The following sermon was preached at St Leonard's, Aston le Walls, on Sunday 23 January 2022.

The occasion was the Third Sunday in Epiphany season.

Scriptures relating are: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a & Luke 4:14-21

You can listen to a recording of the sermon by clicking here.

Corinth, in 70AD – the time that St Paul was writing his letters to new Christian churches – was a busy, cosmopolitan, port city.  A place of thriving commerce, but one where the gap between the wealthy and the rest was pretty large.  (Though not so much by the standards of our own time, which has huge disparities of wealth, taking the global perspective.)

If you or I had been a dockworker on those bustling, hustling streets, in that first century, you might consider going on strike, when the rich merchants and corrupt local officials put the screws on really hard.  And the response of the owners and the bosses employed a metaphor.  The bosses said told the workers that they should accept their poor treatment and get back to work.  Their argument went along the lines of this: "A body has many parts that must all work together for the health of the body, on which the health of the members depend; you lot are the feet, so you belong in the muck, while others belong in more honoured places higher up".

St Paul takes that familiar metaphor and uses it instead in a wonderfully subversive manner, to argue the reverse: that the health and honour of all of us hinges upon honouring and caring for the weakest.

So, what does it mean to be a member of the Body of Christ?

That has been a question of crucial importance ever since St. Paul flipped the metaphor for his first hearers…

Well, I sort of just answered the question, or started to. The thrust of the metaphor for Paul includes a number of points central to what it means to be God's church.  It means that we are linked with one another in a relationship that we can't dissolve any more than we could have launched it on our own.  How could an organ choose to become my liver?  Does it have to fill out an application? Go on some Liver Idol television competition? Prove itself as a particularly good and loyal liver to rise through the ranks of mammals judged less worthy? It's a rather silly question. My body, being relatively healthy, had a liver develop as part of my body in the womb. It was there when I was born; it's part of God's creating me.  And what could my liver do to become not a part of my body? Nothing whatsoever. If it could and did issue some kind of declaration of independence from my pancreas, that would do nothing to change the status of either as part of my body; it would just make a little meaningless noise (like the noise of a clanging gong, even).

I want to emphasize something else that Paul uses that metaphor for, though - something that's something of a hot word in Anglican circles these days. I'm talking about interdependence. Paul is saying that we need one another. He is NOT saying merely that the poor need the rich, the sick need the healthy, and the weak need the strong to protect or rescue them; he's saying that we ALL need one another. There is no one to whom the Spirit has not given gifts that are needed by all of us.

These are gifts that are needed for our health as a body and as members of it, to be sure, but they are needed for more besides. They are needed because, in Paul's terms, we're not just parts of *a* body; we're members of the Body of Christ. God has made us one Body of Christ, a sign - a living sacrament - for the world of what God, in God's grace, is doing in the world.  St. Teresa of Avila puts it something like this:

Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world. Ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good. Ours are the hands with which he blesses his people now.

We experience what it means to be Christ's Body as we engage in Christ's mission in the world. And if we want to know more about what that means, we have an excellent starting point in our gospel reading for this Sunday. In it, Luke portrays Jesus at the start of his public ministry claiming a combination of passages as his mission; and in claiming this as his mission, Jesus offers himself and his life as a prophetic sign that "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

These are inspiring words.  But they're not just words -- not by a long shot.

What would it mean if we really believed that in Jesus, the words are being fulfilled today? How would we respond?

For once, I find that the epistle reading is perfectly paired with the gospel. Our gospel reading shows Luke's version of Jesus, the Christ, saying clearly what his programme, his mission is.  If we who seek to follow Jesus are the Body of Christ, it's the mission we're called to engage.

And I would like to invite you, during the Peace (which was never meant to be a kind of mini-coffee-hour for socializing – though our pandemic times have already largely reshaped this!) to commission one another. Each one of you here is a member of the Body of Christ. I invite you to use the Peace to say to one or two people near to you, prayerfully and with eye contact, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, because God has anointed you to bring good news to the poor."

And as I bless and dismiss you at the end of our Eucharist this morning, I want to include in that an invitation to you to own your role in the world as Christ's feet, eyes, and hands personally as well as understanding it corporately: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, because God has anointed you to bring good news to the poor. He has sent you to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."

Because that's what I draw from this passage.  I'm not Jesus, and I can't save the world.  But we are the Body of Christ - here and now, not contingent on us winning some kind of pageant or getting our act wholly together, but by God's action, with Jesus having done all of the groundwork necessary. We are called to live into that identity, and to engage the mission that comes with it - not later, when we've got our act together, or when it's more convenient, or once the kids are in college, or after some kind of cosmic sign. We have our cosmic sign. We have the life, the teaching and healing, the confronting and defeating of worldly powers, the death on a cross and the resurrection by God's action of Jesus, the Christ.

The Spirit of God was upon him, because God anointed him to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and the year of the Lord's favour. And here and now, we are the Body of the Christ, the Anointed. It's true. It's powerful. And this scripture is fulfilled in our hearing - and in our doing.