1/20/13
1 Corinthians 12: 1-11
John 2: 1-11
Does anyone remember the name Althea Gibson? She was a great tennis player, the first African-American female on the professional tour and the first to win a major championship. Althea Gibson was a devout Christian, and somebody once asked her if she ever prayed before a match; and she said, “I pray, but I don’t pray to win. I pray for the inspiration to give my best.” She understood that she had been given certain gifts by God, and that with God’s help she would use them the best she could. She understood that that was the point, that was what her gifts were for: it wasn’t about her, it was about honoring God’s gifts by doing her best with them.
Each of us has gifts from God. It doesn’t matter what they are. What’s important is how we use them.
The apostle Paul talks about gifts in today’s reading from his letter to the Christians in Corinth. The city of Corinth is on the narrow isthmus between Greece proper and the Peloponnesian peninsula. Corinth was a major center for trade and shipping, and its population was largely immigrant: people from all over the Mediterranean, with their different cultures, and their gods and belief systems. Because Corinth had such a diverse population, the church Paul established there started to fracture pretty soon after he left them.
This is why First Corinthians is the kind of letter it is. Paul is not here primarily concerned with setting forth religious doctrine, as he is in Romans and Galatians. Most of the time, in this letter, Paul is addressing specific problems that have arisen out of the day-to-day life of the Corinthian church. And by “church”, I’m not referring to a building Paul built, or a hall he rented (neither of which he did); I mean the group of people who heard and responded to what he had told them about Jesus Christ, people who felt the truth of the gospel . That’s what a church is. And this church, this group of people, had been having a lot of problems.
One of them was that this small church had already begun to split up into factions; one of which seems to have been a group of charismatics – people with a very active spiritual life - who claimed to have a variety of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues; and unfortunately these people seem to have established a pecking order within the church: not only playing spiritual one-upmanship with each other, but looking down their noses at pretty much everybody else.
Paul addresses this situation by talking to the church about what spiritual gifts actually are. And he is not speaking in exhortation, he is not trying to rally the Corinthians behind a particular belief: he is trying to teach them something real, something he has experienced, something he knows about. That’s why, at the beginning of the passage, he talks in terms of information: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.” I have to say this actually doesn’t sound like Paul: it’s a little too polite.
Paul lists a number of spiritual gifts, but it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list: they’re just examples. And though he mentions them in a certain order, he isn’t ranking them, as apparently the Corinthians had been doing: he says at the outset, there are varieties of gifts, and services, and activities, but they all proceed from the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God. So it is God to whom we should be looking to hold up in thanks and praise, not the gifts themselves, nor the people to whom these gifts have temporarily been given. It is important that we recognize them as gifts, Paul is saying: we have been given them, so on the most basic level of reality, they’re not ours. We are stewards of such gifts, caretakers; they all come from the same source, and we should all use them toward the same end. What is that?
When you or I say to someone, You have a gift for this or that, we’re usually referring to something about them that we admire, and we mean it as a compliment (you have a gift for getting things done/you have a gift for fixing things with your hands/you have a gift for making people laugh.)
But in this passage from Corinthians Paul is not talking about gifts this way. He talks about various spiritual gifts, not as particular qualities to be admired, but as particular abilities to be used; and to be used with a particular purpose in mind, a purpose which Paul seems so to take for granted that, when he mentions it, it sounds almost like a sidelong reference: Paul says that these gifts are to be used “for the common good.” Right now, in the Corinthian church, that’s not how they’re being used: they’re being displayed as badges of achievement, they’re status symbols.
Now, some of the spiritual gifts Paul mentions we would certainly recognize as such today: utterance of wisdom, utterance of knowledge, faith, healing. There are others that seem a little more from another time, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be misled by that. Paul mentions prophecy, for example. Well, we tend to think of prophecy as foretelling the future. It’s not. Speaking prophetically, in the Biblical sense, means telling the truth to people who need to recognize it and either don’t want to or can’t. It’s not going to make you popular; but it is definitely a gift of the spirit.
Paul also mentions the working of miracles. Does anybody work miracles today? Well, let’s look at the miracle in today’s gospel story, the wedding at Cana, Jesus turning the water into wine. The evangelist John doesn’t call this a miracle, he calls it a “sign”, as he does a couple of other times in the gospel, notably the raising of Lazarus. These are signs, that is, we’re not simply to stand there and gawk at them; they are representations of something greater and more profound that lie behind them, and that’s what we should be paying attention to. In the case of Jesus’ miracles, they are signs of who Jesus is, of what God is doing in this man.
Jesus performs the miracle, of course; but there are others involved.
The first person John mentions in this story is the mother of Jesus, Mary. The wedding is in the village of Cana, which is about ten miles from Nazareth, and John tells us that Mary is at the wedding, and that Jesus and his disciples have also been invited. So the way he tells it, at the beginning, John is distancing Mary and Jesus just a little. They haven’t come to the wedding together, as a family; so Jesus and Mary are separate, at the beginning of the story.
The wedding runs out of wine; and Mary goes to Jesus, and tells him, They have no wine. Now, this is a big problem, not because everybody at the wedding has to drink as much as they can, it’s not about binge drinking. It’s that the job of the host is to provide people the hospitality he’s promised them, and not to come up empty-handed. In this way the wedding feast is a representation of the infinite riches of love; so if they run out of wine, in some way it’s not really a wedding, the way it should be. Everyone there knows this.
Mary comes to Jesus and says, They have no wine. She’s not gossiping, and she’s not just keeping Jesus up to date on what’s happening. She tells him this for a reason. She is exercising a particular spiritual gift, actually one of those mentioned by Paul: and it is the gift of the discernment of spirits. Discernment, in this way of speaking, has to do with recognizing where God is in a given time and place. The Bible tells us that Mary has known the truth about who Jesus is since the Annunciation, since before he was born; but John tells us that here, at this moment, Mary is discerning something about how the Spirit of God is uniquely present in her son Jesus. She discerns that the situation at the wedding has a spiritual dimension. She discerns that Jesus can and will do something about it, something that nobody else can do. She doesn’t know what that is, exactly: we see that in what she says to the servants: Do whatever he tells you. She tells Jesus, They have no wine; and then she gets out of the way, and waits to see what’s going to happen.
Jesus does the miracle, certainly; but Mary starts the ball rolling. Jesus’ first reaction is to put the problem off: What concern is that to you and to me? My hour is not yet come. But the seed is planted, and the miracle happens. Mary put her spiritual gift to work, for the common good.
When we use God’s gifts that way, we make room for the Holy Spirit to work. It’s like opening an electric circuit. And even though whatever we’re doing may look like a small thing at first, who knows how far it’s going to reach? Mary says four words to Jesus: They have no wine. Where did that end up? It hasn’t ended up yet. It’s alive in us, 2000 years later, halfway around the world. When we use our spiritual gifts for the common good, the power of God, working in us, really can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Thanks be to God.
The Rev. Jack Gilpin
1 Corinthians 12: 1-11
John 2: 1-11
Does anyone remember the name Althea Gibson? She was a great tennis player, the first African-American female on the professional tour and the first to win a major championship. Althea Gibson was a devout Christian, and somebody once asked her if she ever prayed before a match; and she said, “I pray, but I don’t pray to win. I pray for the inspiration to give my best.” She understood that she had been given certain gifts by God, and that with God’s help she would use them the best she could. She understood that that was the point, that was what her gifts were for: it wasn’t about her, it was about honoring God’s gifts by doing her best with them.
Each of us has gifts from God. It doesn’t matter what they are. What’s important is how we use them.
The apostle Paul talks about gifts in today’s reading from his letter to the Christians in Corinth. The city of Corinth is on the narrow isthmus between Greece proper and the Peloponnesian peninsula. Corinth was a major center for trade and shipping, and its population was largely immigrant: people from all over the Mediterranean, with their different cultures, and their gods and belief systems. Because Corinth had such a diverse population, the church Paul established there started to fracture pretty soon after he left them.
This is why First Corinthians is the kind of letter it is. Paul is not here primarily concerned with setting forth religious doctrine, as he is in Romans and Galatians. Most of the time, in this letter, Paul is addressing specific problems that have arisen out of the day-to-day life of the Corinthian church. And by “church”, I’m not referring to a building Paul built, or a hall he rented (neither of which he did); I mean the group of people who heard and responded to what he had told them about Jesus Christ, people who felt the truth of the gospel . That’s what a church is. And this church, this group of people, had been having a lot of problems.
One of them was that this small church had already begun to split up into factions; one of which seems to have been a group of charismatics – people with a very active spiritual life - who claimed to have a variety of spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues; and unfortunately these people seem to have established a pecking order within the church: not only playing spiritual one-upmanship with each other, but looking down their noses at pretty much everybody else.
Paul addresses this situation by talking to the church about what spiritual gifts actually are. And he is not speaking in exhortation, he is not trying to rally the Corinthians behind a particular belief: he is trying to teach them something real, something he has experienced, something he knows about. That’s why, at the beginning of the passage, he talks in terms of information: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.” I have to say this actually doesn’t sound like Paul: it’s a little too polite.
Paul lists a number of spiritual gifts, but it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list: they’re just examples. And though he mentions them in a certain order, he isn’t ranking them, as apparently the Corinthians had been doing: he says at the outset, there are varieties of gifts, and services, and activities, but they all proceed from the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God. So it is God to whom we should be looking to hold up in thanks and praise, not the gifts themselves, nor the people to whom these gifts have temporarily been given. It is important that we recognize them as gifts, Paul is saying: we have been given them, so on the most basic level of reality, they’re not ours. We are stewards of such gifts, caretakers; they all come from the same source, and we should all use them toward the same end. What is that?
When you or I say to someone, You have a gift for this or that, we’re usually referring to something about them that we admire, and we mean it as a compliment (you have a gift for getting things done/you have a gift for fixing things with your hands/you have a gift for making people laugh.)
But in this passage from Corinthians Paul is not talking about gifts this way. He talks about various spiritual gifts, not as particular qualities to be admired, but as particular abilities to be used; and to be used with a particular purpose in mind, a purpose which Paul seems so to take for granted that, when he mentions it, it sounds almost like a sidelong reference: Paul says that these gifts are to be used “for the common good.” Right now, in the Corinthian church, that’s not how they’re being used: they’re being displayed as badges of achievement, they’re status symbols.
Now, some of the spiritual gifts Paul mentions we would certainly recognize as such today: utterance of wisdom, utterance of knowledge, faith, healing. There are others that seem a little more from another time, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be misled by that. Paul mentions prophecy, for example. Well, we tend to think of prophecy as foretelling the future. It’s not. Speaking prophetically, in the Biblical sense, means telling the truth to people who need to recognize it and either don’t want to or can’t. It’s not going to make you popular; but it is definitely a gift of the spirit.
Paul also mentions the working of miracles. Does anybody work miracles today? Well, let’s look at the miracle in today’s gospel story, the wedding at Cana, Jesus turning the water into wine. The evangelist John doesn’t call this a miracle, he calls it a “sign”, as he does a couple of other times in the gospel, notably the raising of Lazarus. These are signs, that is, we’re not simply to stand there and gawk at them; they are representations of something greater and more profound that lie behind them, and that’s what we should be paying attention to. In the case of Jesus’ miracles, they are signs of who Jesus is, of what God is doing in this man.
Jesus performs the miracle, of course; but there are others involved.
The first person John mentions in this story is the mother of Jesus, Mary. The wedding is in the village of Cana, which is about ten miles from Nazareth, and John tells us that Mary is at the wedding, and that Jesus and his disciples have also been invited. So the way he tells it, at the beginning, John is distancing Mary and Jesus just a little. They haven’t come to the wedding together, as a family; so Jesus and Mary are separate, at the beginning of the story.
The wedding runs out of wine; and Mary goes to Jesus, and tells him, They have no wine. Now, this is a big problem, not because everybody at the wedding has to drink as much as they can, it’s not about binge drinking. It’s that the job of the host is to provide people the hospitality he’s promised them, and not to come up empty-handed. In this way the wedding feast is a representation of the infinite riches of love; so if they run out of wine, in some way it’s not really a wedding, the way it should be. Everyone there knows this.
Mary comes to Jesus and says, They have no wine. She’s not gossiping, and she’s not just keeping Jesus up to date on what’s happening. She tells him this for a reason. She is exercising a particular spiritual gift, actually one of those mentioned by Paul: and it is the gift of the discernment of spirits. Discernment, in this way of speaking, has to do with recognizing where God is in a given time and place. The Bible tells us that Mary has known the truth about who Jesus is since the Annunciation, since before he was born; but John tells us that here, at this moment, Mary is discerning something about how the Spirit of God is uniquely present in her son Jesus. She discerns that the situation at the wedding has a spiritual dimension. She discerns that Jesus can and will do something about it, something that nobody else can do. She doesn’t know what that is, exactly: we see that in what she says to the servants: Do whatever he tells you. She tells Jesus, They have no wine; and then she gets out of the way, and waits to see what’s going to happen.
Jesus does the miracle, certainly; but Mary starts the ball rolling. Jesus’ first reaction is to put the problem off: What concern is that to you and to me? My hour is not yet come. But the seed is planted, and the miracle happens. Mary put her spiritual gift to work, for the common good.
When we use God’s gifts that way, we make room for the Holy Spirit to work. It’s like opening an electric circuit. And even though whatever we’re doing may look like a small thing at first, who knows how far it’s going to reach? Mary says four words to Jesus: They have no wine. Where did that end up? It hasn’t ended up yet. It’s alive in us, 2000 years later, halfway around the world. When we use our spiritual gifts for the common good, the power of God, working in us, really can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Thanks be to God.
The Rev. Jack Gilpin
