Our Epistle today is from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. These letters that Paul wrote to the various communities that he had helped found are not regular check-in letters. They are not “miss you, hope to see you soon” kind of letters. They have a meatier substance to them. We often don’t know the details of why he sent these letters, but we can generally say he sent them to encourage people, teach and inform them, and, most pressingly, to resolve some kind of controversy or conflict within the community. We only have one half of the conversation, so we don’t know what all the conflicts were, or the depth of them, but we can reconstruct it based on what Paul’s response is to the people.
In a letter like First Corinthians, there are a lot of issues he is dealing with. Paul has gotten word that there are lots of challenges he needs to talk with them about. One of the primary issues in which he spends about 20% of the Epistle talking about it, is the issue of spiritual gifts. “Now concerning spiritual gifts,” we heard him say in the Epistle reading. We don’t know exactly what is going on here, but it seems that there is a group of people who think that either they have gifts and others don’t, or their gifts are better than others, and they are not being very nice about it. Paul is addressing this issue. This whole section is going to culminate in that very famous passage that every single person here knows: Now faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is love. You’ve all been to a wedding so you have heard it. But the context of this passage is the issue of spiritual gifts. The culmination of his argument is that love is the answer. You have to live in love. Faith and hope are also gifts, but the most important of all the gifts is love. If you would strive for love and act in love, then there would not be these fights over has better gifts than another person.
Paul is going to lay some foundations before he gets to this culminating statement about love. In today’s reading, he makes three critical foundational arguments. The first is that every gift is from God. So perhaps some people were saying their gift was from God, but someone else’s gift is from another spirit. But Paul says that every gift is from God. Every gift you have is from God, not from some other spirit, and not from yourself. It is, in fact, a gift that has been given to you by God. That is the first thing.
The second thing Paul says is that everyone has a gift. Every single person has a gift. They may be different from other people’s gifts, but every person has one. Part of Paul’s argument is that the gifts are much more varied than we probably think. Our best guess is that the people who have the gift of tongues think they are a little better than everyone else. Paul says that tongues are indeed a gift, but there are many gifts. He named some in the reading today: gifts like wisdom, gifts like discernment, gifts of tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Faith, hope and love are gifts, although we don’t often think of them as gifts. But they are gifts from God as well. There are other gifts. I wonder what kind of gifts you might think of in your life. It might be obvious for some, like you are intelligent and have the gift of teaching, or maybe you’re an amazing musician. There are other gifts, like the gift of time, financial resources, the gift of creativity, the gift of boredom. Can that be a gift? I think it could be. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to pull out our phones to stop the boredom. There are lots of gifts.
The third thing that Paul argues, and I think this is the most important one because it will lead us to that message of love. Paul says that every single gift we have has been given to us for the common good. These gifts we have been given are not just for us to enjoy for ourselves. You may take pleasure in the gift, but they are given to us for the other, for the community, for something bigger than ourselves, for something outside of ourselves.
That, I think, is the most challenging message for the people in Corinth, and still the most challenging message for us today. Considering the common good instead of ourselves is really hard, and a lot of folks struggle with this. We are not naturally inclined to think of the bigger picture. We tend to look inward. Paul wants us to shift our mindset and start thinking of something greater than ourselves. Every gift we have been given is for the common good. We are meant to share the gifts that have been shared with us. We are not meant to be dragons sitting on hoards of gold. We are meant to share them for the common good.
My friends, I want to encourage you this week to spend some time thinking about Paul’s argument about gifts. You can even call this homework. I want you to take some time and think about gifts. Think about the gifts you have, name them, list the obvious ones, but try and think about how varied the gifts can be. Most things in your life can probably be seen as a gift. Spend some time intentionally, but also ask yourself at other times, could this be a gift? Could this boring moment I’m living in be a gift to me?
The second thing I want you to think about is how this gift that you have been given can be shared with others. How can you shift your mindset, as Paul wants us to, to start thinking about the other, start thinking about the common good. How can we start, just as Jesus taught us, to love our neighbor with the gifts that we have been given? That is your homework assignment. You don’t have to turn it in, but I want you to spend the time working on it. Think through how God is calling you to use your gifts in this world.
AMEN
