The Gifts at the Bottom of the Bag

But what is the weirdest thing that someone's found in their bag? Someone shout out something that you shared. Yeah, Ali. Please tell me it was closed. Interesting. Anyone talking about spaghetti-os in a purse? Oh, there's a story there. Anyone beat somebody else's passport? Sorry? I found a sandwich in the bottom of my school bag once that was... All right. So the reason that I started with that slightly silly analogy is that we've been talking in this sermon series about the things that we carry.

And what I want to talk about today is something that maybe we've forgotten that we've been carrying or haven't noticed that we've been carrying or didn't even realize that we've had in the first place. And we're going to talk today about spiritual gifts, which is not something that we talk a lot about here at the table, which is why I was sort of thinking about maybe it's in the bottom of our bag somewhere. Maybe it's... maybe we haven't taken it out to take a look at it in a while.

So, good morning. I'm Matt. As Ternetta mentioned, I'm part of the preaching team here at the table. And I'm going to carry on this series, everything we carry. So I want to build on what Pastor Ternetta talked about last week.

So last week, Pastor Ternetta talked about the subversive power of the Holy Spirit. That the Spirit comes to empower, to bring life, to liberate. And one of the ways that the Holy Spirit does that, one of the ways that the Spirit works, is through one thing that we all carry, which is spiritual gifts.

So I think part of the reason that we haven't talked about gifts at the table much is that a lot of us carry wounds and trauma from people misusing spiritual gifts. Some people grew up in churches maybe where if you were told that you couldn't pray in tongues, you weren't a Christian. Or someone prayed over you and you didn't get better, and that was your fault because your faith wasn't strong enough.

And then maybe some of us came from churches that skipped over the spiritual gifts altogether. We just spent more time in the palatable, more fruits of the Spirit. This is what it looks like when the Spirit's here.

And for some of us, this is all new, and you're like, what are you talking about? What is Pentecost and what are spiritual gifts? So I'm going to try and unpack some of that today.

I want us to dig around in that sort of virtual bag that we're carrying, or imaginary bag that we're carrying, and see if we can find that spiritual gift. Some of us have buried it. Some of us carry it, knowing it's important, but just don't really know what to do with it.

And maybe some of us, and this is kind of what happened to me as I was writing the sermon, which is why it's changed so much from when I started it. Is that you kind of start digging around in this, and you find something that you'd sort of forgotten, and you pull it out, and you're like, does this still work? There's an old joke, right, that when archaeologists are digging up the early part of the 21st century, they'll find a Nokia 3310, and it'll still have 20% battery in 2000 years' time.

That's the spiritual gifts that we're talking about, those things that are there that still work, but we just need to, we maybe need to figure out what they are, and how they help us. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read two pieces of scripture back to back, and then we're going to explore some of the gifts. I imagine that these two will be, at least one of these should be fairly familiar to folks, but let's dig in.

So I'm going to do both of them back to back, and then I'm going to jump around between them. So if you want to keep both of them open, they will be 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and Romans 12. So, starting in 1 Corinthians 12, verse 7.

Now to each one, the manifestation of the spirit is given for the common good. To one, there is given a spirit of a message of wisdom. To another, a message of knowledge by the same spirit.

To another, faith by the same spirit. And to another, gifts of healing by that one spirit. To another, miraculous powers, and to another, prophecy.

To another, distinguishing between the spirits. To another, speaking in different kinds of tongues. And to still another, the interpretation of tongues.

All these are work of one and the same spirit, and they distribute them to each one, just as they determine. And now switching down to Romans 12, and we're starting in verse 6. We have different gifts according to the grace given to each of us.

If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith. If it is serving, then serve. If it is teaching, then teach.

If it is to encourage, then give it encouragement. If it's giving, give generously. If it is to lead, do so diligently.

And if it is to show mercy, do it cheer. So I want to point out a couple of similarities between these passages, and then we'll dig a little bit into a couple of the gifts and how to steward them. We do not have time to talk through each of the gifts and all their manifestations, but I want to highlight a couple that I think are relevant to us here at the table today.

But the first thing I want to say, and I've said this already, but I want to ground it in Scripture, is that both passages are really clear that we all have spiritual gifts. This is not something that some people get and some people don't. There isn't a hierarchy of who gets gifts and who doesn't.

If we dig around in that bag that we're carrying, we'll probably be able to find it. We may need to figure out a little bit of what it is. And part of our work as followers of Jesus, both individually, and I really want to stress this, individually and collectively, is to nurture these gifts.

Because they're given for the good of the community. So that means we can't just say, oh, I found this thing, I don't know what it is, put it away. But it's also important that we discover and we manifest and we think about these gifts in community.

You can do a lot of harm trying to figure out your spiritual gifts on your own. And I also think, in addition to these gifts being given for the common good, they can be for our good too. Particularly, I think, in times of doubt or struggle.

Because these gifts, these manifestations of the Spirit, they remind us that God is actually real. That God's power is real. That God's Spirit is real.

That God's liberation is real. And that even as we're in community, we're not alone in this community. Many of us here are drawn to the work of justice and liberation.

And many of us are following in the footsteps of Jesus and his disciples as we do that. But just occasionally, maybe I need to be reminded of this. Maybe we all need to be reminded of this.

Just occasionally, we need to be reminded that we're not following a dead saint with some liberative ideas, but a living God who still moves and still works and still acts with power. And that we, as God's people, get to witness and participate in and serve as agents of God's liberation through the power of God's Spirit living in us. The Spirit's gifts are one of the most tangible ways we have to be sure that the God we're following is alive and well.

Praying out loud, for example, may allow you to express your desire for peace, for healing, for yet another reckoning on race. But maybe praying in tongues gives us that reminder that we're not alone, that God is working through us even in difficult times. And being in a place where gifts are well stewarded, used with discernment, can be edifying and restorative places when we're feeling exhausted or distant from God.

So gifts are good for edification of the community. They're a good reminder for us that the Spirit of God is alive and well. But I think, particularly in this community, there's some real trepidation around gifts, regardless of your background.

I think we can all call to mind examples of places where gifts have been used for self-promotion or control or to create hierarchies or to oppress. And I wonder as well, if we call those images to mind, whether we're anxious about using our own gifts or exploring our own gifts, because what if we repeat the harm that was done to us? What if we mess up and cause harm to someone else?

So that's where I want to start, and we'll see where we go. So turning back to the two passages, we've done a lot of talking about Paul, and we worked through a whole series on Romans a few months ago. So very brief summary.

Both of these are letters. For the purposes of this sermon, we'll say they're both written by Paul, the same person. And they're both written to very different contexts.

But one of the things that you'll notice as you read the two lists of gifts is that they're quite different. And this happens sometimes in Scripture. If you read Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, you get slightly different versions of the creation story.

Luke's telling of the Sermon on the Mount looks a little bit different to Matthew's. But these two lists of gifts aren't slightly different. It's more like Genesis 1 saying, on day one, God created light and dark, and Genesis 2 saying, on day one, he went to McDonald's.

These are very different lists. But there is one gift that's common across both lists, and so that's where I want to start. And the gift that's mentioned in both lists is the gift of prophecy, which caught me slightly off guard when I read that, because what's so special about prophecy?

Why does Paul mention it both times? And why is it so crucial to building this community? Why does Paul think prophecy is so vital to any community that follows Jesus?

So let's start with what we mean by a prophet. I think sometimes when we think of prophet, we think of Isaiah making bold proclamations to the Israelites in exile, or Moses coming down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, or maybe John the Baptist shouting in the desert.

But prophecy isn't just making these proclamations that resonate across centuries. Walter Brueggemann, in his book, Prophetic Imagination, describes it like this. Alternative prophetic community is concerned with both criticizing and energizing.

On the one hand, it is to show that the dominant powers will indeed end, and that that power has no final claim on us. On the other hand, it is the task of the prophetic community to present alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality. So we see that in the work of people like Isaiah.

We see that in the work of people like Moses. But it's also much more day-to-day. Prophecy bridges the spiritual gap between what could be and what currently is.

Prophecy is the vision that we cast to bring about the kingdom of collective liberation. It's being able to say, this is what this looks like. Prophets bridge these two worlds, the one that is and the one that is to come.

Those with the gifts of prophecy can do two things. They can see the faults of the world. They can call out injustice, pain, needs of the community, and can envision a community, a body of Christ or a spiritual expression where those needs are met, where injustices are overcome, and where pain heals.

Prophecy can be art. Prophecy can be poetry. But prophecy is calling out what is and presenting a vision of what can be.

For example, if anyone's read William Still's collection of letters from the Underground Railroad, you'll hear the voices of enslaved people yearning to be free, knowing intuitively that slavery was an injustice. Regardless of how well the people were kept by their owners, regardless of how well people felt they were treated, something about the institution of slavery was just wrong. But these letters alone were not enough.

It took the vision of William Still, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and countless others to envision the abolition of slavery, to outline the roots of the Underground Railroad, to present a vision of a community where slavery did not exist. It took John Barry Meacham to teach freedom in freedom schools, to cast that vision into the next generation. Knowing the problem isn't enough.

Knowing that we are in a place where we are, where something is wrong, is not sufficient. The gift of prophecy, the great gift of prophecy, is to envision, describe, and help us bridge the gap between the injustice that is and the freedom that is to come. But here our two lists diverge.

In Romans, Paul is describing the conditions needed to build a fledgling community of believers. Those who serve, those who teach, those who give, those who lead. And that was necessary, because without going too deep in this, the church that Paul was writing to in the context of Romans was a place full of tension between those who were raised in the Jewish community

and those who were raised in Greek or Roman or other religious traditions. Paul's letter on the church was seeking to bridge those divides, build community, find common ground, take care of one another in the midst of empire, but with these huge divisions. So Paul writes to this church, a place of bridging divides, creating a subversive culture, a place where tradition could be questioned, but the scripture and the centrality of the life of Jesus was important,

a place where mercy was practiced as people from different backgrounds and traditions came together to try and figure out what the life of Jesus would look like in their devised metropolitan capital. But the thing is, without the gift of prophecy, without the gift of seeing where this community is supposed to go, without the gift of seeing the path towards liberation, all of those other gifts are really just good organizational practices.

But in the Corinthians passage, Paul is writing to an established church, and sure, it's one with problems, including how they use the gifts in the church. Some felt that gifts were a crucial part of worship. Others felt that they carried over from their former traditions that they'd left behind to follow Jesus.

And all were confused. And into this confusion, Paul provides a list of gifts that are also of the spirit. But these gifts go beyond creating that safe space for believers, like we saw in the Romans passage.

These gifts are a guide to changing the world. These gifts are words of knowledge, words of wisdom, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles, the ability to distinguish between spirits, speaking in tongues and interpreting tongues. If you're anything like me, as you go through that list, it gets progressively more uncomfortable.

Wisdom, knowledge, faith, fine, healing, yeah, all right, yeah, okay. Miracles, spiritual divination, what is happening here? What is this all about?

In case you didn't know, I grew up in a relatively traditional, and frankly, unremarkable, Anglican church in England. We didn't really talk about gifts much. We did occasionally look over at some of the weird stuff that was happening in America and be very distrustful of revivals and manifestations of the spirit, like speaking in tongues.

We didn't understand it. We very much lived in the Romans passage. These are the gifts of building good community.

And then during college, I was a part of a campus ministry, also a fairly charismatic church for several years. And one of the things that we used to do in both of those places was we would pray for each other, but not just for named things, right, when you're in a small group and everyone goes around and asks for things for prayer. But we'd pray over people often with periods of silence and meditation to see if there was a word or an image that came to mind that we felt we should share.

And here's the thing. Sometimes we talk, you know, we'd pray over someone and we'd all sort of share what we saw or heard afterwards. And the person would just sit there like, okay, come on, wrap it up.

None of this is helpful. And then other times you'd share something and it would really hit someone. It would make sense.

That word landed. Sometimes we'd pray over the ministry. And one of the things that we used to do was we'd each write down sort of a word or draw a picture of what came to mind.

And a lot of the time when we all came back together, these were disconnected words and phrases. But sometimes they told a cohesive story. Sometimes they gave us a pathway forwards.

Now, if you put that experience to Science Mike, who is one of the liturgist podcasters and wrote the book, Finding God in the Waves, he'd likely point out two things. He has a great phrase, WWRDS, which is, what would Richard Dawkins say? It's a beautiful phrase.

What Richard Dawkins would say is that AI has consciousness. So that's a whole other thing for another day. Sorry.

So, if you put this sort of wondrous prayerful experience in front of someone like Science Mike, he might point out two things. The first is that when you pray for someone you know, you're thinking about them. Maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously.

Maybe you're putting things together that they've said. And as you're thinking closely about them based on new conversations and history, you may be able to share something that's meaningful because you've sort of put it together. It's not some miraculous discernment.

It's just, I was listening to you. I heard what you said. And here's what I think maybe is reflecting back to you.

And hey, if you're all in the same ministry and you're all concerned with the same things that are happening in that place, maybe if you all sit down and think for a minute about what we need to do, you do actually all come up with the same thing because you're all stressed about the same things. And maybe he's right.

Maybe it was nothing. But here's the thing. The more I did it, the more I prayed with people, the more we prayed in groups over people, the more we prayed and reflected on our ministry, the more often we were likely to be able to share words with each other that had meaning and had impact.

I will also say, just as an aside, we had a pretty strict list of like red flag rules that if you see something or you think you've got a word of something, it doesn't matter how convicted you are, you're not talking about marriage, relationships, health, children, or death. You cannot share those in any context.

It does not matter how convicted you are. But within that framework, one of the things that we found a lot was we were able to pray and share things with people for whom these words and pictures made a difference. And it made a profound impact on people.

And I can't fully explain how praying over someone that you barely know, you share a picture or a word with them and it makes sense to them. I can't explain it. So what I'm getting at in a sort of a roundabout way, because as you may have noticed, this is quite uncomfortable for me, I think we need to spend more time in that 1 Corinthians 12 passage.

What does it mean for us as the table church to follow the prophecy of liberation into the gap between what is and what will be? What does it mean for us to dream of liberation, preach against clear and present evils, and then do something about it. And here's where we run into the weight of everything we carry collectively here at the table.

Some of us have been deeply hurt by the same gifts that have nourished others. Some have had random strangers come up to them and give them a word from the Lord, which is usually followed by something homophobic or sexist or both. While others have experienced that same blessing of someone, a stranger, sharing a word that still resonates years later.

Some of us have been in places where praying in tongues is a beautiful part of spontaneous worship. And others have been in places where whatever the work of the Spirit was doing, it's been corrupted by people faking it to make themselves look good. And then we find ourselves in this second tension.

If you look at the gifts of Romans, they're kind of easy to quantify into a little quiz. Do you find yourself eager to give money? Do you prioritize giving at the start of every month?

That's a lot easier of a question to ask than something like, when terminally ill people touch your cloak, how often do they instantly get better? There's also a much lower, for the most part, much lower stakes with the Romans' gifts. If I think my gift is to be encouraging, and I go around attempting to encourage people, and I'm bad at it, I'm probably kind of annoying, but at some point someone's going to tell me to shut up,

and I'll realize that that's not my gift, and I'll go back to something else. With the gift of healing, the gift of miracles, the gift of prophecy, we can do a lot of harm really quickly if we get it wrong. But here's the question that I'm left with.

How do we know if we have the gift of interpreting tongues if no one's speaking in tongues? How do we know if we have a gift of performing signs and wonders if we've never tried? How do we know if we have the gift of healing if we're too scared to confront the people who are hurting?

How do we know if the word or the picture that we've seen when praying over someone is the work of the spirit unless we share it with them? And then even if we're fairly sure, and I would say, you know, I've sort of joked about the spiritual gift surveys. I think they have a place in some contexts, but I think it's really important that we identify and nurture spiritual gifts in community.

I don't think taking a quiz and finding the top three things is necessarily helpful for spiritual formation. Even if we as a community are convinced that this is the gift that this person has, how do we steward it? How do we steward it collectively and how do they steward it individually for the good of the community?

What does it mean to not just comprehend problems, but to dream big about solutions, to articulate them prophetically and join with the power of the spirit to be a force for liberation? So here's my unsatisfactory answer to all of those questions. Here at the table, we do want you to grow in your gifts.

Daniel talked a lot about some of the things that are coming up over the next few weeks. So in addition to this series, in addition to working through everything we carry, we're moving into this sort of time of reflection, empowerment, service. And one of those questions is, how do we honor people's gifts?

How do we acknowledge that they might come with baggage? How do we give people space to grow their gifts without setting back others' healing? After service today, we're going to have a short time of prayer.

Come and join us. That's a great way to sit in space with others, to think through these gifts. Even if prayer isn't your thing, even if communal prayer is terrifying, come and sit in silence.

So let me close with this. This was hard to write, and I think it's hard because this is such a difficult topic for many of us for many reasons. But I think I've landed on a couple of truths.

The first is that the gifts of the Spirit are a powerful reminder of the presence of God in our lives. Leaning into our gifts, building ourselves up, brings the presence of God into our community. And I think as a community, we need to work collectively to identify each other's gifts, bring them to the fore, and support each other in developing the talents and gifts

that will move the table into our next six. So let's pray. Spirit of God, for so many of us, we have questions about gifts, trepidations about using them, trauma from them being misused.

As we move into this new period of growth for the table, we pray that you would help us to collectively identify the gifts that we value, to nurture and steward the gifts that we see, and to use in our community. Amen.