Gifts and the Future 1-16-22
Gifts and the Future
1 Cor 12:1-11; John 2:1-11
1 Cor 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
John 2:1-11
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
Prayer – Lord God we give thanks that you chose to come to us in the form of Jesus, your beloved Son, and that you continue to seek us out, you continue to come to us, and that in doing so, we are never alone even when things are hard. We thank you for opening our eyes to your presence among us, for opening our eyes to the many gifts each of us bring to this place and for opening our minds and our hearts that we might overcome the limitations of our modern world. Help us to realize that something is afoot while giving us the grace to see you at work even among the perplexing, confusing and sometimes disturbing events of our time. Enable us to move beyond any fears that we may feel about our future to see your eternal presence revealed among us – amen.
This wedding scene is profound and a mystery we can ponder forever. If you go to Cana today, they sell little pottery contraptions obviously equipped with some dye inside that when you pour water on top, and then pour it out, it comes out red. And then there’s a kooky greeting care attached with a picture of a policeman who has pulled over a priest. The policeman says to the priest, “Reverend, have you been drinking?” The priest replies, “Just water officer.” The policeman says, “Then why do I smell wine?” to which the priest replies with a look of amazement, “Good Lord, He’s done it again.”
One of our earthiest Jesus stories, so mundane, attending a wedding, with his mother becomes a time of revelation. He gets a little snarky with her – and we notice that her words are to the hosts of the wedding – ‘Do whatever he tells you’ is the best counsel ever. Is Mary pointing us toward revelation during this season of Epiphany – is there greater and deeper significance about to break forth in this story of Jesus? Wine – good wine, the best wine requires time to age, but Jesus’ batch is ready and tasty, even better than what they had initially served. Is Jesus showing off, still maturing from a Bruce Almighty-ish dazzler to a more mature raiser of the dead and healer of the blind? Though Mary is Jesus’ mother, she seems to be as baffled by the strange and wondrous actions of her son. The changing of water to wine is an amazing sign of amazing gifts, but to what does the sign point for the future? That is the question for today, how do gifts point to the future?
January is a get-serious month for many church-goers. The residual joy of Christmas, it’s cold, at least this weekend anyway, New Year’s resolutions – so perhaps urging ourselves to think about our place within the Body and to get with it is helpful for ourselves, for our church, for our world. Are our native strengths, unearthed in the interest and ability reflections, really ‘spiritual’ gifts? Do I do what I like, and what I’m good at, for God? Yes in many cases but do I put them in the context of spiritual gifts which are alien to my nature the other 6 days of the week, or are surprising to my preconceived notions, or something hard or uncomfortable, something I’m not particularly good at, something noticed in my brokenness. Remember, Leonard Cohen’s line – “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Our two passages this morning I would assert are about the ‘common good,’ the Greek sumpheron a compound word roughly meaning ‘bearing together.’ It’s a challenge in our modern world to encourage, or even persuade hyper-individualists that it’s all about the common good, the health of the Body, and not me and my satisfactions. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who’s life we commemorate tomorrow, was endowed with remarkable gifts, not so he could get rich and famous, but for building up the whole Body.
For our eyes to be opened and for us to see usually requires some disruption. In our gospel passage, there is a crisis at a party. The wine gives out. The host is embarrassed, the guests are annoyed. And yet Jesus uses this crisis, this disruption as an opportunity for revelation. To see beyond something we have always thought requires that there be dismantling of what we have always thought. Our eyes can’t see everything in the world, so our eyes quite naturally filter out much that is set before them so we can focus on a few certainties. Trouble is, focusing upon those few certainties block out seeing counter truth, exceptions to the rule, and prohibit another point of view.
The beginning of the year is often a time of reflection and perhaps looking at life, expectations from a different perspective. Raising questions, pushing limits, having honest conversations can create a fair amount of dissonance and in doing so can enhance one’s ability to see things differently and therefore to have one’s eyes opened to a new reality perhaps previously missed is critical. All for the common good.
For example, we have a difficult case at the hospital. A 30 year old young father and husband has been sick with covid since late in Nov. He was transferred from an OSH to BAS for ECMO. He has been on ECMO since before Christmas and this week we met with the family to say he just isn’t getting better. In fact, he nearly died on Thurs morning and the family was emergently called to the hospital. After he ‘somewhat’ stabilized, one of the doctors, the surgeon who put him on ECMO, shared with them that his body just needs more time to see if it can get better and the family desperately grasped at the straw of hope. The critical care doctor who is also the pulmonologist came in and said he had less than a 5% chance of survival and if he did, he would more than likely be vent dependent the remainder of his life. We wondered if that would be an acceptable life for this young man. The confused and defeated look on their faces were hard to see – two perspectives – one of hope, one of reality – and meanwhile the pt is caught between those two perspectives – one of hope and one of reality – and he and his body will be the one who will suffer the most because of those two perspectives.
It has been almost two years ago when Covid began here in Texas. Since it started it seems as if our world stopped in its tracks, and we were jolted into a very painful time. Our usual patterns of life have been disrupted. Isolation severed many of our accustomed ways we had been relating with one another, particularly here in church. Yet, in the process, sometimes our eyes have been opened. We have seen things we earlier had failed to see.
Perhaps it is only natural for us to look upon the time of the pandemic and the time of racial justice reckoning as well as the political mess we find ourselves in as temporary sidetracks in the course of things. We hope that things will get back to normal in an attempt to reassure ourselves, and yet we are torn between hope and reality, just like my family in the hospital and just like the hosts of a wedding party.
It makes one ask – is our present situation – with an ongoing pandemic, racial strife, a political disaster being played on the nightly news – is this an outlier or is it an epiphany? Will we look back upon this time as a temporary lapse, a temporary detour, or are we experiencing a momentous turn of history, that will give us radically changed lives in the future? Is this time one of an aberration from the accustomed course of things, or is that an unveiling of truly new things?
Will we look back at this time as a time when we had a slight diversion from humanity’s constantly upward mobile path of eternal economic expansion and growth, of constantly growing human power and competency through science and technology? Or will we see this as a time when a virus revealed just how vulnerable, dependent, interconnected and fragile humanity is? What we see may be a matter of how much courage we have to see, truly to see ourselves and our age. It may also be a matter of how much God gives us the capacity to see.
To see the hundreds of people I have seen in the last two years die from Covid; having held the phone or IPad as too many families had to say I love you and goodbye because they couldn’t be by their loved ones side as they took that last breath; to see the exhaustion in the eyes of nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, and even chaplains who have borne witness to the costs of a pandemic has literally crushed any sense of control any of us ever had and we are left feeling small, vulnerable, and out of control. I wonder if there had been an international outcry at the murder of George Floyd if his murder hadn’t been filmed by a bystander and then posted for millions to see? To actually see this horrible event, not to turn our eyes away but to stare at the sheer inhumanity of this act, propelled many to the streets demanding change, but will this be remembered two years from now; or will we have forgotten what we have seen as we resumed our normal lives? Who knows?
It’s one thing to have our eyes opened, to receive a vision, it’s another thing to know what to do about it. It’s one thing to see what needs to be done, quite another thing to actually do it. We will see. It will be sad if, having our eyes opened by truth we could not avoid, we simply close our eyes, and proceed right down the pathway of before. Who was it who said that sometimes humanity learns from its mistakes, but most of the time we just pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and proceed right down the path on which we stumbled before?
Sometimes when our eyes are opened, we are paralyzed with fear over the prospect before us. There are other times when we can for the first time clearly see something wrong, but we can’t see beyond the wrong to do what is right. There are other times when what we see is so difficult to look at, that we just close our eyes, look away, or yearn for a distraction. Perhaps that will be the case for us in the present moment. It’s too early to tell. And yet, many of us have been given a vision, a sight that we just cannot get out of our heads. We have seen politicians who tried to deflect, excuse and downright lie about scientific, biological, human realities, excusing themselves right before our eyes.
I’m not saying that simply seeking the truth, having our eyes opened to reality, the world as it is, will change our future. But I do believe it is the first step toward changing something. Some of us have had our eyes opened. Enlightenment, seeing things as they really are, calling things by their proper names, is progress of a sort. The more important question is, where will we go from here? That is the question before us as a nation, as a community, and also as a church.
In just a short while we will install two people who have accepted the call to share their spiritual gifts as elders for our church. At the conclusion of our service, we will have a congregational meeting to discuss where we are as a church, financially with significant building concerns that need to be addressed, and finally, what can we hope for, realistically, with the decisions that were made in the past and how do move into our future as a church. My hope today is to be honest, to be real, not to take away hope by any means. To have an honest conversation today, and perhaps in the future, of what and where to we go as a community of faith, a community of caring people who love God and love one another. May God bless the opening of our eyes so that we may indeed have a vision for tomorrow – thanks be to God – amen.