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.