Now What? Our Spiritual Gifts are life-giving mysteries

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,

with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Ephesians 4:1-16

My sermon from the 11th Sunday after Pentecost (August 5, 2018) on Ephesians 4:1-16. Listen to the recording at the bottom of the page or read my manuscript below.

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So if you are a fan of the Internet, your social media feeds might have been devoted to goats over the last few days. A goat on the internet can mean many different things. It can be an acronym, referring to someone who is a g o a t – the greatest of all time. But it can also refer to that hairy little animal with horns that eats practically everything. On Friday morning, a breaking news report shook Boise, Idaho because over 100 goats were wandering in a residential area. At first, no one knew how they got there. They just showed up, wandering from yard to yard. Now, if your yard is mostly crabgrass like mine is, a bunch of goats coming over to have lunch isn’t really that scary. But if you have a yard you actually care for, a herd of goats showing up at your front door is downright terrifying. Those goats were on a mission and they were going to eat every plant in sight.

Now, if you followed the story, you know how the goats got there and what happened next. Everything, eventually, worked out and the goats went back to where they came from. It’s a fun little news story with a happy ending but instead of focusing on how the story ended, I want to spend time with how the story began. And it started with a tweet. Joe Parris, a reporter for a tv station in Boise, received a tip about these goats, so he went out and found them, taking 4 pictures of the goats with his phone. He immediately sent word to the wider internet that by writing this: “#Breaking – About 100 goats are on the loose right now in a Boise neighborhood. They are going house to house eating everything in sight. Nobody has a clue where they came from…updates to follow.” Goats on the loose is a really great sentence we don’t hear often. And this short news tweet had everything in it to keep us interested. But what drew me into this story wasn’t only the goats. Rather, what enticed me was how no one knew how they got there. It was a mystery! And the very best kind of mystery there is. If imagine ourselves as one of the homeowners on that street, seeing one goat in our front yard would be unexpected. But seeing over 100 goats would totally blow our mind. We would wonder where they came from but that question would have to wait because the mysterious herd of goats would be making our flower and vegetable beds disappear in a very non-mysterious way. We wouldn’t get to dwell on where this mystery came from. Instead, we have to live with it, and engage it, right away. And that’s what makes mysteries powerful. A mystery is an experience we can’t, in that moment, fully explain but it is something we have to live through. We run into these kinds of mysteries all the time and they’re usually very small. We might get a phone call late at night from an unlisted number and wonder who called us. But when that person leaves a voicemail, that little mystery is solved. Yet there are other mysteries that we are asked to hold onto; mysteries we can’t fully explain. And that’s important because it’s those mysteries that teach us who God is calling us to be.

We have spent these last few weeks taking time during worship to explore our spiritual gifts. And we’ve done that because of this passage from our second reading today. This is the moment in Ephesians when the focus of the letter changes. Before this, the author talked about everything that God had done and how God, through Jesus, had included Gentiles into a new humanity God was bringing about. This new humanity isn’t here yet so God created a community of faith, a church, that could be a inclusive, welcoming, and loving community for us all. God gives the church a sense of unity by connecting us to each other through the gift of faith and the gift of baptism. But this unity doesn’t ask us to forget who we are. We all have our own histories, backgrounds, experiences, and identities. We are all different. And that’s great because God wants the church to include all the diversity present in God’s world. Living with this kind of diversity isn’t always easy. So the letter to the Ephesians moves away from talking about what God has done and invites us to consider how our lives can respond to God done. And one way we do this is by discovering the gifts God has given to each of us.

These gifts, our talents and abilities, are not always easy to see. And, in fact, they can be quite mysterious. A gift we use in our everyday life might not be the gift God wants us to use in the church. We might be an amazing public speaker, able to articulate a clear point of view that impresses our coworkers and our boss. Yet in the church, God might want us to hold back, to not speak out as much as we do, and instead nurture a prayer life that prays for everyone in our bulletin and in our prayer chain. Or this mystery could be the exact opposite. We might be shy when we’re out in public and at school. We might be unassuming and quiet when we’re part of a large crowd. Yet in this place, surrounded by people who recognize us as a necessary part of what God is doing in the world, the spiritual gift of preaching might be exactly what God wants us to do. We can’t assume that the gifts we use in the world are the same gifts God calls us to use inside the church. Because the spiritual gifts God gives to each of us are designed for one thing: and that’s to help all of us grow into the kind of people God wants us to be. That happens when we, as a community, know each other and know ourselves. The gifts we bring into the church are needed so that the people sitting next to us can become the Christians they’re meant to be. And their gifts other people have are necessary for us so that we can fully follow Jesus Christ. These mysterious gifts from God are not designed to remain a mystery to those around us. We need to tell each other our stories and share the gifts God has given us. We need to listen to each other so that we can discover who we are and how other people’s gifts can change our lives. And we need to recognize the gifts we see in others before they see it in themselves. Our spiritual gifts, right now, might be mystery. Or we might think that we don’t have any gifts to share at all. But if 100 goats can show up mysteriously in Boise, Idaho, then we can take a chance and live more deeply into the mysteries of faith, love, hope, and mercy that God gives to us each and everyday. It’s in those mysteries where we discover who God is and why Jesus makes a difference in our lives. And it’s through those mysteries where we learn how we can make a difference in Christ’s Church and throughout all of God’s world.

Amen.

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