Sermon:
May 16, 2004
Sunday Night Alive  

Scripture:
Romans 12:3-8

During the first week, we focused on how life in the Spirit is a transformation experience that begins by no longer allowing ourselves to be conformed to the world, but by experiencing a renewal of the mind. And I talked about how the renewal of the mind begins with the decisive act of accepting God’s grace, freely extended to us. Or, rather, I preached about choosing to feed on the Everlasting Gobstopper of God’s love. 

Tonight we’re invited to consider how our minds are further renewed and our life is given meaning and direction through the claiming and the sharing of our spiritual gifts. I’d like to pick up again from Romans, chapter 12, beginning with verse three: 

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we who are many are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy in proportion to faith, ministry in ministering, the teacher in teaching, the exhorter in exhortation, the giver in generosity, the leader in diligence, the compassionate in cheerfulness. 

When I preached my very first sermon in this church, almost five years ago now, I preached about the story of a young, beginning pastor, just fresh out of seminary, who wanted to be the perfect pastor. He worked very hard. He spent lots of hours putting together his sermon. He went around and visited all of the shut-ins. He was very careful about constructing prayers that had long, meaningful thoughts connected together. He was very good about organizing and leading the committees. And he did his best to please most everyone. You can imagine his delight when, following the worship service one morning not too long after he had been there, he was greeted by one of his parishioners who shook his hand and said to him, “You know, I just love you. You are the model pastor. You are so warm.” 

Well, he felt pretty good about that. So he went home and, later that afternoon, he pulled out his dictionary and looked up “model preacher.” And under “model” he found “A small imitation of the real thing.” And then he looked up “warm,” and it said “Not so hot.”

Today, I’d like to tell you the story of another pastor in her first church. She, too, wanted to be the perfect pastor. She worked many long hours, balancing each week with doing it all. She had studied hard in seminary and she worked hard to apply what she had learned in Greek classes and Hebrew and theology and biblical exegesis in order to develop very thoughtful and interesting sermons. Her experience through high school and college in gaining business and secretarial skills allowed her to relish in the fact that she could whip off the weekly bulletin in a couple of hours and a monthly church newsletter in an afternoon’s time, because there was no secretary. And having played school and taught her brothers and the children that she babysat from an early age served for her as a complimentary ability in her seeking the challenge to develop an after school program for children in the community, where she could not only teach and organize, but also write curriculum. Finally, like the pastor in the first story, she also knew the importance of visiting and developing warm, friendly relationships with her parishioners. In fact, having learned in seminary class that she was to visit one hour for every minute that she preached, she set about to make at least ten home visits each week and keep regular office hours when others could stop by and visit, in addition to the regular hospital hours and visits. 

This young pastor did very well. She was well liked for her preaching. She brought energy to the programming and the ministries of the church. The church was fond of her ability to run all the office machines. And people often commented favorably about how she spent so many hours visiting in homes and hospitals. In turn, the pastor began to feel very confident in her abilities and the importance of her ministry. Yet, despite all her hard work and dedication and her many displayed abilities, there were two important things that happened that would forever change her life. 

First, only a little more than a year into her ministry, a 55-year-old woman in the parish hung herself with a shoelace in the doorway between a living room and kitchen. The young pastor had, earlier in the day, put a church newsletter in her car to hand deliver to this woman as an excuse to visit, knowing that the woman had not been in church for several weeks. But other demands of the day had taken precedence and the hour was growing late, so the young pastor decided to wait and visit the woman the next day. It was too late. 

The second experience was a phone call received from a parishioner who was going through a nasty divorce with her husband. Both she and her husband had been accused of abusing their own children. Earlier in the month, the young pastor had been subpoenaed to court by the mother. The pastor had chosen to be evasive with the lawyers, feeling that she, as a pastor, was not qualified to make judgment over which parent was telling the truth or which parent was the safer one for the children. The phone call that she received that day was one in which the mother was crying hysterically at the news that her daughter, who had been removed from her home by the Friend of the Court and placed in the care of another couple, had now been raped by the man who had not been investigated. Had there been an investigation prior, the court would have discovered he was wanted in another state for the same crime. 

Is it a true story? Yes. And those of you who know me know that it’s not only a true story, but it’s my story. Why do I tell it? For shock value? No. For confession? No. But rather because I think it’s a perfect illustration of the Romans 12 passage. It is a story from which my real interest in and passion for spiritual gifts comes.

My initial response to these incidences was feelings of guilt and responsibility at not having known or done enough. It led me to work harder, try to do more, enroll in additional training for pastoral counseling, read more books, consult more resources, and seek to make myself even more available to people. In addition, I pushed the church to do more and more outreach and service to the community. But as much as I pushed, I could not make the nagging voice inside go away. I knew that I was doing lots of things well and people appreciated what I did. And deep down, I knew that what had happened was not my fault, that I was a good pastor, and had done everything I knew to do and done it well. But I was becoming more and more tired and questioning myself and God’s will for me more and more. I was struggling in my prayer life and my heart to feel the assurance of God’s direction in my life and in my ministry. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, I realize I was, after only three years in the pastoral ministry, fast approaching burn-out. 

Turning to the help of a spiritual director, I had my heart and my mind renewed as together we began to deeply explore my spiritual gifts and God’s call upon my life. In the passage that I read to you from Romans, Paul was trying to get the attention of the Roman church, to relate to them God’s caution—caution that in their zeal and their enthusiasm for ministry, they were tending toward self seeking and self aggrandizement. Paul calls them to instead focus upon the unique and individual ways that each has been gifted. 

For me, these events got my attention. Not that I was particularly thinking of myself too highly, but I certainly was not thinking of myself realistically. For so much did I want to be successful, well liked and a pleasing pastor, and to build a church membership while not letting anything fall through the cracks—so much did I have an idea of both what it would take and some sense of the ability to do so—that I was trying to do it all and be it all. It was through these events that I heard God’s caution to me and my spiritual director’s invitation to take a long, hard look at how God had gifted me and who God had created and called me to be. It was through these events that my real interest in spiritual gifts developed, and I began to experience a transformation. 

So you ask, what are spiritual gifts? The scriptures list nineteen different spiritual gifts. Some of them are on the boxes wrapped this evening. Scholars, in various inventories, argue about the number of spiritual gifts that there are, depending upon whether you stick to the ones that are only specified in scripture or you expand it to include others, and depending upon which scriptures you look to. What we do know from today’s scripture is this: that spiritual gifts are given to us through the grace of God. They’re not something that we have the power to choose. They vary according to the person. They are also different than talents. 

When I say they are different than talents, I often like to suggest that there are things we learn to do well. We are talented at those things we do well. But there are other things in our lives that we just naturally are able to do, and those are our gifts. Each person has spiritual gifts. It is the will of God, according to the Romans passage, that they are to be used for God and for the good of all God’s creation. When we live and share them, that is when we are living in God’s will. That is when we grow in the fruits of the Spirit most naturally. And it is when we use our gifts that we know real joy, peace and harmony in our lives, as well as help to bring about harmony in God’s creation. 

I’m one of those people who, from the time I was very young, thought that God had a specific plan for my life and that I best get it right. But I couldn’t get God to give me a clear vision. I couldn’t get it in a dream. I couldn’t get a voice in the sky or a bolt of lightning. And because I had learned to do so many things as a child and was pretty good at a lot of them, I think I eventually ended up in the ministry because there I could do it all and not really have to make any decisions about it. But exploring my spiritual gifts—what they are, which ones I had, and how living in God’s will is not so much about choosing between door number one, door number two or curtain number three, but rather is about living and acting out of our giftedness—was a freeing experience for me. 

It also helped me to appreciate and understand how, though my parents had invested a lot of education and lessons into my becoming a fairly talented organist, I was never going to feel the comfort and ease in playing before others that was required of a performer, and that I didn’t have to feel guilty or bad that I wasn’t. For I was a talented musician, but not a gifted musician. 

There are many things in my life that I can do well. I’ve learned to do them well. But they’re not necessarily my gifts. They do not come naturally for me. And I don’t have to feel bad about saying no to doing them, when I can more easily and productively and joyfully give of my gifts. 

As I grew in my understanding of my spiritual gifts, I found out that it was a lot easier to know what to put first in my life and how to balance my responsibilities in a way that was pleasing to God and would bring joy and peace to my life. I learned that as long as fifty percent of my time was spent utilizing my gifts, burn-out was less likely, and that I would know much joy in my life. In fact, it freed me to say no. And I learned that by understanding God’s will for my life to be that of using my gifts and living into that, that there was a growing awareness, embracement and appreciation of my true self as I was created and intended by God to be. 

So you might ask yourself, how do you know what your spiritual gifts are? Following the worship service this evening, you will be given a spiritual gifts assessment on the way out the door that is a tool that begins to help us to understand our spiritual gifts. But it’s only a tool. Like any other inventory or piece of paper that tries to measure who we are, it cannot give us all of the results and it is only as truthful as we are in answering it. It is an instrument, but that instrument alone will not help us to discern our gifts. Further discernment must be wrapped in prayer and the consideration of several other points. 

One of those that I would invite you to consider is looking back over your life, the patterns and experiences of your life. As you look back, what do you find reoccurring over the course of time? As I look back over my own life and the patterns and experiences, there are two things that particularly stick out as events or incidences that repeat themselves. One of them is the whole idea that, from the time I was very young, I always had an interest and a desire in playing school, and I always thought I was going to be a teacher. My little brothers, before they could read and before they could speak and before they were in kindergarten, were sitting in a schoolroom class down in the basement. Another pattern that I found in my life was that I always found myself listening to other people. While everyone else was out playing in the play yard, I was in the classroom listening to someone bare their heart. Those patterns and experiences in my life reoccurred, time after time. 

In my own prayerful discernment and measurement of my spiritual gifts, I have to ask myself: “In those experiences, what gifts seem to come forward?” I’d invite you do the same thing in your own reflection of experiences and patterns in your life. 

And then, in addition to that, I’d also invite you to think about the burning bush experiences. And when I speak of a burning bush, I’m referring to the story of Moses in Exodus. It is a curious story. Moses draws near the burning bush, the story says, and takes off his shoes. When he draws near the burning bush, God speaks to him. And from that point on, he has his sense of ministry and call to go back to Egypt and to free the slaves. But the interesting piece of the story is that the bush is not what burns. The bush is not burning. It’s Moses’ heart that is burning. And when Moses draws aside and comes near the bush, Moses is engaged in prayerful discernment in listening to what it is that burns within his heart. 

When you consider your own spiritual gifts, take time to ask yourself: “What is my passion? What is it that grabs me? What is it that makes me stir when I hear it in the news or when I see it around me?” Then ask yourself: “What is it about my passion that might speak to where my gifts are?” 

And then, finally, in discerning your spiritual gifts, I think it’s important to discern them in the spirit of community, to share with others what you see as your gifts and to ask them whether or not they see it as well. It is when others can affirm us in our discernment of those gifts that we feel more and more sure of what our gifts are. 

And so I ask you this evening: Do you sometimes find yourself torn in too many directions and yet not knowing what to let go of or what to say no to? Do you sometimes find yourself struggling with finding purpose or meaning in your life? Or are you one who is always being asked to give or to do something more and wondering how much of it is really you? Are you at your wit’s end trying to be all things to all people or that which others think you ought to be, but wondering what you really want? If so, hear the words again of Paul: “Do not let your hearts be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”