One Body Does Not Come In Pieces

The box has four cities written on the side of it in marker and three of them are crossed out.

He knows this box. He knows the mug is at the bottom of it, wrapped in a dish towel that came out of an apartment two states ago. He knows it will take eleven minutes, because it took eleven minutes last time and the time before that. Six moves in nine years. He can pack a whole kitchen faster than most people can find a fork in one.

The new place smells like somebody else's paint. There is a light switch by the door that turns on nothing he has yet been able to identify. Out the window there is a road he does not know the name of, and a gas station, and past that whatever it is that is out there in the dark.

He puts the mug on the shelf. Then he stands in the middle of a room full of cardboard and says it out loud, in the voice of a man reading a number off a meter. "Two years."

Two years since he was in the same room as another believer. Not two years since a building, or a service, or a program. Two years since a room. He is not being dramatic about it. He is being accurate, which is worse.

And you have got so used to that arithmetic that the word has changed meaning on you. You read Paul writing about one body, one Spirit, one Lord, and every time you hit the word one you hear it as a description of the kind of togetherness other people have. In buildings. On streets with names you would recognize. Whatever one is, it is going on somewhere, and you are a piece that came off six moves back and has been rolling along the shoulder of the road ever since.

One is a count, and it was never a mood

Read the passage as arithmetic before you read it as comfort, because Paul wrote it as arithmetic.

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.Ephesians 4:4-6

Seven times. Body, Spirit, hope, Lord, faith, baptism, God and Father. He is not describing a warm feeling that a group of people manage to generate on a good week. He is counting, and every single count comes back at one.

Now do something with that number that nobody usually does. A count of one cannot be experienced in fractions. There is no such thing as eight percent of one body. A body does not come in pieces; the moment it does, it stops being a body and becomes remains. So when Paul says the body is one, he is telling you a fact about the whole object, and a fact about the whole object does not vary by zip code, by county, or by how many hours it would take you to drive to the nearest person who agrees with you.

You are inside a body that is counted at one, and a count of one does not divide up according to how far you have driven. Ephesians 4:4 puts that number down in writing, and the Spirit is what does the joining, not a shared street and not a shared morning.

And look at the second item on the list, because it is the one that answers the road outside your window. One Spirit. Not one Spirit for the gathered and a thinner arrangement for everybody else. Paul then stacks three prepositions on the Father: above all, and through all, and in you all. Through is the word doing the heavy work. Not beside. Not near. Through, which is a word about something that passes right the way across a thing without a gap in the middle of it.

You have the same Spirit that every one of them has, the one Spirit, and He does not come in regional editions. There is one Spirit, and Paul says so in the same breath he says one body, and it is written down that way on purpose.

The miles were never a membrane

Here is the picture most of us are carrying without having chosen it: the body of Christ as a signal that gets weaker the further out you go. Strong in the middle where everybody is standing together, fading at the edges, and out past a certain radius you are receiving a version of it with static in it.

That picture is not in the text anywhere. What is in the text is a different joining agent entirely. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. Not by attendance. Not by proximity. By one Spirit, which is not a local utility that stops at the county line and does not require a line of sight.

So let me say the plain thing, because you have probably been telling yourself the other one. This is not a waiting room. You are not on a leave of absence from the people of God, serving out a stretch of miles until the real thing resumes. There is no reduced membership and no probationary status and no lesser share for a man in a half unpacked kitchen. If you never sit in a room with another believer again, and some people reading this will not, nothing in Ephesians 4:4 gets edited.

You are a full member of the one body tonight, in a room full of cardboard, at the same grade as anybody standing in a crowd this morning. 1 Corinthians 12:13 says that by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, written down exactly like that, and the Spirit never asked how far apart anybody happened to be standing.

Now, the ache is a separate matter and I am not going to insult you by merging the two. You were made for a room with people in it, and missing that is not a weakness or an idol or a sign of anything. It is a healthy man wanting a healthy thing. But wanting company and holding membership are two different objects, and for two years you have been paying for the first one out of the second, and that is the exchange I want stopped tonight.

You have belonged all the way through those six moves, and it was never once suspended between addresses. Ephesians 4:6 puts the Father above all and through all and in you all, three prepositions with not one mile among them, and His Spirit is the one who is in the all.