Sensible

It just makes sense. If we take communion together, doesn't that bond us together? 

To Paul, that's perfectly obvious. (1 Cor 10:15-17) "I speak to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf."

Paul is confident we'll see the logic, because he says he's speaking to sensible people. That's a term my grandma used to use, to mean the same thing we mean by "common sense." She had her "sensible shoes," and said extravagant purchases "just aren't sensible."

What Paul is relying on is our common sense. He's sure that if we just listen for a minute and evaluate what he says, we'll come to the same conclusion. 

What that does is make me feel the way I used to when my dad would say, "If you had brains you'd be dangerous." I feel anything but sensible.

Because I take communion regularly, yet sometimes I don't feel connected to the body. To a few close friends, yes. To a handful of men I've served on council with, yes. To the ones I work alongside on praise teams or committees, yes.

But the majority of my church is people I know and like whose paths I only cross leaving church. These are folks who bring meals, paint walls, make phone calls, drop off bulletins and do a hundred other acts of mutual care and fellowship that make the church work. They're the ones who quietly drop their tithe in the offering plate every single Sunday, and often add a little bit to it. They're people who work hard and sometimes play hard and then show up on Sunday to stay grounded.

My church is full of people I know but don't know about. I'm supposed to be "one body" with them yet I won't talk to most of them for months at a time.

But maybe that's part of the miracle. In the same way that I could sit in the back of a Korean church service, not understand a single thing beyond melodies, and yet belong, maybe the miracle of Jesus' blood is that it makes comrades out of a whole diverse range of people who have one simple thing in common: we know where our hope lies.

That way I'm "one body" with the stranger in the Promise Keepers T-Shirt. It's just common sense, Paul says. In this case, it really is Us and Them.