You are needed. You are needy. We need each other.
I got to share those words on Sunday morning for our final gathering at a Laity Lodge retreat, and they are still running through my head. Such simple truths, and yet also ones that are hard for us to believe about ourselves and one another. I preached from 1 Corinthians 12, which is a passage where Paul wants the church in Corinth to stop fighting and one-upping each other and instead function together in a way that leads towards love (1 Corinthians 13 is one of the most famous passages in the Bible; it’s the one all about love).
What struck me as I reflected on these verses is how weird it is to think about being one body with other humans. There’s a radical intimacy involved in inviting the people Paul describes here—Jew and Greek, slave and free—to see themselves as closer than neighbors, closer than friends, more intimate even than wife and husband. Paul points out the widest social divisions of his day, and he says that if they share faith in Jesus, they are one body. As intimately and intricately connected to one another as muscle to bone.
They aren’t just intimate, but interdependent. It’s a feature, not a bug, of our humanity to need one another. And that includes “the members of the body who seem to be weaker are indispensable” (v22). For those of us with low social status, who are seen as weak and perhaps even disposable by this world—Paul writes that we need to know God created us with gifts to offer. We are needed.
For those of us with high social status, we need to reckon with our posture toward and relationships with the people of low status—the ones who seem weaker according to our society’s metrics. If we aren’t living in a way that acknowledges how much we need these people, and if we aren’t living in a way that actively honors them and their contributions, then we are cutting ourselves off from the body of Christ.
You are needy. You are needed. We need each other.
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