“Now are ye the body of Christ and members in particular.” “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. The communion of Saints.”

(1 Corinthians 12:27)

Perhaps our first lesson on the nature and mission of the Church was taught us not with words but with hands. “Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the door and see all the people.” So we learned from this nursery routine that it is not the church building or the beautiful stained-glass windows or the organ or the pulpit that makes the Church, but rather the people gathered together for the worship and service of God.

And it may well be we shall never really understand the nature and mission of the Church until we understand it in terms of hands — our hands and others’ hands-until we learn to use our hands in every way and for everything for which God made them.

First of all the Church is understood in the symbol of the extended and clasped hands of friendship and welcome. Once there was a minister who was about to give up trying to be a minister because he failed in every church he tried to serve. In despair one day he asked a fellow minister, “Why do I always fail? Why can’t I be useful as a minister in the Church? Please tell me why?”

“It’s your gestures,” said his friend. “They are all wrong. Whenever you preach you gesture with your fists clenched. That’s no way to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Can you imagine Jesus saying with clenched fists, `Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God’? Can you imagine Jesus shaking a fist and saying, `Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’? Why, of course not. Whenever Jesus tried to teach or to minister to the people, it was always with hands wide open in love and welcome. When at last they killed him and nailed him to a cross, his hands were stretched out in welcome to the two thieves on either side of him.”

The Church of Jesus Christ is a body of people who in the name and spirit of their master hold out their hands in welcoming friendship to all the people of the whole world. When we say the Apostles’ Creed we parrot the words, “I believe in the holy catholic church,” or perhaps some of us with all sorts of Protestant reservations won’t join in this section at all because it sounds so much like professing faith in the Roman Catholic Church. But the creed pledges allegiance to the holy catholic church, that is, the one great universal Church of Jesus Christ, which is above and beyond all denomina­tional differences, all geographical boundaries, all class distinctions, all language barriers, all time and space limitations.

The Church is catholic or universal in two ways: first, it is universal in that it meets the spiritual and eternal needs of all people everywhere, regardless of nationality, race, or culture; second, the Church is universal in that it is destined to cover the universe and gather within its protective fellowship all of Christ’s redeemed. “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” said Jesus. “Where Jesus Christ is,” said Ignatius, bishop of Antioch and one of the early Christian fathers, “there is the Catholic Church.” And the communion of saints is that warm, understanding fellowship those newly gathered in Christ find themselves enjoying because they have been saved from the damning, dividing barriers to human fellowship.

Would that there were more of us who understood this basic meaning of the Church as a universal fellowship of the saints, symbolized in the extended hand of welcome. There is no such thing as an isolated Christian in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. Just as there cannot be an individual hand or arm, for it is then cut off and dead, so there cannot be an individual Christian.

The second symbol of the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, is the open hand of sharing, a hand stretched out to give. (One might say it is more of a double motion, a combination: first, a thrust into the pocket or handbag and then a quick and willing offer.) Did you ever hear anyone whine, “They are always asking for money at church”? Well, did you ever reply, “Why yes, of course, how like the Church. Giving and sharing are congenital to the Church”?

In the letters of Paul we find him using that one Greek word koinonia, which means fellowship, to refer to a variety of Christian experiences. Now he uses it to describe his spiritual communion with the living Christ, now of spiritual communion with fellow Christians, now of sharing material sub­stance with other Christians in need by chipping in cash for the contribution to the suffering saints in Jerusalem.

The congregation of a church that does not give, that does not share, ceases to be a church.

The third symbol of the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, is the uplifted hand of witness and testimony. The Church is composed of those people who have stood up to be counted for Christ. It is the social organism where men and women recognize Jesus Christ, the carpenter of Nazareth, as their Lord and Redeemer and act accordingly.

This involves two things, for the whole catholic church and the com­munion of saints have two characteristics dramatically portrayed by Simon Peter: confessor and apostle.

First, confessor. Peter, when asked by Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” answered, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” As Emil Brunner, the Swiss theologian, says in his book I Believe in the Living God:

Confession of faith is an unconditional declaration of loyalty, an oath of allegiance. Upon this confession the Christian community rests. After Peter came the other apostles; after the apostles, the three thousand on Whitsunday and then the expansion of the community throughout the whole world. All of them had to be ready at any time to be imprisoned, tormented, and killed for the sake of their oath of loyalty, their confession of this Lord, and many of them have paid this price from the first days of the Christian community on.

Second, apostle. Peter was not only the first confessor, he not only held up his hand in act and oath of allegiance, he was also an apostle. He raised his hand high in arresting testimony to others. As Brunner describes him, he was “the ambassador of God, whose witness to Jesus Christ awakens faith in other men.”

And we must follow Peter in this manual of arms if we would know and experience the meaning and mission of the Church.

The fourth symbol of the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, is found in the ancient custom of laying on of hands in blessing. In The Promise of the Spirit, William Barclay recounts being taken by his father when Barclay was a very small child to visit a great saint of the church in the retirement of his old age. When the time came to go, the elder Barclay stopped at the door and said, “If I leave the boy with you for a moment, will you put your hands on his head and bless him?” Barclay recalls:

So for a moment I was left with the old man, and he placed his hands on my head and blessed me, and I have not forgotten the feeling of that moment to this day, more than forty years after. It was not simply because he was an ordained minister of the church that the old man’s blessing was so vividly effective. It was because he was who he was. There is only one truly apostolic succession, and that is not the succession of those who are within any denomination or who have been ordained in any particular way. It is the succession of those who themselves have the Spirit of Christ in any Church.

A mother noticed as she told her son repeatedly, “I love you. I love you,” that it made him feel important. And then she sighed and said to herself, “In a better world, everybody must be made to feel important.” In the communion of saints, where the love of God in Jesus Christ is the supreme reality, there is a remarkable power to bless all life the Church touches, as if the very hand of Christ were laid in blessing.

Finally, there are the folded hands of prayer. The holy catholic church, the communion of saints, is a praying fellowship, praying all for each and each for all. We do not trust only in ourselves. We know we are sinners. Kneeling before the Almighty, the Church confesses: “We have done those things we ought not to have done. We have left undone those things we ought to have done. There is no health in us. Lord, have mercy upon us.” The Church is a society of confessed sinners who know that the love of Christ has forged them into a fellowship of the forgiven.

Confronted with the sins of self and society, the evils and perils of this awesome age, the communion of saints gives its heart neither to hate nor fear. The Church does not meet hostility with hostility or the unknown with suspicion. With admission of its failure, trust in God, and intercession for its enemies, using folded, praying hands as its spiritual compass, the Church moves forward into the unknown future believing that future is not only known to God but is also his coming kingdom.

As members of the communion of saints, we are not called upon to be cockeyed optimists and believe naively in crafty, unreliable human nature, but we Christians are called to believe implicitly in the invincible power of God’s Holy Spirit, who can cleanse and empower the most unlikely can­didates for sainthood, even such miserable failures as ourselves, and make each one a child of God and mold us together with all his children into a communion of saints.

The nature and mission of the Church is symbolized by hands, the various ways in which hands — human hands, yours and mine, even dirty or frail hands — may be put to work for God. And our hands, yours and mine, what of them? When we look at our hands today and tomorrow and tomorrow, can we say with Meister Eckhart, the German theologian and mystic, “I would be to the Eternal God what a man’s right hand is to a man”?