Where Is This Place?

Where is this place, where we all come to drink together…where we are all refreshed and sustained…where we all become one body of people, receiving this sustenance together?  Could it be in this world?  What would it look like?

The answer to these questions can be found in this week’s scripture passage:

1 Corinthians 12:12b-13 (MSG)

Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

Thirsty, we come as individuals, each of us different.  And then we drink together at one fountain - Christ’s Spirit.  Refreshed and sustained, we become one, transformed, all part of his resurrected body.

And when we drink, when we are transformed, we will say good-bye to living for our own individual lives.  We begin a new, integrated life where Jesus has the final say about everything. The hopes and prayers that Walter Russell Bowie wrote in his hymn in 1909 still ring true in today’s fractured (unintegrated) world:

O holy city, seen of John,

where Christ, the Lamb, doth reign,

within whose foursquare walls shall come

no night, nor need, nor pain,

and where the tears are wiped from eyes

that shall not weep again!

Hark, now from men whose lives are held

more cheap than merchandise,

from women struggling sore for bread,

from little children's cries,

there swells the sobbing human plaint

that bids thy walls arise.

 

Oh shame to us who rest content

while lust and greed for gain

in street and shop and tenement

wring gold from human pain,

and bitter lips in blind despair

cry, 'Christ hath died in vain!'

Give us, O God, the strength to build

the city that hath stood

too long a dream, whose laws are love,

whose crown is servanthood,

and where the sun that shineth is

God's grace for human good.

Already in the mind of God

that city riseth fair:

lo, how its splendour challenges the souls that greatly dare:

yea, bids us seize the whole of life

and build its glory there.