Sermon delivered Sunday, June 14, 2015, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN
3 Pentecost, Proper 6, Year B (1 Samuel 15:34-16:13)
What does it mean to be "chosen" by God?
In the Hebrew scripture for today, we heard the story of God choosing David to replace Saul as king of Israel. God tells Samuel he has chosen one of Jesse’s sons to be the next king, so Samuel goes to visit Jesse and find the chosen one. One by one, Jesse’s sons come before Samuel, but Samuel hears from God that none of these are the chosen one. He finally finds out that there is one more son that no one has thought to bring in, since he is young and is out tending the sheep. When this youngest son, David, comes before Samuel, he knows instantly that this is the one God has chosen as the next leader of Israel.
I don’t know about you, but in today’s day and age, I think many people tend to be skeptical about people or communities who claim to be “chosen by God.” If that person is the chosen one, who is everyone else? The non-chosen ones? The rejected ones? The not-good-enough ones? Language about being “chosen” can easily lead people to believe they are superior to others, to take being “chosen” as an indication that they are better than those who are not chosen, that David was somehow better than his brothers, for example, because God chose him rather than any of them.
That’s certainly one way of interpreting what it means to be “chosen by God” – that we are the special ones, that we are superior to others, that God loves us more than God loves everyone else – and certainly there is scriptural precedent for holding such a perspective. But I prefer another narrative in scripture that reminds us that we are ALL people of God, that God’s temple is a house of prayer for ALL nations, not just the Israelites, that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation those who fear him and do what is right are acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35), that we are ALL chosen by God; it’s just that we are not all chosen to do the same thing. Claiming to be "chosen by God" only becomes a problem when we believe that the thing God has chosen us to do is better than the things God has chosen other people to do.
My grandfather, who was not a church-going man himself, used to say, "What a good thing it is that God made us all different -- that's what makes the world go 'round." Or, as the letter to the Ephesians puts it:
"[E]ach of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. (Ephesians 4:7, 11-13)
Paul’s metaphor about the church as the body of Christ emphasizes how essential diversity is within the community. We need all parts of the body to function effectively. If we all tried to do the same things, not much would get done. Just because David’s brothers were not chosen to be king did not mean that God did not have a plan for their lives, or that God valued them less than God valued their brother.
Each of us has particular gifts that God has given us to use for the building up of the body of Christ. No one gift is better than any of the others. Even this passage from Ephesians is quite limiting, since it talks about people being called to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers -- but God also chooses people to be health care workers and architects and BBQ or English tea volunteers and vestry members and gardeners and finance committee members. What role has God chosen you to play in building up the body of Christ? Where do your gifts lie in serving God and bringing others to the knowledge and love of God? (As an aside, if you’re not quite sure of the answer to that question, I invite you to consider joining our next group of Faith Leaders, which will begin in the fall. Faith Leaders is an eight-month-long program for adults that meets weekly and helps people discern what their gifts are and how God is calling them to use their gifts in the world.)
In my own experience of discerning my call to the priesthood, I have come to believe that at any given time, God is calling us to a particular path that will bring us to a place of abundant blessing if we choose to follow it. I believe God will still be with us and work good in our lives even if we do not choose that path, but I do believe that we will find more fulfillment and abundant blessings if we do follow the tug of God’s call, however impractical it may seem.
In late college and the beginning of graduate school, I planned to pursue a career in journalism. I knew I loved studying religion, and I was also a good writer, so I thought I would combine these two things and become a religion reporter for a newspaper. My experiences in the world of journalism were all rewarding in some sense, but while I was writing articles and copy editing newspaper pages, I couldn't shake the sense that there was something else that I should be doing. From the first time I began to read the Bible in earnest in late high school, I had been struck by Jesus's injunction to reach out to the poor. Passages from Scripture like, "If you love me, feed my sheep" (John 21:15-17), and "whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40), would ring in my head as I walked past homeless people begging for change on the streets.
Finally, I listened to the call and began to volunteer with an outdoor church for the homeless in Cambridge, Massachusetts, similar to the Church in the Yard here in Nashville. You’ve heard me mention this ministry in sermons before. Although I had no idea what to say or do as I interacted with the people on the streets and I felt completely unqualified and incompetent to do that ministry, it certainly brought me much closer to God than journalism ever had. After I wrote some reflections about my experiences with the Outdoor Church, some of my mentors suggested that I might consider ordained ministry. Although every practical bone in my body told me it was time to get a "real job" and start making money to pay off my educational debt, I felt drawn to devote intentional time to discern whether or not I was called to ordained ministry. So, I decided to take a year to reflect and pray through one of the Episcopal Service Corps internship, designed to help young adults in their 20s and early 30s discern their vocational call. Although I wanted to stay in the northeast, in Boston or New York, it turned out that the place God had for me was in Omaha, Nebraska. I could have turned down the opportunity because Omaha was not where I wanted to be, but I’m so glad I didn’t, because it became obvious to me once I arrived and met the wonderful people there who supported me in my discernment that I had found the place of deep blessing that God had for me at that time.
Listening to God's call is not often easy or practical, in my experience. But when God chooses us to do something, we actually have very little choice in the matter. From comparing notes with others in the field of ordained ministry, I have heard countless stories of people who have denied their calling for many years, pursuing another career, until finally they were able to accept and begin to live into that place of deep blessing to which God had been calling them all their lives. Like Jonah, we are finally unable to run from our calling, however scared we might be to accept it.
Accepting that we are chosen by God can be difficult, especially since we often mistakenly think that we cannot be chosen unless we are of a certain level of righteousness and holiness. But the only thing we have to do to disabuse ourselves of that notion is to return to the study of scripture. None of the people chosen by God in scripture were perfect. Think about David, who we read about today. The “spirit of the Lord was mightily upon David,” and yet he still wound up committing adultery and having the husband of his lover killed in battle so he could have her for himself. Not exactly model behavior. But he was still chosen by God to do the role he was called to do.
One of my favorite quotes about our reluctance to accept that we are chosen by God is often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but was actually written by Marianne Williamson, an author and minister in the Unity Church. She writes,
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
I believe this is what happens when we begin to follow the path that God has prepared for us -- we are brought face to face with our belovedness and are liberated from our fear. God begins to pry open our hearts to accept God's love and to offer it to others. It may not always be the path we would have expected to take, and it may not be the path that others would have us take -- but it is the path God calls us to nonetheless. And it is an invitation to a place of great blessing.
My prayer is that each of you would find that path, that place of great blessing, in your own lives, and in doing so you would find yourselves face to face with a God who loves you and who chooses you - every day and every hour - to represent God's love to the world.
The Lord has chosen YOU. So, "let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works, and glorify God in heaven" (Matthew 5:16).
Showing posts with label spiritual gifts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiritual gifts. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Sunday, February 3, 2013
They'll know we are Christians by our love
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013 (Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, TN. (Scripture for the day: Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)
The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.
This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:
“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).
Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.
So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.
It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.
And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.
And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.
As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.
And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.
This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:
“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).
Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.
So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.
It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.
And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.
And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.
As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.
And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
The manifestation of Christ to the world through us
Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013 (Second Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11)
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “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?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “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?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
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