Scripture: 1Corinthians 13.
Both the scripture reading and the sermon from last week were incomplete. In a certain sense of course all sermons are incomplete. The Christian life is always a work in process so anything anyone says about it should be understood as unfinished. In that sense a sermon is never complete. But last week’s scripture and sermon were incomplete in a more immediate and definite sense as well. Let me talk first about the scriptural context, and then we’ll let that lead us into what I want to say this week.
I don’t know whether you realized it when we were reading scripture last week, but we cut Paul off right in the middle of what he was saying, interrupted his whole train of thought. He was talking in chapter 12 of 1Corinthians about all the different spiritual gifts people have in a community of faith and how they are all valuable, and how the church is like a body, the body of Christ in fact, and how all the gifts need to be seen as working together the way the parts of the body work together, to make a whole. He said, you know we’re all different. Are all apostles, all prophets, all teachers, all workers of miracles, all speakers in tongues, etc., etc. Then, he said, “but strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way.” And that’s where we cut him off. Just closed the book and said that’s all Paul, all you can say today, and I think I might have heard Paul’s voice saying, as Roger closed the Bible, but…but…wait…I was going to tell you about a more excellent way. Don’t you want to hear about a more excellent way?
Well, this morning we heard about the more excellent way…Paul’s well-known words about love. I don ‘t know whether you remembered last week, as we were reading what Paul had to say, that this was what was coming next. “If I speak in the tongues of humans or angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Normally we cut these words off in the other direction. Instead of reading chapter 12 and not going on to chapter 13, we read chapter 13 about love, usually at weddings, but maybe on other occasions as well, without the lead-in from chapter 12 about spiritual gifts.
Of course, it’s all right to do that. The words about love certainly apply to people about to be married and contain good advice for people making commitments to each other. But originally these words were meant for people in the church, and had to do with the question of spiritual gifts that we began talking about last week. So I wanted to hear Paul out on this and think a little more today about spiritual gifts.
I said last week that as I speak of it a spiritual gift is not something we possess—some talent, skill, or interest—so much as it is something that is embedded in who we are. So prayer, for instance, (as the example I used last week) is not a spiritual gift of someone who can talk eloquently about prayer, or even of someone who can say eloquent prayers, or of someone who can pray lengthily, loudly, vigorously, on instantaneous demand, or anything else. Prayer is a spiritual gift of people who have made prayer an important part of the way they live their lives and for whom it has become an important part of who they are as human beings.
And this is true, I was saying, whether prayer comes easily and naturally as a kind of offering of our inner thoughts to God, as it seems to for some people, or whether it comes only with difficulty and is filled with all kinds of doubts and questions and uncertainties, as seems to be the case with others. Prayer can be very much a spiritual gift—whether it is felt as serene or strenuous—it can be very much a spiritual gift if it is part and parcel of who a person is.
My concern last week was to interpret spiritual gifts in such a way as to make clear that we all do have spiritual gifts. If we tend to think of gifts as things we are good at, the way we speak of someone being a gifted writer or musician, then we may be hesitant to claim any spiritual gifts for ourselves, or even to see them in ourselves. What does it mean anyway to be good at something “spiritual”? But if spiritual gifts are rooted in who we are, then we all have them, because we all are, as Jesse Jackson used to remind his audiences, we all are “somebody”. And our gifts are simply what we have to offer. It is not a question of bragging and does not depend on the state of our self-esteem this week. Our spiritual gifts do not depend on how good we are at some churchly or spiritual task, but simply on who we are.
The other side of this is to try to get away from the tendency to judge ourselves or others as deficient in some way. If I am a person let’s say who has some real trust issues in my relationship with God, if I find myself uncertain of who God is for me, and find it a whole lot easier to ask religious questions than to make affirmations of faith, none of this should cause myself or others to look on this spiritual condition as a deficiency to be filled in or a difficulty to be overcome. It is a gift. Likewise, a person whose desire is simply to praise God, putting aside all questions, simply to praise God with a loud or genuine and joyful voice should not think of herself or be thought of by others as deficient in intelligence, depth, sensitivity or anything else. It is simply who that person is, and as such it is a gift.
O.K. All of this has been trying to say in a slightly different way what I said last week, and saying what I believe was the spirit of Paul’s words in chapter 12. Every person is gifted. Every gift needs to be valued and honored. All gifts are necessary in order for us to be the whole people of God, in order to be the body of Christ. But we can’t stop there.
What Paul was basically saying at the end of chapter 12 was: You are all already gifted in many ways, and every gift is important, but if you want to strive for something greater, go right ahead. Whatever you think the greater gifts are, go ahead and strive for them, but whatever you think the greater gifts are, I have one that is better. And it is love.
Love is the more excellent way that we didn’t talk about last week, that we didn’t let Paul talk about last week, and we quickly find out that Paul is not thinking of love as one more spiritual gift to placed alongside all the others, but rather as one that undergirds and gives value to all the others. It is not, as I said earlier, just a romantic kind of love that Paul is talking about, nor is it especially sentimental.
What love really is, I think, is a challenge. It is one thing to accept diversity, and even to value it, in a spiritual sense as well as in all the other ways we are diverse here at Sojourners. It is one thing, and it is a good thing, to say that we are going to leave room for each person to be himself or herself, and a whole self, not having to leave some part of ourselves behind when we walk into a worship space.
Even at Sojourners, I think we need to say, even at Sojourners, some people have felt attacked or misunderstood or looked down on or felt that they would be if they let their true feelings be known. And of course when we feel a little bit defensive about who we are or are perceived to be then we may build little walls around ourselves and say in effect: o.k., you don’t like or respect or appreciate me or some part of me, but I have a right to be who I am, so why don’t we agree to just let each other be, and we’ll get along all right. A policy of co-existence, if you will.
Co-existence, of course, is not love, but sometimes it’s about the best we can do. Or at least diversity is sometimes about the best we can do. We are different people, with very different gifts, and we may not be able to see how all these differences mesh together, but we can at least agree to be in the same room together, in the same church together. We can go on to agree that our differences are not deficiencies, but that who each person is—in a spiritual sense as well as other senses—is a gift. We can agree that who we are is not something to be tolerated but to be celebrated, that we can be thankful that we are not all the same, and that we can find joy in the varieties of gifts that are present among us.
Still, even if we have done all those good things, we have not come to the point of love. Paul talks about how important it is to have a diversity of gifts present in the church, how we need to respect all kinds of gifts, not just the most flashy ones, how we need all these gifts to form a whole body, and how it is good to value and celebrate and strive for all kinds of gifts. And then, after we have done all that, he says, there is a more excellent way.
Letting ourselves be who we are is a good and wonderful thing. To have a church where people can be who they are, honestly and fully, is a good and wonderful thing. And I have said that our spiritual gifts are rooted in who we are. But a gift is not only something we have that is valuable. Part of the meaning of gifts is that they are meant to be given and received.
Love is a challenge, or maybe better to say, an invitation to go even beyond the point where we celebrate all the gifts present among us but are able to offer them to each other and receive them from each other. It is to be able to say that who I am is a gift that is valuable to others, and who others are—no, not just others in general, but who this specific other person is, this specific other person has gifts that are valuable to me. Love is when we’re able to go beyond the point where we just sort of say that what’s good for you is good for you but not for me to the point where we can say that I believe I will be enriched by who you are and I believe that you will be enriched by who I am.
It strikes me as I say these words that it all sounds a little too nice, you know some pleasant words about love and sharing and how we can enrich one another’s lives. The reality is, I think, that love is not very easy at all. Much easier to celebrate that you are you and I am me. Not so easy to say that who you are has a real possibility of changing who I am, for the better, or to offer myself in ways that make it possible for you to be changed for the better by me.
Love calls us, challenges us to become engaged with each other in ways that put us at risk. To be sure, love calls us to become engaged with each other in ways that are patient and kind, that are not jealous or boastful, that are not arrogant or rude or irritable or resentful. But even if we succeed in all those things, there is risk. We offer ourselves at some deep or personal level (there is no other way to offer spiritual gifts) and we make ourselves vulnerable. We take the chance that the person or persons we are offering ourselves to will respond in some way that is hurtful. And if, on the other side, we do honestly and truly open ourselves to the gifts, especially the spiritual gifts, that another person has to offer, we risk becoming a different person, which is never such an easy thing to do.
The love that Paul speaks of, this more excellent way is not filled with warm fuzzies. It is not a feel good kind of affair. It is a challenge to go beyond a recognition of gifts in one another, go beyond co-existence, go beyond diversity, go beyond an appreciation and celebration of differences, and to make ourselves vulnerable to each other in ways that may change us. Yes, spiritual gifts are rooted in who we are, but it is not enough for us simply to be who we are, politely, respectfully, side by side. There is a more excellent way. It is when we make ourselves, some significant part of ourselves available to another person, not to accomplish some purpose of ours but to allow them to accomplish some purpose of theirs, and God perhaps to accomplish some purpose of God’s…and it is when we allow some significant part of another person to enter the hidden parts of ourselves, not knowing what may happen as a result. The name of this other gift, where we not only honor who we are as people but engage one another at a level that may change who we are…the name of this gift is love, and it is the greatest gift, and it is the one that gives life to all the others. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 14, 2000