Learning to Love the Whole Body of Christ

Losing any part of the human body causes pain and the subsequent adjustments needed to compensate. The more body parts lost, the greater the pain and time needed to cope. And yet, over the centuries, this very loss has happened to the Body of Christ.

Some Christians get distrustful of attempts to reconcile or reassemble, and I once fell into that wary category too, but the Lord had something else in mind. As God-incidence would have it, various job transfers gave my family the opportunity to get to know almost every denomination: Evangelical, Fundamental, Pentecostal, Orthodox, and Liturgical.

With each move, we looked for a church home where we felt the presence of the Lord, and, with each change, we learned to love yet another part of Christ’s Body on earth.

Initially, for instance, hymn lyrics and tunes were a priority, which encouraged singing praises and words of faith – still remembered decades later. Another church home emphasized Scripture, taking us through the whole Bible in three years or less and helping us to recognize God’s purpose and perspective from Genesis through Revelation.

Other churches focused on the Holy Spirit, making us aware of God’s desire to live with us and within us, today and forever, whereas Liturgical denominations filled us with appreciation for God’s creation through prayer, poetry, and art.

Do you see how each part of the Body has a place, a purpose, and something to add to the whole?

God loves all of His children! As we make an effort to understand where our siblings in Christ are coming from, we begin to realize we have the same Heavenly Father, the same Savior and Lord, and that our differences are primarily personal preferences and gift we’re given – gifts mean to be shared to edify the whole Church.

Even if we don’t feel comfortable visiting a church without an invitation or a member to accompany us, we can get to know denominations with which we’re not familiar by investigating their denominational websites and focusing on what we have in common.

With God’s help, we can pull ourselves together and do whatever we can to bridge our differences, make peace, and repair the breach. What a positive and powerful impact the whole Body of Christ on earth will make on our troubled world.

 

Mary Harwell Sayler

 

A few of many relevant Scriptures:

Romans 12:5, “Though many, we are one body in Christ, and individual members of one another.”

Colossi an 3:15, “Let the peace of Christ govern your hearts for to you were called to be members of one body.”

Ephesians 4:16, “Christ makes the whole body fit and united through the support of every joint. Every part does a job, so the body grows and is built up in love.”

 

Every Job A Parable

Pastor, author, and seminary teacher John Van Sloten investigates vocations in his insightful book Every Job A Parable: What Walmart Greeters, Nurses & Astronauts Tell Us About God. Published by NavPress, who kindly sent me a copy to review via the Tyndale Blog Network, this book speaks of our Creator God, Who works in and through us in all kinds of work.

As the author of this highly recommended book explains, “The first step may be submitting to the fact that creation really is filled with the thoughts of God, that you are meant to grasp those thoughts, that work is a place where that can happen, and that none of this can happen apart from God’s Spirit illumining your way.”

Equally important, “For this process to play out in an effective way, we need to be very familiar with the God of the Bible. Without a deep knowledge of the God of the Scriptures (the Old Testament and the New) we won’t be able to recognize his signature moves in creation.”

For example, “Sanitation workers image a God who cleans and maintains his creation. Their work points to a central tenet of our Christian faith: that God is a God who cleans up our lives (justifies us through the humble, selfless, servant-like work of Christ) and then keeps them clean (maintains and sanctifies us via the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit).”

In the parables, Jesus used everyday jobs to illustrate deep spiritual truths, for instance, in His stories involving vineyard workers, judges, and farmers, the latter of whom know “they need to submit to and trust an entire ecosystem of outside forces” – all of which remain under God's care-filled management.

Then “the deeper we enter into an awareness of God’s presence at work, the more we will know him as the providential source of all things. As we experience him through our creativity, rationality, sense of timing, physical skills, or entrepreneurialism, we will be reminded that all of these good gifts – just like the sun and the rain – come from (God’s) gracious hand.”

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-writer and reviewer


Every Job A Parable: What Walmart Greeters, Nurses & Astronauts Tell Us About God, paperback



...

Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition

Who would expect a book written over 50 years ago to give serious poets and poetry students such a timely word about Christianity and culture today? Nevertheless, Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition manages to do just that.

Written by the late Amos Wilder – a New Testament scholar, poet, literary critic, clergyman, and brother of Thornton Wilder – the book, kindly given to me for review by Wipf and Stock Publishers, provides a highly intelligent look at ways we can relate Christianity to the culture in which we live.

Interestingly, the poets Wilder highlighted for significant contributions in this area are the ones I also recommend: Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, and others.

Why does this matter? As Wilder said, “We recognize that the creative, imaginative expressions of culture are often our best clues to the diagnosis of men’s hearts and the deeper movements of the age.” Furthermore, “of all the arts, poetry, since it is an art of language, of the word, will often retain and sustain a varied relation to religion.”

Attesting to the insight that “poetry is praise,” the author acknowledged different views “held as to what is important and unimportant, what is healthful and harmful, what is Christian and un-Christian, in the tangled skein of cultural traditions” as we find “differing judgments as to the true spiritual heritage of the West and especially as to the Christian tradition in our English-speaking lands. Thus different values can be assigned to such main factors as Catholic order, the Protestant revolution, scientific empiricism, all of which have had their changing roles through the centuries and which have entered into special combinations with more recent phases of culture….”

With a fair-minded presentation of the many factors involved in the “story of what happened to the modern world’s faiths and assumptions” in literature, the author stated how, “We note first the loss of absolutes in our world.”

This loss led to devaluing traditions and communal roots until we reached a general “depersonalization” of mankind. If we take a sec now to think about the ads, television programs, popular books and movies today, we can see how timely or, perhaps, prophetic, Wilder’s words were in saying, “The depersonalized psyche, the numbered and enervated worker, requires high-tension stimuli to recover a transient awareness of his own identity.”

Insightful!

In other words, the more insensitive society becomes, the more it takes to awaken individual readers, help them to feel again, know themselves again, and/or draw them to Christ, the church, and the Christian faith.

So, how are we, as Christian poets and writers, to respond to this dilemma? As Wilder reminded us, “It is the spirit, as the Christian understands it, which searcheth all things and which underlies all the dynamic impulses of our crisis. Therefore the Christian is in the best position to understand them, to diagnose the age, to ‘interpret the times’.”

While acknowledging that a “diagnosis of our time in terms of its imaginative literature allows us to speak rather of directions than of solutions or conclusions,” the author gave us insight into Catholic and Protestant poets and writers who found ways to connect with readers during their lifetimes and also with readers now.

As I mentioned earlier, Wilder selected works to discuss of the very Christian poets and writers I’d also recommend for careful study and enjoyment. What I did not mention, though, is that it took me years of reading and searching on my own to “discover” and recommend those same literary artists as mentors I turn to again and again.

Be forewarned, however: You might need a dictionary, as I did, to clarify some words in Wilder’s heightened vocabulary, but his insights will give you a wide view of the impact and Christian influence your poems and writings can have on our needy society now.


© 2014 Mary Harwell Sayler - poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem and the Bible-based poetry book, Outside Eden - also wrote the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry e-book, based on the home study course she used, one-on-one, with poetry students and other poets for years.


Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition, paperback



…