4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
28 January 2007
I Corinthians 13.1-13
Loving in an incomplete time
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
The only African-American I remember from my high school was one of the brightest kids in my trigonometry class. I don’t recall his name, but his face was mocha, his hair was dark and kinky, and he had crooked teeth. He lisped, slightly, and was slender and gangly, and he was not into sports. The two of us talked casually in class most days, but outside of class we really didn’t have much contact. He was rather shy and didn’t have much contact with anyone, socially, as far as I could see.
One day during lunch, my classmate came walking past the cluster of benches where my group of friends had lunch. He walked as if he was always following a dot moving ten feet in front of him, eyes always cast down on that spot.. He didn’t make eye contact with you, unless you called his name. This day, no one was calling his name, but everyone around was soon noticing him. Some other friends of mine—swim team teammates who were one year ahead of me in school—were at a different cluster of benches opposite where I was with my friends. As my African-American classmate made his way along the walkway between our two groups, my teammates from swimming—there were four of them—began to clap slowly. They stared at my reserved classmate and clapped steadily, on and on, following him with cold, blank stares.
I don’t want you to think that I look for confrontation. I don’t. Nor do I often size up a situation that surprises me and know immediately what I want to do. I find the human spirit, and human society, too complex and baffling to know always what to do in the moment, but this day, something happened in me. I had a sense of the deep shame my classmate might have been feeling, and I felt a sense of the crushing hopelessness that comes from being hated for the kind of thing my classmate could do nothing to change. He was black, and people hated him. He was black, and he was living in a little part of the world, his school, which, though it was meant to be safe for every young soul there, was dangerous for him, at least for his personhood.
I felt deep pain. I could not change my classmate. His attributes were given to him by his parental genes and by God. I could not change my teammates. Their hatred was given to them by people of longer and closer influence on them than I could hope to have. And what about the school that was supposed to be a safe community for us all but had suddenly turned into its opposite for my classmate? Could I change that? A school, like any institution, has a culture, and it’s a daunting prospect to change a culture.
What occurred to me, though not quite consciously, was that what I could change was the situation. The situation was, right now, that people were demonstrating hostility against a young person because of who he was, and the world was just watching. The message to him was, It’s okay to heap racist abuse on you, and we all agree that this will happen without consequence. What was in my power to do was change that message. One way to do that would have been to go up to my classmate and tell him I thought he was okay and that my teammates were wrong. Another way to do that was to confront my teammates and tell them, myself, that they were wrong.
This would have been the spring of 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., would be assassinated on April 4th, or perhaps, by the date of this incident, that had already happened. We would see Robert Kennedy assassinated on June 6th and watch, in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago and its riots. The Watts riots had happened in our city, Los Angeles, in 1965, and racial tension was simply so high that anything confrontational that happened because of skin color could turn into a donnybrook. I apparently wasn’t thinking about any of that.
I walked across the pavement to my four teammates from swimming, people I’d been working out with every day for two swim seasons. I said to them something like: “Don’t do that. It’s disrespectful and it’s wrong. Leave him alone.”
The four teammates stopped clapping and stared at me. Then one or two of them said something derogatory about me, which I would not repeat to you. I turned around and went back to my own group of friends. The African-American classmate had already walked on out of sight. He and I never discussed what happened.
My best friend, who was there, did tell me years later that he was sure he would have to rescue me from a fight. He was also on the swim team, and he knew these guys, who were big, could be rough actors. I weighed 115 pounds and would have been toast without my best friend’s protection, had it been needed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What is love?
In church, teachers and preachers usually taught me that the New Testament agape love was different from filial love, which was the love of friendship. My best friend would have rescued me, and, in this way of understanding love, that was filial love. There is erotic love, the teachers and preachers have mentioned, but they have noted that in the gospels Jesus really didn’t get into that. Three kinds of love, teachers and preachers have said—agape, philia and eros—and agape, they said, was the Christian kind of love. Not love with the strings of personal attachment or the fire of passion, but love that extends to all persons, even enemies, because it is dispassionate and does not depend on feelings.
Call me arrogant, but I’m here to tell you that that is baloney.
Jesus was passionate about everything he loved, as far as I can tell. Loving your neighbor as yourself means being as full of feeling and connection to one another as you are to the things that matter most to your own heart. Love every life as you love your own life. Don’t tell me you’re dispassionate about your own life. So there was a moment when a cosmic nerve pathway was strung between the heart of a vulnerable black high school student and a momentarily passionate white high school student, and the love that was strong as self love triggered a passionate act. How could such love, indispensable to life and faith, be dispassionate? It wasn’t for Jesus, and it isn’t for me. Philia and agape go together. They are parts of a whole. (Eros belongs there, too, but that’s more delicate, and we’ll think about that another time.)
We live in a world that fights love like that. Our world kills that kind of love. Our world says that we can love ourselves if we drive a Lexus or wear a size six dress. If love means loving ourselves as who we are inside, in other words, we’re being foolish. Our world says that winning is not everything but that it is the only thing—really, the only thing. It’s not that love, in other words, might come in second next to winning; love doesn’t even exist next to winning. Our world says that if Wall Street ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. If love gets in the way of the bottom line, it’s too costly. Our world says that we should wait and wait to see if all the carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere is really going to destroy life for our great-grandchildren, but we should immediately wage a war against a penny ante dictator we think might someday have something to do with a threat against our country, the most powerful in history. If love means saving the planet, in other words, it’s overreacting, but if love means restraining our violent instincts, it’s too timid. The world has little respect for love.
But when Paul stacks faith and hope up against love, love, as he sees it, towers above both of the other two put together. Imagine that. One of the most famous passages in perhaps the most famous book of faith in history says that faith isn’t the main thing, never mind hope. What could that mean?
I have come to my own sense of what Paul means by saying that between faith, hope and love, the greatest spiritual gift is love. It is not that if you must choose between the three, you have to choose love. We all of us need faith and hope and love. Paul does not exclude faith and hope.
But faith is trust in the reality of God that already exists and which we have already come to know something about. Our faith grows out of what we have experienced, and so it arises out of the past. In faith, we reach back to the past to gain strength in life. Hope is about the future. Our faith, arising from the past, gives us hope for what will come when we arrive in the future.
Love, on the other hand, occurs in the present. Love about the past is nostalgia; love about the future is longing. The love Paul is talking about occurs in the present, or it doesn’t happen.
This is hard to learn. To love in the present is a hard commandment to obey. For what if faith is weak? and what if hope has faded? But this is love’s greatness. Love is simply knowing in the moment what to do. Love is seeing with compassion what is happening now, even if the vision of faith is clouded by the fog of history. Love is knowing how to act now with compassion, even if the object of hope is uncertain and unknown. Indeed, sometimes only when one has enacted love, then faith sees a past (a history) on which to build, and hope has a future toward which to live.
But love is hard, which is why we’re grownups by the time we really start to learn it. I was a youth, it’s true, when I did something I now consider loving, but I did not yet know how to make love my way of life. I did not have a mature practice of love in every moment. Even now, I feel as if, in so much of my life, I miss the moments of enacting love that run through my every day. Still, like Paul, when I was a child, it was one thing—I didn’t even know how to look for moments in which to love—but now that I am a man, something very remarkable and transforming has been growing in me. I am learning to see when and where to love, and that’s what matters most. You can take all the tricks I’ve got in my spiritual gift bag, and they all add up to nada, unless I am driving the present moment with love beaming out from the headlights.
The reason life is still hard, even once you get the hang of love—even once you’re grown up enough to know how to see by the headlights—the reason life is still hard is that where you’re going, in the end, is a lot farther than the headlights show you at any one time. Paul’s point is simply that, while the headlights only reveal the road just ahead, you can make it all the way home that way. There is a point where the trip will be complete, which is maybe when you die or maybe after that or maybe when the whole entire universe implodes again and God starts all over, but this side of paradise, everything looks to you like a dark mirror made murkier by the fog of your own breath.
There is a point where the trip will be complete, but you can’t know what that will look like, not yet. Meanwhile, you have love, and when you have enacted love, the act itself is always complete and is in that sense perfect. This will have to be enough for you, Paul believes.
And he this one more thing: “Now I know only in part; then [when the complete comes] I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” You may, in other words, only know just enough to enact love right now, but even in the simple and incomplete present you’re living in now, you are fully known by God. That’s a kind of completeness right there. Whoever you are, whatever has happened to you, whatever you have done to anyone or anything (or whatever you have not done), however confused or broken or lost you are—no matter, even, how faithless and hopeless you are—you are fully known by God, and that is at least the gift of existing in the mind and presence of eternity, which is a way that God, at the very heart of things, loves you. Enacting love and being loved go together, especially in the heart of God.
We have been, these last few weeks, working out what it means to have spiritual gifts. We all have them, and since each of us has a spiritual gift (or several!), the purpose of the church is to form a working whole of those gifts into what we call the body of Christ. What we realize, now, is that the way we have our gifts, know our gifts, increase our gifts, use our gifts and engage our varied gifts as one living body of believers is to enact them in love. Faith and hope will wax and wane with our strength and mood, but love will be a flash of splendor in every moment by which we practice living according to the grace of life, which we call Christ.
Amen.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
January 21, 2007 - Now you are the body of Christ
3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
21 January 2007
I Corinthians 12.12-31a
Now you are the body of Christ
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
I don’t actually remember this happening, but my mother does.
I was eight or nine years old. We were packing a rented travel trailer for a two-week vacation, a week of it in Yosemite. We lived at the top of an extremely steep hill—San Francisco steep, even though it was in Los Angeles, and we had to park the trailer at the bottom of it—and every armload of clothes and food and gear required a trip down the hill from the house and a trudge back up. Those were the days of LA’s worst smog, before pollution controls, and between sweating in the heat and choking on the air, my family members were in various degrees of physical distress.
Well, most of them were. I was fairly comfortable. My job required sitting in relative stillness at the table of the trailer. As my mother remembers it, I sat at length, deep in thought, working out important concerns for the trip we were undertaking. This did not require legwork. I was not frantically stowing items in an organized way, making lists or planning meals. I was not cleaning. I was not making any effort to stay out of the way of those who were doing these things. Sometimes I went back to the house, but I made haste to retake my post in the trailer. What I was doing was very important to me, whatever it was, and, in addition, I had to contend with the persistent complaints of my siblings, busied, as they were, with their more menial tasks.
It turned out great fun visiting Yosemite, one of the nation’s first national parks, as of 1890, and for the previous 8,000 years the home of American Indians. President Kennedy had just months before visited the Ahwahnee Lodge, so my brother and I scurried to sit in every chair of the public area to be sure to have sat in the same place as our president had. We saw Half Dome, Mirror Lake, Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan. In the evening, we waited outside at our campsite until just after dusk, when park rangers shoved an enormous pile of embers over a cliff for what was then the famously popular “Fire Fall.”
The Fire Fall lasted just a minute or so, and after it we started over to the bath house by ones and twos to wash up for bed and brush our teeth. Some member of my family—I won’t accuse my younger sister, it isn’t worth the grief—had come back and left the tube of toothpaste on the table for the next person, and the next person came out and said, “Hey, who lost the cap to the toothpaste?!”
Everybody looked around accusingly at everybody else. My parents went in search to the bath house, the men’s section and the women’s, but they came back without the cap. Everyone else was standing around outside blaming others for a problem the magnitude of which was such that it would impact the entire family multiple times a day, threatening to ruin an entire family vacation. What about disease? What about the hard plug that would form in the end of the tube? It was already a disaster.
While others were thus engaged in finger pointing, I sprung to my feet and dashed into the trailer, where I was heard to be rummaging through our gear and supplies. There was the usual headshaking of my parents, and the tongue wagging of my siblings. (Such was their custom during my moments of purposeful, if eccentric, activity.) But when I emerged to stand in the flickering light of the flames dancing in our fire pit, there my family beheld me, my arm extended, and, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the bright glint of a small cap, about the size of a coat button.
“I knew we’d need an extra cap for the toothpaste!” I shouted in triumph.
Yes, because of my deep pre-vacation contemplations and my prescient deliberation, my family had with them, unbeknownst to all but me, a spare toothpaste cap. In this small way, the Wareham Family Expedition to the vast, hostile wilderness was saved. We would not end our days like the Donner party, succumbing to unforeseen perils and wondering if we would taste like chicken to each other. Because of me and my gift of forethought, my family and I were restored to our joyous and pleasant summertime adventure in peace and ease.
The value of one person’s gift is not always obvious to the family—the family of our original home or the family of the church—but whoever you are and whatever you’re blessed to do, your particular service will be required, even if you’re the only one, at times, who realizes it. My parents and siblings didn’t always appreciate my gift. Until some benefit materialized from it, they didn’t even know it existed, but they never supposed I wasn’t part of the family. (They sometimes wished it, but they never did suppose it.)
In church, we are all part of the family. Or we are all, in Paul’s metaphor, part of the body. The trick is to figure out how we each of us with our gift play our role. All of us, different as we are—unable as we are, oftentimes, to see each other’s gifts—all of us have gifts made to be incorporated into the life of the church. I’m not sure we truly believe this, but it is so, at least according to Paul.
We believe all gifts matter to some degree. Can you cook a meal for a hundred people? We know what to do with that gift. Can you organize a project, replace a water heater, devise a meeting agenda or visit someone in the hospital? We have a job for someone like you. Can you whip up enthusiasm for a challenge or settle the jaggled nerves of a parent facing a crisis? There’s a place for you in front of an eager crowd or over a quiet cup of coffee.
There are other gifts we don’t know exactly what to do with. Has a trip you’ve taken to visit the profound degradation of poverty somewhere in the world changed your perspective on what really matters in life? We will understand your momentary moral awakening and can patiently wait while it goes back to sleep. Can you see the dysfunction in the way decisions get made? Maybe some other church could use your insight. Has a voice told you to do something new in your life? We, your friends, will listen to you without judgment, but we really don’t know what to do about something like that. Has a whole new realm of spiritual discipline opened up before you and given you deep spiritual connection with God? Please accept our compliments, but we don’t want, by comparison, to feel deficient in what serves for us as a simple, but adequate, occasional prayer life.
But, you see, these are all spiritual gifts—Paul also describes them as spiritual activities—that are shifting around in churches like ours through the coffee hour. Chances are, you will brush shoulders with someone, today, who bears a spiritual gift and is undertaking a spiritual activity like these—perhaps actually some of these gifts and activities—but you do not know it and are not likely to find out about it, because it may not seem safe to tell you.
So we blithely pass by one another without knowing or noticing or even wondering about the very marvelous spiritual gifts—perhaps precisely the very essential ones that would transform and enliven our church—and we fail to bring ourselves even to the point of curiosity about them. It may be that someone sitting here right now is figuring out what the spiritual equivalent to the toothpaste cap is for our congregation, and we may be ignoring, or even resenting, that activity. And I know the pragmatist will say, “Yeah, well, I’ll wrap a piece of tinfoil over the end of the tube, and everything’ll be fine without the stupid cap.” And, okay, we can make do for many little deficiencies, maybe even for a long time, but even little deficiencies tend to add up to trouble. It was famously for lack of the seemingly insignificant nail that the horseshoe, the horse and ultimately a kingdom was lost. If only we were at least curious about such little things. We could be more curious about the spiritual gift of the person next to us.
And we could be curious about our own spiritual gift.
St. Augustine wrote:
At the very least, as we might be curious about each other, we can practice wondering what spiritual gifts and activities we have ourselves.
Think about this common experience in a church community. Someone has unexpectedly lost a loved one, and we all saw how shaken this person’s world was, and how torn the fabric of faith and hope was. We watched and waited with compassion for some relief and peace for their heart. We watched and waited a long time, and then we saw the change we’d waited for, prayed for. Perhaps, we think, now, it was time that healed the person, as it “heals all wounds.” Perhaps we think our prayers helped. Perhaps we assume the cards and casseroles and caring conversations soothed the sorrowing soul of our friend. Let’s say all that is true.
But the question that is also worth asking—the thing for us to wonder about—is, What is it in my friend’s own soul that enabled healing, recovery and hope to come? I believe that nothing done for us from the outside provides the full explanation for the spiritual changes that occur on the inside. I believe that something in each of us is activated by all the praying, caring and casseroles, and it is worth it for each of us to find out what that is. It may be the ability to pray with a sense of fervent connectedness to God. It may be the ability to meditate with dreamlike active imagination—perhaps with scriptural images, or perhaps with imagery that takes on a life of its own. Your ability may be to make your mind so still that in the silence of the universe you hear the bell-like song of the Spirit. Your ability may be something as seemingly ordinary as journaling, though people like me who keep trying to keep a journal would find that a miracle. Each of us can and should ask what it is about who we are, how we’re uniquely made and what it is that we have done, in times of spiritual and emotional restoration, that has contributed to our becoming whole again.
So we see here, already, two things that are important for appropriating and integrating the unique gift of the Spirit we every one of us has to contribute to the life and health of the body of Christ, the church. We on the one hand can learn to be curious about each other’s gifts, opening ourselves to the difference and newness we have overlooked, or even avoided, in each other. On the other hand, we can look inward and discover what in our own self, our soul, is spiritually active and alive in a way that heals wounds to the heart and cures the sickened soul. The balm in Gilead may be found in the stirrings within your own breast.
Finally, once you know what your gift is and what the gifts of other members of the body are, how do we all of us, members of the body, live and breathe and work as a unified whole? How is it that bodily functions become an organism?
What I’ve been noticing in my grandchildren is that their limbs and organs just start in. Things are pretty wacky for a while. The arm goes this way; the leg goes that way. The fingers grasp and the wrist flings. The mouth takes in food, just like it’s supposed to, but sometimes more food goes down the chin than down the gullet. When, likewise, we start doing things in the church we haven’t trained ourselves for, it could look pretty messy.
I mentioned, last week, the potential for what would surely have been an uncomfortable demonstration of speaking in tongues, and when I said that, there was about a half of one percent hope in me that it would happen, that somebody would be on their feet any moment, blurting out syllables the rest of us could make no sense of. It would have been weird. It might have been scary. Someone would no doubt blame it on me, and that way we could, in any event, turn it into a pastor controversy, which is at least something familiar and, to that degree, comforting.
All the same, I’d rather that than nothing at all. At least someone would be letting something spiritually novel and real happen. I believe whatever happens will develop into real progress. A baby looks jerky and wacky for a while, trying out all the nerves and muscles in her body, but eventually, things start to work together, and pretty soon there is smiling. There is crawling and walking. Later there is speaking and drawing and creative play. Only much later is there fitting puzzles together, and building with blocks and Legos, and making stories with dolls and action figures. Something like a real life begins to happen. It takes time, and patience is needed.
I believe it is a time in the church when we can learn from Paul’s metaphor of the body and the way the body learns how it works. We need to each of us figure out our unique spiritual gift. We need to trust the gift in our self and to honor the gift in each other. It is too soon to ask what each gift is going to mean and how different gifts will all work together. It is enough to trust that in practicing our gifts, we will learn how they work together. If we are able to believe in the miracle of a baby, we can find a way to believe in the miracle of the body our Christ, of which we are all members.
The joy of who we are and how we are is enough right now to inspire boisterous songs of praise and thanksgiving. As we sing and enliven the body with the practicing of our gifts, we will soon enough come to clarity about what we, as a congregation, are here yet to do. We will know we shall do it. We will know, as we are about to sing in the next hymn, our vocation as Christ’s body for our day in this place:
21 January 2007
I Corinthians 12.12-31a
Now you are the body of Christ
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
I don’t actually remember this happening, but my mother does.
I was eight or nine years old. We were packing a rented travel trailer for a two-week vacation, a week of it in Yosemite. We lived at the top of an extremely steep hill—San Francisco steep, even though it was in Los Angeles, and we had to park the trailer at the bottom of it—and every armload of clothes and food and gear required a trip down the hill from the house and a trudge back up. Those were the days of LA’s worst smog, before pollution controls, and between sweating in the heat and choking on the air, my family members were in various degrees of physical distress.
Well, most of them were. I was fairly comfortable. My job required sitting in relative stillness at the table of the trailer. As my mother remembers it, I sat at length, deep in thought, working out important concerns for the trip we were undertaking. This did not require legwork. I was not frantically stowing items in an organized way, making lists or planning meals. I was not cleaning. I was not making any effort to stay out of the way of those who were doing these things. Sometimes I went back to the house, but I made haste to retake my post in the trailer. What I was doing was very important to me, whatever it was, and, in addition, I had to contend with the persistent complaints of my siblings, busied, as they were, with their more menial tasks.
It turned out great fun visiting Yosemite, one of the nation’s first national parks, as of 1890, and for the previous 8,000 years the home of American Indians. President Kennedy had just months before visited the Ahwahnee Lodge, so my brother and I scurried to sit in every chair of the public area to be sure to have sat in the same place as our president had. We saw Half Dome, Mirror Lake, Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan. In the evening, we waited outside at our campsite until just after dusk, when park rangers shoved an enormous pile of embers over a cliff for what was then the famously popular “Fire Fall.”
The Fire Fall lasted just a minute or so, and after it we started over to the bath house by ones and twos to wash up for bed and brush our teeth. Some member of my family—I won’t accuse my younger sister, it isn’t worth the grief—had come back and left the tube of toothpaste on the table for the next person, and the next person came out and said, “Hey, who lost the cap to the toothpaste?!”
Everybody looked around accusingly at everybody else. My parents went in search to the bath house, the men’s section and the women’s, but they came back without the cap. Everyone else was standing around outside blaming others for a problem the magnitude of which was such that it would impact the entire family multiple times a day, threatening to ruin an entire family vacation. What about disease? What about the hard plug that would form in the end of the tube? It was already a disaster.
While others were thus engaged in finger pointing, I sprung to my feet and dashed into the trailer, where I was heard to be rummaging through our gear and supplies. There was the usual headshaking of my parents, and the tongue wagging of my siblings. (Such was their custom during my moments of purposeful, if eccentric, activity.) But when I emerged to stand in the flickering light of the flames dancing in our fire pit, there my family beheld me, my arm extended, and, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the bright glint of a small cap, about the size of a coat button.
“I knew we’d need an extra cap for the toothpaste!” I shouted in triumph.
Yes, because of my deep pre-vacation contemplations and my prescient deliberation, my family had with them, unbeknownst to all but me, a spare toothpaste cap. In this small way, the Wareham Family Expedition to the vast, hostile wilderness was saved. We would not end our days like the Donner party, succumbing to unforeseen perils and wondering if we would taste like chicken to each other. Because of me and my gift of forethought, my family and I were restored to our joyous and pleasant summertime adventure in peace and ease.
The value of one person’s gift is not always obvious to the family—the family of our original home or the family of the church—but whoever you are and whatever you’re blessed to do, your particular service will be required, even if you’re the only one, at times, who realizes it. My parents and siblings didn’t always appreciate my gift. Until some benefit materialized from it, they didn’t even know it existed, but they never supposed I wasn’t part of the family. (They sometimes wished it, but they never did suppose it.)
In church, we are all part of the family. Or we are all, in Paul’s metaphor, part of the body. The trick is to figure out how we each of us with our gift play our role. All of us, different as we are—unable as we are, oftentimes, to see each other’s gifts—all of us have gifts made to be incorporated into the life of the church. I’m not sure we truly believe this, but it is so, at least according to Paul.
We believe all gifts matter to some degree. Can you cook a meal for a hundred people? We know what to do with that gift. Can you organize a project, replace a water heater, devise a meeting agenda or visit someone in the hospital? We have a job for someone like you. Can you whip up enthusiasm for a challenge or settle the jaggled nerves of a parent facing a crisis? There’s a place for you in front of an eager crowd or over a quiet cup of coffee.
There are other gifts we don’t know exactly what to do with. Has a trip you’ve taken to visit the profound degradation of poverty somewhere in the world changed your perspective on what really matters in life? We will understand your momentary moral awakening and can patiently wait while it goes back to sleep. Can you see the dysfunction in the way decisions get made? Maybe some other church could use your insight. Has a voice told you to do something new in your life? We, your friends, will listen to you without judgment, but we really don’t know what to do about something like that. Has a whole new realm of spiritual discipline opened up before you and given you deep spiritual connection with God? Please accept our compliments, but we don’t want, by comparison, to feel deficient in what serves for us as a simple, but adequate, occasional prayer life.
But, you see, these are all spiritual gifts—Paul also describes them as spiritual activities—that are shifting around in churches like ours through the coffee hour. Chances are, you will brush shoulders with someone, today, who bears a spiritual gift and is undertaking a spiritual activity like these—perhaps actually some of these gifts and activities—but you do not know it and are not likely to find out about it, because it may not seem safe to tell you.
So we blithely pass by one another without knowing or noticing or even wondering about the very marvelous spiritual gifts—perhaps precisely the very essential ones that would transform and enliven our church—and we fail to bring ourselves even to the point of curiosity about them. It may be that someone sitting here right now is figuring out what the spiritual equivalent to the toothpaste cap is for our congregation, and we may be ignoring, or even resenting, that activity. And I know the pragmatist will say, “Yeah, well, I’ll wrap a piece of tinfoil over the end of the tube, and everything’ll be fine without the stupid cap.” And, okay, we can make do for many little deficiencies, maybe even for a long time, but even little deficiencies tend to add up to trouble. It was famously for lack of the seemingly insignificant nail that the horseshoe, the horse and ultimately a kingdom was lost. If only we were at least curious about such little things. We could be more curious about the spiritual gift of the person next to us.
And we could be curious about our own spiritual gift.
St. Augustine wrote:
[Mortals] go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains,
the huge waves of the sea,
the broad flow of the rivers,
the vast compass of the ocean,
the courses of the stars,
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
At the very least, as we might be curious about each other, we can practice wondering what spiritual gifts and activities we have ourselves.
Think about this common experience in a church community. Someone has unexpectedly lost a loved one, and we all saw how shaken this person’s world was, and how torn the fabric of faith and hope was. We watched and waited with compassion for some relief and peace for their heart. We watched and waited a long time, and then we saw the change we’d waited for, prayed for. Perhaps, we think, now, it was time that healed the person, as it “heals all wounds.” Perhaps we think our prayers helped. Perhaps we assume the cards and casseroles and caring conversations soothed the sorrowing soul of our friend. Let’s say all that is true.
But the question that is also worth asking—the thing for us to wonder about—is, What is it in my friend’s own soul that enabled healing, recovery and hope to come? I believe that nothing done for us from the outside provides the full explanation for the spiritual changes that occur on the inside. I believe that something in each of us is activated by all the praying, caring and casseroles, and it is worth it for each of us to find out what that is. It may be the ability to pray with a sense of fervent connectedness to God. It may be the ability to meditate with dreamlike active imagination—perhaps with scriptural images, or perhaps with imagery that takes on a life of its own. Your ability may be to make your mind so still that in the silence of the universe you hear the bell-like song of the Spirit. Your ability may be something as seemingly ordinary as journaling, though people like me who keep trying to keep a journal would find that a miracle. Each of us can and should ask what it is about who we are, how we’re uniquely made and what it is that we have done, in times of spiritual and emotional restoration, that has contributed to our becoming whole again.
So we see here, already, two things that are important for appropriating and integrating the unique gift of the Spirit we every one of us has to contribute to the life and health of the body of Christ, the church. We on the one hand can learn to be curious about each other’s gifts, opening ourselves to the difference and newness we have overlooked, or even avoided, in each other. On the other hand, we can look inward and discover what in our own self, our soul, is spiritually active and alive in a way that heals wounds to the heart and cures the sickened soul. The balm in Gilead may be found in the stirrings within your own breast.
Finally, once you know what your gift is and what the gifts of other members of the body are, how do we all of us, members of the body, live and breathe and work as a unified whole? How is it that bodily functions become an organism?
What I’ve been noticing in my grandchildren is that their limbs and organs just start in. Things are pretty wacky for a while. The arm goes this way; the leg goes that way. The fingers grasp and the wrist flings. The mouth takes in food, just like it’s supposed to, but sometimes more food goes down the chin than down the gullet. When, likewise, we start doing things in the church we haven’t trained ourselves for, it could look pretty messy.
I mentioned, last week, the potential for what would surely have been an uncomfortable demonstration of speaking in tongues, and when I said that, there was about a half of one percent hope in me that it would happen, that somebody would be on their feet any moment, blurting out syllables the rest of us could make no sense of. It would have been weird. It might have been scary. Someone would no doubt blame it on me, and that way we could, in any event, turn it into a pastor controversy, which is at least something familiar and, to that degree, comforting.
All the same, I’d rather that than nothing at all. At least someone would be letting something spiritually novel and real happen. I believe whatever happens will develop into real progress. A baby looks jerky and wacky for a while, trying out all the nerves and muscles in her body, but eventually, things start to work together, and pretty soon there is smiling. There is crawling and walking. Later there is speaking and drawing and creative play. Only much later is there fitting puzzles together, and building with blocks and Legos, and making stories with dolls and action figures. Something like a real life begins to happen. It takes time, and patience is needed.
I believe it is a time in the church when we can learn from Paul’s metaphor of the body and the way the body learns how it works. We need to each of us figure out our unique spiritual gift. We need to trust the gift in our self and to honor the gift in each other. It is too soon to ask what each gift is going to mean and how different gifts will all work together. It is enough to trust that in practicing our gifts, we will learn how they work together. If we are able to believe in the miracle of a baby, we can find a way to believe in the miracle of the body our Christ, of which we are all members.
The joy of who we are and how we are is enough right now to inspire boisterous songs of praise and thanksgiving. As we sing and enliven the body with the practicing of our gifts, we will soon enough come to clarity about what we, as a congregation, are here yet to do. We will know we shall do it. We will know, as we are about to sing in the next hymn, our vocation as Christ’s body for our day in this place:
To live according to [God’s] word,Amen.
And daily learn, refreshed, restored,
That [God] is Lord of all
And will not let us fall.
—Fred Pratt Green, 1981
Monday, January 15, 2007
January 14, 2007 - Now concerning spiritual gifts
2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
14 January 2007
I Corinthians 12.1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In tenth grade, we studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Mrs. Cotterell taught us the play like she taught everything: a few minutes of introduction to start us off, make everybody read a section every day before class, pop the occasional quiz on us to keep us on our toes, lectures on Shakespeare, class discussion, the exam. I wished I’d come down with a rare disease that would give me a mysterious fever for two weeks and force me to lie in bed, where I could only eat and watch television. No reading. Absolutely no reading, or I might go blind. Or die!
My older brother’s friends had Mrs. Cotterell the year before me. They called her Old Triangle Head, because of her sharp chin, angular cheekbones and hairdo that spread as it ascended until it flattened at the top. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so scary, I wondered, if she’d taught geometry. Her approach to literature was to demand detailed, precise and unbending reason, as if God had sent her to be the Pythagoras of high school English.
And Mrs. Cotterell was both insistent and patient. She would stand there at the blackboard with her piece of chalk, tapping at the question she was waiting for us to answer, the clicking sound reminding me of a time bomb set to go off, we knew not when (maybe the ides of March). But the timer was set for such a duration that I began to wish she’d just get it over with and blow us all to smithereens, if it would just stop the infernal tapping. Eventually, I began thinking of what in the movies they called “Chinese water torture,” which was presumably meant to drive you crazy with monotony. It was working. I was ready to scream for mercy—Old Triangle Head was that patient.
But we actually had it in our power make it all stop in a instant by giving her the answer she wanted, which always seemed too subtle to figure out. Me, my mind just wandered, which even then my loved ones suspected was the premature onset of dementia. (Now they say it’s a mature onset of dementia.) I was oblivious.
So in my aimless musing, it occurred to me that if I did know what Mrs. Cotterell wanted me to know about Shakespeare’s play, it would have something to do with the unquenchable thirst for power of the already powerful, the ambition of those who were drawn to such people, the way power rots human character at its moral core, and what it means for friendship when the rot has become contagious. Then that noise intruded: tap, tap, tap, tap: Et tu, Bru - te? And you, Brutus? What, Mrs. Cotterell wanted to know, did that mean?
Someone said it meant that Caesar wondered what had gone wrong with his friend, that he felt betrayed. But the piece of chalk did not relent. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Of course it was betrayal, but what does this betrayal mean?
“Well,” I, roused from obliviousness, found myself saying, “Caesar did think there was something wrong with Brutus, but really what was wrong was that something between them was broken. There was nothing there between them that would make someone be loyal.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Cotterell said, and to this day, I don’t know if it was that I had given her the answer she was looking for or had just shown her I was really trying to understand. It didn’t seem to matter. She’d heard something that made a difference.
It was an exhilarating moment for me, something completely different from the satisfaction of knowing an answer. One minute earlier, I had not known what it was like to feel the increase in my soul that great literature can bestow, but in that moment, a new world began to open up for me. One minute earlier, learning was the project of satisfying a demanding teacher, but in that moment, learning became a life-giving spring. If coercion was the teacher’s method, I’d forgotten I was being coerced. If fear was what made me want to have an answer, I’d forgotten to be afraid. I was oblivious, and in my obliviousness, I stepped through the looking glass into a world full of eccentric wonders and unconventional wisdom.
So it turns out, obliviousness has from then on been my spiritual gift. I go there to await truth. Then, when the usual wonders have gotten tedious, I can be relied on for something eccentric to liven up the spiritual party. When conventional wisdom keeps beating our heads against a brick wall, trust me for something wacky but wise. My spiritual gift was coming to life that day in tenth grade English.
And Mrs. Cotterell? What she gave me was no accident. She had the tenacity and nerves of steel to stand at that blackboard until the light came on in some young mind. She never panicked in the face of dull wittedness. Her spiritual gift was a kind of courage that did not give in to a class hoping either to be told the right answer or to stonewall until the bell. She had the guts not to let us off the hook and to believe that we’d hang in there while she waited for something good to happen. Even Old Triangle Head had a spiritual gift.
The apostle Paul does not have Mrs. Cotterell’s spiritual gift. He just writes you a letter and gives you the answer. But his answers are pretty good.
“Now concerning spiritual gifts,” he writes, “I do not want you to be uninformed.” Sometimes the messiness of learning unsettles Paul, who sometimes thinks he’s the only informed apostle in the room. (Sometimes he has been.) Also, he may remember that we, at least in the mists of our ancestral heritage, come from paganism. We do, after all, persist with our Christmas trees, mistletoe, evergreen wreathes and other remnants of our pagan past.
Paul plows on: “I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Which serves to recall for us how important open mindedness is to Paul. We don’t think of him as particularly open minded. You don’t expect it from a guy who gets quoted so often by intolerant people, but it is in fact a mark of Paul’s tolerance that he says this. If someone says “Jesus is Lord,” it’s from the Holy Spirit. Never mind that you think God keeps a Kosher table and the next guy serves bacon at communion. You may measure your spiritual progress in miles while someone else marks it off in kilometers, but if you claim Christ as Lord, you’re rolling along the same road. The core faith we have in common is always more important than the differences.
This is not to say that differences don’t matter. In fact, the spiritual differences between us are essential. “There are varieties of gifts, . . . and there are varieties of services,” even if they come into us from the same Spirit and Lord. “There are varieties of activities,” Paul maintains, which is to say that if what the church is can only be understood in what it does, the activities that make up what the church does may not always look as if they work very well together.
So if someone announced a meeting for Tuesday to pray for our troops, and someone else announced a meeting for Wednesday to protest the war, that wouldn’t surprise Paul one bit. Paul would realize that the one activity doesn’t necessarily cancel out the other, though the typical attitudes of the two often clash. He’s saying that, even if there’s some friction, activities that pull in separate directions, but both from the same centeredness in Christ, can be the sign of a faithful church, even if this is a hard way to be a cohesive institution.
All of this is important to remember, when we look at what Paul has to say next. This is not just background, and Paul isn’t just trying to make us feel like a big happy family. Diverse gifts, perspectives and actions are important for the growth of the church and the deepening of our faith.
And yet none of all that matters, unless you get the impact of Paul’s next bit of wisdom. Here it comes . . .
“To each is given,” he says, “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” To each, he says. No one here today can say that God has not given to him or her a manifestation of the Spirit. You have something in you that kindles a spiritual flame, and the light from it illumines a unique space within the life of the church. Your spiritual gift might be knowledge, it might be wisdom, it might be healing or miracles or prophecy. You might have been given the gift of speaking in tongues, in which case our worship today might take an interesting turn any minute now. Maybe you have the gift of interpreting tongues, Paul suggests, which would be a frustrating role to play in the staid and settled worship of moderate Presbyterians, but if you do have the gift of interpreting tongues, it’s your responsibility to know about it and to use it.
It seems to me that we often take knowing and using our spiritual gifts for granted. If we have one, we figure it was automatic and there’s nothing we have to do about it. We seldom make much of a conscious effort to know and use the spiritual gifts we believe God gives us. Maybe it’s that we ordain certain people to offices in the church, and we assume that all the spiritual gifts reside in them. The minister must have all the spiritual knowledge, we figure, or the elders have all the wisdom. Or since just the idea of speaking in tongues gives us the shivers, we hope that certain spiritual gifts have gone out of fashion. Doctors do such a spectacular job of healing, these days, so why would anyone in the church think she has a responsibility to anoint and lay hands on someone with cancer or a heart condition or a broken heart? There are a million ways to talk ourselves out of the belief that we each have a spiritual gift.
But Paul thinks each of us does have a gift. If that’s true, how do we find it out? Do you think you know what yours is? How can you tell? I think you might find out the way I found out in Mrs. Cotterell’s class what kind of gift I have. You let go of an expectation of yourself, and something inside you speaks from a more native truth. Or your mind puts together what you already know into a way of seeing things only you have just discovered. Or you actually try out doing something you’ve never done before and find out if doing that gives you life and serves the church and the world God loves.
I believe we can find out something about our spiritual gifts by taking some of those personality tests they’ve dreamt up over the last several decades. The Myers-Briggs test tells you if you’re introverted or extroverted, if you’re oriented around underlying intuitions or outward sensations, and if you know something is good or bad by linear thinking or holistic feeling. If you learn to recognize your tendencies and strengths, you can rely on them to lead your way through spiritual challenges.
On the other hand, we all of us sometimes rely on aspects of ourselves that often trip us up, and we should learn how to question our weaker aspects before we assert ourselves in areas where others have the stronger gifts. I can’t count the times I’ve sat in session meetings listening to someone hold forth on a matter about which everyone knew the person was not the epitome of wisdom.
The point is, knowing your spiritual gift demands your attention. You have to watch for it, open yourself to it and act on it. You have to refine and strengthen your spiritual gift. I’m glad I learned something about a gift I have in the tenth grade, and yet I have worked on it ever since. Every year, it seems to me, I read a book or a poem, and on finishing it, I say to myself, “I would never have understood that five years ago.”
It would be discouraging, if we any of us ever had to think that there was a point at which we will have perfected our spiritual gifts. The point is not to perfect them but to nourish, challenge, tend and trust them. Like a garden, a spiritual gift is a renewable resource, and it only serves its purpose if it is repeatedly tilled, planted, tended and harvested. (And also rested, for a season. Our spiritual gifts require their Sabbath rest—just like God, just like everything else.)
So don’t be surprised if your spiritual gift feels awkward to you. Of course it does. The Spirit didn’t give it to you fully formed, any more than you were born with a complete set of teeth or hair under your armpits. Also, don’t be surprised if your spiritual gift annoys somebody. Paul predicts that, and, as we’ve already noted, he thinks that’s a good thing, so don’t let it discourage you if someone—it may be another Christian, I’m sorry to say—if someone cuts you down. Paul wouldn’t have written all this stuff to the Corinthians if disparate spiritual gifts were not a persistent challenge. Just keep at it.
The main idea for us at Park Church—and I think in Presbyterian churches, and churches all over like ours—the main idea is that there are a lot more spiritual gifts just standing around in the coffee hour alone than any of us even think about. That’s a terrific thing. The other thing is that we really can’t be the church we’re called to be without all those gifts. You may believe you don’t have much of a spiritual gift to share, but that belief doesn’t give much regard either to yourself or to the Holy Spirit. You may be the spiritual equivalent of the kid whose elementary school music teacher told her to silently move her lips because she couldn’t sing, but you have to get over past criticisms that hurt you and retune your voice to your song of spiritual giving for the church you love. You may suppose you don’t need to work any longer or harder on your spiritual strengths than you already have, but there is no one else who can do or be what you do and are for us in our life together with each other and with God. We really can’t be the church we’re called to be without all the gift you have to give.
Think of it as gratitude, as thanksgiving. Thank the Spirit for noticing what it is about you that matters to the life of the church in a way that no one else can matter. Thank God for creating you in the very image of God, so that whatever you do will be the face of God for the world. Thank Christ for becoming the flesh and blood example of someone whose gifts are powerful, good and true, even if not everyone appreciates them—even if some despise them—and commit yourself to the life of grace through which the world is being redeemed. Be grateful, and prepare to manifest your spiritual gift. Amen.
14 January 2007
I Corinthians 12.1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In tenth grade, we studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Mrs. Cotterell taught us the play like she taught everything: a few minutes of introduction to start us off, make everybody read a section every day before class, pop the occasional quiz on us to keep us on our toes, lectures on Shakespeare, class discussion, the exam. I wished I’d come down with a rare disease that would give me a mysterious fever for two weeks and force me to lie in bed, where I could only eat and watch television. No reading. Absolutely no reading, or I might go blind. Or die!
My older brother’s friends had Mrs. Cotterell the year before me. They called her Old Triangle Head, because of her sharp chin, angular cheekbones and hairdo that spread as it ascended until it flattened at the top. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so scary, I wondered, if she’d taught geometry. Her approach to literature was to demand detailed, precise and unbending reason, as if God had sent her to be the Pythagoras of high school English.
And Mrs. Cotterell was both insistent and patient. She would stand there at the blackboard with her piece of chalk, tapping at the question she was waiting for us to answer, the clicking sound reminding me of a time bomb set to go off, we knew not when (maybe the ides of March). But the timer was set for such a duration that I began to wish she’d just get it over with and blow us all to smithereens, if it would just stop the infernal tapping. Eventually, I began thinking of what in the movies they called “Chinese water torture,” which was presumably meant to drive you crazy with monotony. It was working. I was ready to scream for mercy—Old Triangle Head was that patient.
But we actually had it in our power make it all stop in a instant by giving her the answer she wanted, which always seemed too subtle to figure out. Me, my mind just wandered, which even then my loved ones suspected was the premature onset of dementia. (Now they say it’s a mature onset of dementia.) I was oblivious.
So in my aimless musing, it occurred to me that if I did know what Mrs. Cotterell wanted me to know about Shakespeare’s play, it would have something to do with the unquenchable thirst for power of the already powerful, the ambition of those who were drawn to such people, the way power rots human character at its moral core, and what it means for friendship when the rot has become contagious. Then that noise intruded: tap, tap, tap, tap: Et tu, Bru - te? And you, Brutus? What, Mrs. Cotterell wanted to know, did that mean?
Someone said it meant that Caesar wondered what had gone wrong with his friend, that he felt betrayed. But the piece of chalk did not relent. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Of course it was betrayal, but what does this betrayal mean?
“Well,” I, roused from obliviousness, found myself saying, “Caesar did think there was something wrong with Brutus, but really what was wrong was that something between them was broken. There was nothing there between them that would make someone be loyal.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Cotterell said, and to this day, I don’t know if it was that I had given her the answer she was looking for or had just shown her I was really trying to understand. It didn’t seem to matter. She’d heard something that made a difference.
It was an exhilarating moment for me, something completely different from the satisfaction of knowing an answer. One minute earlier, I had not known what it was like to feel the increase in my soul that great literature can bestow, but in that moment, a new world began to open up for me. One minute earlier, learning was the project of satisfying a demanding teacher, but in that moment, learning became a life-giving spring. If coercion was the teacher’s method, I’d forgotten I was being coerced. If fear was what made me want to have an answer, I’d forgotten to be afraid. I was oblivious, and in my obliviousness, I stepped through the looking glass into a world full of eccentric wonders and unconventional wisdom.
So it turns out, obliviousness has from then on been my spiritual gift. I go there to await truth. Then, when the usual wonders have gotten tedious, I can be relied on for something eccentric to liven up the spiritual party. When conventional wisdom keeps beating our heads against a brick wall, trust me for something wacky but wise. My spiritual gift was coming to life that day in tenth grade English.
And Mrs. Cotterell? What she gave me was no accident. She had the tenacity and nerves of steel to stand at that blackboard until the light came on in some young mind. She never panicked in the face of dull wittedness. Her spiritual gift was a kind of courage that did not give in to a class hoping either to be told the right answer or to stonewall until the bell. She had the guts not to let us off the hook and to believe that we’d hang in there while she waited for something good to happen. Even Old Triangle Head had a spiritual gift.
The apostle Paul does not have Mrs. Cotterell’s spiritual gift. He just writes you a letter and gives you the answer. But his answers are pretty good.
“Now concerning spiritual gifts,” he writes, “I do not want you to be uninformed.” Sometimes the messiness of learning unsettles Paul, who sometimes thinks he’s the only informed apostle in the room. (Sometimes he has been.) Also, he may remember that we, at least in the mists of our ancestral heritage, come from paganism. We do, after all, persist with our Christmas trees, mistletoe, evergreen wreathes and other remnants of our pagan past.
Paul plows on: “I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Which serves to recall for us how important open mindedness is to Paul. We don’t think of him as particularly open minded. You don’t expect it from a guy who gets quoted so often by intolerant people, but it is in fact a mark of Paul’s tolerance that he says this. If someone says “Jesus is Lord,” it’s from the Holy Spirit. Never mind that you think God keeps a Kosher table and the next guy serves bacon at communion. You may measure your spiritual progress in miles while someone else marks it off in kilometers, but if you claim Christ as Lord, you’re rolling along the same road. The core faith we have in common is always more important than the differences.
This is not to say that differences don’t matter. In fact, the spiritual differences between us are essential. “There are varieties of gifts, . . . and there are varieties of services,” even if they come into us from the same Spirit and Lord. “There are varieties of activities,” Paul maintains, which is to say that if what the church is can only be understood in what it does, the activities that make up what the church does may not always look as if they work very well together.
So if someone announced a meeting for Tuesday to pray for our troops, and someone else announced a meeting for Wednesday to protest the war, that wouldn’t surprise Paul one bit. Paul would realize that the one activity doesn’t necessarily cancel out the other, though the typical attitudes of the two often clash. He’s saying that, even if there’s some friction, activities that pull in separate directions, but both from the same centeredness in Christ, can be the sign of a faithful church, even if this is a hard way to be a cohesive institution.
All of this is important to remember, when we look at what Paul has to say next. This is not just background, and Paul isn’t just trying to make us feel like a big happy family. Diverse gifts, perspectives and actions are important for the growth of the church and the deepening of our faith.
And yet none of all that matters, unless you get the impact of Paul’s next bit of wisdom. Here it comes . . .
“To each is given,” he says, “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” To each, he says. No one here today can say that God has not given to him or her a manifestation of the Spirit. You have something in you that kindles a spiritual flame, and the light from it illumines a unique space within the life of the church. Your spiritual gift might be knowledge, it might be wisdom, it might be healing or miracles or prophecy. You might have been given the gift of speaking in tongues, in which case our worship today might take an interesting turn any minute now. Maybe you have the gift of interpreting tongues, Paul suggests, which would be a frustrating role to play in the staid and settled worship of moderate Presbyterians, but if you do have the gift of interpreting tongues, it’s your responsibility to know about it and to use it.
It seems to me that we often take knowing and using our spiritual gifts for granted. If we have one, we figure it was automatic and there’s nothing we have to do about it. We seldom make much of a conscious effort to know and use the spiritual gifts we believe God gives us. Maybe it’s that we ordain certain people to offices in the church, and we assume that all the spiritual gifts reside in them. The minister must have all the spiritual knowledge, we figure, or the elders have all the wisdom. Or since just the idea of speaking in tongues gives us the shivers, we hope that certain spiritual gifts have gone out of fashion. Doctors do such a spectacular job of healing, these days, so why would anyone in the church think she has a responsibility to anoint and lay hands on someone with cancer or a heart condition or a broken heart? There are a million ways to talk ourselves out of the belief that we each have a spiritual gift.
But Paul thinks each of us does have a gift. If that’s true, how do we find it out? Do you think you know what yours is? How can you tell? I think you might find out the way I found out in Mrs. Cotterell’s class what kind of gift I have. You let go of an expectation of yourself, and something inside you speaks from a more native truth. Or your mind puts together what you already know into a way of seeing things only you have just discovered. Or you actually try out doing something you’ve never done before and find out if doing that gives you life and serves the church and the world God loves.
I believe we can find out something about our spiritual gifts by taking some of those personality tests they’ve dreamt up over the last several decades. The Myers-Briggs test tells you if you’re introverted or extroverted, if you’re oriented around underlying intuitions or outward sensations, and if you know something is good or bad by linear thinking or holistic feeling. If you learn to recognize your tendencies and strengths, you can rely on them to lead your way through spiritual challenges.
On the other hand, we all of us sometimes rely on aspects of ourselves that often trip us up, and we should learn how to question our weaker aspects before we assert ourselves in areas where others have the stronger gifts. I can’t count the times I’ve sat in session meetings listening to someone hold forth on a matter about which everyone knew the person was not the epitome of wisdom.
The point is, knowing your spiritual gift demands your attention. You have to watch for it, open yourself to it and act on it. You have to refine and strengthen your spiritual gift. I’m glad I learned something about a gift I have in the tenth grade, and yet I have worked on it ever since. Every year, it seems to me, I read a book or a poem, and on finishing it, I say to myself, “I would never have understood that five years ago.”
It would be discouraging, if we any of us ever had to think that there was a point at which we will have perfected our spiritual gifts. The point is not to perfect them but to nourish, challenge, tend and trust them. Like a garden, a spiritual gift is a renewable resource, and it only serves its purpose if it is repeatedly tilled, planted, tended and harvested. (And also rested, for a season. Our spiritual gifts require their Sabbath rest—just like God, just like everything else.)
So don’t be surprised if your spiritual gift feels awkward to you. Of course it does. The Spirit didn’t give it to you fully formed, any more than you were born with a complete set of teeth or hair under your armpits. Also, don’t be surprised if your spiritual gift annoys somebody. Paul predicts that, and, as we’ve already noted, he thinks that’s a good thing, so don’t let it discourage you if someone—it may be another Christian, I’m sorry to say—if someone cuts you down. Paul wouldn’t have written all this stuff to the Corinthians if disparate spiritual gifts were not a persistent challenge. Just keep at it.
The main idea for us at Park Church—and I think in Presbyterian churches, and churches all over like ours—the main idea is that there are a lot more spiritual gifts just standing around in the coffee hour alone than any of us even think about. That’s a terrific thing. The other thing is that we really can’t be the church we’re called to be without all those gifts. You may believe you don’t have much of a spiritual gift to share, but that belief doesn’t give much regard either to yourself or to the Holy Spirit. You may be the spiritual equivalent of the kid whose elementary school music teacher told her to silently move her lips because she couldn’t sing, but you have to get over past criticisms that hurt you and retune your voice to your song of spiritual giving for the church you love. You may suppose you don’t need to work any longer or harder on your spiritual strengths than you already have, but there is no one else who can do or be what you do and are for us in our life together with each other and with God. We really can’t be the church we’re called to be without all the gift you have to give.
Think of it as gratitude, as thanksgiving. Thank the Spirit for noticing what it is about you that matters to the life of the church in a way that no one else can matter. Thank God for creating you in the very image of God, so that whatever you do will be the face of God for the world. Thank Christ for becoming the flesh and blood example of someone whose gifts are powerful, good and true, even if not everyone appreciates them—even if some despise them—and commit yourself to the life of grace through which the world is being redeemed. Be grateful, and prepare to manifest your spiritual gift. Amen.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
January 7, 2007 - Baptism of the Lord
Baptism of the Lord
7 January 2007
Luke 3.15-17, 21-22
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Our Jack, we call him.
No one ever thought he’d be a holy man,
not the upright sort
that wraps up faith in tight little bundles,
so comforting from the pew, not him.
Not the pious guy who shows up expectedly
and prays expectedly
and expects your little group to stop talking
about certain things when you see him.
Not someone who feels better if you admire him,
which people seem to need to do,
if their cleric wants their support.
Not even the evangelist,
who struts back and forth,
spellbound eyes glazing over,
fearful souls seeking comfort that God
has trusted him to impart.
None of it has ever been Jack.
Besides, he was too angry.
He seethed, he sputtered, he
denounced people who called the shots,
their wealth and power somehow giving them
permission to indulge their craving for
the finer things—fine meaning pleasure
only they can buy.
People don’t want a preacher
condemning pleasures he obviously
can’t afford. It’s pettiness,
or seems so.
No, our Jack has this uncomfortable way of
making you feel like God
wants you to change things about yourself,
as if you can’t be both good and happy
at the same time.
Personally, I love it, though, how by the end of
a red-faced harangue about this
fouled up world—and not because of
all the godless heathen but because
the God fearing people make things such a mess—
I love it how he gets hoarse from joy in battle against
the way of things. People shouldn’t like him,
but they do.
Last night, we were throwing the last
sticks and brush we’d scrounged along
the river bank into a fire ring to cook our supper.
Jack had earlier poked hotshot priests
in the eye about their fancy holy costumes and
uncharitably noticed with
admittedly unbridled glee
how their self absorbed wives
and daughters spare no excess
when it comes to a good party. Our campfire was
crackling, and we were cracking up,
retelling his tirade:
“Stone a poor girl for sleeping with a guy to
get food for her kids,” he had roared,
“but any slutty thing goes
if the wine and canapés cost enough and
the guests know how to wink
at a high society indiscretion.” Oh boy,
that got the big shots going. We
couldn’t stop laughing.
But our Jack, baptizing the masses.
To see the truth that’s fun to know
is really all you need,
if you’re the one who runs the show
and never has to bleed.
But if the world is spinning out
and heading straight to hell,
the truth that’s hard to know about
someone has got to tell.
So this morning we were waking up to a
nice day.
And you never know.
Over western hills a dark sky was forming, but that
usually blows away. We hoped for such and
not one of those storms that roll
across the plain, the wadis swelling from
the torrent, people, unsuspecting, swept in dark gray
waters to oblivion—they should pay
closer attention.
We solved that, anyway, turning from the dark horizon,
banishing our dread. See no evil.
Jordan’s reliable current,
color of mud, glided by.
We, Jack’s regulars, watched from our
casual distance. Why so many came out
for these things
I still can’t say. Jack never gave them
much to like. “Repent!” he bellowed, and
we never knew if he meant it a
threatening alarm or a more kindly chance at
relief. People are miserable enough, that’s sure:
Romans in our streets and into our pockets,
Pharisees and Levites wringing our
consciences, never really saying where all
their vaunted standards of holiness
are going to get us. Things just get worse. So
here by the turbid, shambling river of
hard memory—Jacob slept here,
Moses died here—to this shore they
stride (or stray, depending)
day after day
to release themselves from
life and past and weary habit,
to submit to the cleansing power of
a murky mix of heaven’s pure water,
earth’s grit and the output of upstream
human commerce, waste and bodily function.
How that cleans you, hard to say, but they
keep coming; such is the trusting thirst
in their breast.
They kept coming.
The fire burned low.
That dark western sky had hovered all day.
Your earthly days start out with cries,
so someone soothes your mind.
But then the soother up and dies,
and you’re just left behind.
But what if in your soggy soul
a fire unlikely sparked,
and light escaping heaven stole
into your rising heart?
Me, why do I tag along?
It could be enough that Jack is
interesting. He gets angry, I’ve said, but
that’s a sort of gimmick with him, his
rants dredging up ancient resentments.
The rest of us? Our insides
keep twisting through night in
bitter dreams he dredged up in us.
And Jack, he’ll sprawl across his blanket,
tired, snoring softly,
an agreeable calm across his face. Rage serves his
purpose, not the other way round, but me,
I’m a bed of embers and umbrage,
inconspicuous, yet always simmering on the
edge of the fire. Jack, for his part,
flares and cools.
It’s been a weird day. Our Jack has been
changing. For one, he says things feel
stuck. He’s been preaching the same old sermon,
chafing spiritual sores till people give in; he
baptizes them; they
go away; others
come for their dose of spiritual balm.
Then
life goes on about as ever.
And it’s gnawing at him.
“I’ve started something,” he sighs, “that I
don’t know how to finish.”
“I convince someone the world needs cleansing,
‘starting with you,’ I say. They splash
into the stream. I dunk ‘em.
It’s as far as I get.
They dance away washed; they feel better.”
His voice trails off: “But things are not better.”
Funny, to me, because just now
is about when the mocking
priests have stopped calling him
Wacky Jacky Water Boy
and now almost defer to him as
John the baptizer. It’s a movement.
So people take him seriously, and suddenly
he can’t stand it.
Now that he knows he’s for real,
it isn’t enough. You see it
eating at him. You hear it. Something’s
snapped.
“So it’s up to YOU,” he starts shouting at
next morning’s gathered hopeful, almost
first thing—way off message.
He has stopped reading
from the cue cards.
“You come to me like I’m the one gonna
clean up Dodge,” he fairly whines, by now,
“but the answer to this sad, broken world
is gonna come from YOU!
From YOU will come the power,
from YOU the fire.
This washing you with water, what good is it?
But fire! When out of YOU rises
the sight and strength and courage
to burn pure this world,
to sweat out its fever, then it is
that heaven’s salvation comes.
YOU!”
I think, at first, he’s railing at me,
personally. But it might be
the group of us. Or someone in
particular, and he hasn’t said, not yet.
When God decides it’s time to tell
you what comes next and speaks,
and sense—touch, sight, sound, taste and smell—
ascend their neural peaks,
suspended, then, twixt heav’n and earth,
your next heartbeat unsure,
a vision blinding true breaks forth,
a hope you may endure.
And just then—I’m not making this up—
someone wiggles out of
the knot of the now bewildered spectators And
this guy walks up to Jack,
or John, I guess John.
And John just stands there.
“Baptize me,” says the guy.
John shakes his head. I think,
“That’s it, he’s through. No more
preaching, no more
baptizing, no
changing the world.
Not anymore.”
But the guy wades in up to his knees,
stops,
stands with his back to the shore—
to John, to all of us—stands and waits.
Very still.
Maybe something rumbles out of the
gloomy west, hard to say,
maybe a flash of light and
brighter blue just above. Could be.
You’d think I could
remember better. Anyway, sound and light
and we all of us shuddering. All
except John, and the man.
The two of them, back to back, and
John looks more still than a statue,
shoulders smoothed into soft curves,
eyes glinting gold from late afternoon sun
or something. Steady,
like a dancer, John turns
a graceful arc, leaves the shore,
each foot-stirred shimmer of water
reflecting light out of
nowhere, and as he passes the man and
their shoulders brush, we on the shore
all seem to be standing in
darkness, darkness everywhere.
But there around them, where some strange
glow evanesces out of the very water,
light.
John turns back after he’s waist high
in the river. He stretches out his arms;
the man moves into them. John
wraps the man’s shoulders
hard around till his fingers grip into the man’s
sides. So hard, they’re red with
something like blood, though
it could be just the light. But blood in his side
is what it looks like.
The two sink under the surface. All the light
is swallowed up with them. We all
stop breathing. I try to think but think of
nothing. I try to
see, I try to
speak. There is
no sight, there are
no words.
They rise;
light returns;
the air makes sounds, something
like a voice there is; and something
like a pulse beats
against our feet,
the earth coming alive, maybe;
we breathe out,
breath in.
One by one, we submit to
the water in John’s arms, the light
still alive across the surface,
as if stars were there,
until the last of us is standing
dripping on the shore,
and a spinning body dives from straight up
beyond our sight, crying for
its beloved, its joy and pleasure
a silence that falls
upon the man and all of us,
washing over us and into the water,
gathering under stones on the
bottom of the river, holding there
the peace of the world
until the work of peace be
fulfilled, all of us made ready.
The gurgle of the river returns.
The light shines again from the sun.
The voices again are ours.
The wind chills our wet bodies.
We feel hunger.
We feel tired.
These things so familiar,
everything changed.
The red sun settles toward the western hills.
The darkness between them has, if anything,
widened.
Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
let not our fate come down at last
to death’s procession’s drum.
Let waters wash and fire burn
away our dirt and dross,
that hearts may feel and minds may learn
your hope and love and cross.
Amen.
7 January 2007
Luke 3.15-17, 21-22
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Our Jack, we call him.
No one ever thought he’d be a holy man,
not the upright sort
that wraps up faith in tight little bundles,
so comforting from the pew, not him.
Not the pious guy who shows up expectedly
and prays expectedly
and expects your little group to stop talking
about certain things when you see him.
Not someone who feels better if you admire him,
which people seem to need to do,
if their cleric wants their support.
Not even the evangelist,
who struts back and forth,
spellbound eyes glazing over,
fearful souls seeking comfort that God
has trusted him to impart.
None of it has ever been Jack.
Besides, he was too angry.
He seethed, he sputtered, he
denounced people who called the shots,
their wealth and power somehow giving them
permission to indulge their craving for
the finer things—fine meaning pleasure
only they can buy.
People don’t want a preacher
condemning pleasures he obviously
can’t afford. It’s pettiness,
or seems so.
No, our Jack has this uncomfortable way of
making you feel like God
wants you to change things about yourself,
as if you can’t be both good and happy
at the same time.
Personally, I love it, though, how by the end of
a red-faced harangue about this
fouled up world—and not because of
all the godless heathen but because
the God fearing people make things such a mess—
I love it how he gets hoarse from joy in battle against
the way of things. People shouldn’t like him,
but they do.
Last night, we were throwing the last
sticks and brush we’d scrounged along
the river bank into a fire ring to cook our supper.
Jack had earlier poked hotshot priests
in the eye about their fancy holy costumes and
uncharitably noticed with
admittedly unbridled glee
how their self absorbed wives
and daughters spare no excess
when it comes to a good party. Our campfire was
crackling, and we were cracking up,
retelling his tirade:
“Stone a poor girl for sleeping with a guy to
get food for her kids,” he had roared,
“but any slutty thing goes
if the wine and canapés cost enough and
the guests know how to wink
at a high society indiscretion.” Oh boy,
that got the big shots going. We
couldn’t stop laughing.
But our Jack, baptizing the masses.
To see the truth that’s fun to know
is really all you need,
if you’re the one who runs the show
and never has to bleed.
But if the world is spinning out
and heading straight to hell,
the truth that’s hard to know about
someone has got to tell.
So this morning we were waking up to a
nice day.
And you never know.
Over western hills a dark sky was forming, but that
usually blows away. We hoped for such and
not one of those storms that roll
across the plain, the wadis swelling from
the torrent, people, unsuspecting, swept in dark gray
waters to oblivion—they should pay
closer attention.
We solved that, anyway, turning from the dark horizon,
banishing our dread. See no evil.
Jordan’s reliable current,
color of mud, glided by.
We, Jack’s regulars, watched from our
casual distance. Why so many came out
for these things
I still can’t say. Jack never gave them
much to like. “Repent!” he bellowed, and
we never knew if he meant it a
threatening alarm or a more kindly chance at
relief. People are miserable enough, that’s sure:
Romans in our streets and into our pockets,
Pharisees and Levites wringing our
consciences, never really saying where all
their vaunted standards of holiness
are going to get us. Things just get worse. So
here by the turbid, shambling river of
hard memory—Jacob slept here,
Moses died here—to this shore they
stride (or stray, depending)
day after day
to release themselves from
life and past and weary habit,
to submit to the cleansing power of
a murky mix of heaven’s pure water,
earth’s grit and the output of upstream
human commerce, waste and bodily function.
How that cleans you, hard to say, but they
keep coming; such is the trusting thirst
in their breast.
They kept coming.
The fire burned low.
That dark western sky had hovered all day.
Your earthly days start out with cries,
so someone soothes your mind.
But then the soother up and dies,
and you’re just left behind.
But what if in your soggy soul
a fire unlikely sparked,
and light escaping heaven stole
into your rising heart?
Me, why do I tag along?
It could be enough that Jack is
interesting. He gets angry, I’ve said, but
that’s a sort of gimmick with him, his
rants dredging up ancient resentments.
The rest of us? Our insides
keep twisting through night in
bitter dreams he dredged up in us.
And Jack, he’ll sprawl across his blanket,
tired, snoring softly,
an agreeable calm across his face. Rage serves his
purpose, not the other way round, but me,
I’m a bed of embers and umbrage,
inconspicuous, yet always simmering on the
edge of the fire. Jack, for his part,
flares and cools.
It’s been a weird day. Our Jack has been
changing. For one, he says things feel
stuck. He’s been preaching the same old sermon,
chafing spiritual sores till people give in; he
baptizes them; they
go away; others
come for their dose of spiritual balm.
Then
life goes on about as ever.
And it’s gnawing at him.
“I’ve started something,” he sighs, “that I
don’t know how to finish.”
“I convince someone the world needs cleansing,
‘starting with you,’ I say. They splash
into the stream. I dunk ‘em.
It’s as far as I get.
They dance away washed; they feel better.”
His voice trails off: “But things are not better.”
Funny, to me, because just now
is about when the mocking
priests have stopped calling him
Wacky Jacky Water Boy
and now almost defer to him as
John the baptizer. It’s a movement.
So people take him seriously, and suddenly
he can’t stand it.
Now that he knows he’s for real,
it isn’t enough. You see it
eating at him. You hear it. Something’s
snapped.
“So it’s up to YOU,” he starts shouting at
next morning’s gathered hopeful, almost
first thing—way off message.
He has stopped reading
from the cue cards.
“You come to me like I’m the one gonna
clean up Dodge,” he fairly whines, by now,
“but the answer to this sad, broken world
is gonna come from YOU!
From YOU will come the power,
from YOU the fire.
This washing you with water, what good is it?
But fire! When out of YOU rises
the sight and strength and courage
to burn pure this world,
to sweat out its fever, then it is
that heaven’s salvation comes.
YOU!”
I think, at first, he’s railing at me,
personally. But it might be
the group of us. Or someone in
particular, and he hasn’t said, not yet.
When God decides it’s time to tell
you what comes next and speaks,
and sense—touch, sight, sound, taste and smell—
ascend their neural peaks,
suspended, then, twixt heav’n and earth,
your next heartbeat unsure,
a vision blinding true breaks forth,
a hope you may endure.
And just then—I’m not making this up—
someone wiggles out of
the knot of the now bewildered spectators And
this guy walks up to Jack,
or John, I guess John.
And John just stands there.
“Baptize me,” says the guy.
John shakes his head. I think,
“That’s it, he’s through. No more
preaching, no more
baptizing, no
changing the world.
Not anymore.”
But the guy wades in up to his knees,
stops,
stands with his back to the shore—
to John, to all of us—stands and waits.
Very still.
Maybe something rumbles out of the
gloomy west, hard to say,
maybe a flash of light and
brighter blue just above. Could be.
You’d think I could
remember better. Anyway, sound and light
and we all of us shuddering. All
except John, and the man.
The two of them, back to back, and
John looks more still than a statue,
shoulders smoothed into soft curves,
eyes glinting gold from late afternoon sun
or something. Steady,
like a dancer, John turns
a graceful arc, leaves the shore,
each foot-stirred shimmer of water
reflecting light out of
nowhere, and as he passes the man and
their shoulders brush, we on the shore
all seem to be standing in
darkness, darkness everywhere.
But there around them, where some strange
glow evanesces out of the very water,
light.
John turns back after he’s waist high
in the river. He stretches out his arms;
the man moves into them. John
wraps the man’s shoulders
hard around till his fingers grip into the man’s
sides. So hard, they’re red with
something like blood, though
it could be just the light. But blood in his side
is what it looks like.
The two sink under the surface. All the light
is swallowed up with them. We all
stop breathing. I try to think but think of
nothing. I try to
see, I try to
speak. There is
no sight, there are
no words.
They rise;
light returns;
the air makes sounds, something
like a voice there is; and something
like a pulse beats
against our feet,
the earth coming alive, maybe;
we breathe out,
breath in.
One by one, we submit to
the water in John’s arms, the light
still alive across the surface,
as if stars were there,
until the last of us is standing
dripping on the shore,
and a spinning body dives from straight up
beyond our sight, crying for
its beloved, its joy and pleasure
a silence that falls
upon the man and all of us,
washing over us and into the water,
gathering under stones on the
bottom of the river, holding there
the peace of the world
until the work of peace be
fulfilled, all of us made ready.
The gurgle of the river returns.
The light shines again from the sun.
The voices again are ours.
The wind chills our wet bodies.
We feel hunger.
We feel tired.
These things so familiar,
everything changed.
The red sun settles toward the western hills.
The darkness between them has, if anything,
widened.
Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
let not our fate come down at last
to death’s procession’s drum.
Let waters wash and fire burn
away our dirt and dross,
that hearts may feel and minds may learn
your hope and love and cross.
Amen.
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