Read 1 Corinthians 12:12–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future” (Ephesians 4:4 NLT).

I love music. I mean, I really love music. Heavy metal, industrial, rock and roll, goth—get me going and I am there! My musical tastes are actually far more eclectic than those categories might suggest. I can move quite happily from Beethoven to Bon Jovi to Jewel to Stryper to, well, yes, Marilyn Manson.

At least I’m balanced!

To be honest, people are often shocked that I would listen to—or, worse yet, attend—a Marilyn Manson concert. My reaction is: Why? Would Jesus not find himself at such a concert too? Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard” and “a friend of tax collectors and other sinners” because of the company he kept (Matthew 11:19). He repeatedly went where respectable religious people thought respectable religious people should not go. Besides, I’ve been listening to Marilyn Manson since I was, well, a teenager—and here I grew up to become a Christian pastor. Who knew, right?!

Over the years, I’ve had several opportunities to see the band live. The last time I saw Marilyn Manson in concert, he stopped at one point and talked about something that has followed him throughout his career: people trying to dispose of him. Most recently, that story has included serious allegations of sexual abuse and the enormous public and professional fallout surrounding them. After a four-year criminal investigation, however, prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges, determining that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that the sexual-assault allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of the civil claims against him were also dismissed, withdrawn, or settled. Accountability for harm matters, but so does telling the whole story rather than freezing someone forever at the moment of accusation. Still, something Manson said that night struck me. People had tried to dispose of him, he said, but he had never been disposable.

That word caught my attention because Manson had been using it long before his most recent controversies. In 2000, he released a song called “The Disposable Teens.” The song gives voice to the alienation and anger of young people pushing against systems of authority and social expectations that seem to have little place for them unless they become what those systems expect.

The title itself is unsettling: disposable teens.

People young enough to still be discovering who they are, yet already receiving the message that if they do not fit, behave, believe, achieve, produce, or conform correctly, society can simply move on without them. More than two decades later, I heard the person who sang about disposable teens standing onstage insisting that he himself had never been disposable.

Sitting there listening, I found myself agreeing with him on this:

No human being is disposable.

That does not mean our actions do not matter. Human dignity does not eliminate accountability, consequences, repentance, justice, or the responsibility to repair harm. Christianity does not teach that because every person bears sacred worth, everything every person does must therefore be accepted. There is a profound difference between holding someone accountable and declaring that person expendable.

Paul makes an even more radical claim about the Christian community in 1 Corinthians 12. The church in Corinth was a mess. Its members competed over status, spiritual gifts, leadership, knowledge, wealth, and importance. Some considered themselves more significant than others. Into that fractured community, Paul introduces an image they could hardly misunderstand: a body.

One body, composed of many parts.

But Paul does something fascinating with the image. He addresses disposability from both directions. First comes the person who feels disposable. The foot looks at the hand and essentially says, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” The ear compares itself with the eye and reaches the same conclusion.

I know that voice. Perhaps you do too.

Because I am not like you, I do not belong. Because I cannot do what you do. Because I do not look like you. Because my gifts are different. Because my body works differently. Because my mind works differently. Because I am too old, too young, too wounded, too strange, too uncertain, too much, or somehow not enough.

Paul’s response is wonderfully straightforward: saying you do not belong does not make you stop belonging. The foot remains part of the body. The ear remains part of the body. Difference does not disqualify belonging.

Then Paul turns the argument around. Now it is no longer the foot saying, “I do not belong.” It is the eye saying to the hand, “I don’t need you.”

That is the voice of superiority rather than insecurity. It is what happens when one part of the body decides it possesses enough importance, power, ability, resources, knowledge, or status to determine whether another part is necessary. Paul rejects that sentence too. In fact, Paul says that the parts of the body that seem weakest are actually indispensable.

Notice what Paul does not say. Paul does not say the weaker parts should be tolerated because perhaps someday they will become stronger. Paul does not say everyone deserves a place because everyone can eventually be made useful. Paul does not tell the apparently weaker members to discover their hidden productivity so the rest of the body can justify keeping them around.

They are indispensable.

That distinction matters because even churches can begin measuring human worth according to usefulness. We may never say it aloud, but our questions can reveal the calculation: Can you serve? Can you teach? Can you sing? Can you give? Can you sit on a committee? Can you volunteer? Can you help us grow? Can you still do what you used to do?

There is nothing wrong with discovering and using our gifts. Paul spends considerable time talking about them. But the Body of Christ is not a machine whose parts earn their place by remaining productive.

A person lying in a nursing-home bed is not less part of Christ’s Body because they can no longer serve on a committee. A person with a disability does not need to demonstrate some inspirational hidden talent before becoming indispensable. A teenager sitting silently in the back of the sanctuary does not have to become “the future of the church” before being valued as part of the church now. And notice how often, when we speak about that future, we attach expectations about how they should look, talk, believe, behave, and belong when they get there. The exhausted person who presently needs more from the community than they can give back is not a drain on the Body. And the person whose gifts, personality, questions, identity, or way of moving through the world does not fit neatly into our existing structures is not spare equipment waiting to be discarded.

Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

This is where Paul’s metaphor becomes particularly uncomfortable for institutions, because institutions inevitably make calculations. Budgets must balance. Programs must be evaluated. Buildings must be maintained. Organizations have to make decisions about what is sustainable and what is not. 

But people are not programs. People are not buildings. People are not line items.

The Church may sometimes have to let structures die. We may have to close programs, change traditions, merge ministries, relinquish buildings, or admit that something which once served the mission no longer does. None of those decisions makes the people connected to those structures disposable. The Body of Christ has no surplus members.

That means neither of the false conclusions Paul sets up is available to us. We cannot look at ourselves and say, “Because I am not like you, I do not belong.” And we cannot look at another person and say, “Because you are not like me, I do not need you.” The first denies the place God has given us. The second denies the place God has given someone else.

Perhaps that is why the phrase I heard at that concert stayed with me: I was never disposable.

Neither were you. Neither is the person you find difficult. Neither is the person who can no longer produce what they once produced. Neither is the person whose presence complicates the community rather than making it more efficient. Neither is the person the world has decided would be easier to ignore.

God is creating something new, and according to Paul, that new creation looks remarkably like a body: different parts, different gifts, different functions, joined into a life none possesses alone.

There are no disposable teens. There are no disposable adults. There are no disposable people.

And in the Body of Christ, there are no disposable parts.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

PRAYER
God of every member, free us from believing that our differences make us unnecessary and from treating the differences of others as reasons we do not need them. Teach us to honor the dignity of every person, use our gifts without measuring our worth by them, and become a Body in which no one is treated as disposable. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).