1 Corinthians 12.12-31a, Luke 4.14-21
Church Anniversary service: The Third Sunday of Epiphany, at the end of The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Waterloo United Free Church, 26 January 2025
You know that old joke: My dog has no nose. “How does he smell?” Awful!
Here’s some more, which I found this week in The Beano: [1]
Which of your bones is the best at jokes? The funny bone!
What did the left hand say to the other hand? “Why is it you’re always right?”
What did one eye say to the other? “Between you and me, there’s something that smells!”
What’s the fastest thing in your body? Your nose – it’s always running!
Where in a medical book do you find out about the most useless body parts? In the appendix.
Today we’re celebrating The Body. Not just any old body, but The Body to which we each, and together, belong. It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine ourselves like this, perhaps, but we can do it. St Paul is keen to help us see ourselves this way. We are all members of The Body of Christ.
And the message is, that despite what we may find ourselves believing, there are no useless parts in This Body: we all contribute, and without each other The Body can’t function; just like Saint Paul said.
Coming back here to take a Sunday service, for the first time in eleven years, on the anniversary of the Baptist and URC congregations coming together, brings to my mind just how pioneering, and just how healing, this particular part of The Body is, and has been, throughout its history.
For let us remember with thanksgiving that this is a congregation forged in the ecumenical ferment of Merseyside in the 1970s and 80s. A Merseyside which had been riven by sectarianism for so long, as we know. Where sadly the churches had played a full part in fuelling the conflict between protestants and catholics which spilled out into violence on the streets of Vauxhall and Dingle: particularly when the Catholics processed on Good Friday and when the Orange Lodge did the same on the 12th of July. You may know people – I do – whose walk to school everyday was a fearful experience, having to pass streets populated by families from ‘the other’ side, and to run the gauntlet of groups of children from ‘the other’ school. Chases and beatings were commonplace because some malignant religious differences had been allowed to fester within The Body.
But, quite contrary to this spirit of hatred and fear, there was another Spirit at work here in our community during those years. It was of course The Spirit which Paul wrote about in these remarkable words: that we all – Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, protestants and catholics, Baptists and URC – “have been baptised into the one body by the same Spirit, and we have all been given the one Spirit to drink”.
The headliners in the wonderful act of reconciliation which healed this city during that period, were of course, the Anglican Bishop David Sheppard and the Roman Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock. Do you remember how Sheppard and Worlock came to be known as ‘fish and chips’ because they were always found together and in the newspaper?
We celebrate their influence, we remember the symbolic walk along Hope Street which they led the day they signed the Ecumenical Covenant, because here was a vision of a broken body healing; here were bare bones being covered with sinews and muscles, and then with skin; here was the breath of The Spirit returning to The Body’s previously asphyxiated lungs.
On that day in 1985 their ecumenical commitment was enshrined in a covenant celebrated by a service begun in one cathedral and concluded in the other. Halfway down Hope Street, Sheppard looked back at the crowd still streaming out of the Catholic cathedral towards the Anglican. ‘Even if we wanted to turn back now,’ he said to Worlock, ‘I don’t think people would let us.’ [2]
We were part of that movement of The Spirit, our churches here. It may only be in recollection and contemplation that we realise the significance, and the strength, of it.
Today I’d like to say that fish and chips are nothing without salt and vinegar; and that the salt and vinegar of the ecumenical movement which healed this city were John Williamson, the first moderator of the Mersey Province of the United Reformed Church, following the merger of Congregationalists and Presbyterians in 1972, and David Savage, minister of Waterloo Baptist Church, here, and the first Ecumenical Officer for Merseyside. We celebrate their leadership and their legacy today, we are thankful to them for providing the essential seasoning to the great chippie-feast which Sheppard and Worlock served up way back then.
I was a child, a teenager, whilst all this was going on, and largely I guess because of David Savage’s influence I grew up taking Church Unity for granted: taking as a given that whatever our differences in worship or in churchmanship or in theology, we belong together, that we’re better together.
My earliest memory of ecumenism in action was the occasion when Waterloo Baptist Church had been broadcast live on Granada TV’s Morning Service, sometime in the mid-1970s. This was in the period when video recorders had started to come out, but very few people yet had them in their homes. No-one here at Waterloo, for sure. But one household in the city did have a video, and they recorded the service for us, and then invited us to their home so that we could watch it back.
These were a group of Roman Catholic nuns who’d got a video in their convent somewhere in Liverpool city centre. I can’t remember the name of their order now, or exactly where their house was. But I do recall boarding a minibus in the car park outside here, and sitting in a room of excited Waterloo Baptist folks, where, beneath a crucifix and under the watchful gaze of a plaster Virgin Mary, our eyes were fixed on their telly as we looked out for a glimpse of ourselves on film. It was a kind and generous gesture of hospitality by these sisters, and I’m guessing now that it must have come about because David Savage knew them well enough, and there was mutual love and trust between them, for either him to feel comfortable asking them if they’d do this for us, or for them to have offered, even before he asked.
Some years later I was a community worker for St Gabriel’s Church in the Dingle which had its own proudly protestant past, and whose close proximity to St Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church had meant that many a scuffle had taken place in the streets outside these red-brick Victorian sectarian temples. It came about that work was going to begin on our church hall, and so we had to tell the Orange Lodge, who practiced there every Tuesday, that they’d need to find another place to rehearse their music and their marching whilst the work was going on. It’s a measure of how far we’d come in Church Unity by then, that the Lodge relocated to the Parish Hall of St Malachy’s, which they liked so much, they stayed there.
Now you may have been thinking between the lines of my talk so far, that this has all been well and good, but that Church Unity has never been complete; that, to their eternal lament, Sheppard and Worlock never managed to take communion together, because that was one step too far for the institutions they represented; that each congregation coming together in Local Ecumenical Partnerships like this one here, experienced losses as well as gains, finding that unity involves compromises at times deeply uncomfortable.
I know of an Anglican minister and a Roman Catholic priest in Liverpool 8 who would bring their congregations together for a Good Friday service, but each congregation had to separate for a communion which began with a Kiss of Peace, which they could not share. Feeling the pain of not being able to join together for this, and in protest, the congregations came to call the ‘Kiss’ a ‘Kiss of Grief’. [3]
We think of the ongoing struggles over social, ethical, sexual issues raging across the world church today, and… let me put it this way… we find that the Body of Christ is a broken body. It’s a disabled body.
Now I wonder if you’ve heard of Nancy Eiesland, who was born with a congenital bone defect in her hips. By the time she was 13 years old, she had had eleven operations, and realised that pain was always going to be with her. She was a Christian; and as she matured she developed a remarkable ‘take’ on her faith and destiny. She said that she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled. [4]
The reason Nancy gave for this remarkable statement, was that her disability made her who she was; that her identity and character had been formed by the mental, physical and social challenges of her disability. She said that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”
By the time of her death, aged 44, in 2009, Nancy had come to believe that God was in fact disabled. The key for her was the scene described in Luke 24, in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds. She came to see God not as an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither as a pitiable, suffering servant. She came to see God, like herself and other paraplegics she knew, as a survivor, as one of those whom society would label “not feasible,” “unemployable,” with “questionable quality of life.”
Nancy noticed the resurrected Jesus saying to his followers, who are alone and depressed, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.” And she realised that “here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are – disabled and divine.”
Her insight is that The Body of the resurrected Christ bears the marks of profound physical impairment. That “The resurrected Christ is a disabled God – one who shares in the human condition; who understands the experience of the disabled; who experiences in his embodiment all our vulnerability and flaws. In emptying himself of divinity,” she writes, “Jesus enters the arena of human limitation, even helplessness. Jesus’ own Body is wounded and scarred, disfigured and distorted.”
That the Body of Christ is imperfect, is Good News, I would say. Particularly when the aches and pains we each feel in our own ageing bodies we may find reflected in the life of our dwindling, struggling congregations. Like ourselves, our Churches have to adapt to changing circumstances. We may not be able to be and do what we used to be and do. But we still are: part of the Body of Christ, disabled and divine, we still are very much active and alive.
What is the Body of Christ doing in this world? I’d like to share a clip from the Church minister and evangelist J. John, speaking on an American Christian TV chat show, answering that very question. [5]
(J. John tells of the time he tried to explain to a fellow-passenger on a long-haul flight just what it is that he does….
I sat next to this lady on an aeroplane at Heathrow airport (he says) and I said, ‘Hello’, and she said, ‘Hello’. Then I said to her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘I’m going to Singapore’. And she said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Australia’.
I said, ‘What do you do?’ So she told me; then she said to me, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well….’
‘… I work for a global enterprise.’
She said, ‘Do you?’
I said, ‘Yes I do.’ I said, ‘We’ve got outlets in nearly every country of the world.’
She said, ‘Have you?’
I said, ‘Yes we have.’ I said, ‘We’ve got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters,’ I said, ‘We do marriage work, we’ve got orphanages, we’ve got feeding programmes, educational programmes.’ I said, ‘We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things’. I said, ‘Basically, we look after people from birth to death, and we deal in the area of behavioural alteration.’
She went, ‘Wow!’ And it was so loud, her ‘Wow!’, loads of people turned round and looked at us.
She said, ‘What’s it called?’
I said, ‘It’s called the church … have you heard of it?’)
Now, today let us give thanks that we are part of that ‘global enterprise’ which is The Body of Christ. And that in our own modest ways we help with the welfare of others – I think here especially today of this congregation’s link with the Home of Hope in Malawi. [6]
Our mission is set out in Jesus’ manifesto, presented for the first time in the synagogue at Nazareth, where, to a congregation of the rural poor, he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor”; where, to a people subjugated by the Roman occupying forces he says, “He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives”; where, to the sick and lame in that place he says, “He has sent me to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind”; where, to those struggling to make ends meet, endlessly indebted to their paymasters, he says, “He has sent me to set free the oppressed”.
This is why The Body is in part a religious institution which runs welfare organisations. Because we follow the lead of our Lord in striving to be among, and to serve, the poor. But as J. John reminds us, Jesus “deals in the area of behavioural alteration”. Undoubtedly Jesus wants His Body to see that change is possible in the world; he does want His Body to play our part in bringing about that change; but he needs us to understand that such change starts right here, in our hearts.
Which part of The Body is our modest local church? Is it the eye, the foot, the ear?
We might say that our modest little gatherings are the beating heart of The Body. [7]
As we gather here to worship, our prayers and hymns rise to Him who is The Head, and sustain The Body’s life.
Today we celebrate that as we worship, we do so in the company of the lively gospel dancers of Malawi; that we do so with the High Priests of Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy; with the rocking congregations of Asia’s megachurches and with the tiny huddles of country Methodist chapel-goers belting out Wesleyan hymns with gusto.
Today we give thanks that we’re not called to be superhuman; we’re called as we are; we’re simply called to live together in This Body which is, most wonderfully, both disabled and divine.
Notes
[1] 24 Anatomy Jokes That Are Very Humerus! Beano.com.
[2] Andro Linklater, Better Together. togetherforthecommongood.co.uk.
[3] Thanks, Robert Gallagher, for sharing that story.
[4] Nancy Eiesland, ‘The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’. See also my talk, The disabled God, living into the resurrection, Clapham, 2021.
[5] J. John, How To Explain What You Do, When You’re A Pastor, YouTube,Trinity Broadcasting Network interview, 13 Nov 2014.
[6] Home of Hope Malawi.
[7] This is the view of a number of participants in Easy Church, Clapham, which discussed this last week, 19 January 2025.
