Enriched in Every Way
Epiphany + 2 - January 19, 2014
Watch this sermon here.
A long, long time ago (I won't tell you how long!), way back when I was in junior high and high school, I was in the marching band. I started band when I was in 7th grade. (I went to a little school that was a joint junior/senior high, with grades 7-12 all in one building.) And what I remember is that I went in wanting to play the trumpet – a nice loud, familiar, flashy instrument. But they had enough of those at the time, so instead, I got assigned to the baritone horn. How many of you have even heard of that instrument? Yeah. It's not the most well-known or recognizable. It's not even that unique – it looks like a mini-tuba, and it sounds pretty similar to a trombone, so you could almost make the argument that you don't even need the baritone horn really. Color me disappointed at what I was assigned.
You could say that the church in Corinth that Paul is writing to in our (2nd) reading for today was kind of like that marching band. As Paul starts off this letter to a congregation he had founded, he is filled with thanksgiving to God. He reminds the Corinthian Christians of their calling as saints, people set apart to do God's work in the world, and then goes on to thank God for the grace they had been given, the ways God had enriched them in every way, the spiritual gifts that had been lavishly bestowed on them, so they were lacking nothing. And yet, if you were to go and read more of this letter, you'd see Paul was just laying the groundwork for what is to come. See, the church in Corinth is kind of a hot mess. Though God has given them so much, this is a church filled with divisions and competition and arguments. Corinth was an up and coming city, very cosmopolitan, with people from all over – slaves and people who had been freed, the rich and the poor living side by side, and the church reflected the same mix. But all of these differences as well as the different spiritual gifts and roles people had became a source of contention rather than celebration. They threw out their allegiances to different spiritual leaders – “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Peter...” They got drunk around the communion table and gobbled up all the food before some of the members could get there. They argued over which spiritual gift was the most important – speaking in tongues or the gift of interpretation, wisdom versus knowledge, the ability to heal or work miracles and on and on and on, and I imagine that there were some who were jealous of the gifts they hadn't received, who wanted the loud, recognizable, flashy gifts, instead of the ones no one had ever heard of. And not only do these divisions damage their relationships, they distract the Corinthians from carrying out the mission God had given them – to be witnesses to Jesus and reveal his love, grace, and mercy to the world.
Any of this sound familiar? I'm not suggesting that Ascension is a church ripped apart by conflict, or that it has the same exact issues, because I haven't seen that or experienced that here. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things that divide us from one another and distract us from fulfilling God's vision for us as a congregation. Really, hang around any church long enough and you're bound to see some of the tension that naturally happens when people get together. Strong personalities rub each other the wrong way and make it hard to work together. Miscommunication and misunderstandings happen and don't necessarily get worked out right away, so resentment festers, sometimes for months and years! People who have been working hard in a particular ministry for years feel unappreciated or undervalued – or finally move on only to get mad that that person who follows in that role doesn't do things the exact same way they always did. Newer folks look for ways to plug in and use their gifts and feel stymied at every turn, not knowing how to become part of a group that's been together a long time. We've got our annual meeting next week, and there we'll talk about the budget for 2014 and constitutional amendments and the vision and hopes and dreams for the coming years, and if you come (and I hope you will), I'm willing to bet that there will be something that doesn't quite fit with your understanding of how things should be. Again, I'm not saying that Ascension has these issues on a wide scale, but it's just how churches, any groups of people really, tend to be. If you've been a part of this church or any church for a while, you've seen it happen, and you know how much it distracts us. It takes our energy and focus away from the things of God. It damages our witness to those around us.
So maybe my time in band was useful to my participation in a church – because what I learned over the years in that place is that we needed all of the talents and abilities of everyone involved. For the music to be complete, we needed all of the different instruments, from the squeak of the clarinets and saxophones to the blare of the trumpets to the beating of the bass drum. And not only that, we needed the non-musicians – the majorettes and the color guard and the pom-pom squad, the band parents who helped us raise money for trips and walked along the parade route with us to hold the water bottles as we marched in wool uniforms in ridiculous heat, and the fans who stood on the sidelines at halftime at the football games to cheer us on instead of going to get a snack at the concession stand. For us to do what we were supposed to do, we needed all of those people sharing all of their gifts and time and energy and passion in whatever way suited them best. And perhaps most surprising of all to me was the way our band director was able to gather all of these random teenagers and their supporters and help them use their gifts together as one. He didn't have us doing the moonwalk like The Ohio State Marching Band did this past season, but we did alright.
That's the good news for us this morning. That's our encouragement for all of the times when we let our petty differences get in the way of being the people and church God has called us to be. God has already enriched us in every way – not as individuals, but as a community of faith. Together God has given us all that we need to do God's work with our hands. Somehow, when we listen and follow God's direction, God is able to gather us up, differences and all, and use us to do great things together, things we could never dream of accomplishing on our own. God has and is and will continue strengthening us for all God calls us to do. God has called us into fellowship – partnership – with Jesus, and God is faithful to help us in all we do.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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