Roger Ray, Pastor
June 12, 2011 Pentecost
1 Corinthians 12:4-13
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
I had a friend in my church in Louisville who married a beautiful young woman who, after visiting a few Sundays, decided that she preferred going to the Catholic Church, which, seemed to me was pretty much her business. But my friend hated the Catholic Church and couldn't stop talking about it. They are the only couple I have ever known about whom it can be fairly said that they divorced because of religious differences.
What made him hate the Catholic Church so much was not really a theological issue though he tried and tried to make it sound like one. My parishioner was a capitalist in meanest sense of the word. He liked his nice house and his luxury car. He wore more jewelry than any man I have ever seen other than Mr. T and he obsessed about making money.
However, he believed that the church should be poor.
His wife attended one of those old European styled cathedrals with heavy marble pillars and gold plated altar ware. It drove him crazy that the Catholic Church had amassed so much wealth and, he would say, their members are often so very poor.
Of course, if he were really very concerned about the poor he could have done quite a bit himself by restraining his own spending and being a bit more generous but, over the years, what I realized was not that he was so offended that there was gold on the altar of his wife's church but that the gold was not on his wrist or fingers.
You hear this kind of complaint from Americans a lot when they travel in Central America or in the more impoverished areas of Europe. In America, we tend to believe that personal wealth is a goal but public wealth is just a waste of money.
I have a friend in Paris who is a physician. She does not own a car and she lives in a fairly small, one bedroom apartment and she has no desire to move her practice to the United States where she could own several cars and live in a big house. You can look out her living room window and see a part of the Eifel Tower. She can walk or ride her bike past some of the most beautiful bridges, towers, statues and fountains in the whole world. For her, and for a lot of Europeans and Latin Americans, the obscenity is in hoarding great personal wealth while letting the public live without the blessing of great art and beauty.
If the Mona Lisa was owned by a private collector it might be seen by a dozen people a year. Where it stands in the Louvre it is available to people from all over the world to come and to enjoy..... and, perhaps the word "enjoy" is not at all the right word to use here. We are inspired by great art.... Our lives are changed when we are exposed to beauty, our souls can be filled with awe and we can then become better and more capable people as a result.
If Barry Stacy took all of his talent and went home and played keyboards, drums, accordions and flutes in a house all by himself, the quality of the music might be the same but the qualitative affect on the world would be reduced to nearly nothing. When Sean and Barry have finished some of the pieces they do, I often feel remorse that we did not have a thousand people here to hear it.... It seems a shame that only 70 or 80 people were here to experience something so beautiful, so profound, so inspiring but still, don't you see how enriched our lives are by the fact that they are here and they work so hard to find meaningful music to present in our community?
Today is Pentecost in the western Christian calendar. This is the day in which we celebrate the birth of the Christian Church by the miraculous events described in the second chapter of Acts about how the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples who were in hiding in Jerusalem.
A companion reading to that text is Acts is this lesson we read today from 1st Corinthians in which Paul is trying to explain the nature of the Holy Spirit to a church he had founded but which has, apparently, begun to stray from Paul's teachings.
Paul moves along at a pretty good clip in this letter. We can assume that most of the contents of the letter would be a reminder to the Corinthian church folk of things which Paul had said in greater detail when he lived among them. For us, it might move along a little too fast. There is a lot of material in that paragraph to talk about but I want to pay particular attention to verse seven.
Paul is telling this church that every one of them.... Male or female, Jew or Greek, have been given a gift by the Holy Spirit. That is affirming in and of itself. No one should feel that they are worthless. No one should assume that the work of the church is for more talented people, more educated people, better, more saintly people. Everyone has been given a gift, the apostle says. But it is that qualifier at the end of verse seven which catches my attention.....the apostle says that every one of us has been given a talent, a gift, a manifestation of the Spirit.... For the common good.
We had a Catholic bishop in Kentucky whom I once heard speaking while I was on retreat at the Gethsemane Monastery. He was talking about a time when he was working in a leper colony in Viet Nam. He was the priest for about 200 people who lived in a village where everyone was afflicted with the horrible distorting disease of leprosy. Many had simply been dropped off there as children by family members who were afraid of them and who could not bear to look at their faces which were often bereft of noses, ears and lips.
The bishop talked about being on a flight back to the United States when his work in Vietnam was finished. During the long flight a remarkably beautiful young flight attendant eventually came and sat next to him. She introduced herself as being a lapsed Catholic but she said that she was getting tired of just flying around the world and wanted to settle down to do something meaningful with her life. She said that she had not gone to college and didn't really have any job skills so and she wondered if the priest might have any suggestions.
He told her that of all of the gifts that God gives to people, that God gets less return from the gift of beauty than from any other. God gives some few people amazing beautiful faces and all God gets back is a wrinkled up memory. The flight attendant was simultaneously intrigued and insulted but she asked the priest, "What would God have me do with my beauty."
And the priest said, "I work among a people who never see beauty. They are trapped and isolated by a disfiguring disease that is so horrible that they never even see the faces of their own family members." He said, "If you are willing, I can send you there to work in my old village where just the sight of your smile will lift the burden in the lives of many people."
It was a huge idea, too much to swallow all at once but she asked for the priest's name and number in the states and she promised to think about what he had said.
A couple of years later, long after he had forgotten about the conversation, he did get a call and the young woman said, "If your offer still stands, I think that I am ready now." He made the arrangements and a few weeks later the flight attendant was living in the leper colony as a teacher.
More than a year passed before the priest was able to go back to Viet Nam but when he did he found his old acquaintance there surrounded by adoring children. And she told the priest, "I don't know what they see when they look at me, but I know that I have seen the face of God in their faces and I don't know how to thank you for helping me to find my way here."
Now, with that in mind, let's look again at the first three verses of this pericope we have from Paul's letter today:
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
You may recall an article I published in the newspaper a month or so ago in which I brought up this matter of being a good person. If you think that you are a good person, shouldn't you be able to tell us what you are good for?
I don't know if Paul is right about this but he is published in the Bible and that beats any publication you or I have ever made it into.
He says that every single one of us has been given a gift which is not for our own pleasure or profit but that we each have been given a gift which we are suppose to use for the common good. You have something in you which you owe to everyone else, a debt to be paid, an obligation to be fulfilled. You have a talent, a skill, an ability to do something for other people which, if you take the apostle at face value, you have no right to keep to yourself.
Your spirituality may be personal but it cannot be private. If you don't know what your gift is, then I can only implore you to try to get it figured out because we all have a leper colony somewhere waiting to be enriched by your smile.
