The
Church in the Power of the Spirit
Text: 1 Corinthians 12.3-13
In the calendar of the ecumenical Church, today is the day of
Pentecost, that feast day on which we recall that after Jesus had
departed from his disciples in the flesh, he yet came to them anew in
the Spirit to gift and equip the young church with everything it would
need to continue on with Christ’s mission in the world. The
passage we read from 1 Corinthians 12 is a key Pentecostal text.
It can teach us a great deal about both the nature of the mission
itself, and about the way in which the Spirit has chosen to resource
the church for that mission. Allow me a few short moments to
explore these two themes with you.
So let us first ask what the apostle would say to us about the nature
of the mission itself. Let me read a portion of the text to you
again:
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
baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all
made to drink of the one Spirit.
According to Paul, the church is the new way in which Christ makes his
presence felt in the world. There was a time when Christ walked
the earth in a single human body, greeting the poor and the lame in the
name of his compassionate Father, and preaching that the kingdom of
God’s peace and justice was drawing near. Jesus roamed the towns
and cities of Judea, calling all who lived only for themselves to
repent, to turn aside from their self-centred ways, and live with
compassion and care toward their neighbours. “The time is
coming,” he declared, “when the cause of the poor will be vindicated;
the wicked will be torn from their ivory towers and the poor will reign
with me in God’s kingdom of peace.” But, as we know, Jesus was
murdered for his trouble, done away with by the political and religious
elites who felt threatened by his message. All seemed lost for a
while, it looked as if the thugs of the world would always be the
winners. Yet, after a little while, Christ came to his friends
once more, not only alive and breathing, but so enormously alive that
his fragile human body seemed barely able to contain or convey all that
he now was: a person so completely at one with his Father God
that his face and body positively shimmered with divine glory.
This resurrected Jesus was real and human, for sure. His body was
a real body, his flesh was real flesh. Yet he was mismatched,
somehow, as though the future of God’s promises had already arrived in
him, and yet the world as we know it was, the world from which his body
had taken its substance, was not yet adequate to all that God wanted to
give it.
So then, after appearing to his disciples on a number of occasions,
Christ finally took his leave. He ascended to his Father and our
Father, to his God and our God. It could have been a very sad
occasion. But it wasn’t. For Christ left his friends with a
promise: that very soon the Father and he would come to them in
another way, in an experience we call the Holy Spirit. The Spirit
is Christ’s way of making himself more available, no longer confined to
a particular place and time—a wandering Rabbi in Galilee for
example—but now available to his church in every place and time as the
power and wisdom we need to continue his mission.
Note that the Spirit is not a disembodied ghost, some kind of bodiless
nothing that throws things around in haunted houses by the power of
some kind of telekinesis. No, in the theology of Paul, the Spirit
always comes to us as a body, the “body of Christ”. In the
Pentecostal era following Christ’s ascension the phrase does not, of
course, refer to the singular body of Jesus of Nazareth, but to the new
body he inhabits by the Spirit, which is nothing other than the
church—you, and I, and everyone in every place and time who has
submitted themselves to Christ in baptism. For baptism is the
sign and seal of our belonging to Christ, it is the indispensable
sacrament by which we receive God’s promises and agree to give our
lives over, body and soul, to the mission which Christ has given
us. Baptism: God’s way of making us part of Christ’s
pluriform body, the church, which is nothing other than the presence
and vocation of Christ’s Spirit in the world today.
The implications of this theology for our understanding of mission are
many. First, if the church is the new body of Christ, if the
church is the way in which Christ addresses the world today, then
we—that is you and I—share in the same mission that Christ exercised
while he was here as the man Jesus. Our mission is not different,
at its heart. It is the same. We are to do as Jesus did,
and say again what Jesus said. Of course some of these things
have to be translated, said and done a little differently for a
different kind of world; yet we should be wary of innovation. For
innovation may easily become unfaithfulness to Christ if we are not
continually testing what we say and do by the first and normative
witness to Christ, the writings of the New Testament. The Christ
who works in us today by his Spirit is the same Christ who walked the
roads of Galilee, you see. If we do and say things that Jesus of
Nazareth would never have said or done, we run the risk of abandoning
his mission. That is why, in the Uniting Church’s Basis of Union,
we commit ourselves to biblical and theological scholarship.
Scholarship is not about being clever and smart, in the church.
It is about making sure that we do not abandon the ministry and mission
that God has given us in Christ. Scholars and theologians serve
the church by continually reminding us of whom we speak, and in whose
name we carry out our mission.
A second implication of Paul’s theology of church is this: that
no-one should be excluded from the church or its mission on the basis
of their language, ethnicity, gender or culture. The church can
only be Christ for the whole world if it is made up of many different
people, drawn from many different lands, cultures, backgrounds and
times. As Christ welcomed all who were excluded by his own society and
religion, so the church can never be itself unless it is willing to
welcome as Christ welcomed, to have mercy as Christ has mercy.
Now, let us be clear here. God indeed said a “No” to the world in
Christ. “No, the greedy and the care-less and the self-righteous
may not enter the kingdom of God”. For that reason, the church is
forever bound to confront these evils as Christ did before us.
But Christ never, ever, said “No” to the world on the basis of things
like race, social class or gender. On the contrary, Christ’s
“yes” extends to everyone who suffers because of these things.
Christ says “yes, you are welcome” to everyone who feels
less-than-welcome simply because they do not belong to whichever race,
class or gender is strongest at any particular juncture in
history. Thus, as the body of Christ, the church is commissioned
and gifted by the Spirit to be a place of welcome. In our own
place and time we are called, I suggest, to combat the racist policies
of the Howard government, which refuses to welcome those who come to us
for asylum. For that policy is certainly not about security or
economic stability. It is about race, pure and simple. He
stole it from Pauline Hanson. But that is not all the church is
called to do. It is also called to a ministry of welcome at the
local community level. There is no point in opposing racism at
the national level, it we then refuse to actively welcome the one who
is different, the one who is a stranger, into the warmth of our church
communities. The mission of Christ has to find flesh in warm
hearts and smiling faces, in invitations to share meals and in a
willingness to bear our neighbour’s burdens. If it does not, then
it is not the mission of Christ. It is the mission of hypocrites.
But now I must return to the second of those themes I mentioned at the
start, although time is running out. Just for a moment let us
consider the way in which the Spirit equips us for this mission of
Christ. I quote again:
Now there are varieties of
gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the
same Lord; and there are varieties 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 . . . All these
are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one
individually just as the Spirit chooses.
According to Paul, the Spirit equips us for Christ’s mission by
distributing gifts, gifts of speaking and gifts of doing. They
are distributed to every church member, everyone who has joined
themselves to Christ in baptism. No-one is excluded. They
are given not for the good of the person who receives them alone, but
for the good of the community. They are given not to reward some people
for the extra-special religiosity, but as a gift of unmerited favour by
which each person may then serve their neighbours. The worst
thing that anyone could possibly do with their gift is to hoard it, to
keep it to themselves. Hoarding renders a gift useless, because
hoarding transforms a gift into a possession. But the gifts of
God are not ours to possess: they are given to pass on to others;
they are given that they may be given again, and therefore kept alive
as gifts. What God gives the individual enriches the individual,
certainly. But only if the gift is given again, as a service to
others.
The gifts of the Spirit, then, are both qualities and people.
They come in as many sizes, shapes, colours, genders, or ethnicities as
there are people in the church. They are given not as we choose,
but as the Spirit chooses. As Christian people, this means that
we are not free to refuse the gift or service that the Spirit gives
us. Because we no longer belong to ourselves, but to Christ, we
are called to simply receive and give thanks for a gift when it comes
our way: to welcome it, to receive it, and to pass it on.
In concrete terms, this means that we should always be alert to the new
and often unexpected gifts the Spirit may choose to drop in our
laps. Like a person of different colour or race, a stranger who
comes to teach us how to see things new ways to welcome and to
care. San was a refugee who came to this country from somewhere
else. He is a gift to us from God, and if we cannot see that, we
are blind. So, too, we must be alert to the gift that God may
wish to make of ourselves to our community. If God calls you to
become a gift for others, don’t make excuses like “NO, I don’t know
how; or NO, I’m not worthy” because God couldn’t care less. If
God calls you, God will also give you everything you need to serve in
that way. For none of us are worthy, but God chooses to use us
anyway. God gives the gifts liberally, and there is none who
misses out. God has a service for you to perform, and you won’t
become who you are until to find out what it is.
O.K. that is enough for today. There is much more to be said, but
is for other times and places. For now, remember only this:
that Christ continues his mission of hospitality and love in the Church
by his Spirit—through you and me, in other words. We are his
body, whom the Spirit resources with gifts by which the mercy and love
of God may be embodied in the world. All of you have been given a
gift, but it is not for you alone. It is for the good of the
church, and ultimately, for the good of the whole creation. So
don’t refuse the gift. Receive it, let it grow in you, and let it
flourish into the service you render your neighbours for the sake of
Christ, who is himself the greatest, and most generous gift of all.
In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
Pentecost 2005
back to homily index