The system, then, is broken.  Love is removed from the heart of the communal life.  Malfunction, something worse than normal wear and tear, sets in, things rubbing the wrong way, making things worse in the long run.  So what to do with disordered love and malfunction not repented of?  Well, there’s only one thing really.  Since the body of Christ in the here and now is flesh and blood, and because we too often refuse to follow the Spirit’s lead to repentance, we are forced to use flesh and blood to keep things running.  We must use one another to make up for what is lacking, as band-aids, as spare parts, as a kind of compensation.  And because there is still something in us that hopes for unity and maturity and love, we buy into what seems like the necessary scenario.  We allow ourselves to be used and eventually start using others ourselves.  We’ll call this level of the breakdown instrumentalisation, a term used by Samuel Kimbrell in Friendship as Sacred Knowing, which I hope to say more about next week.

When I shared this model with some co-workers, this was the level that got the most push-back, mostly based on the notion that the body of Christ was made so that we could make up for what others lack.  I understand that and even agree with it to an extent.  When some things stop working, our bodies learn to adjust.  We learn to make-do with one kidney or missing teeth.  Our spines learn to adjust when our wallets in our back pockets get too big.  But you want health for your body when it is possible.  That’s what Paul seemed to be going for in Ephesians.  Sure, you might need a hand and arm to help your balance when your two feet aren’t enough, but you don’t turn your arm into a perpetual third leg.

We have gotten too good at, too used to, using one another.  As Kimbrell states, it is a way of impersonal (not interpersonal) communication and community that doesn’t reflect the nature and love of God much at all.  And because we’re too afraid of what might happen if the machine, the community, stopped working, that we keep things going and grow in bitterness and resentment and then turn it into some odd form of spiritual (de)formation.

We have gotten too good at not listening to our bodies, the hints and nudges that tell us that something is not right.  It’s true for the human body as well as for the relationships that form the body of Christ.  We would do well and be wise to learn to listen again.  If we don’t, we’ll turn the body into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.  And we all know how that ended.