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“MANY GIFTS, ONE SPIRIT”
Sermon by Robert D. Thomas
January 24, 2016 • Pasadena Presbyterian Church
Scriptures: Luke 4: 14-21 • I Corinthians 12: 4-31a
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
— Luke 4: 14-21 (NRSV)
God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
wise counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous acts
proclamation
distinguishing between spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues.
All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.
You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”?
As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:
Apostles
Prophets
Teachers
miracle workers
healers
helpers
organizers
those who pray in tongues.
But it’s obvious by now, isn’t it, that Christ’s church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It’s not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called “important” parts.
But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.
— I Corinthians 12: 4-31a (“The Message”)
As many of you know, Dr. Mark Smutny and I tend to preach from the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings that is used by preachers in many denominations around the world as the framework for their sermons. Despite the fact that in each week the Revised Common Lectionary offers four scriptural choices, occasionally none of those choices seems particularly illuminating or exciting. Today is the opposite end of the spectrum: each scripture passage is rich with possibilities.
The first Old Testament lesson from Nehemiah — the first 10 verses of chapter 8 — offers the first Biblical profile of what it means to be a preacher:
“The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for this purpose … [he] read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so the people understood the reading.” 1
The second Old Testament reading — Isaiah 2: 2-6 — was the basis for today’s Call to Worship.
That leaves today’s Gospel lesson and Epistle lesson — two of the most familiar scripture passages — on which I propose to focus this morning.
There are a multitude of facets on which we could concentrate when it comes to the Gospel reading. First of all, the verses we read this morning are only the first half of the story — Pastor Mark gets to tackle the aftermath next week. Second, this is a story that also appears in both Mark and Matthew’s Gospels but in both cases the story appears much later in Jesus’ ministry.
Luke places this passage immediately after the story of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, a passage we traditionally read on the first Sunday of Lent. Thus, Luke’s Gospel begins Jesus’ adult ministry with his baptism, then moves immediately to the 40 days and 40 nights of the temptation story, and continues with chapter 4, verse 14:
“Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.”
Thus, it’s obvious from the Gospels — all three Gospels — that Jesus was already well into his ministry when he arrived back in his hometown. It is, however, a pivotal moment in the Gospel stories. Harry T. Cook writes:
Luke 4: 14-21 has been called Jesus’ “maiden speech,” his “inaugural address” and even his “manifesto.” Its text is prima facie evidence of how Luke wanted Jesus’ mission to be perceived. It portrays a Jesus figure that resonates well with the social gospel, liberation theology and secular humanism. Salvation is seen as having to do not with just deserts or retributive justice in a then-and-there but with pure grace and distributive justice in the here-and-now — and, we might add, as a corrective to abuses inflicted by the principalities and powers on ordinary people.2
Jill Duffield, editor of the Presbyterian Outlook, suggests that the preacher du jour might consider making today’s Gospel passage into a “four S” sermon: Spirit, Synagogues, Sabbath, Scroll/Scripture.” 3I like the concept but today I propose to focus only on the first “S” — Spirit — what the Spirit said to Jesus and it says to us.
Luke says that Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah, what we now call chapter 61, verses 1 and 2. The Kirk Choir’s offertory anthem, Sir Edward Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me, adds verses 3 and 11. But in both cases, we are talking about God acting through the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ life: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Pastor Robert M. Brearly writes:
Even Jesus is not self-sufficient. He is dependent upon his God for life, faith, and mission. Our text, which finds Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, is preceded by the brief story of Jesus’ baptism and the somewhat longer account of his temptations in the wilderness. For Luke, all three episodes are Holy Spirit stories as the Spirit claims, tests, and empowers Jesus for the ministry that lies before him. The Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove while he is praying after his baptism and speaks the claiming word of affirmation. Then the Holy Spirit fills and leads Jesus into the wilderness for a time of testing as Jesus refuses the pathways that are the wrong choices for his servant ministry. Now as Jesus returns to Galilee, the Holy Spirit will fill him with power for ministry as he reads a text that will be his mission statement as Messiah. 4
This is the same Spirit that is at the center of the Apostle Paul’s great proclamation about the nature of the church, as written in what we now call his first letter to the church at Corinth. “What I want to talk about now are the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives,” writes Paul in the first chapter, using Eugene H. Peterson’s translation, The Message.
“God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit.” 5
I wrestled a long time with which translation to read of today’s Epistle lesson. It’s one of those passages that are ultra-familiar to many Christians, which means our eyes often glaze over when we hear it yet again. So reading a different translation can be helpful. On the other hand, Peterson’s background — former seminary professor who became a pastor, only to discover that his congregation has little, if any, familiarity with the Bible and felt they needed to hear the scriptures in a new light — means that he occasionally interjects preaching into the commentary. This is one of those times. Nonetheless, there is much to ponder as he translates I Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 4 through 31.
What I have been wrestling with as I prepared this sermon was the whole idea of the Holy Spirit working within this body, this congregation.
During the past year — through the “New Beginnings” process and its aftermath — I believe we have been seeing and feeling the Holy Spirit working anew at PPC. It has been a long process. My wife and I became members here in 1976 and I now feel as if the entire 40 years have been preparing us for this moment in time. That seems symbolic. The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the wilderness and Jesus spent 40 days in the desert prior to today’s Gospel reading, so 40 is a significant Biblical number.
As I said, what I have felt in the past few months, coming out of the New Beginnings process, is a new sense of the Holy Spirit. I just wish I could see it a bit more clearly. Our new Spanish-language pastor, Walter Contreras, is leading groups of people within all three language groups of our congregation to wrestle with a concept that he calls “Take 6.” The name comes from the six things that Jesus commanded us to do in Matthew 25: 31-40: feed the hungry, provide drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned.
None of these, my friends, are easy but they are what Jesus called us to do, first articulatedwhen he read from the Scroll of Isaiah:
“To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
At the same time, I am watching the Spirit move in two new groups working within our midst. One is our Disabilities Task Force, which is challenging us to welcome and provide for those who have hearing loss and/or who need assistance in walking, opening a door or using a bathroom. Meeting those challenges is not easy, in part because some of the solutions will require significant expenditures of money, which means re-thinking our budget priorities.
But caring and healing are part of Jesus’ call to us — we cannot escape it or blow it off.
A second emerging group is our Congregational Care Task Force, which is seeking to find new and innovative ways to care for this congregation and the community around us, both of which are growing older. This requires more radical re-thinking.
When I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, we expended amazing amounts of human and financial resources on Christian Education because we were in the midst of a baby boom. Even though the numbers are smaller today, this is still an important ministry and I’m pleased to report that we have seven English and Spanish young people who are in the midst of a Conformation Class that we hope will lead them to profess their faith in Jesus Christ and become members of this congregation.
Now, however, the priorities are changing. Those baby boomers and their parents of the 1950s and 1960s have grown older and are facing new challenges in our sunset years. Some of those challenges are physical, thus the Disabilities Task Force. Dr. Gary Brainerd, a member here at PPC, has said somewhat ruefully that there are only two types of people in this world: those that are physically challenged and those that will become physically challenged.
The same could be said for the mind. We are either mentally aging or will become so in the future. I’m not just talking about dementia or Alzheimer’s, although those are real and debilitating diseases. It’s also just slowing down. I often tell people that I can’t do at age 70 what I could do at age 60. My mother responds, “Just wait until you’re 92.” All around us, my friends, in our community of faith, in the high-rise apartments surrounding us, in the senior apartment complex that will replace the Kirk House one day, are people who are growing older and facing challenges. Often they face them alone. So it seems to me and others that we here at PPC need to find new ways for us to meet this call that God, through the Holy Spirit, is laying upon us as the body of Christ, aging though we all may be.
One aspect that makes this ministry unique is that much of it is one-on-one. It’s one person calling on another person to let them know that we care, that God still cares for them. It’s helping to identify which people need care from a congregation member or from a pastor. It’s writing a card, offering a prayer, maintaining a database, helping to convene a meeting, welcoming someone at the door to our Sanctuary, asking — and caring, really caring — how they are.
On Saturday night, Jonathan Mack and Vicki Ray will present an evening Cole Porter songs and stories. Many of you don’t realize how blessed we are to have Jonathan helping to lead the tenor section of our Kirk Choir. After he received degrees from USC, Jonathan was the lead lyric tenor at opera houses in Kiel and Dortmund in West Germany. He has sung more than 50 roles with Los Angeles and appeared with orchestras and opera companies all over the world. Now he’s back home and, among other things, singing with our choir.