October 21, 2007
Consecration Day
1 Corinthians 12:4-28
Many Gifts – One Spirit
The Bible doesn’t tell us
much about Jesus’ childhood. A couple of
birth stories, a baby tale or two, and that story about the child Jesus getting
left behind in Jerusalem and being found, three days later in the Temple,
chit-chatting with the teachers. In all
of Luke’s 24 chapters, everything he has to report about the pre-adult Jesus is
confined to the first two – albeit lengthy – chapters. And that second chapter ends on something of
a summary note – with the 52nd verse that you, perhaps, like I
memorized as a child (in words that prefigured the more inclusive terms of our
current discourse”: “Jesus grew in
wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” Even at that young age I knew that the
observation was intended to be more exemplary than remarkable – at least that’s
the reason Mrs. Bounds wanted us to memorize it. In other words, we somehow got the message
that Jesus was not the only one to whom that description should apply. We were supposed to grow that way as
well: in “wisdom, stature, and in favor
with God and man.”
Intellectually,
physically, spiritually, relationally. Looking
back on it, it all sounds pretty normal.
It turns out, however,
that that last one, which seems like it would be the simplest, is fraught with
the most complications. We know how to
grow in wisdom. We go to school, we read
books. We pass tests. We earn diplomas and degrees. And we know a little bit about physical growth
and health – proper diet, regular exercise, decent insurance. As for spirituality, even if we aren’t every
week sitting in a church pew, most of us experience moments of awe and
admiration for a Creator larger than ourselves – even if only on the golf course,
or climbing a mountain or staring out at the deep blue sea. Why, even our profanity invokes the name of
God.
But relationships –
getting along, working together, colluding rather than colliding, growing in
favor with each other – that has not always been our strong point. We get jealous. We get defensive. We begin to care more about possessions than
people. We develop prejudices and
practice bigotries. We make
judgments. We cause injury. We start wars. We cultivate more suspicion than curiosity. We draw circles that shut each other out
rather than draw them in such ways as to take each other in. We establish pecking orders – hierarchies and
classes.
Even in the church. Take me, for example. I know this will sound presumptuous, but stay
with me. The pastor of a church looks very
much like the most important member. Oh,
I know you’ll laugh and scoff and make the obligatory protestations. No one would really say such a thing out
loud. But let’s be honest. Whether or not anyone would make that claim
quite so nakedly, we all know that people both join and leave
congregations because of the minister – which is only natural, I suppose, given
how constantly the pastor winds up within your line of sight or earshot. It is too much to ask, I suppose, for
congregants to regularly and willingly subject themselves to the ministrations
of one whom they find to be an irritant or offense.
Maybe the pastor is most important. Indeed, if sheer volume is the measure, there
is much to support that impression. The
pastor, after all, is typically the most frequent visitor to your hospital room
– short of your own family members. The
pastor rather quickly becomes the “face” of a congregation in community
meetings, in the press, and certainly on Sunday mornings. The reporter didn’t quote your opinion this
week about the Jesus action dolls on the WalMart shelves right there next to
Barbie and G.I. Joe. The reporter asked
a pastor – you know, the expert.
In the “old days” it
wasn’t unusual for the pastor to be the most educated person in a congregation,
and even these days, if for no other reason than his or her attendance at the
widest variety of church meetings, the pastor wields perhaps an inordinate
amount of influence. And so it is that
the pastor often comes to be viewed as the most important part of the church –
shamelessly often by those pastors, themselves, given the larger-than-life
photographs on billboards and self-aggrandizing television “ministries” they
implore us ad nauseum to fund.
But
somehow, deep down, we know there is more to it than that – even if we aren’t
too sure just how to practice that inarticulate comprehension. The church, we know if only by intuition, is
larger, more blessedly complicated than that.
Paul knew it too, and was
quite understandably miffed by the seemingly inexorable descent of
congregations into that competitive way of behaving – or “misbehaving” as the
case may be; as if some folks in the church are more important than
others. But as Paul reminds us in the
passage guiding us this morning, appearances can be deceiving. In fact, writes the Apostle, the members of the body that seem to be
weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less
honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are
treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need
this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the
inferior member…
We have been talking a great deal, in
recent weeks and months, about the idea of “gifts”; about the varieties of them
– such as the gift of leadership and creativity and organization and justice;
of knowledge and teaching and crafting and prayer. They and the others are represented in the
graphic on the bulletin, according to our particular possession of them. But until today we have left implicit the
larger reason for naming them and understanding our personal ones more
deeply.
Part
of that reason is validation. There is,
after all, something gratifying and ennobling to comprehend that God’s Spirit
is at work in me. When viewed through
the lens of Paul’s affirmation there is really no justification for poor
self-esteem. We can hide it, we can
ignore, we can abuse it, we can confuse it, but we simply can’t refute it: “To each,” Paul insists, “is given the
manifestation of God’s Spirit.” There is
absolutely no truth to the suspicion of some or the claim by others that on the
morning God handed out gifts some had overslept. You may not have discovered yours quite yet,
or fully comprehended its import, but there really are no exceptions. “To each is given the manifestation of God’s
Spirit.” Maybe a fortune cookie, every
now and then, gets packaged without a fortune; maybe a Cracker Jack box ever so
rarely slips by without a prize, but never has there been a person – ancestor
or since – who does not bear the fingerprints of God. And we ought to feel good about that.
But
recognize, as well, that the affirmation is only the first half of the
sentence. We aren’t merely gifted; we
are purposed. It isn’t enough to know
that we have spiritual gifts; we need also know what they are for. To each
is given the manifestation of the Spirit for
the common good. Biblical
scholar C.K. Barrett translates it as, “To each one is given his own
manifestation of the Spirit, with a view to mutual
profit” (emphasis added).
Gifts
of God are never given for private or personal gain, but always for the common
good. Little wonder, then, that we talk
about gifts – including, but not limited to, our financial ones – in the
context of stewardship, for stewardship is all about the life we hold in
common, and the community we are, by God’s initiative, trying to build. Which also coincides with another, still
broader, conversation that has captivated our thinking along the way: this idea, this vision, this practice, of
hospitality whose depths we will never finally plumb this side of heaven. What does it mean to extend genuine welcome?
When
Eboo Patel, who is the young founder and executive director of Chicago’s
Interfaith Youth Core, was in college at the University of Illinois, he became
intrigued by the Catholic Worker movement started decades before by Dorothy
Day. Discovering that a Catholic Worker
House still functioned right there in Champaign, Illinois, he decided to
experience it first-hand. He writes
that, “From the moment I first entered St. Jude’s, it was clear to me that this
was different from any place I’d ever been.
I couldn’t figure out whether it was a shelter or a home. There was nobody doing intake. There was no executive director’s
office. White, black, and brown kids
played together in the living room. I
smelled food and heard English and Spanish voices coming from the kitchen. The first thing somebody said to me was, ‘Are
you staying for dinner?’
‘Yes,’
I said.
The
salad and stew were simple and filling, and the conversation came easy. After dinner, I asked someone, ‘Who are the
staff here? And who are the residents?’
‘That’s
not the best way to think about this place,’ the person told me. ‘We’re a community. The question we ask is What’s your story?’” [1]
That
is the kind of question I think a good stewardship sermon should inspire.
If there are, as Paul
insists, varieties of gifts, but the same
Spirit; if there are varieties of
services, and varieties of
activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone,
then wouldn’t our curiosities be better served if, instead of questions about “role”
and “function” and one’s “place in the pecking order” of life, the questions we
asked were “What’s your story?” “What’s
your gift?” For stories, after all – as
we learned last Thresholds Festival from Jerome Kills Small – “are the long
version of ‘hello.’”
What
is your story? What are your gifts? And how might such treasures by contributed
to bless the common good? Wouldn’t that
be a community of trust and grace that bears striking resemblance to the very
body of Christ – bearing within the touch of its questions the very fingerprint
of God?