Connections

Sermon

Let’s pray. God, though sometimes overbearing, Paul also wrote that the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. All our sighing and all our crying and four-letter words are prayers. And so, we ask that those meditations and the words I speak now be life giving, as we try to figure out these lesser enjoyed scriptures. Amen.

I do prefer Paul when he’s less pious and talks about the spirit in that very human way. But even though he starts these verses on the spirit working within us from a place of piety—in some translations he sounds even more pompous—I like where these verses on work go. One could even say that these verses are the Corinthians working alongside Paul.

My favorite resource that I often consult when preparing for sermons is a site that is called Working Preacher. I think it started as a resource from our Lutheran siblings and so there are great many Minnesotans quoted, but also many Presbyterians, Baptists, pastors and professors of color, new ideas and things recycled from decades previous, and this week (rather three years ago, on Pentecost, so somewhere near this week), a New Testament professor named Valerie Nicolet, studying queer theory at “the Institute of Protestant of Theology in Paris.” It sounds cooler in French, but I don’t, so I’m not gonna try to say it. But I love what Professor Nicolet says about Paul and the Corinthians’ working relationship:

…this letter to the Corinthians, is different. We learn a lot about the members of these early churches. They came from different social backgrounds. They did not necessarily lead lives that would traditionally be qualified as saintly. And most interesting to us, they seemed to have had great conversations with Paul… It is not that Paul simply told them what to do, and that was that.

What I like about the Corinthians is that they challenged Paul; they offered their own ideas about his gospel and defended their interpretations at least as passionately as Paul argued for his own. Thus, the relationship between the Corinthians and Paul can serve as a healthy model for integrating dispute and disagreement into the modern, post-modern, or emergent church which still thinks about what it should become and how it should behave…

In this installment of the disagreement between the Corinthians and Paul, Paul is reflecting upon the diversity of gifts in the community at Corinth. Blessedly, their churches had plenty of people feeling like they brought something special to the life of the church: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues as mentioned earlier. Because of that diversity of gifts, there seemed to have been some talk among the Corinthians about whose gift was best.

Or maybe Paul interpreted that disagreement because he loved to end an argument; either way, I’m glad Professor Nicolet points out there is a back and forth here. Where Paul may be trying to say, “this is where the Spirit is and I know because of my connection with God,” these churches have said, “that’s neat that you see that, here’s where we’ve seen Spirit.”

The note from the lesser-known line of Moses is a good one here, too; he says to his young, flustered friend, why would I get in the way of that Spirit? Moses, at least in this moment, is open to wider leadership of all kinds. And the story reminds me of something a member of our Vision and Strategy team said last week as we were talking about the whole church being empowered, not just the staff. He said, I see 70 faithful people here. And we found out later we ate 77 cupcakes, so that was a good guess! We, the church, love the idea of 70ish people eating 77 cupcakes while they reflect on a vision and strategy for a working church. We love it… I also really loved seeing people coloring. So, in addition to the vision and strategy one sheet and additional materials you can look at in the Great Hall today, we’ve also brought the beacon of light coloring sheets back if you want to take one home. Coloring is also a work of the Spirit and it’s important to encourage it.

What has shown me Spirit the most in the last dozen years, in work, is when things that shouldn’t work, work. I see it regularly in church traditions that still amaze me. It amazed me when I was working with high school and college students and they loved singing Taizé songs. The coolest, gayest, most intense Southernly accented young people would beg to sing the “laudate,” a very average praise chant, in Latin, made famous by monks in France, and absolutely detested by most music leaders, as it makes guitar strings break and voices crack. Stuff like that shouldn’t work, but it does. It is a connection point between people somehow, like communion still works even though making people queue in a line to get a lovely but tiny piece of bread and grape juice, then circle back, is incredibly odd.

And Sunday School and Family Dinner Church work, even though inevitably everyone feels awkward being there at first. This last week, my six year old was doing really well at Family Dinner Church, so I knew the end was coming as he was getting antsy and I was tired, so I just let him play games on my phone. I thought that was it—that was as much as he was going to connect with it that evening and now we just needed to make it through without a breakdown. But I could see him drawing or playing something on my phone while another person was talking and saying very smart things, even though they hadn’t been to Family Dinner Church before so certainly they felt awkward at first, too, but I could also see that my kid was doing something with his other hand. I couldn’t tell if something was wrong or if he was shaking nervous energy out, so I finally whispered to him and asked, “What are you doing with your hand?” and he said, “This is the sign for connection…” I didn’t look it up, or at least I didn’t spend much time trying to verify if his ASL was correct, because even if it doesn’t mean connection, he meant it as a way of making a connection, so why would I get in the way of that? The Spirit works, even and especially when you’re tired.

I especially love this line, “there are different kinds of working,” which could mean, there are different types of work, that’s where the rest of these more famous verses go here, but I love that it could also mean something like, there are lots of opinions on success. Or there are types of working that are still working just fine, like Jonathan, our Director of Operations, and I, often discuss that something shouldn’t be too shiny in the church. Elder millennials are very suspicious of an overly polished website filled with beautiful stock photos.

Nicolet continues: Thus, having made a strong argument about the equality of each gift, Paul insists on the proper use of gifts. Gifts are all given by the spirit, but they are not all the same, and so, particular gifts matter. However, what Paul wants to avoid is people focusing on one gift, work or connection, to the detriment of others and exalting the people who practice that particular gift (which in Corinth appears to have been the gift of speaking in tongues, that is also the gift or work that usually gets highlighted on Pentecost). Christ-believers need to move away from a state of mind in which one judges the achievements (or perceived lack) of others. Rather, we need to concentrate on the manner in which each and every gift is used… as “each work of the Spirit is given for the common good.” So “there are different kinds of working, but in all works and in everyone there is the same Spirit at work”.

There are lots of opinions on success in my own head in a single day. There are lots of different kinds of working. The spirit is mysterious, as we read in our liturgy today. There are times I feel more superstitious than spiritual or scriptural (though my glee at 70, 77 people eating cupcakes as we share a vision is arguably superstitiously scriptural since seven is often known as the biblical number of perfection). And that’s what Paul seems to be implying was wrong in Corinth, that the culture wasn’t one of spiritual connection but of being led away from the Spirit by lesser influences. But if you connect with the Spirit in astrology or astronomy, in camp like Eldad and Medad, in your favorite dress, or in your car, if you hear the Spirit in a song, or on TV, or in a cry, or a groan more than in a tongue of flame… Why would we get in the way? Why would we get in the way of Spirit?

When we talk about the Church, especially on the Church’s birthday, we talk about the Church being connectional. And that can sound like a corporate marketing word, but I’ve grown to love it especially as I remember the Spirit. It means we are accountable to each other and accountable to the church down the street and to the church in Nashville and in San Diego and online and in someone’s living room. The word connectional helps me as I think about leaving one great church and looking for another, trusting that this isn’t the only place that won’t get in the way of the Spirit moving. As Claire McKeever-Burgett noted in our liturgy for today: the Spirit connects over small distances that go unnoticed… Over chaos that feels like chasms, generational divides and cease fires that can’t seem to be kept… and over gerrymandered grasps at power, the Spirit is still moving.

It’s as close as your next breath… and the Spirit will be there to advocate when you feel like you can only make groaning sounds or whimpers.

There are different kinds of working, and lots of things still work without shine, but in all of them and in everyone it is Spirit at work.   Amen.