A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 18, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a
In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul tells us that each part of the church, each member of the church is like an eye or an ear or a hand. The foot can’t say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,’ nor can the eye say to the rest, ‘I’m the whole body.’ And Paul underlines that the weaker members of the body are vital to the health and welfare of the body. What does Paul mean?
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories written by the later fourteenth-century senior civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer. It brings together a variety of pilgrims making their way to and from the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury and stopping each night for rest and restoration, allowing time for the exchange of stories. The stories are notable for their variety. The pilgrims come from different social classes, have different social roles: some, like the Miller, are small businesspeople; others, like the Pardoner, have official roles in the church; some, like the Monk, are professional religious. Others, like the Wife of Bath, come from outside the rigid social structure of the time. The literary style of the stories varies, with some in prose and others in poetry, and the understanding of faith and politics is diverse. The overall effect is to offer a unique cross-section of medieval society.
Besides the honesty of its portrayal of society and church, and the playful ribaldry of the stories themselves, the most important thing the collection as a whole shows us is how much the pilgrims need each other. All of the pilgrims are flawed, complex and open to criticism. But taken together we have a group of pilgrims who find wisdom and intelligence for an awesome variety of social circumstances and situations. To be a part of a group like that group of pilgrims can be a wonderful experience. One of the reasons a school encourages team sports is to give its students the opportunity to join a group that will only succeed if it has a mixture of speed, size, strength, hand-eye coordination, determination, courage and imagination, and the breakthrough comes when the members of the team realise it’s not about any one of them being the star but about each of them discovering how much they need each other. The same is broadly true for actors putting on a play, musicians participating in an orchestra and singers joining a choir. The soprano doesn’t say to the alto halfway through Messiah, ‘I have no need of you.’
So being one body is a familiar human experience. But I think this group of pilgrims offers us a particular series of lessons about what it might mean to be the Nazareth Community. I’m going to suggest three such lessons.
First, we can never say we’ve ‘made it.’ The pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales are like Christians making their way through life – they’re longing to get to the point where they can say ‘Phew – that’s it. We’ve made it.’ Well, there is no such point. Teenagers long to leave home, undergraduates long to get a degree, graduates long for the Ph.D. or the first professional pay cheque, parents for the first child, homeowners to pay off the mortgage, pension savers for a healthy retirement. And churches are the same. They long to pay for the new building, open the outreach programme, finally get a decent preacher, and sort out the music. But the moment never comes. And the stories of the pilgrims shows us why it shouldn’t. There’s almost nothing in the Canterbury Tales about getting to Canterbury: it’s all about what’s learned about one another and oneself on the way.
The Nazareth Community will always be on a Saturday morning prayer pilgrimage. It will always remain a people on the way. Whenever you meet a bunch of Christians who feel they’ve ‘made it’, whether in strength of numbers, firmness of doctrine, righteousness of attitude or purity of life, you can anticipate that pretty soon they’ll be in trouble. Israel was formed on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. The disciples were formed on the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. The Nazareth Community becomes one body as it is bound together on its common journey. It’s always a work in progress.
Seeing ourselves as a pilgrim people should help us avoid the twin temptations of identifying too strongly with our culture or sealing ourselves off from it. We can’t live in this culture as if it were our permanent home. But the fact we have promises to keep elsewhere doesn’t make this culture inherently bad. On the contrary the gifts God gives us for the journey don’t just come from one another: they often come from strangers. The pilgrims in Chaucer’s stories are strangers who realise how much they have to learn from one another. The Nazareth Community likewise must be open to receiving surprising gifts from those it might regard as strangers or enemies.
Second, the diversity of the Nazareth Community is a strength, not a weakness. The pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales are nothing if not diverse. Paul says there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit, varieties of ways of serving God but the same Lord. Paul may have seen it that way, but it’s hardly a fashionable view among Christians today. Today we say to one another, ‘If you’re a different sexuality, you need to be in a different church. If you play music according to the custom of a different century, you need to be a different church. If you have a rival understanding of liturgy, or the Bible, or baptism, or most ironically, spiritual gifts, you need to be in a different church.’
I expect you know the story of the man who arrived on a desert island to be greeted by the sole occupant of the island. He noticed there were two buildings on the island, and asked what the first one was. ‘That’s my church’ said the sole occupant. ‘And the other building, over there?’ asked the visitor. ‘That’s the church I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’ And that’s the tragedy and the scandal of the contemporary church. If you asked a lot of Christians who the enemy is, they might well say the enemy is other Christians. And the internet makes it so much worse, because there, judgemental Christians, using the shield of anonymity, pass on hearsay and half-truth about apparently ghastly things alleged to be happening in formerly respectable churches – a practice that used to be called malicious and self-righteous gossip but is now simply called blogging.
And the third thing we learn from the pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales is that being one body isn’t just a matter of ignoring differences, allowing tolerance to break out, and dimming the lights to a point where all the pilgrims are grey. Being part of the Nazareth Community means taking the time to listen to one another’s stories, stories of why one person felt it needed to break away and how another person felt pushed out, stories of how one person came to regard as central an issue most others regard as peripheral, of how so many members of the wider church have come to assume that unity and truth are separable and that they can somehow make it on their own.
Being one body doesn’t just mean that the eye can’t say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’ It means that if the eye’s in pain, the whole body’s in pain, and the hand does whatever it can to make things better. Paul’s picture isn’t about bland tolerance. It’s about shared direction, shared wisdom, and shared pain. Being one body is probably a lot more painful than going our separate ways. We spend a lot of our time searching around for vital things we have to do that make listening to one another’s stories seem like a waste of time. But Paul says to us. ‘Your mission is to be one body. Your message is that Christ has made you one body. There isn’t anything more important for you to rush off to.’
So these are the three lessons for the Nazareth Community from 1 Corinthians 12, as mirrored by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. First, we can never say we’ve made it. All church life is provisional. We are a pilgrim people. Second, diversity is a gift and a strength, not a weakness or a sin of unfaithfulness. Third, unity is something you have to work at, and that work is not a distraction but is at the heart of the gospel.
The Nazareth Community is not in the business of eclectic religion for those who don’t want real church. It’s about calling together Christians of all kinds, in all ways, across all barriers, and bringing them face to face, and holding them there in the presence of God, until they say to one another, ‘I need you.’
