The Tenth Sunday After Trinity Sunday '23
A Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, August 13, 2023
The Rev’d Stephen C. Scarlett
The Epistle, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 - The Gospel, St. Luke 19:41-47
Spiritual gifts and phenomena
Today’s epistle from First Corinthians teaches us about spiritual gifts. St. Paul writes,
There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord . . . But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all (1 Cor. 12:4-7).
All believers receive the one baptismal gift of the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit also enables each believer to serve the body the Body of Christ in unique ways. The Bible refers to the unique ways you serve the Body as your spiritual gifts. This unity and diversity reflects the unity and diversity of the Holy Trinity.
The topic of spiritual gifts was brought to the forefront in the last generation by what is called the “charismatic movement.” This was a renewal movement that had a broad impact in the church. It tended to focus on “phenomenal” gifts like speaking in tongues and prophesy. Tongues is the ability to speak in a language that the person did not learn by study. Prophesy is the ability to reveal or proclaim hidden truth. Both gifts are mentioned in the epistle.
The more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit can provide people with encouraging and life changing encounters with God. But spiritual problems result when people come to rely on spectacular gifts. The same pattern that Fr. Hayden highlighted last week about the mountain top experience can be observed here. It can be subtly implied that God is not present unless something miraculous or weird is happening, or that a lack of intense experience implies a defect in faith. A dependence on spectacular gifts can blind people to the presence of Christ in ordinary and equally “charismatic” gifts like serving, giving, exhorting, leading, and showing mercy—see Romans 12:6-8.
Sometimes, we need a revelation of God’s power and presence to shake us out of spiritual lethargy. But we also need to learn to see Christ in ordinary acts of love and service. Spectacular revelations always lead to the subsequent call to “Pick up your cross and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Spiritual maturity is marked by decreased dependence on extraordinary experiences and a growing awareness of the ways Christ’s love and grace is shared through the faithful exercise of less spectacular but equally powerful spiritual gifts.
Spiritual gifts and the fall
Spiritual gifts are part of the restoration of the human vocation that was lost through sin. In the act of creation, God shared his Spirit, which is his life and his love, with the humans he created in his image (Gen 2:7). The Bible talks about the “fullness” of God. In Ephesians, St. Paul prays that believers might “know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). God is so full of love that his love naturally overflows into acts of creation and giving.
The creation of the world, a magnificently ordered cosmos and earth, the mere idea that there would be birds, fish, animals, and humans reflects God’s nature as Giver and Sharer. Humans, as God’s image bearers, would mirror this creative and generous love in their benevolent dominion over the creation (Gen. 1:26). Adam would love Eve, who would reciprocate love to Adam. Their love would be manifest in their children and their children’s children, who would endlessly and geometrically magnify God’s gifts of love and creation, each person reflecting God’s love in his or her unique way.
This ideal pattern was shattered by the first act of taking. As Alexander Schmemann observes in his book For the Life of the World, the first sin was not so much the breaking of a law. The first sin was to take what was not a gift. Love and gift necessarily establish boundaries. To love means to say no to everything that is not love. To receive a gift means to respond with thanksgiving—and not take what the giver has not given as a gift. Sin was a profound act of ingratitude.
In this light, we understand that repentance means more that saying I broke a law. To repent is to recognize our ingratitude for God’s gifts of life and love, and to practice faithfulness as an expression of gratitude.
The New Creation and agape
We are saved from ingratitude and unfaithfulness by God’s New Creation in Christ. In Christ, we receive the breath of life again. As Romans 8:15 says, “You received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’” And as Romans 5:5 says, “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” It is our vocation to respond to the gifts of adoption and life by giving thanks and by becoming givers of love to others—“The manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all.”
We experience the New Creation in the Eucharist, which reverses the pattern of sin. We take the creation God has given us and we offer it back to him in thanksgiving. What we offer to God comes back to us in the Body and the Blood of Jesus as the gifts of forgiveness, life, love, and grace. We are delivered from the pattern of taking that leads to emptiness and misery, and are renewed in our ability to love and give, through which are filled with all the fullness of God. As Jesus said, "Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you" (Lk. 6:38).
As we exercise our spiritual gifts, we must purify our motives. Spiritual gifts don’t “work” apart from the love of God. St. Paul’s teaching in the epistle, 1 Corinthians 12, continues in the next and more famous chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. Despite its use in a variety of other contexts, 1 Corinthians 13 is primarily about the use of spiritual gifts. St. Paul writes,
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor [the gift of giving], and though I give my body to be burned [dying as a martyr], but have not love, it profits me nothing. (13:1-3).
If we use our gifts with an attitude that says, “look at me with my great gifts,” or if we give to others because we want a status, recognition, or a reward, what we give ceases to be a gift. We move out of the New Creation and back into the pattern of sin. As Jesus said of the Pharisees who practiced their religion to be seen, “Verily I say unto you. They have their reward” (Matt. 6:5).
Our motives are purified by growing in our own experience of God’s love. We must first receive the gift in order to become givers of gifts. Our experience of God’s love begins with repentance for our ingratitude, which prepares us to receive the gifts of forgiveness and life. Gratitude then continues with “all such good works as [God] has prepared for us to walk in” (BCP 83). As St. Paul writes in Ephesians,
That we . . . speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love (Eph. 4:14-16).
