Hee! Maybe we secretly attend the same church--my sermon today was on this very same passage.
I took away from it that everyone has a gift, and all of them are important in doing God's work, from the minister, to the choir leader, to the guy who takes out the trash. When one is doing well, we're to rejoice, when one is ill or having a hard time, we all have a hard time together. None of us is above the other, and none of us can survive when the others don't.
That's what I got...then again, I spent the first five minutes looking for hard candy in my purse and telling Eric not to put his shoes on the backs of the pews.
Oh, that is *absolutely* the kind of thing it's meant to be read as, and more or less what our pastor preached on, with extra relevance because we do a lot of work with the local homeless people.
It's just that (at least in the translation we use) Paul starts talking about how the "least respectable" members of the body are the ones which we "clothe in the greatest honor" I can't help thinking about body taboos and which "less respectable" body parts we are always at pains to clothe (not to mention "one member is honored and all rejoice together" which really could have come out of a particularly purple romance novel. Um.) And *then* he compares the teachers and apostles to those "less respectable" body parts ...
What denomination are you? We Lutherans have the same texts the same week every year, (with I think a three-year cycle in Old Testament readings) which have to do with where in the church year we are. Your church year should mostly be the same as ours, anyway, so it's not *that* much of a coincidence.
I think you're mistaken - what this clearly means is that it is not just the preachers who are dicks.
As to your last point, I don't think it necessarily offers a black check of justification, but that and the whole Incarnation are the basis of that idea of the perfection and sanctification of human ritual. (Baptism was not invented by John, after all.) But there's always the question of how exactly nontraditional spiritual activities can be practiced in faith in Christ (is magic still magic if it's not "horizontally" homeopathic?) Then, of course, maybe no spiritual practices *are* strictly horizontal (so, we can ask *God* to place the voodoo curse)... or at least were, before the New Agers came along and corrupted them! I certainly haven't seen any human sacrifices lately!
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I took away from it that everyone has a gift, and all of them are important in doing God's work, from the minister, to the choir leader, to the guy who takes out the trash. When one is doing well, we're to rejoice, when one is ill or having a hard time, we all have a hard time together. None of us is above the other, and none of us can survive when the others don't.
That's what I got...then again, I spent the first five minutes looking for hard candy in my purse and telling Eric not to put his shoes on the backs of the pews.
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It's just that (at least in the translation we use) Paul starts talking about how the "least respectable" members of the body are the ones which we "clothe in the greatest honor" I can't help thinking about body taboos and which "less respectable" body parts we are always at pains to clothe (not to mention "one member is honored and all rejoice together" which really could have come out of a particularly purple romance novel. Um.) And *then* he compares the teachers and apostles to those "less respectable" body parts ...
What denomination are you? We Lutherans have the same texts the same week every year, (with I think a three-year cycle in Old Testament readings) which have to do with where in the church year we are. Your church year should mostly be the same as ours, anyway, so it's not *that* much of a coincidence.
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As to your last point, I don't think it necessarily offers a black check of justification, but that and the whole Incarnation are the basis of that idea of the perfection and sanctification of human ritual. (Baptism was not invented by John, after all.) But there's always the question of how exactly nontraditional spiritual activities can be practiced in faith in Christ (is magic still magic if it's not "horizontally" homeopathic?) Then, of course, maybe no spiritual practices *are* strictly horizontal (so, we can ask *God* to place the voodoo curse)... or at least were, before the New Agers came along and corrupted them! I certainly haven't seen any human sacrifices lately!
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. . . have you ever read Pratchett's Small Gods?
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