One Body

Haiku for members

Hey there, look at me

I am so clever, gifted;

I have the Spirit!

So, even Christians

get caught up, forgetting love.

It’s all about me!

Seduced by power,

craving honour and glory;

forgetting their Lord.

My gift is better

than your gift is. Look at me!

God thinks I’m clever.

It’s time you grew up.

Boasting is way out of line

for people of God

Your gifts were given

that you might work together;

do great things for God.

Big gifts, lesser gifts,

each one has their part to play;

you need each other.

In the one Spirit

baptised into one body;

Jews, Greeks, slaves and free.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Posted in response to the Narrative Lectionary for Pentecost

Difficult Words Haiku

Eat my flesh, he says,

as if it’s a normal thing;

this deep mystery.

Living forever;

the reward for believers.

Is there something more?

The spirit makes life,

he told those who would listen.

The flesh, conversely.

His difficult words

drove many away. Not me;

there is no other.

The fisherman spoke

for us all. Your words are life:

where else can we go?

© Ken Rookes 2015

all people are God's body

What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely. It [Christianity] proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.
-Sara Miles
Take This Bread: The spiritual memoir of a twenty-first century Christian (book)