The Asperger Church

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a   |   1/21/2001

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Commentary

Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth is an astounding example of practical theology. In Paul's straightforward, almost serial address of everyday issues within the Corinthian church, he presents some of the most stirring claims about the nature of Christian community ever made.

In one chapter he demands the expulsion of an unrepentant man within the community who is sleeping with his stepmother (5:1), while in another he extols the power of God's love which is patient and kind (13:4). In one chapter he berates the Corinthian Christians for their confusion regarding the celebration of the Lord's supper (11: 17), while in another he proclaims the promise of Christ's return and the resurrection of the dead (15:21ff). The letter balances the poignancy of Paul's visceral connection to the people of Corinth with timeless verities connected to living out the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here we see a pastor, his feet on the ground, and his heart tuned to God in order to compel, cajole and inspire his congregation to a "still more excellent way" (12:31b). If there were one term that could apply to that way in 1 Corinthians, it would likely be "unity."

In an outline of the letter's contents, the lection falls within the final major section. In chapters 1-6, Paul responds to word on the street (e.g., reports from Chloe's people, 1:11), that there are divisions within the Corinthian community, and that there is a variety of immoral and unsavory behaviors in the church (e.g., incest, 5:1ff, and intramural litigation, 6:1ff). In chapters 7-11, it appears that Paul moves from responding to hearsay, to taking up issues that the Corinthians themselves have asked him about (7:1). Here he takes up issues of marriage and celibacy, food offered on the altars of pagan idols, the nature of worship, the practice of the Lord's Supper.

In chapters 12-14, Paul engages the issue of spiritual giftedness, and the paramount importance of unity in the church. The final chapters take up the issue of the general resurrection (chapter 15) and Paul's important project of the Jerusalem collection for the poor (chapter 16). Even this seemingly practical afterthought takes up the issue of church unity. It is through the collection of money from churches in Greece and Asia Minor for the poor in Palestine that Paul hopes to demonstrate tangibly the baptismal formula of "Jew and Greek" being united through the Spirit into the body of Christ (12:13).

As a practical theologian, Paul employs metaphors in order to illustrate important theological concepts for his congregation. The body is the prevailing image of this lection. Paul uses the metaphor to demonstrate how Christians are organized in the power of God's Spirit to be both one and many. The illustration serves to balance Paul's need to show the church that it can be diverse in its gifts and callings and yet unified in its life in and for Christ.

Importantly, Paul begins with the single identity-forming moment that all his congregants share, baptism (12:13). Baptism is the ground of their calling into the mystery of the church. Through baptism each Christian is imbued with the Spirit and knit into the fiber of the common life in Christ. Paul reminds the Corinthians that God's power has united them from very diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though the categories of the world may define them as separate (Jew/Greek/Slave/Free), the power of God has broken down those dividing walls to make them one. In this the church is distinct and called out of the world to live in another reality, a reality of God's love known in Christ.

At this point Paul moves to sketch out fully the metaphor of the body. Here, employing great humor, Paul demonstrates how, in spite of their diversity, the members of the church are still one in Christ. Feet and hands, eyes and ears all belong to the body. In projecting that ears and eyes might talk and protest their membership in the body, Paul intends to show this contentious group (some who have claimed "I belong to Cephas," or "Apollos," or "Paul," 1:12) that in spite of their grumbling they are one in Christ. Moreover, Paul argues that this unity is not by their design or volition, but that God has arranged them into this new form (12:18). God has ordered this diverse organism for God's own good purposes. God is sovereign over the life of the church.

Paul moves to engage the notion of hierarchical divisions in the church according to different gifts. Still employing the body metaphor, Paul argues that contrary to appearances, the members that would appear to be "weaker" and "less honorable" than others are clothed with greater honor in the church. Again, Paul attributes this reversal of worldly expectations to God's design (12:24). The purpose of the design is unity in common life (12:26). Previously Paul has exhorted the church to boast in nothing but the Lord (1:31), and has demanded that they eat and drink the supper of the Lord in a "worthy" (read, "unified") manner (11:27ff). Here he illustrates for them the basis of their unity. God has organized them so.

In 12:27 Paul states the lesson in a nutshell: "You are the body of Christ and individually members of it." The declarative mood is important. Paul does not believe that this church is "becoming" Christ's body. They are the body of Christ now. It is imperative for Paul that they behave thusly in their individual and corporate lives. In this sense, Paul's call for unity sometimes demands the expulsion of members who cannot live out this vision (e.g., 5:11-13). Unity seeks inclusion of the diversity of God's gifts, but demands an ethic of personal accountability.

At the close of the lesson Paul speaks of the diversity of talents in the church (apostles, prophets, teachers, deeds of power, healing, forms of assistance, leadership, and speaking in tongues). The order of this list might be to correct an over-emphasis of tongues within the church (e.g., 13:1, 14:1-25). In all these gifts the church is blessed by God, and their single purpose is to live out God's unified purpose of God's love in the world. From this point Paul offers a meditation on the power of God's love (chapter 13). This is the power in which his congregation can live out God's purposes in the world. Paul, through the metaphor of the body of Christ, has managed to assure them that they live within this love now, and to exhort them to extend humility and grace toward one another.

Animating Illustrations

Some [Asperger's children] grow up to be functional human beings. Others struggle throughout adulthood, finding intimacy impossible and common milestones unattainable. The Washington Post reported (August 7, 2000) the story of a young man with an IQ of 146 and an SAT score of 1,320 who had studied Advanced Placement statistics and three years of Latin but was nevertheless rejected by the colleges he applied to his senior year of high school. His social and organizational skills were abysmal and inconsistent with collegiate life because he has Asperger's - a disease first discovered by an Austrian pediatrician by the same name in 1944.

Estimated number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, according to the American Institute of Physics: 10 to the 64th.

Estimated number that can dance in a row across a pinhead's diameter, "Rockettes-style": 10 to the 32nd.


-Harper's Index 2000,
Harper's Magazine, January 2000, 13.

Consider Glenn Gould. The eccentric Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at age 31, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: he had a phobia about shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and arrowroot biscuits and rocked incessantly at the keyboard. At the same time, Gould's obsessive focus and prodigious memory helped give his legendary renderings of Bach their burning intensity. Might Gould have been an Asperger's sufferer? Timothy Maloney, a musicologist who manages the Gould archives, suggested precisely that at a recent academic conference.

Other scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label to oddball intellectuals ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Bela Bartok to Ludwig Wittgenstein.


-Lawrence Osborne, "The little professor
syndrome," The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2000, 56.

Friends have never been stimulating or entertaining enough for me. When I was younger, I lived in a make-believe world that was heavily layered. I was usually watching myself and my activities through a third party. Not unlike a camera watching an actor pretending to be in someone else's life. I was very inflexible and needed to do things my way. It was too difficult to explain to friends what I was doing and I was never interested in doing things the way they wanted to. I had a great imagination - maybe too good. I was always busy in some elaborate fantasy - so it was difficult to break out of that and play with dolls or some other type of role-playing with other kids.

I remember one afternoon, I was in my room building a house for my Barbie dolls. I didn't play with the dolls, but I loved building them houses. I would use cardboard, a bread knife and scotch tape and be totally consumed for weeks on end. We had bought a new washer and dryer and I got the boxes. I had built a 2-story house with an elevator that was moved by string pulleys. I needed lights inside the house so I was contemplating running electricity. I had taken my bedroom lamp, removed the shade, and put it in the living room of my new house. The house was so large, that I thought it would be neat to make the elevators move horizontally as well as vertically. As I was working out the logistics of what I would need to do to make the elevator go sideways from room to room, I smelled something burning. It was my leg. I was sitting Indian-style and my knee was resting on the light bulb. I had 21 blisters on my third-degree burn. I went back to my room and finished my house. I never got the elevators to work how I wanted them, but it was a great house anyway. I hated it when they were finished. No other house was going to be this much fun to build.

Today, I still prefer to work on my computer or with electronics rather than socialize.


-A woman's first-person account
of life with Asperger's Syndrome,
www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger.

Ten of the World's Shortest Books:
10. Everything Men Know About Women
9. Everything Women Know About Men
8. French Hospitality
7. George Foreman's Big Book of Baby Names
6. "How to Sustain a Musical Career" by Art Garfunkel
5. Mike Tyson's Guide to Dating Etiquette
4. One Hundred and One Spotted Owl Recipes by the EPA
3. Staple Your Way to Success
2. The Amish Phone Directory
1. The Engineer's Guide to Fashion


-R. Kwon, "World's shortest books," September 9, 1999, jokes@eurweb.com.

Six wise, blind elephants were discussing what humans were like.

Failing to agree, they decided to determine what humans were like by direct experience.

The first wise, blind elephant felt the human and declared, "Humans are flat."

The other wise, blind elephants, after similarly feeling the human, agreed.


-Narada's Spiritual Quest,
members.tripod.com

How do you get people who are suspicious of each other - if not downright hostile - to work together on change? David Berdish, 42, an organizational-learning manager, has spent the past eight years wrestling with that question at Ford Motor Company.

In his role as a change-agent at Visteon Automotive Systems, Ford's parts-manufacturing company, Berdish helped usher in production and manufacturing changes that helped turn the division around - from $50 million in losses to $175 million in profits. But it took five years. And he didn't do it alone. He had to get engineers and accountants, and union and nonunion factory workers, to stop flinging accusations at each other and start solving problems. He had to get them to start trusting each other.

"Trust equals speed," Berdish says. "Once people have stopped worrying about what the other guy's agenda is, you can make changes much more quickly. But building trust takes time, especially in a company as big as Ford, where there are a gazillion years of baggage associated with where you're from, what you look like or what you do."


-"Trust for a change,"
Fast Company, December 1999, 398.

No one is left from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its 40-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century. The shock in the Little Rock, Arkansas, Sertoma Club, however, is still painful: in the mid-1980s, nearly fifty people had attended the weekly luncheon to plan activities to help the hearing-and-speech-impaired, but a decade later only seven regulars continued to show up.

The Roanoke, Virginia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been an active force for civil rights since 1918, but during the 1990s, membership withered from about 2,500 to a few hundred. By November 1998, even a heated contest for president drew only 57 voting members. Black city councilor Carroll Swain observed ruefully, "Some people today are a wee bit complacent until something jumps up and bites them." VFW Post 2378 in Berwyn, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, was long a bustling "home away from home" for local veterans and a kind of working-class country club for the neighborhood, hosting wedding receptions and class reunions.

By 1999, however, membership had so dwindled that it was a struggle just to pay taxes on the yellow brick post hall. Although numerous veterans of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam military lived in the area, Tom Kissell, national membership director for the VFW, observed, "Kids today just aren't joiners." Somehow in the last several decades of the 20th century, all these community groups and tens of thousands like them across America began to fade.


-Robert D. Putnam, "We're just not joiners,"
Beliefnet, beliefnet.com.

Can churches save America?

In the beginning came the governor's challenge: If each of Mississippi's churches would help just one poor family back on its feet, welfare could end. "God, not government, will be the savior of welfare recipients," Gov. Kirk Fordice likes to say. That's how Frances White, a jobless mother facing eviction from a crumbling house, suddenly found herself adopted by a suburban church. There were good deeds (church members paid White's bills), communion (they took her kids shopping) and finally redemption (through one congregant, White found a job as a hospital records clerk and now is partly off welfare).

Not long ago, no governor or politician could get away with asking churches to do the antipoverty work that is normally the responsibility of government. And it would have been the height of hokeyness to suggest that churches, synagogues and mosques could cure the drug addicted, feed the hungry, house the homeless, rehabilitate the criminal and lift the poor better than government. Yet ... there is talk of a second welfare revolution: Let churches and charities, not government, provide more of the social safety net.


-Joseph P. Shapiro, "Can churches
save america?" U.S. News & World
Report, September 9, 1999.

Children's Sermon

Before Sunday take or create a "paper doll." Perhaps you can find a picture of a person in a catalog and glue him onto posterboard - then cut it out. Then on another piece of posterboard, draw around the paper doll so that you have an outline. Cut the paper doll into enough pieces for each child. Be sure the pieces are of a hand, a leg, eyes, mouth, foot, etc. Have the outline sitting on an easel at the front of the church. Tell the children that you are going to give each of them a part of the person outlined on the easel. Ask the children to help you put this person back together using the outline. (You might ask another adult to do the gluing while you keep the children on track.) When each child comes forward with a piece, ask him/her to name one thing for which you can use that part of the body to help someone else. Examples: eyes, to see someone in danger and offer help; mouth, to give someone a compliment, etc. If the child cannot think of anything, suggest something. When the paper doll is complete, tell the children that Paul told the people of Corinth that the church is like a person - each member is a different part of the body, and each of us has been given gifts by God that help make up the church. Close by saying that we all need each other, just as the body we made today needs all its parts.

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