Time for the Spirit
Three days ago, on Thursday, the church celebrated the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. In that feast we acknowledge that the physical Jesus ended his earthly existence and continues his personal relationship with each of us by some spiritual means.
One week today, we shall be celebrating the feast of Pentecost when the empowering Spirit of God was poured out onto the first disciples in order to equip them to continue the ministry which Jesus had begun while among them.
So today is a really good time to stay with the theme of our spiritual relationship with Jesus, as we live through our own challenge of faith in a saviour who is no longer physically present among us, but who promises us all the power and strength we need to continue his ministry in this time and place.
Our reading today gives us a vivid explanation of how Paul understood and taught others about the way Jesus continues to empower and enable ordinary people to continue his ministry. He shows us that, through the Holy Spirit of God, we each receive specific gifts designed to build up the Christian community in which Jesus calls us to serve. But Paul goes further and explains how these gifts relate to each other.
The reason he does this in this particular letter is because he was trying to resolve a church conflict.
The Corinthians
The church at Corinth had been founded by Paul during an 18-month stay in 50 - 51 AD. Although the church included some high-born individuals, it was composed mainly of ordinary people such as artisans, freedmen, and slaves. Around 4 years later Paul received word that some people were engaging in unacceptable behaviour and that the church was dividing into factions. Some members, perhaps the richer and more influential ones, were claiming superior wisdom, spiritual insight, and status. This special 'knowledge' was leading them to engage in immorality and idolatry, and they began to ridicule the less-sophisticated believers as being foolish and weak in their faith. Some of the factions were even falling out badly enough to take each other to court.
So Paul wrote to them, asserting his right as the founder of the church at Corinth, to vigorously oppose the behaviour which had arisen there. His broad message was that, for Christians, true wisdom and divine power are to be found not in the arrogance of human wisdom or knowledge, but in the apparently weak and foolish message of a despised and crucified saviour. True spirituality is knowing the crucified Christ and following the way of love.
Across the 16 chapters of this long letter, Paul goes into great detail about how a Christian behaves; and at the heart of the letter, in chapter 13, he includes one of his most famous and beautiful passages on the subject of love. Paul describes this as the more excellent way by which any conflicts can be resolved.
And he leads us into his belief in the centrality of love for every Christian by explaining why our differences and our diversity should be celebrated and not be a source of jealousy or prejudice. And to explain his teaching even more clearly to his rebellious community in Corinth, he uses the image of the church as a human body; and the spiritual gifts which build up the church he likens to the various parts of the human body which contribute to the healthy functioning of the whole body.
Spiritual Gifts
This is not the only text in which Paul compares the framework of the church to the framework of the human body - he uses the same idea in letters to Ephesus and Colossae; and it is not the only text in which he speaks of spiritual gifts being implanted in us by God for the purpose of fulfilling our personal ministries and building up the church of Christ - he describes them also in his letters to Rome and Ephesus. But, faced with the indiscipline and distortion of his teaching which was going on in Corinth, Paul masterfully pulls together the two ideas and offers a way to understand more deeply the true nature of the Christian calling.
2000 years later, this teaching still challenges us to look hard at the inner person behind the image of ourselves that we bring to church. A popular Sunday School or Bible Class exercise is to look at all of Paul's references to spiritual gifts and to try and list them. One study I read recently said that we should aim to identify between 12 and 24 distinctive gifts. The letter to Corinth mentions 9:
wise
counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous
acts
proclamation of God's word
distinguishing between spirits
speaking
in tongues
interpretation of tongues
Then he seems to link these gifts
to 8 identifiable roles within the Christian community:
apostles
prophets
teachers
miracle
workers
healers
helpers
organizers
those who pray in
tongues
Not all those gifts, or those church roles, are obvious ministries within the church of the 21st century, and much work has been done to try to adapt the core element of each gift into a modern equivalent. But we must be careful not to let the language divert us from the essential truth that God still implants spiritual gifts into every Christian disciple to enable them to continue the ministry of Jesus and to build up his church. The gifts are still given; the gifts are within each one of us; but we might not have discovered them yet, either in ourselves or in others. This is our challenge and it might very well change our lives.
Paul certainly
believed that if his people in Corinth could
* attune themselves to their
own gifts,
* open themselves to the discernment of those gifts by others,
* test the authenticity of their gift against the benchmark of whether it
serves to build up the church of Christ,
* and recognise that all gifts were
equally important to the health of the body of Christ,
then the causes of
conflict in the Corinthian church would disappear.
It is surely a vision of Christian community to which we also aspire 2000 years later.
Our Gifts Today
So, what about our own spiritual gifts here, today? How attuned are we to what God expects of us and has equipped us to achieve? How vibrant are our gifts within the commitments we make to this church? What life-changing things have we yet to discover about ourselves and each other? Where are our prophets, our teachers, our healers, our proclaimers of God's word, our helpers, our organizers - are you sure it isn't you? Hasn't Jesus called each one of us to this church and equipped us to make a unique contribution? Doesn't Paul convince us that he has?
I have absolutely no doubt that Jesus calls us to this church in order to change our lives. Sometimes we have to face a harsh truth - it is that those people who spend part of their faith journey with us, but are unwilling to open themselves to the changes Jesus calls for, are probably in the wrong place. God has called this church into being for a purpose and we believe that purpose is to save lives and change lives through the more excellent way of love.
The seeds for those changes are our spiritual gifts; and we start to change and bring about change in others as they blossom and mature within us.
Attuning ourselves to our gifts
But no seed blossoms and matures unless it is nurtured and encouraged to grow. The process of discerning and nurturing our spiritual gifts can be difficult - just as difficult, perhaps, as that other life-changing time of decision when we reached the end of our formal schooling and may not have known what we wanted to do with our life.
How did we handle that time of uncertainty?
* If we were
lucky, we might have followed a long-cherished ambition which we had been
nursing for some time, knowing with great certainty that we were called to that
particular role.
* Or perhaps we looked at our strong subjects and judged
whether they pointed to an obvious career.
* Did we ask other people - our
friends, our parents, our careers teachers - to say what gifts they thought we
had?
* Or did we perhaps just drift for a while, trying this and that, until
eventually we settled into something which was a tolerable fit?
It was a struggle for me! I hated that time of uncertainty in my own life; but I knew I had to decide something. I knew I had to move forward in some way because the whole direction of my future life might depend on it.
Now, how do we feel about our career as Christian disciples? Have we felt the same urge to stop drifting, to stop trying this and that, to understand enough about ourselves and our calling so as to decide where we're really going - after all, might not the direction of our eternal life depend on it?
Also, things change - which is good, because we come here to be changed! People's careers change - either by choice or by force of circumstance. Hidden talents emerge as we mature and age. Our environment and external factors change and require us to adapt. In the same way, we need to be open to that force for change within our journey of discipleship; and we need constantly to re-examine what God is calling us to do and which gifts are active in our ministries.
Moving Forward
God has called this church into being for a purpose, and has blessed it with every gift it needs to achieve that purpose. Those gifts are implanted within each one of us and are crying out to be nurtured so that they may blossom and mature.
If today I have convinced any of you that you are ready to change, ready to discern God's gifts in your life as a disciple of the risen, ascended and glorified saviour who taught love as the way to life, you need to talk to someone - you need to talk to Jesus, you need to pray. Only then will you be ready to talk to someone in this church who will try to come alongside you on your journey and help you discern those gifts which God is already calling you to use.
Just think: when our earthly lives are over and our resurrection comes, and God says to us,
"What did you do with that gift I gave you?"
wouldn't it be tragic if we answered,
"Well, I never realised!"
Our continual task as Christians is to realise - that is, to make real - those gifts which change us, which give new dimensions to our lives, and which empower our discipleship in the way God intends for each one of us.
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.