Dismembered

 

“I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you… This is my body, broken for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

—1 Corinthians 11:18, 24

Ann Voskamp, in her little book of poetic essays, Be the Gift, writes a lot about brokenness, as it has to do with our individual lives and as a people of God collectively. She says:¹

We are all a body, we belong to one another, we are one…We live a horror story of distortion and dismemberment. To be the re-membering people—this is the work of life in a brokenhearted world.

When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper and Paul wrote about it in his letter to the Corinthian church, they spoke about Jesus’ broken body. The whole thrust of Paul’s writing here concerns the church as the broken body of Christ. We all have broken lives pulled apart by sin, selfishness, hurting, and the misunderstanding of each other.

Especially during this Season of Lent, we need to consider deeply the body of Christ with whom we share this sacramental meal. We belong to each other.

I see my sister down the row in church. She is elderly, wearing tattered clothing, but alive in her love for Christ. I see my brothers sitting across the aisle. They are smart-looking in their business suits, but they are also struggling with broken and sinful habits. I see children growing up in a culture ever anxious to pollute their innocent minds and pull their spiritual arms and legs from them in an effort to own them, absorb them, and turn them away from a relationship with God. We come, a dismembered people, to the Lord’s table.

Jesus wants us to see the selfless, tortured mind and body that He gave for us. He wants to remind us that He longs for us to be that kind of broken for our brothers and sisters in Christ. He wants to see us re-joined together—“re-membered,” if you will—healed, complete in Him, and completing each other, as we join hearts, minds, and hands and follow Him.

Ann Voskamp, again:²

Our call is to be compassionate, to be a community, a communion, of broken bread and poured-out wine, to live cruciform, formed like a cross. Our call is to take the form of reaching hands, open ears, listening hearts because our God is with us and we’re called into communion with Him and with each other.

And sometimes, we must simply absorb the pain of living in a body with sinful members, like our very own. We simply need to forgive and bear the burden. Karen Mains refers to a quote she once read:³

Forgiveness is being willing to bear the pain of another’s misdeeds against us.

This seems far easier said than done. But, such a mindset is required if we are to allow the Body of Christ to function with all its members intact. As we struggle to bring the broken pieces together in a healthy whole, may we see the model of oneness in Him that our Lord gave us in the reminder of the Lord’s Supper: whenever we eat it, whenever we drink it!

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1 Voskamp, Ann. Be the Gift. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Company, 2017. p. 118.

2 Ibid. p. 6.

3 Mains, Karen Burton. The Key to a Loving Heart. Elgin, IL: David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1979. p. 81.