Gifts Received, Gifts Given

 Gifts Received, Gifts Given

A Sermon given on Jan. 19, 2025

Renton United Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ

Mark Fredericksen, ND, MDiv

Based on 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

 

A saying my mom was fond of reciting at me when any of my pals would call me some awful name was, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  Have you heard that before? Did the saying do anything to make you feel better? Naw, me either, because the ways that we can be hurt don’t only involve our physical being but, too frequently, real injury can be inflicted by words said. If they get repeated, they can dig a trench in our psyche such that we adopt them and make them into who think we are.  If those words dig into our very soul, they may keep us handicapped or knocked down our whole life long.

As you heard, a big part of my healer’s mindset is holding together the belief that we are complete human beings who have physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and socio-cultural parts.  I think of our soul as being the underlying processing unit that knits these connections together into the authentic person, we are according to God’s design. Our soul provides the gears to make us what we are. But if there are missing gears or damaged gears it’s going to impact our ability to be authentic. Sadly, our society, culture, and technology have pulled us in directions that discourage authenticity and because we can’t be ourselves in the mold that God made us to be, we have a lot of problems like what we’re having. I am sure that you probably would like to see the world a lot differently.  I’m assuming that you would like to experience authenticity.  It’s a hard thing to come by in our society with our past histories and traumas.  So, let’s explore a concept that we can work with to help make a difference – if not for the world, maybe for ourselves or a small corner in which we live.

There is a theological practice borne out of Judaism called ZimZum.  To explain it completely would take several days in a retreat, but I’ll boil it down to its simplest idea.  Instead of Creation being made by a power-exerting God. ZimZum embraces the notion of a love-exerting God who opens a space within Godself for a womb where the love spark for creation is breathed in and grows.  We, and all we know, are growing inside of God.  Through Christ we see the potential love can create and manifest.  This means a) God is our mom, b) God intensely cares what happens to ALL of us.

With those givens – we come to 1 Cor. 12. A wise loving God knows what we need and has provided us with many gifts to enable us to thrive and realize our full authentic potential both as individuals and as an entire species. God is pumping love into the system as an empowering enlivening force for our world.  The Apostle Paul lists a few of these as Gifts of the Spirit. Our souls crave and need all of them.  I don’t believe it is in any way limited to these 12 as there are other passages with different gifts listed.  I also don’t think that we are limited to having just one or two, which is not what some of the Spiritual Inventory makers preach with their online questionnaires.  To reach our full authentic love-empowering selves we need to be open to receiving all the gifts God is providing.   One of the questions that you might ponder or journal about at home is this: What are the gifts you carry in your soul?  And what ones is your soul wanting you to have?

Call me an idle dreamer or an impossible romantic, but I have believed in my heart and soul my entire life that love – a true agape love – such as that demonstrated by Jesus, such as that preached about throughout the New Testament, such as that God imagined to spark the universe -- you know – the ideal we see being strived toward early in the book of Acts – if the Church could model that/live that what would become of the wars, the greed, the grasping for power, the racism, sexism, the hating, the monetizing of everything?   Even though the Church historically and at present has failed to live this out on so many levels I still hold my small little candle of hope that I can do better, that we can do better, that the Church can be better/do better, and that my light and maybe ours together will be the light that the darkness cannot swallow up.

To get there we have to daily recommit ourselves to seeing and receiving the gifts God is placing into our lives in front of us.  To see something we have to look for it.  Get in the habit of assessing/taking an inventory every day of all the good you saw – compassion shown, joy felt, gratitude expressed, love demonstrated, kindness offered, and miracles worked. Since the 1^st of January, I have been keeping a Joy Jar.  I have a small Mason jar and each day I try to write on a small slip of Post-it note a joy I felt, and I put the paper in my Joy Jar.  I have found that when I’m asking myself what I’ve enjoyed (note that word: En-JOY) my thinking changes as well as my perception of what joy is.  Our culture has taught us to be so serious & critical that we don’t realize we’re enjoying things when they’re right there in front of us.

In this process of looking for and taking note of what we are receiving, the table begins to turn. We begin to think things like – “Why couldn’t I do that!”  I could be more positive.  I could smile more.  I could be more willing to offer a helping hand.  I have a gift for listening – I could reach out to someone.  Let me tell you – I’m doing some work in the area of grief and loss.  And what I’ve learned is EVERYBODY has loss and grief.  EVERYBODY.  And the single best healing practice for it is simply telling the story to someone.  Who hasn’t got time to listen?   Though I will admit that listening without offering fixes and advice is a hearty challenge – and maybe it IS a gift.  One that you have? 

 But see?  THIS is how the Holy Spirit spreads. We for too long have been lulled into Christian complacency of expecting the Holy Spirit (or God) to fix every wrong.  But the wrongs get fixed when we activate and use the gifts we’ve received.   Are you sitting under a bushel?  Letting your light be hidden?  Feeling sorry for yourself or frustrated or angry at the stampedes of hypocrisy and greed and violence it seems the whole world is descending into?  I’m convinced it’s taking place because we all have been lured into shutting down, separating ourselves, isolating & withdrawing, and hoarding what gifts we have and not sharing what we have.  What we’ve already been given.

Finally, the last benefit of sharing our gifts is through that experience we get insights into who God made us to be. We find out where our authentic self has been living. And we take a step closer to being a full loving representation of God-in-Christ to the world. 

What Child Is This?

 "I was given nothing to help me learn to live as the person I was created to be."

                  --Richard Wagamese, Walking the Ojibwe Path, p.43

This statement caught me short, and I had a loud, resounding question pop up in my brain: Do any of us know the person we are created to be?  If we consider all the accouterments of culture, education, family, and religion does anyone really know themselves, I mean in God's sight, as we're created to be?  I suppose it is impossible to spin time back to the moment of our birth and look at "Who is this child?" Likewise, few of us get born with a predetermined purpose - like Jesus' beginnings of the angelic" Son of God" proclamation to his mother-to-be. People who wind up doing big things with their lives, tend to get biographies written that imply they were "called" to be great in their early beginnings.  But do the majority of us?  Most of us go to public (cookie-cutter) schools receiving the same culturally pre-determined education that curriculums are based upon.  Those K-12 packages supposedly send us all out into the world on a "level playing field" - even though, in truth. they can't possibly. So what happens to any self-actualizing goal "to be the person I was created to be?"

Sure, some families put strait jackets on their offspring at early ages to follow in a parent's or grandparent's footsteps.  Then, depending on the child's created disposition, they'll take on the assignment with gusto or alternatively, go complete rebel and wind up in a wildly different place. That is what I am getting at -- how do we learn to live as we're meant to?

At its heart, I am addressing a profoundly spiritual question: who/what does God intend for humans to be?  Through the ages, undeniably, humans have veered off the "humane" track.  The laundry list of sins cataloged and treated by religion(s) as an illness needing correction reflects the course of departure from loving, peaceful, generous, cooperative, helpful, courteous... basics of the human soul that God likely intends.  While some social structures work at furthering these "positive" ways we are created to be, their commonality across the board is rare. 

For humanity to aim toward a more egalitarian, magnanimous world it would be necessary to change many of the assumptions on which our world's economic and legal systems are based. We would need more effective (and more widely available) methods for addressing mental illness, improved methods of breaking generational trauma, concerted means of addressing homelessness and poverty, and refined educational strategies to support self-esteem and self-actualization. 

All of these and hundreds of other ideas fly 180 degrees against the "traditional" social and religious attitudes reflective of crime and punishment and "making a living." So politically the leap to a New World remains impossible.  Still, there is a peace-filled place for dreaming the God-hope in our meditative imaginations and seeing in our souls the purity of divine intent for our existence. 

Faith

Faith is one of the simplest words in the Christian lexicon.  Yet it also seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks thrown into the Christian Church. Why? Largely because The Church, long ago, got in its own way racing to define what one needed to believe if one was going to have "faith."  So, rather than faith being the experiential thing it is, it became prescriptive by order of the educated, who possess a well-honed recitation of narrow beliefs according to catechism and creed.  The Church said, "We will provide you with the right belief(s) so you can have the right faith" (And then if you don't hold precisely to the line, we can burn you at the stake as a heretic.)

Jesus never knew any kind of "catechism."  The closest he came was having a solid knowledge of the Law on which Judaism was founded. He could answer the questions when the synagogue/temple lawyers showed up to trap him, but he did not preach to his followers about them. In fact, he provided his own set of suggestions on how to live one's life through the Beatitudes. (I like to use the word play Be-attitudes for these.)  Jesus played up the power of faith (if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains) and downplayed the difficulty of faith (you need only the faith of a child.)

Simply, faith is a trust that we will have a tomorrow. Kids have faith that their parents will be there when they wake up.  We can have faith that even in death, life does go on. There are scads of people who spend their lives building guarantees into their faith whereupon their faith becomes grounded in the security of their investments, But that becomes an extremely thin line between "faith" and idol worship. Faith doesn't operate in the realm of guarantee nearly as powerfully as it does in the realm of hope. On the spiritual plane hope and faith keep us going (treasure kept in our hearts) far more than our investment portfolio (where moth and rust can steal or be lost.)  

In what do we have faith?  The four Sundays of Advent often include a weekly focus on four spiritual words that usually include peace, joy, love, and hope.  These four words strongly connect to the personhood of Jesus - his life, teaching, and ministry.  Likewise, they can be our words.  While there can be some instruction involved in teaching children the how-tos, the actual practice of them is a life-long laboratory of experiencing what they mean in the contexts we find ourselves in with each relational interaction. When we give/receive joy, when we practice/experience peace, when we give or receive hope or love we meet the elements of faith that radically alter our lives and those of the people we interact with. We don't need stuffy theological Ph.D.s cramming quilt and atonement and hell down our gullets - nothing about those elements fosters a speck of faith (far more worry if you ask me!).  They're just intellectual snobbery.  As the Apostle Paul ends 1 Corinthians 13: "Faith, hope, and love abide." Let your faith abide in you.  Have faith in the eternity of tomorrow. (Spoken like a great procrastinator, eh?)