Second Sunday after Christmas Day, 2003
1 Corinthians 12: 1-19

Rev. Dominic Taranto

This morning I would like to survey the first half of this chapter, but the single major focus will be on St. Paul's teaching that being united to Christ necessarily means being made parts of a single, unified whole, whose members are arranged and equipped by God to serve one another. Every Christian has a role to play in the Church, and if any Christian cannot or will not serve as God calls him or her, the whole body will suffer, whether or not we realize it, just as we may not realize immediately if some part of our body ceases to function properly. To enable all Christians to profitably serve the other members of the Church, God gives us both different natural talents and desires to serve, and also grants at His discretion supernatural gifts that will enable us to minister to others. God gives different gifts to different people, and, I believe, at least some different gifts at different times in the history of the Church. Today though I don't want to get into a discussion of the particulars of each gift mentioned by St. Paul as though he was giving a technical outline or taxonomy of the way in which God works. Rather, I want to focus on the main point that he makes, that we all have a role to play in the life of the Church, the body of Christ, and that God makes available to each of us the spiritual resources necessary to serve.

In the first three verses of this chapter, there is one point in particular that I want to draw your attention to. That is that truth claims made by people professing to be guided by the Spirit can and ought to be tested by what we already know to be true of God. This knowledge will be chiefly contained in the canon of Scripture. This is true, by the way, whether individuals or groups, such as Church Councils, are involved.

Saint Paul applies this to the particular case of claims about Christ, but the point applies generally. We should always follow the example of the faithful people of Berea that we read about in the book of Acts, who tested even the preaching of an Apostle of Christ, to make sure that it was consistent with what had been revealed by God before. If any spiritual leader ever tries to intimidate or coerce members of their flock to uncritically accept their teaching, they are not acting according to the Spirit of God, for if it is God's will that his people test all claims to spiritual guidance, unless God is confused, it will also be His will that a person led by His Spirit will have the humility to submit to a Scriptural examination of his or her teaching.

Beginning at verse four, St. Paul develops several extremely important and related ideas. He points out that though there are many gifts and ministries in the Church, all are ultimately given by one God. This implies that people who are working in the Spirit of God will be in harmony and that the individual filled with God's Spirit will be serving the Church, and not acting to draw attention to him or herself, and will not be thinking in terms of "my ministry", but in terms of the health of the body of Christ Verse 7 explicitly states that gifts given by God are intended to bless the whole Church, not merely the one given the gift. This should also be a fact that leads us to humility when -not if, but when - we recognize that God has given us some gift and ministry in His Church. Simply put, God may in some sense bless you with some spiritual gift and ministry because He loves you, but He primarily does so because He loves everyone else, and wants to use you to serve and bless others.

One other point that Paul makes in this section that I think warrants special attention is that all gifts of the Spirit are given according to the will of God. It appears that not even the Church can dispense spiritual gifts, but rather that the Church recognizes or requests the working of God and grants authority to minister on that basis. God has surely instituted in the Church an authority to regulate ministry, so that not only worship but all things may be done decently and in order, as Paul says in another passage. However, some have confused this with a delegated authority on the part of the Church to actually impart spiritual gifts, which is not taught in scripture.

From verses 12 through 19 and on to 27, St. Paul explains that one result of our salvation is our incorporation into an organic whole, very much like the body of a human being. In a human body, the parts are united into a whole that is interdependent, and is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, a properly ordered and functioning body can do more than each of its parts in isolation. Just so, a body of Christians working together in love and harmony, empowered by God's Spirit, can do much more than a bunch of individuals trying to do God's work each on their own.

Another important point made here is that every one of us has a role to play in the life of the body. Consider again verses 15 through 18 [read]. We have a natural tendency, whatever lip service we give to the priesthood of all believers, to think of the ordained ministry, the men in collars, as really doing the work of the Church. This is terrible. The primary purpose of the clergy is to help the body as a whole to glorify God in its life and service, not to minister in place of them.

This is an important point to stop and consider. Unfortunately, one problem that I have seen over and over in the Church, both when I was in a congregational Church several years ago, and since I have attended Anglican churches, is that of looking to clergy to do more than God has called them to do. Let me give you a couple of examples. When I went to a congregational Church in Santa Ana, we had a dynamic pastor. Not infrequently, the church would be referred to, by its members, as "David Hocking's church". I understand how this reference might have been helpful in some contexts, but in general this betrayed a really unhealthy attitude toward what a Church was supposed to be. Usually people had in their minds the idea that our church was were you went to go in order to hear Pastor Hocking speak, or to take part in his ministry.

Another example, this time from Anglican experiences: I have on several occasions heard people complain about a lack of direction from their bishops. I have thought about this for some time, and I still cannot figure out why a congregation of Christians needs marching orders from someone who may be quite far away and have only a passing knowledge of the people in a given parish in order to love God and effectively serve one another in His Spirit I realize that there are practical matters that require interaction with bishops, but on many occasions 1 think the dependency has been unhealthy.

What clergy are fundamentally set apart in the church to do, aside from leading the church in worship and being the designated persons authorized to celebrate the sacraments, at least in most cases, is to preserve and transmit the faith. More than anything else, the essential function of the clergy is to make sure that the faith once for all delivered to the saints is preserved and delivered to the next generation. If the clergy fail to do this, then we have failed in our primary charge, and left our children and Gods once again lost in darkness. This obviously requires an emphasis on teaching and making time to talk with people individually in order to answer questions that might be hard to deal with apart from formal training. And this of course will help to develop the spiritual maturity necessary to understand the character of God, and to discern His will and how a knowledge and love of Him might be communicated to others in your ministries.

One thing that I think is important in this regard is that because the clergy have formal training in theology, they have had some chance to think through what certain ideas naturally lead to, and what consequences they have. As you strive to obey the commandment to love God with all your mind, it is important to avail yourself of the help that the clergy can provide as you think through issues on your own. I don't mean mat you automatically accept anything your priest or bishop says, but you do have a moral and intellectual obligation to give the opinions of your clergy significant weight.

Now before I close I want to take a step back and deal with a few practical questions that will come up as we begin to live, as a community, in light of this teaching of Scripture, How does one go about finding his or her Spiritual gift? To be honest, I have seen a lot of well intentioned but I think misguided efforts to help people do this. Often the approach taken is that we should sit down, figure out all of the gifts listed in the New Testament, and then try to figure out which one or ones we have. Now, you could do a lot worse that to try it this way, and I'm sure that this method has been of some help to many.

However, I don't think that, for the most part, the listing of spiritual gifts is intended to be a technical taxonomy, a rigid and fixed qualification of, say, the nine ways in which God works - and that's it. I think that each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made, and each of us has a unique set of abilities and desires to serve, and that God will work differently in each of us to maximize each of our potentials to serve others and to glorify Him.

Now if this is true, then I think that the best thing to do in trying to find out where God would have us serve is to engage in regular, disciplined activity such as bible study, prayer, and corporate worship and participation in the sacraments, so that our souls are in as much harmony with God as our maturity will allow, and then to prayerfully consider what we really want to do. If we are spiritually 'on the same page' as God, then almost certainly the manner in which we want to serve will reflect the way in which God is working in us, and will be the way in which He wants us to serve. To some degree we need to consider the pressing needs of the Church, but by and large, if a need really is pressing, God will call someone to fill it who is well suited to doing so. While there is a proper place for planning as an aspect of stewardship in the life of the Church, we need to let God's working drive our ministry as a body, not our management decisions and our annual goals and objectives.

In closing, I want to ask each of you to take this passage to heart. God really does have a ministry for you in the Church. Some people have more time than others, I know that, St. Paul talks about that elsewhere in the New Testament But that does not mean that others are not dependent upon you to some degree for their spiritual growth. To the degree that we do not actively seek to develop spiritually, and as we grow and actively seek to serve others in the body of Christ, we deprive our brethren of blessing that God has called us to give. We have a glorious calling, God has given us the opportunity of being the means of bringing His love and blessing to others in concrete and tangible ways. Every one of us has a role to play in this truly glorious ministry, and each one of us is dependent upon the body as a whole for our full spiritual health.

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