Members Of One Another

The pen skips. She shakes it, writes a scribble in the corner of the envelope to get the ink going, and starts again at the top of the form, and the form wants to know a great many things about her before Thursday.

Date of birth. Any allergies. Previous surgeries, with dates, which she guesses at. Then, halfway down the second page, in bold: Next of kin.

She writes her sister's name without thinking, because it is true. Her sister will drive four hours. Her sister will arrive with the wrong slippers and a bag of the good grapes and a story about the parking that will make her laugh until her stitches hurt. There is no better next of kin in the world and she knows it.

And there is no line on that form, or on any form, for the other thing. There is no box that says: name one person you could send four words to on Thursday morning. Pray for me at nine. Nobody. Not because the people in her life are cold. They are not cold. They are lovely and they would do anything, and the one time she said grace out loud at their table there was a small kind pause, and then somebody passed the potatoes, and it was fine, and it was never mentioned again.

You know that pause. You are not describing a hostile house when you describe yours. You are describing a good one that speaks a different language after nine o'clock at night.

And that is why, when somebody tells you about the body of Christ, you nod and nothing happens in your chest. Body is a word you cannot get your hands on. Alone, meanwhile, you could pick up off the table.

Body is a word you cannot get your hands on

Let me take your side against a phrase for a minute, because I think you have been fairer to it than it has been to you.

When a believer with nobody hears the body of Christ, what usually arrives is a diagram. A big blue shape with parts labeled. It is true, and it is enormous, and it is exactly as much use to a woman filling in a form at her own kitchen table as a map of the ocean is to somebody who wants a drink of water.

Here is the thing that ought to be said out loud: Paul did not stop at the diagram either.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:5

Read the second half slowly. He has said one body, which is the diagram. Then he adds a clause he did not have to add. Members one of another. The word for members is the ordinary word for limbs, particular parts, a wrist and not an idea of a wrist. And the phrase one of another is a reciprocal pronoun in the Greek, the word you use for a thing running in both directions between specific parties.

He does not say you are members of the body, which would keep it abstract. He says you are members of each other.

You are joined to particular people rather than to a concept, and the joining was done in Christ and not in a room. Romans 12:5 says members one of another in as many words, and the Holy Spirit is the joint itself, the living tissue between you and people you have never once been in a building with.

And watch what Paul does immediately after he writes that sentence. He does not go up into theory. He goes straight down into specifics: this one prophesies, that one serves, that one teaches, that one gives, that one shows mercy and had better do it cheerfully. Particular people doing particular things. And four chapters later he ends the whole letter with a page of names, more than twenty of them, in a city he had never set foot in. Phoebe. Priscilla and Aquila. Mary, who worked hard. Rufus, and Rufus's mother, whom he calls his mother too.

He had never eaten a meal with most of them. He named them anyway, because they were his.

The names you already have

Now I want to be careful with your house, because your house is not the problem in this article and I will not turn it into one. I am not going to tell you what to say at your own table, and I am not going to make any prediction about the people you love. That is not mine to do and it would not be honest.

I am going to tell you about a second fact that sits beside the first one without disturbing it.

The household of faith does not run along the same lines as an address, and it does not stop at the edge of a century. When Scripture calls the church a household, it is using the word for the people who live under one roof and eat off the same table, and the roof in question is not made of tile.

So think about who has actually fed you.

There is a woman who wrote a hymn you have sung at the sink since you were eleven, and every time your throat closes on the third line, she is the one who put the words in your mouth. There is a man who spent his working life over a Greek text so that the sentence you read this morning came out in a language you think in. There is somebody two centuries back whose prayer you copied out and taped inside a cabinet door. There is the person who taught the person who taught you.

Not one of them is a metaphor. They are relatives. You have their words in your body.

You have relatives in this faith that you did not grow up with, and the relation is not honorary. Ephesians 2:19 says plainly that you are no longer a stranger and a foreigner but a member of the household of God, and the same Spirit who made you a child in that house made every one of them children in it too.

There is a particular ache in believing something alone, and part of that ache is the suspicion that you invented it. That it is a private hobby you happen to have. It is not. Everything you believe was handed to you by hands, and the hands belonged to people, and those people are kin in the plainest sense the word has: same Father, same house, same table, different rooms.

You are inside a family that has been running for a very long time, and it did not begin when you found it. It stands written, and His Spirit does not hold a person at the door of a house He has already put them in.