How Do You Move An Elephant - 1 Corinthians 12
2022 Prescott House Chapel Sermon
How do you move an elephant?
That’s the premise of an old African story told by Kenyan theologian and minister, Grace Imathiu.
She tells the story of a hunter who shoots down and elephant with his bow and arrow. He’s overjoyed at the thought of having so much meat for months, meaning that he won’t have to hunt for some time to come. He tries to move the elephant but can’t. He pushes on the legs, but it doesn’t move. He pulls the trunk, it doesn’t move. He tries the tail, still the elephant doesn’t budge. He simply can’t move it an inch on his own.
So he goes back to his village and announces to those gathered, ‘I’ve killed an elephant, come and help me move it.’ The villagers respond, ‘who’s elephant is it?’ The hunter says, ‘it’s mine’. At that all the villagers walk away. The hunter realises his problem and rethinks his answer. He announces to the crow, ‘the elephant is for all of us, we can share it.’
Enthusiastically, the whole villages rush to the forest and resolutely they move the elephant, inch by inch. Even those who are too frail to push, stand on the sides and cheer the villagers along. As they push a leader shouts ‘One, two, three, whose elephant.’ And they respond in unison ‘Our elephant!’
On his own, the hunter didn’t stand a chance at moving the elephant. But when the burden, and the eventual results, are shared the task doesn’t seem daunting.
This simple parable serves to demonstrate a powerful point. On our own, we are limited by what we can do. Yet through community, we are much stronger. When we work together, we can achieve things we otherwise couldn’t have imagined on our own.
Being in community is such a vital part of our sense of humanity. While many of us like to have solitude and find sustenance in being with ourselves we are, by nature, pack animals. We need to be with community to find strength, to find support and to grow as people. It’s through our community that we learn to be the best people we can be.
But being in community doesn’t mean uniformity. Just because we’re together doesn’t mean we need to be the same. In fact, it through the differences that we become a stronger community.
The reading we heard tonight illustrates this idea of diversity shaping and strengthening community. The Apostle Paul is writing to the early church in Corinth. We know from history this group of followers had a number of squabbles and were really struggling to work together and be with each other. They were bringing assumptions of class and hierarchy from their normal society into this new community of Christians. They really didn’t know how to be a community.
Paul responds by giving them this image of what a community looks like. He uses the image of the human body to illustrate this. Each part of the body has its individual function; a foot is not a hand and an eye is not an ear. But each member of the body is just as important as another. He has this beautiful phrase “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” You can’t discount any part of the body because each is important for the functioning of the whole.
Paul suggests that this is the same for the body of believers gathered together, this early Christian community. He says that each member of this body has different functions, some teachers, some prophets, some leaders. But each plays an important role in shaping the community. You can’t suggest that one is more important than the other because all are needed to make the collective group function.
SLIDE Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and prominent theologian describes it in this way. He says Paul shows the Church that there is “another way of being together. There is a new way in which we can be friends, where we can respect each other and receive and give to one another”. It’s a powerful, and at the time, a radical image of community that challenges the social norms of the time. It’s an image of reciprocity and collaboration that seeks to support and build up each other, even when there are differences and disagreements.
I think this image of the whole body working together helps to illustrate our theme for tonight really well. On our own, we are limited, but together as a community we are much stronger. SLIDE
An orchestra cannot make beautiful music if everyone is playing the flute. You need a multitude of instruments, working together in collective harmony to great the sound. In the same way a cricket team can’t win if everyone is bowling and there’s no one in the field to take the catches. The players need to play multiple roles for the success of the team.
We got a glimpse of what it meant to be strong in community during the Covid pandemic. Now, I’m not discounting the incredible difficulty that it was for many people. But through that, we saw the flourishing of new ideas of community. We wore masks, even before it was mandated, to protect the most vulnerable. We stayed home if we thought we were unwell to protect the sick, even if they were people we didn’t know. We dropped off toilet paper and cake on the doorsteps of our neighbours, even if we’d never met them. In the midst of great difficulty came and increased sense of kindness and concern for our fellow human.
We put the collective wellbeing of our whole community at the forefront of our decision making, even if it meant that individual freedoms were curtailed. It was a wonderful example of what it meant to support each other and be strengthened by one another, even when we were coming from a place of great difficulty.
I wonder how we might maintain that sense of community as we go back to normal, or establish a ‘new normal’. How might we continue to be strengthened by one another and build each other up rather than worry about our individualistic pursuits. Because if we do that, if we remain aware of the important role that each plays in supporting the collective, then we become stronger for it.
We can’t move an elephant on our own. But if we put aside personal biases and rather work for the building up of the whole then that elephant doesn’t seem that hard to move at all.
