Who are you? What are your gifts? What is your place in the world? These three questions have bugged me since I first heard them almost ten years ago. Eric Hartman, the dean of students at Sewanee was keen on asking these three introspective puzzlers to anyone who sought his counsel and even some who did not. So this past Sunday after we talked about spiritual gifts Kristin Hanson invited me to talk about my experience of discerning one’s gifts and a call to ordained ministry.
As I talked about spiritual gifts and ministry, I stumbled upon a Truth that I keep bumping into in my own life. No matter how hard I try to figure out my call right now, no matter how much work I put into discernment at this moment, no matter how exhaustive I am with discerning a vocation, I will still have to keep listening to figure out who I am, what my gifts are, and what my place is in this world.
In today’s epistle to the Church in Rome, Paul help us, or at least me, to know how it is that spiritual gifts are most effectively used. At this point in the early Church, the gentiles within the Church of Rome were boasting of their practices to the Jewish faction within the church. The gentiles did not follow the same rigorous code that the Jewish followers of Christ did, but instead of harmoniously coexisting, the gentiles rubbed it in faces of their Jewish brothers and sisters. As this is one of Paul’s last letters, it possesses some more advanced statements of his Faith in God, and he eloquently urges both sides to come together. By this point, twelve chapters into the letter, Paul is issuing an invitation not to one specific group but to all members of Christ’s Body. That exhortation extends to us. This is how we can best identify, understand, and use our spiritual gifts… together!
Paul presses hearers of this letter to come together, not focusing on what is happening in the world, but by discerning together the will of God. When we start to see what God is working right here in this world listening as a community, we no longer focus primarily on our individual needs or petty differences that keep us apart. We start to act as a body. It is as this body that we can start to answer, “Who am I? What are my gifts? What is my place in this world?”
Sometimes I think of the simplicity of picking up a coffee mug and then putting it back on a table. My biceps and triceps must work together along with all the smaller muscles in my forearm and all the tendons and ligaments in my hand and fingers. While this task might not drain my brain, I typically have to think about it and send some neural signals down my spine to my arm and fingers. It seems that only when the members do not work together do I ever even think about this task.
Each part of the body has a task to do. Each member has gifts that help to accomplish that task. We can withhold our gifts from one another, we can without our talents from one another, we can without ourselves from this corporate body, but with Paul, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present yourselves (your bodies) as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
We will constantly ask, “Who am I? What are my gifts and talents? What is my place in the world?” While we will never have a permanent answer, by presenting ourselves to God as a living sacrifice, God uses our gifts together to bring healing, unity with God, and love to Creation. We each are given gifts through God’s abundant grace. We must be bold and share these gifts with one another, so that we can make this body stronger and allow Christ to work through us.
Who are you? What are your gifts? What is your place in the world?
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