(87) No "I"

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for No “I”, originally shared on February 4, 2021. It was the eighty-seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

     How can we be a Christian community during the pandemic? Today we’re going to talk about what it means to both be a body and to be an individual member of it at the same time.

   So, how did it get to be February? Time passes weirdly in the pandemic. It moves slowly and quickly at the same time. We got all excited about the approval of the vaccine, and now it’s hard to get it. It’s supposed to be released to small distribution centers like pharmacies soon, but it’s hard to get appointments at large ones like the Fairplex? Things are still bad, but businesses, schools and churches are opening up. We seem to be getting a handle on COVID-19, but now there are variants. No teamwork at Dodger Stadium that morning.

   And, we hear a few people cheating to get a vaccine, and other blocking cars at Dodger Stadium to keep others from getting the vaccine.

   It’s been said that there is no “I” in Team. Coaches have said this to motivate team play since the invention of the word “team”, I suppose.

   It led to the retort, “But there is an “M” and an “E”.

   Shaquille O’Neil referenced this with slightly more colorful language in his recollection of a dialogue he had with Kobe Bryant, Kobe Bryant’s funeral just a little over a year ago.

   I finally got an appointment to receive the vaccine and will be getting my first shot on Saturday. I’m excited, because it will both benefit me and the “team”, the larger community.

   Are Christians team players, or are we standouts? Are we constellations, or are we stars?

   I’ve wanted to play drums almost as long as I knew that I would become a Lutheran pastor, and that’s from my earliest memory. No one in my family had been a Lutheran pastor, or a drummer, though my grandfather on my mothers side played trumpet in jazz bands, along with polka bands and singing in barbershop quartet groups, all as side gigs to his work as a machinist. He was a fine musician.

   I remember watching the high school marching band come down the street in parades and feeling the staccato power of the snare drums, and the force of the base drum beating in my chest. “I want to do that!”, I thought.

   The orchestra program began a year before the band program in my school district in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, so I took a year of violin lessons to help improve my music reading.

   The band program started during the next summer but there weren’t enough drums to go around, so I started playing the mellophone, kind of like a French horn, but with three piston valves like a trumpet as opposed to spoon valves, until my dad found a surplus snare drum that the high school was selling, and I was off to the races.

   I was first chair through high school. When other kids were buying rock albums, I was buying jazz and absorbing all I could find. I listened to what I could find from the big-city radio stations and the records my dad brought back from conventions. When I went to college, I used some of my savings to buy a Ludwig drum company Super Classic drum set, with the silver sparkle finish that one of my drum hero’s, Joe Morello from the Dave Brubeck band, played.

   I played drums in jazz bands through college and seminary, and a little beyond to my first call in Compton.

   Honestly, I wasn’t a great drummer, but I was pretty good by my standards. I wasn’t an explosive drummer, a few fills that’s it.

   I didn’t like to solo, and I didn’t like to lay out when others soloed. To me, playing was about the dynamic space between the musicians and the sound.

   My influences were everything I ever heard. The drummers I most admired were Tony Williams for that dark cymbal tone and feel for the band: Joe Morello for his precision and orchestral tone, and Buddy Rich for the fireworks.

   My goal as a drummer was to keep the time and be invisible. I guess my approach to playing drums could be expressed in something I read was said by Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones: I don’t want to be the world’s greatest drummer. I want to be the drummer in the world’s greatest band.

   I think that that’s a pretty good description of life in the Body of Christ.

   The Body of Christ is one of the Bible’s principle metaphor’s for the Church.

*1 Corinthians 12:12-17

   I want to pause here. Paul reminds us that there is one body, with Christ as the head of the body, the Church. But, there are also many members in the body.

   A “member” is a part of the body. Take a look at your insurance policy. It will tell you that you get so much for the loss of a member. That’s a part of your body. That’s what the term membership means.

   We all have different roles and gifts to support those roles. But, the most important thing about membership is that our gifts are given through us, not to us. They are given to the body, not to individual members.

   That is, every person has the gifts necessary to accomplish the work that God has given them. Every congregation has the gifts necessary to accomplish the work that God has given it. Every denomination has the gifts necessary to accomplish the work that God has given it. The Whole body of Christ, the only group that ultimately matters, has the gifts necessary to accomplish the work that God has given it.

   Let’s continue with Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:

*I Corinthians 12:18-27

   I read a sports commentator once say that Michael Jordan was arguably the best individual basketball player to play the game (let the outraged disagreement begin). But that when Larry Bird played, he made everyone around him better.

   I have no idea whether that is true. But I do think that membership in the Body of Christ means that we are all gifted for something to make everyone around us better, together. Some of us have small gifts and some of us have great gifts, but that even if we have singularly great gifts, they are not given so that we can be called great, or even so that everyone around us can be called great, but so that God, the giver of all the gifts, may be called great.

   I have been involved in heated controversies in my Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over the years. I remember superheated arguments at our annual assemblies. I also remember that we always close those assemblies with worship and Holy Communion. I vividly remember receiving the sacrament and walking back to my seat past the people with whom I had disagreed, making eye contact, and seeing a look of recognition, not as antagonists, but as a brother or a sister, equally grateful for the presence of God and a word of forgiveness and hope.

   We are a part of a Body, not a team, and there’s no “I” in Body. But there is an “m” and an “e”. It’s in the word “member”.

   It may feel sometimes, in this pandemic, that we are alone, but we are not.

   We are the Body of Christ and individually members of it. Our individual gifts, however, are not given to us but through us for the building up of the Body, to the Glory of God.