15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. – Romans 12:15
12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by[c] one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. – I Corinthians 12:12-14
Last week in Sunday School, our class talked about the violent deaths of black civilians and police officers over the past couple of weeks and what, if anything, our response as Christians should be.
Almost immediately, we ran into a very specific impasse: we have had and will have a very difficult time relating to something that is so outside our socio-economic bubble. Our class is made up of mid-30s, fairly affluent, educated, white couples. While we have our political or even theological disagreements, we are much more like each other than we are not. The deaths in Baton Rouge, St. Anthony, and Dallas are beyond our ken. While we know that the best thing for us to do would be to listen to someone whose experience is not ours–to hear a cop or a minority speak about their experiences and vulnerabilities–we didn’t have that option in our class on this particular Sunday.Yet the two passages above kept coming to my mind as prompts to get outside my head and think and feel in a more godly way about what’s happening in our nation. First, Paul admonishes the Roman church to participate emotionally in the happiness and sadness of their community. In the previous verse, Paul echoes Christ’s sentiments from the Sermon on the Mount that the response to persecution is not cursing but blessing. He follows that by implying that we should hurt with those who are hurting around us. I have heard several people over the past couple of weeks talk about how sad the events in Baton Rouge, St. Anthony, and Dallas have made them: disheartened, angry, and lonely. I have not felt those same emotions, but our discussion this morning made me realize I should be praying in earnest for those who do and that my emotional aloofness is not a good thing.
The second passage, the one from Corinthians, is the one that touched me most because it gives us a way of relating to those around us who are different than us. For Paul’s audience, that difference would have been primarily ethnic and religious–the divide between Jews and Gentiles–but also socio-economic–those that were slaves and those were free. Paul has the temerity to say that these different people were all one body in Christ, regardless of those differences. We are connected to those who are unlike us. They are part of our bodies. We are part of their bodies. When those bodies hurt, it is our body that hurts. We are connected.
This made me think of something that happened to my own body a week ago. I have been running again, and on Thursday night, I slipped and scraped my right knee and left hand pretty badly. Both were bleeding, especially my right kneecap. I continued my run, but by the time I got home, the knee looked terrible. It required hydrogen peroxide, neosporin, bandaids, the whole nine yards. I left a small blood stain in the baby’s room from a place where blood was trickling down my knee without me noticing.
Yet in subsequent days I have not prayed for that knee one time. Why? It wasn’t that bad an injury, and a scraped knee is something I can afford to ignore. I certainly thanked God for sparing me a more serious injury, but it hasn’t been part of my petitions list. I have felt a little soreness in my knee and hand over the past day or two, but by and large, it was a mere flesh-wound, a superficial and thus largely ignorable accident.
This morning, I started thinking about how different my reaction would have been had I broken my hand in the same fall, which could have easily happened. All of a sudden, I would have had to look at a significantly different next couple of months as I recovered. Everything from my care for my child to my ability to type this sentence would be affected. I would have been praying as hard as I could, and I would have asked others to pray.
What hit me this morning is that I was treating these violent deaths as a skinned knee to the body of Christ, something that looked bad but certainly wasn’t at the level of a broken bone or sidelining injury (I ran 3.2 miles two nights ago and was just fine). But I’m sure that for members of the body of Christ these events were a broken hand or something far, far worse. How selfish on my part! “If one member suffers, all suffer together,” Paul tells the church in Corinth. “If one member is honored, all rejoice together.” I was not suffering. I was disconnected, a floating body part off on my own who was distancing myself from the very community that helps give my part meaning. Paul points out that a body that is just an eye wouldn’t be a body at all. My myopic vision of Christian community was closing me off from the body of Christ.
And so, that’s what I want to focus on this week, and the next, and the next. More dedicated prayer and meditation, not just on people who are not me (i.e my family members and colleagues and neighbors), but on people I can’t even imagine being like me. Because, as a member of Christ’s body, I am part of everyone who claims Christ whether I know it or not. Everyone is made in the image of God. Those who have taken on Christ’s name have been adopted into his family. I pray that God works in and through these terrible events, that people’s eyes are turned to God as the only real abiding solution for the problems that are the root of this violence, and that when and if God calls me to give support and encouragement, I will be ready.