spirit of Christ to say that their pastors are not CEO's and their sessions are not Boards of Directors. The church is not a corporation - in which you are a shareholder. The church is the body of Christ to which you BELONG as a member. There is no limited liability here. You can't phone it in, pledge it in, or sit it out. You belong. And because you belong, the whole body suffers if you are not here 100% mentally, spiritually, and yes, physically.

We all belong to God and we all belong to one another.

Communities that know this and live this out are demanding of their worship. Worship is not a weekly obligation that we imagine we fulfill in order to please or somehow appease God. Worship is an opportunity we have to gather together and engage within the Spirit of Christ. Through the gifts of ministries of Word, Sacrament, music, and movement we are "re-membered" in worship as the Body of Christ. We hear our joys and concerns, not as a list to elicit our envy or sympathy - but as the chance to know that there is a cold in our nose, or the back has an ache - and to feel that and care for it. As the body of Christ, worship is our best shot at a central nervous system. It is a mystical experience, it is an essential experience, because it connects us with the source of our life and our unity, and it reminds us that what "seems" to be the case about our social status, our economic power, or our political privilege according to the standards of our culture is not what is really REAL. What is really real is what we feel and experience in worship each week -- we all belong to God and we all belong to one another

Communities that embrace this creed are demanding of their mission. When you carry a creed that we all belong to God (no matter what) and we all belong to one another you become a community that can't help but share that ministry of reconciliation, justice, love, and mercy. You do not do this because you want to "help" the poor, or "save" the heathen. You do this because you know (as did Paul) that God's life and activity extends well beyond this congregation, this community, and even the life of the church as you can imagine it. So you get up and you get out. You are eager to go meet God wherever God is at work. You discern local politics, you form bold partnerships (for Trinity, like MCU and Interfaith Partnership), you nurture Presbytery and denominational relationships (for Trinity, like the Covenant Network and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance), and you explore cases of national and international injustice and suffering. You are bold to believe that you can make a difference not because you are powerful, wise, or influential on your own, but because you are a part of the body of Christ - and Christ's body is a body that is always offering itself in love for the healing of the world.

We all belong to God and we all belong to one another. Thanks be to God for this life saving purpose. Thanks be to God for communities that seek to discern this purpose and to live it out boldly and faithfully. Thanks be to God for opportunities of shared ministry that draw us ever nearer to the source and ground of all our being and the unity we know in the body of Christ.

AMEN