1 Corinthians 12:4-13
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.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
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I finally put up some bird feeders in the yard last week and then sat on the front porch to see how long it would take the birds to find them. After about thirty minutes, two chickadees began darting toward the feeders, grabbing the sunflower seeds with their beaks and then darting back into the trees. Later, on a walk I noticed how many different birds were now in the neighborhood: chickadees, yes, but also robins, purple finches, flickers, doves, crows, starlings and jays. And then my mind went back to Maine and I thought of what I used to see at my feeders, in the trees and on the cove there: grosbeaks, nuthatches, goldfinches, juncos, cedar waxwings, sandpipers, eagles and ospreys.
And it’s Pentecost—the time we again hear the story of the spirit coming upon the disciples with flames and ecstatic speech heard and understood by people from different lands because the speech was in the listeners’ own different languages, languages as various as the birds I saw this last week.. It’s Pentecost, when we hear once again in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about different gifts for the common good. It’s Pentecost when our psalm praises God for God’s manifold and different works the psalmist says, God made “for the sport of it.” And it’s Pentecost when the red frontal on our altar reminds us once again about the unity that under girds our differences—”Jew Greek Male Female, Slave Free, One in Christ.”
But while differences are a delight in the animal world, they can be difficult in the human world. We love our chickadees and our finches and our flickers, but we don’t always take equal delight in our own differences in gender, race, personality type, age, ability, life experience, sexual orientation, economic level, or nationality. Our ignorance about these differences, our fear of them in others and, I would say, in ourselves, and our own experiences of the violent divisions that can come about as a result of differences can make us weary and wary of them.
And so what in the world might God be up to in God’s emphasis on variety or differences as one of the ways the Spirit is manifest among us? Could it be that God has given us a church and a world full of differences simply “for the sport of it,’ as our psalmist says? Or is there more?
Maybe it is for the sport of it—for sport, for play—God reveling in and giving us a church and a world of variety because on a good day our differences have the power to astound us and to lift our hearts. But But, of course, there’s more here. Scripture seems to be saying that through variety, through differences, the Church as a carrier of God’s Holy Spirit is able to renew the face of the earth, but it will forever be a challenge for us.
It will forever be a challenge for us because we will be asked to be our difference, not in reaction to others but out of our own unique identity, our gifts, our God-given oddness, for this is what God creates us for and empowers us to offer for our own soul’s health and for the common good.
It will forever be a challenge for us because we will be asked to stretch outside our comfort zone in being with, listening to and living with those different from ourselves, stretching outside our comfort zone either because we don’t understand the way another looks at the world or because we understand only too well and feel threatened or fearful of what another represents for us.
It will forever be a challenge for us because it will mean we will need to let go of our idea that unity is uniformity or homogeneity and give ourselves to the possibility that unity can and will emerge when we create a space where our differences can be seen and offered for the common good in a way that is less consticted.
When these things come together—even imperfectly—and I have seen them come together here—for me, it’s like tonic—like the feeling I get when glimpsing the vigor, the beauty and the fire of nature in flight on a crisp spring day in Seattle. But, of course, in this case, it is our God-given nature in flight, as individuals in community.
And so in some odd way our differences are here for the sport of it—but our sport, our play, is of the most challenging and rewarding kind. It is a sport in which we win not by overcoming the other with our way of doing things but by staying in the play, in the game, especially with those we would not have chosen as our sport-mates. And it is a play in which we do not wear masks or pretend to be people who we are not but stand before one another and God having followed the path of who we really are, though it has been costly for us to do so. In God’s economy neither of these is for ourselves alone but for the common good that is the Body of Christ and for the world that it seeks to renew.
For the Body of Christ is the work of an enfleshed savior who walked our particular, our odd human path, and in doing so, drew all differences to himself and bound them into one. And so he is a kind of tethering place, the place in which all our particularities, all our oddness, all our strangeness, is accepted, tied to together and unified for us and for the renewal of the world.
A hundred years ago a Roman Catholic priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, struggled with his own oddness, in his case with his gift of poetry and where it fit with his calling as a priest of the Church. Luckily for us, though it was a struggle, he did allow that gift to take flight, though most of his poetry was published after his death. He wrote a poem about variety and giftedness that captures some of what I’ve spoken about this morning—about our call to be our gifts and to offer these in one body that is the body of Christ.
Most people who reference this poem in sermons excerpt it because it’s tricky—playing with sound and images in a way that can confound. But you deserve to hear it all, to ponder it all, to struggle as the poet does with the mystery of variety and unity. The one change I’ll make in the poem is to alter one word at the end of the poem so that it speaks to both genders here this morning.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of our faces.
