You’ve heard me talk about my days of playing basketball years ago. I was never a star, but I had a lot of fun. There could be several reasons that I was never a star. There were a couple of minor problems, like I wasn’t especially good at either shooting or dribbling a ball. But another problem was with my knees. My son, the bio-engineer tells me that each knee joint has 4 major ligaments that hold the joint in place. And in each of my knees, the two outside ligaments are loose, so that allows the knee joint to flop around when I run or jump and that meant that the two interior ligaments got stresses that they couldn’t handle and they were injured. And it probably did nasty things to the cartilage, too. We don’t think about our ligaments very much, but when they are weak, you feel it. Those tough little pieces of tissue hold our bones together. Without them our bodies would be helpless blobs.
The Apostle Paul loved the church. He gave his life to build it up. And when he struggled to communicate to people how wonderful the church was, he often turned to the human body as an analogy to help people understand. The human body is made up of many parts, just like the church. It’s good for the parts to be different, to specialize, just like the church. It is of utmost importance that all the parts work together in unity, just like in the church. The body has a head that guides the rest. Christ is the head of the church. And in this morning’s text Paul extends the body analogy even further, mentioning the ligaments of our bodies to help us see the importance of connections in the church.
This morning we turn again to one of the most amazing pictures of the church, Ephesians 4:12-16. The wording is difficult for us to follow today. But as you sort it out, the picture of the church is beautiful. And today we look at the ligaments of the church, the relationships that hold the church together. Please stand for the reading of God’s word as Bill comes to read it for us.
11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.
When we connect to Christ the head, he connects us with one another.
And that’s a message that our lonely world needs to hear. We live in a desperately disconnected world, where the ligaments that are needed to hold society together are being stretched, our connections are flopping around, and people are getting hurt. Sociologist, Robert Putnam, in his best-selling book “Bowling Alone,” talks about the social capital that societies need to flourish. Social capital is the relationships that hold us together. Last weekend our son had to have an emergency appendectomy and his wife was stretched trying to be with him in the hospital and watch her three kids. But they had us there already, just down for a visit, so Kathy could watch the kids and I could sit with Katarina at the hospital during the surgery. As soon as their pastor got word of it he called an elderly couple who live across the street who called and offered to help. But Kathy was there for an extra day and the other grandma came for 2 days. Then we took the 3-year old to our house and the 4-year old went to a neighbors’ house. The pastor visited in the hospital. And all those supports kicked in and they went through this crisis just fine. That’s what sociologists call social capital, networks of relationships that can support us in hard times and that nourish us in good times.
Putnam’s book documents the erosion of social capital in our society. He looked at many different social institutions that once connected us, but are now in decline. Those who have lived a long time can feel the difference. Listen to the groups whose membership has gone down while the population has increased: 4-H, Boy Scout Leaders, Girl Scout leaders, American Bowling Congress, American Legion, Business and Professional Women, Eagles, Eastern Star, Elks, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Grange, Jaycees, Kiwanis, Moose, League of Women Voters, Lions, Masons, Odd Fellows, Optimists, PTA, Red Cross Volunteers, Rotary, Shriners, American Bar Association, American Medical Association, American Nursing Association. We’re a disconnected society. We are individualists. Our movies and novels repeat the same theme of the rugged individualist who stands up against everybody else, fighting the system alone, over and over and over again.
And the result for society is that we are horribly fragmented. Often neighbors don’t even know each other, let alone support one another. Our kids are isolated at school with their peers and have woefully few quality relationships with adults, few role models to learn from. The support that our society gives to those who are in trouble has often been reduced to a government check in the mail with a minimum of human contact. The ligaments that are to hold our society together are just plain weak. And we are all paying the price for it.
And the church is paying a price for it. The Bible gives us very important responsibilities for helping each other grow. When these things are happening we help each other grow. When relationships are loose, it becomes almost impossible to grow. I’ve made a collection of Bible verses that give us responsibilities for how we treat one another. Listen to what the Bible says are our responsibilities for helping each other grow.
“Bear one another’s burdens. Outdo one another in showing honor. Live in harmony with one another. Welcome one another. Instruct one another. Bear with one another in love. Be kind to one another. Forgive one another. Encourage one another. Build each other up. Seek to do good to one another. Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Provoke one another to love and good deeds. Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. Love one another, deeply from the heart. Be hospitable to one another. Serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Lay down your lives for one another.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be surrounded by a group of friends, a lot of them, who will lay down their lives for you, who will graciously admonish you when you are wrong, who will encourage you, forgive you, always welcome you? What a gift that would be! Many of us have tasted parts of that. Those are all commandments in the Bible for how the different parts of the body are supposed to be connecting, and it’s such a beautiful picture.
But our culture pulls us away. We all carry wounds that make us afraid of getting too close. We hear so many messages about going our own ways, asserting our independence, that we are left with some vague feeling of missing out on something, but we often don’t even know what it is that we are missing.
Gerhard Frost asked why it is that mountain climbers tie themselves together when they start getting really high up on the steep slopes of a mountain. And he answered his own question. He said it’s because if they don’t tie themselves together, the sane ones will all turn back.
It gets scary to dare to come really close with one another. It can be hard work. You’ll get your knees skinned a few times on the way. It means saying no to a lot of things we would like to do for ourselves. We all have a thousand excuses for doing anything but being really honest with each other. But as long as we give in to those excuses, we’ll never get very far up the mountain.
But oh, the view once you get up there. And in the struggle to get up there you learn all sorts of things about yourself and about life that you never knew were there. You learn that you don’t have to be pushed around by your fears. And the unity that comes from doing it together as a team feels so good once you get to the top.
Love is the ligament that holds us together. Love pulls us beyond just picking and choosing which services are convenient to get to. Love brings us to church every week not just when we feel we need it or know there will be a special day, but every Sunday so that we can be a blessing to our brothers and sisters.
Love pulls us to build relationships all through the congregation, reaching out beyond our normal circle of friends. Like Charlie Brown said, “I need all the friends I can get.”
You’ll remember that a few months ago we did a fruit basket upset for coffee hour to break us out of our normal coffee hour circles. I had a lot of people comment how they enjoyed that, so we’ll do that again next Sunday. That’s a chance to extend the connections in the church.
Love tells us that even someone who wouldn’t be naturally attractive to us is precious in God’s sight and worth getting to know so that we can encourage them and even find something to learn from them.
Love makes the ligaments of the church. When the ligaments get loose and floppy, somebody gets hurt. When the joints are strong and healthy there is no end to what we can do.
To finish, I want to take a few minutes to celebrate the ligaments of this church. And I want us to see how they have developed. So I want you all to take out those papers you wrote at the beginning of the service, the ligaments of the church.
I’m going to invite you to read out loud the connections you wrote about. And then hold on to your spot on the string and pass the ball to the one with whom you just described a connection. As we do it we’ll unravel this ball of string to help us actually see how the ligaments of the church connect us.
(At the beginning of the service people had been asked to fill in sheets for several different people in the room. The sheet named the person, an activity they had done together that helped them connect and what they learned of value about the person. That opened a wonderful time of affirmations. As we passed the ball of string back and forth through the sanctuary we became delightfully caught up in a giant web of the ligaments of the church.)
