christ has no body now but yours

came across christ has no body now but yours on phil's new blog and am adding it as a worship trick

Christ has no Body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
Compassion on the world
Yours are the feet with which he walks
To do good
Yours are the hands with which he blesses
All the world.

Yours are the hands
Yours are the feet
Yours are the eyes
You are his body
Planning in the Kingdom
It helps, now and then, to step back
And take the long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts
It is even beyond our vision.
Lord, we know in whom we believe
We accomplish in our lifetime
Only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise
that is God’s work
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying that the
Kingdom always lies beyond us.

Lord, we know in whom we believe
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith
No confession brings perfection
No pastoral visit being wholeness
No programme accomplishes the Church’s mission
No set of goals and objectives includes everything
Lord, we know in whom we believe
This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted
Knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
Lord we know in whom we believe

We cannot do everything
And there is a sense of liberation in realizing that
This enables us to do something,
And to do it very well
It may be incomplete
But it is a beginning,
A step along the way, an opportunity for the
Lords grace to enter and do the rest.
Lord we know in whom we believe

We may never see the end results,
But that is the difference between
The master builder and the worker.
We are workers,
Not master builders,
Ministers,
Not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future
Not our own.
(Oscar Romero)

Lord, we trust in you
To eternally renew our belief in you
In ourselves and in each other
In this is our joy. Amen

Yours are the hands
Yours are the feet
Yours are the eyes
You are his body.
Christ has no Body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
Compassion on this world
Christ has no Body but yours.

Comments

[Nic]

Nice post, got me thinking,

I was wondering if the act of communion asks us to move beyond the metaphor of the body— ‘take eat’. In communion, is the swarm asked to devour the body (‘organismic’ metaphor) and move towards a new structure, perhaps a network?

[bob c]

man that phil does some great mashing up

[David]

From the perspective of an ex-Christian, this does a brilliant job of highlighting something that I have difficulty getting Christians to address.

Christ truly does not have a body without yours: without you acting in his name, he would cease to 'exist'. Surely this is shocking and worthy of your attention. We can attribute all acts of love and kindess to 'god', we can be inspired by the stories of the bible and behave in a manner which we believe to be as Christ-like as our flawed selves can muster. But none of that means that Christ does actually exist anywhere other than in the pages of a book and, consequentially, in our heads.

When I try to talk about this, I am usually given the same rote responses: Jesus loves me; it's about having a 'personal relationship' with him; or a number of other *metaphors* that have no direct relation to experiential reality. I'm not asking you to give a response on behalf of those others - but please do think about it. Ask yourself, if you took god out of the equation, could everything you do in his name still happen? I suggest that it could, and in fact, does.