{"id":903,"date":"2014-06-08T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2014-06-08T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=903"},"modified":"2019-11-05T12:30:26","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T17:30:26","slug":"spiritual-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/06\/08\/spiritual-gifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Spiritual Gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/i><\/b>1 Corinthians 12: 3-13<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps you too were arrested by the moving and powerful remembrances offered this week, seventy years later, for June 6, 1944.\u00a0 This week we have heard again about those young men on Omaha Beach and elsewhere we gave so much for the common good, whose sacrificial martial action was offered for the common good.\u00a0 Perhaps you found in such retrospective as we have had these last few days, an emotional upsurge, a spiritual shower, a reckoning with history and duty, an infusion of spirit.\u00a0 There is a gospel echo here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Spiritual gifts are meant for the common good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those who began the practice of ministry in the 1970\u2019s officiated at many funerals, over the years, for men of this, \u2018the greatest generation\u2019.\u00a0 As with all ministry, through which one puts oneself at the disposal and in the service of others, these memorials, over decades, have been moments of great privilege.\u00a0 One such occurred yesterday across the river in the Harvard Memorial Church.\u00a0 We are coming gradually toward the end of this generation\u2019s memorials.\u00a0 Have we truly learned the lessons, their lessons, which by accident of circumstance, age, location, timing, calling, we have been given to celebrate, in ministry? What a privilege, in ministry, to participate in the highest and hardest moments of life.\u00a0 What a privilege.<\/p>\n

Ministry is preaching and visiting.\u00a0 To preach requires, invites, demands visitation, some two dozen forty minute visits per week, forty minutes of listening, which is an offer of life, and forty seconds of extemporary prayer, which is an offer of grace.\u00a0 What a privilege to share the gospel week by week in such a way.\u00a0 You are in the middle of things.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once when our son was ten years old, he accompanied me during such a visit with two parishioners.\u00a0 Mary and Bill had married just after the Second World War.\u00a0 They raised four daughters, who all had become vibrant, creative, caring adults.\u00a0 In addition they found time to prepare the Altar for Sunday, to sit through various Worship Committee meetings, to take an interest in local politics, to read and learn and grow and change, as faith intersected with life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

During the October that Bill was dying, our son Ben went with me once to see him.\u00a0 On an earlier visit, Bill had told me about his experience in the war.\u00a0 At age 20 Bill had become a pilot, and had flown 30 missions from England into and over Germany.\u00a0 His plane had been shot down once.\u00a0 He had survived, though not all of his crew had survived.\u00a0 He had carried responsibility for an airplane, a crew, many missions, and to some small but human degree, the outcome of the war itself.\u00a0 He was honored and decorated when the war ended.\u00a0 30 missions later, several deaths later, many hours of anxious service later, many buildings and bridges destroyed later, after three years in command in England in the air in the war, he came home.\u00a0 He was 22.\u00a0 Bill was 22 years old, when the war ended, and he came home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I cannot remember how this happened, but our son either asked to see or was offered to see Bill\u2019s flight jacket.\u00a0 It was a heavy, worn, brown leather flight jacket, waist long with an old center zipper.\u00a0 At age 10, and I do not remember how this happened, whether he asked or was offered, Ben donned the jacket.\u00a0 He was small in it, but Bill himself was somewhat small, and the jacket fit, if poorly.\u00a0 Here was a moment when Mary, soon to be a widow, and Bill, soon to be buried, and Ben, soon to be 11, and I, soon to conduct a funeral, were fully quiet together.\u00a0 With that jacket Bill came home, 30 missions later, a war won, at 22 years of age. 22. A young man.\u00a0 Bill worked the next 40 years as a public relations writer for a small manufacturing company, a quiet life of backroom pencil sharpening, phoning, rewriting, and mailing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some moments stand frozen in time.\u00a0 Our son in Bill\u2019s jacket is one.\u00a0 Bill\u2019s primary work, his main adult life, as he reflected on all of his life, was completed by age 22.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Which provokes a question: Where did we ever get the idea that young people are not capable of great things?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bill found his voice, his own self, at a young age, and quietly whispered his voice in faith for the rest of his days, right in the middle of things.<\/p>\n

Here we are in the middle of things, the middle of June, the middle of life.\u00a0 In media res.<\/i>\u00a0 In the middle of things.<\/p>\n

Young adults are often concerned about relationships, anxious about performance, overly attentive to their changing appearance, and honestly uncertain about the future.\u00a0 You notice, I am sure, that in all these things they resemble no one as much as another remarkable age cohort sometimes referred to as their parents.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>The issue of appearance, or appearances, which will dog us all for all our days, is of particular importance this morning.\u00a0 Now I think it is good to dress well for church, and particularly for such a special occasion as Pentecost, Whitsunday.\u00a0 In fact, we might wish that there were rather more than less attention, across our time and land, to the matter of courtesy, manners, and dress.\u00a0 However, the Scripture lesson this morning acclaims in startling fashion a distinctly different truth, which is, simply said, that what matters is not how you look<\/i> but how you sound.<\/i>\u00a0 In the life of the Spirit, that is, what counts is not your face but your voice.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To become a person is to find your voice.\u00a0 Spiritual gifts are vocal gifts, meant for the common good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You may, and rightly, wonder why St Paul would start down this rickety path with the shouting Corinthians. In ancient Corinth, a city like New Orleans in its love of the love of the flesh, Paul spoke: \u00a0God made them and gave them life; soon they would be at death in God\u2019s presence; in the meantime they were a sorry lot; and Jesus Christ was raised from the dead to give them new life, community, heaven, meaning, love, and, oh yes, spirit.\u00a0 To this they responded with the chaotic shouting and disrespect They shouted!\u00a0 They groped!\u00a0 They misbehaved!\u00a0 They went overboard!\u00a0 If nothing else, that is, it seemed that there was plenty of volume in Corinth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This morning we are in earshot of part of Paul\u2019s lesson for the Corinthians.\u00a0 In a word, he is heard to say, you are mistaken to focus on what you see.\u00a0 What matters is how you sound.\u00a0\u00a0 What do those around you hear and overhear in your voice?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I heard an editor at Random House explain how he could move through thousands of manuscripts very quickly, and know which ones to publish.\u00a0 \u201cOh, I can tell in a paragraph or two.\u00a0 Did you ever listen to someone sing?\u00a0 You can tell in a line or two\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paul is asking his new born church to exchange volume for value, to listen for the good gifts that God is giving, to feel the heart beat of life and love in various forms of speech that are the whole content of the spirit.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paul gives, too, a concrete, historical measure of spirit.\u00a0 We all have come of age in a time in which the word spirit and its cousins are as exuberantly pronounced as they are unintelligibly defined.\u00a0 By contrast, for the Paul of 1 Corinthians 12 spirit means speech that does good.\u00a0 All of the gifts of spirit, he says, can be known and measured by one simple test: what do they do for the common good?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notice the space Paul creates.\u00a0 There are varieties of gifts.\u00a0 Not one bouquet, but a meadow full of bouquets.\u00a0 Diversities, multiplicities, all the many-sided manyness that his Greek culture decried as the enemy of the true and the good and the beautiful\u2014the oneness of truth\u2014this diversity Paul celebrates.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

God is giving us gifts all the time, but our ears are so muffled that we miss their value, their resounding power.\u00a0 The gifts which make up spirit are many and different, but are the bequests of a single spirit, lord and God (incidentally, one of the earliest Trinitarian references in scripture and history).\u00a0 These vocal gifts are to be distinguished from their contraries by a single test:\u00a0 do they build the common good?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So Paul directs the Corinthians to listen for the arrival of the gifts of the Spirit.\u00a0 You receive your measure of them too.\u00a0 Take the time, over the years, to hear them and know them and know your part in them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To one is given the logos sophias<\/i>, the word of wisdom.\u00a0 Some of you will become wise before your time.\u00a0 Our age disdains wisdom.\u00a0 We prefer willpower.\u00a0 It is willpower, or the will to power, that distinguishes our age, from the raucous willfulness of our music to the undisguised willfulness of our politics.\u00a0 We love things not because they are right and true but because they are ours.<\/i> \u00a0Look at many of our popular cultural figures.\u00a0 Are they wise? No, but they are willful, and in that combination of audacious imagination and utter willfulness, they symbolize much of our era.\u00a0 But the gift of the spirit is wisdom, the quiet capacity to see life as a whole.\u00a0 Listen for a word of wisdom.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To one is given the logos gnoseus, <\/i>the word of knowledge.\u00a0 Paul elsewhere questions knowledge, but not here. \u00a0Paul himself knew a great deal.\u00a0 He knew the Hebrew Bible well enough to use it, and recite it as a part of his heart.\u00a0 He knew the tradition of Greek philosophy, the sophists and the epicureans and the teaching of Plato, well enough to recall them with ease.\u00a0 He knew the cities of the empire well enough to traverse them with grace.\u00a0\u00a0 He even knew enough of the craft of leather working to make his living, city by city, as a tent-maker, the original worker priest.\u00a0 I have no doubt that he would encourage our increase in knowledge, in many directions.\u00a0 But the knowledge to which he gives expression here is of a different kind.\u00a0 He means the knowledge that touches and warms the heart, that makes the heart strangely warm, the knowing word.\u00a0 You will know it when you have heard it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is thought feeling.\u00a0 It is felt thought.\u00a0 Try as we might to unglue the two, feeling and thought, they are enmeshed in one another.\u00a0 Someone will take you by the hand and whisper, \u201cI love you\u201d.\u00a0 Someone will ask you, pointedly, whether you plan to make something of your life.\u00a0 Someone will, at the right time in the right way, tell you to your face that you are forgiven for what you did and you should stop beating yourself up over it.\u00a0 Someone will point out to you a different possibility, a new alternative.\u00a0 Someone will invite you to come to worship God in a church, a church with depth, a church with texture, a church with body.\u00a0 More to the point, some of you will have that voice, that knowing voice, that telling voice, the voice of knowledge.\u00a0 Listen for a word of knowledge.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To another is given the gift of pistis, <\/i>faith.\u00a0 Faith comes by hearing, we know, and hearing by the word of God.\u00a0 As a religion Christianity has yet to come to terms, far and wide it seems to me, with Paul\u2019s blunt assertion that faith is a gift, a form of speech and hearing that is offered to some individuals for the sake of the common good.\u00a0 Perhaps the word of faith, upon your tongue, is the gift of the spirit to you.\u00a0 Listen for a word of faith.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To others are given the gifts of healing and energymata dunameon\u2014energetic power.\u00a0 Words of healing and force, fitly spoken, that make a difference for the good, for the common good.\u00a0 Paul strictly measures the spirit, and spiritual gifts, according to a simple rule:\u00a0 does this make for the common good?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yesterday we took our son\u2019s two daughters for an afternoon.\u00a0 We rode the T.\u00a0 We walked through the Common.\u00a0 We rode the Carousel there.\u00a0 We hiked over the Fiedler bridge.\u00a0 We sat for ice cream along the esplanade.\u00a0 We meandered up along the river.\u00a0 We stopped in a playground, one where a tree has been carved into a part of the yard.\u00a0 All public space, all common good, all ushered into existence by spiritual gifts for the common good.\u00a0 I wonder how many meetings, how many hours, how many votes, how many speeches, how many voices have been lifted, for how many years, to make Boston such a shining example of public space for the common good?\u00a0 Listen for words of healing and force, fitly spoken, that make a difference for the common good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To still others are given the gifts of prophecy, discernment, speaking and understanding.<\/i>\u00a0 I ask that we notice only that all of these, like their predecessors have to do with speech, with voice.\u00a0 You become a person by finding your voice.\u00a0 Spiritual gifts are vocal gifts\u2014in the tongues of Acts 2, in the shouts of Psalm 104, in the dominical cry of John 7, but especially in Paul\u2019s declaration of 1 Corinthians 12.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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