Sermon for Sunday, January 26, 2025 || Epiphany 3C || 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Multiple people asked me to expand on my sermon from last Sunday about common cause. They asked me what I thought they could do to counter the forces of fracture and disintegration in our society. So I’d like to take the time this morning to dwell on one particular call to action, which, handily, springs from today’s reading from First Corinthians. This call to action is so simple that anyone can do it, but it does take time and attention to grow into a dedicated spiritual practice. The call is simply this: with God’s help, expand and deepen your connections with other people.

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We do this practice of connection in three ways. The first way is the most expansive, yet the most impersonal. We take time to imagine all the hands that touched something that we now have in front of us. Think of a banana you’re cutting up in your morning cereal. Before you bought that banana, someone at Aldi opened the box from which you selected the bunch, someone else sealed the box, someone packed the box with bananas, someone cut the larger mass of bananas into smaller bunches, someone cut the bananas from the tree, someone cultivated the tree, someone planted the tree, someone…someone…someone…we can go back as far as we want. That banana in your Cheerios connects you to innumerable other people all over the world…and don’t get me started about the Cheerios or the milk you poured on top of them. As you ask God to bless your breakfast, thank God for those innumerable people to whom you are connected.

This practice of thanksgiving helps us grasp the barest corner of an enormous truth, that we are all connected. C.S. Lewis talks about this connection using the metaphor of a great tree: “[Human beings] look separate because you see them walking about separately…If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.” (Mere Christianity)

Poet Rosemary Wahtola Trommer imagines the enormous truth as a safely net like you’d see at a circus. She writes,

This morning I woke 
thinking of all the people I love 
and all the people they love 
and how big the net of lovers. 
It felt so clear, 
all those invisible ties 
interwoven like silken threads 
strong enough to make a mesh 
that for thousands of years 
has been woven and rewoven 
to catch us all.*

No matter how you imagine this enormous truth of our connectedness, we are all connected. But we don’t often act like we are. We fall victim to the myth of rugged individualism. Or we don’t want to be a bother. Or we don’t think we’re worthy of others’ concern. Or, more perniciously, we succumb to rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes others to the point that we desire to break our connections to them.

And this brings us to the second way we practice connection. We intentionally enter all relationships with a desire for them to be “I-Thou” relationships. First articulated by the Austrian Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in the early twentieth century, the “I-Thou” experience recognizes the mutual dignity and personhood inherent in lifegiving human relationships. Actively living with an “I-Thou” posture prevents us from using other people in transactional ways, as means to ends, rather than as ends in themselves. And so we look the grocery clerk in the eye as they scan our items. We thank them for their aid and remember that they have an entire universe of existence outside our single interaction. We do all this instead of just seeing an automaton whose sole purpose is scanning our groceries. Not only does our practice of the “I-Thou” relationship deepen our connections with other people; this practice deepens our connection with God, who is the source of beloved personhood of each individual.

The people of the Church in Corinth have forgotten the importance of the “I-Thou” relationship. And St. Paul employs an extended metaphor to recall them to lifegiving connections. He reminds them that they are all members of one body, each just as important as the other, no matter their roles. You cannot cast off a hand or an eye simply because it is not a foot or an ear. There is no hierarchy of importance, no identity that matters more than another. Honor people for who they are, not for what they have or how they can benefit you.

Practicing the “I-Thou” relationship can happen even in fleeting encounters, but the practice deepens when we nurture our close connections, making them even closer. This is our third way. We intentionally stay in touch – that’s a great phrase, by the way, because even when we are at a distance, the term “stay in touch” reveals our longing for physical closeness. We go out for coffee. We play board games together. We sit with one another at church. We learn who their grandparents were and where they came from. We learn their hopes and fears. We learn the longing of the other’s heart and share the longing in ours. If you think this is too small an action to combat the forces of fracture and disintegration, remember the poem I quoted earlier. We are all strands in the mesh of that net. The poet continues after describing the “invisible ties / interwoven like silken threads / …to catch us all.”

Sometimes we go on 
as if we forget about it. 
Believing only in the fall. 
But the net is just as real. 
Every day, with every small kindness, 
with every generous act, 
we strengthen it. 
Notice, even now, 
how as the whole world 
seems to be falling, 
the net is there for us 
as we walk the day’s tightrope. 
Notice how every tie matters.

Every intentional act of connection makes the net stronger. You might call this net the love of God made manifest in human interrelationships. Indeed, when St. Paul is done with his extended metaphor, he launches directly into his famous poem about love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love [that] never ends.”

This connecting love of God is true religion. The very word “religion” means “to connect again.” That’s why we’re here: to connect again and again with God and with one another so that we remember we are not alone. And so we gain the strength to expand our connections outward to embrace those who do feel alone in their vulnerability due to the forces of dehumanization.

I’ll talk more about this during the Annual Meeting after the service, but I’ll lay out an invitation in brief now. Nurturing a relational culture in this beloved community of faith is more important than ever before. So I invite you to find someone in this church you don’t know or would like to know better. Make a definite plan to get together for an hour in the next two weeks. When you do, don’t just talk about the weather or the Super Bowl. Talk about real things. Talk about your grandparents. Talk about what breaks your heart. Talk about what keeps you up at night, who inspires you, how God is present in your life. Talk about the way you would heal a societal fracture if you had unlimited resources and allies. And don’t just talk. Listen. Share. Relate. Love one another with the connecting love of our eternally loving God.

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*Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, All the Honey

Banner Image: Photo by Matteo Grando on Unsplash.