September 11, 2005
Romans 14:1-12
NRSV
Matthew 18:21-35
NRSV
A Gifted People
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
17th Sunday after Pentecost – September 11, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Romans 14:1-12/Matthew 18:21-35]
We use the term ‘gifted’ to refer to people, and especially to people who have demonstrated some remarkable abilities or traits. We talk about gifted scholars, students, performers, artists, athletes, and even care-givers. What we’re saying is that these folks have been endowed with some extraordinary talents or abilities which enabled them to excel. However, I am also reminded of Thomas Edison’s definition of genius, “One per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration!” There are few who would say that Edison wasn’t among the gifted, but he realized an essential point – the gift is only good if it’s used. A gift left in a box, still in its wrappings, only has the potential to be one thing, a “re-gift.” Unless it is used as it was intended, it’s really wasted.
Now, what has that got to do with being church? Plenty. There is a danger, you see, to sitting around recovering. You have time to think, to read, and even to watch. The last two weeks following my surgery I’ve gone from the sublime, reading Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful novel Gilead, to the ridiculous, watching the whole series of The Vicar of Dibley and even Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life.’ In all of them I found things that pertain to what it means to be a gifted people, to be the church.
In the pages of Gilead I was reminded of Calvin’s point that the world is a stage, we’re the actors, and God is the audience. Our lives, our actions are observed by God and make a difference. Our lives are a gift from God and what we do with them is our ‘thank you’ for the gift. Reading the reflections of the Reverend John Ames in the novel I saw the truth of that and how we make a difference in each other’s lives – even in the smallest things.
Now, believe it or not, I also found the sublime in the midst of the ridiculous. I am not going to say that my approach to pastoral practice is going to change thanks to The Vicar of Dibley, but I did find something interesting in The Meaning of Life. There’s a scene in the middle of the film that opens with a group of businessmen seated around a large conference table. This is how it unfolds:
[Large corporate boardroom filled with suited executives]
Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: "The Meaning of Life" Now uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Exec #3: What was that about hats again?
Exec #2: Oh, Uh... people aren't wearing enough.
Exec #1: Is this true?
Exec #4: Certainly. Hat sales have increased but not pari passu, as our research...
Exec #3: [Interrupting] "Not wearing enough"? enough for what purpose?
Exec #5: Can I just ask, with reference to your second point, when you say souls don't develop because people become distracted...
[looking out window]
Exec #5: Has anyone noticed that building there before?
And there’s the point – not enough hats. No, the point is we are gifted with a spirit, an energy, and we tend not to develop it because we get “distracted by everyday trivia.”
I believe that we Congregationalists are a gifted people, but tend, like other gifted folks, to neglect our gifts because we get distracted. The gift is God’s will to relationship expressed in the person, the teaching, the life, death, resurrection and abiding presence of Jesus Christ. I know that I’ve used this reference form John Shea before, but it fits. In his book An Experience Named Spirit Shea writes:
Jesus Christ is not only the past founder of our relationship to God but also its present mediator. He not only overcame the law of time by not being forgotten, he overcame the law of death by not being lost. He lives among us! And our rhetoric for his presence ranges from the lyrical Hopkins’ verse “Christ plays in ten thousand places” to the sudden, shocking revelation of Zooey Glass, “And don’t you know – listen to me now – don’t you know who that fat lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.” [p.17]
The encounter, the gift, holds that even though I may never have seen the Christ there were those who did and they have passed their experience to me and in their experience, through their agency, I am brought into that living relationship. For the church to continue as a gifted people, to be what it is called to be, means to bring people into an encounter and relationship with the living God. For that to happen requires those of us who have identified ourselves as “Christ followers” to take our own encounter, our own faith and relationship seriously and recognize that we’re the means of encounter and relationship for others. In short, we could be Zooey’s fat lady!
So we are a gifted people because God desires to know us and gives us the means to know God and to know one another. One way we can express this giftedness is by talking about the “three fs” that we see on publications and nametags around here: Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship. These three concepts are at the root of our being a gifted people.
Faith can be used in a number of ways, as I pointed out in a sermon back in January. We can talk about faith as believing or assenting to a certain set of doctrines or teachings. We can also talk about the radical notion of faith that we see in Jesus’ invitation to his disciples. I like what contemporary theologian Hans Kung notes, “Jesus nowhere said, ‘Say after me,’ but rather ‘Follow me.’ That means that Jesus did not first require a confession of faith from his disciples, women or men, but rather called them to utterly practical discipleship.” [Kung, Christianity: Essence, History and Future, p. 50] What Kung is saying is that it’s more about the life we live than the words we say; because we can ‘know’ something and never have it make a bit of difference in our lives. My own thought is that faith is our response to that invitation to follow and the means by which we come to understand what we’re about.
Now, that being said, let me address a point of misinformation about Congregationalism and faith. This is NOT the church where you get to believe anything you like and the reason we have a weather vane and not a cross on the top of the steeple is NOT so people can figure out which way our theology is going today. I have no idea where that notion got started, but after ten years of fairly consistent research I have yet to find one Congregational scholar who says faith for us is a free-for-all. You see, there’s a reason that we have a book in the library called The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism and why over the years statements of faith, like the 1913 Kansas City Statement of Faith (you can find it on page 512 in the back of your hymnal), were written. We believe something – we stand in the historic Reformed tradition. We simply choose not to use these statements as tests, but rather as testimonies.
When Pastor Robinson sent the Pilgrims off from Leyden he told them, “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth out of his holy Word.” So, we stand on the truth of Scripture and that these words penned long ago still have meaning and effect because of the living Spirit in the living body of Christ – which is the church, a gifted people, the Lord’s free and gathered people.
We have a faith and while we see creeds not as tests, but as testimonies, we are not acreedal. Our freedom comes as a result of this faith-perspective. The early Congregationalists didn’t want to be constrained by external statements or liturgies so that they could be absolutely free to give themselves to loving God and one another. I’ve said it before and will continue to say it: our freedom is not a freedom from, but a freedom to. We are not freed from believing, but freed to believe and to follow Jesus with all our hearts, minds, souls, and our everyday lives reflecting it.
That faith and freedom come because we are gifted with forgiveness. That’s the point Jesus makes in Matthew’s Gospel. Peter is looking for the minimum, the “how-long-before-I-get-to-retaliate?” point. Jesus tells him, and in no uncertain terms, that there isn’t one. Seventy seven times, overcoming Lamech’s vengeance in Genesis 4, and multiplying the perfect number seven, Jesus says. That’s forgiveness, compassion at a level beyond comprehension, but that’s what God practices and we’re to do the same. People who come among us are to be welcomed, embraced, forgiven, and cared for – just as we have been. All of us, all of us, are debtors and all of us have had a “zillion” dollar debt (which, by the way is what that number is in the Gospel – an astronomical sum) pushed aside by a God who says, “I love you – now get on with the business of loving others.” And every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we are reminded of that forgiveness and of our action in response, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Faith and Freedom, then, lead to Fellowship, to community. This isn’t an exercise in individuation – though this is Congregationalism’s thorn in the flesh. The point is that we are a gifted people, not just gifted persons. God’s love, God’s grace, God’s action takes individuals and draws them into community. God’s takes persons and makes a people. It is as a people, a church, that we are to reach to others with the message of God’s love and healing presence. Christians have been having difficulty at this almost from the beginning. Notice Paul’s words to the church at Rome we read today. Still, that doesn’t mean that we give up or that we lightly excuse ourselves from the effort of forming and maintaining community. We have been given a gift and now we’re expected to use it.
As I’ve prayed, read, and thought about what we’re undertaking in the next few weeks as we seek to “rekindle the gift,” I realized that we’re taking a big step. As a church we’re stepping back and giving serious thought to who we are and what we’re about. I believe that God is going to use this time and use all of us, if we accept our giftedness and exercise it.
Part of my musing has been on what I envision for this church and I’d like to share it with you. First, I see this as a welcoming, a safe, and loving place. A place where people seeking refuge and healing can come knowing that they’ll be accepted and welcomed. Second, I see it is a place where we practice “a generous orthodoxy.” This is a term that I discovered in a book, of the same name, by Brian McLaren. It originates with respected theologians Hans Frei and Stanley Grenz. Grenz talks about it as having elements of both the liberal and the evangelical. I like what McLaren says in the introduction to his book:
Scandalously, the generous orthodoxy you will explore (if you proceed) goes too far, many will say, in the direction of identifying orthodoxy with a consistent practice of humility, charity, courage, and diligence: humility that allows us to admit that our past and current formulations may have been limited or distorted. Charity to ward those of other traditions who may understand some things better than our group – even though we are more conscious of what we thing we understand better. Courage to be faithful to the true path of our faith as we understand it even when it is unpopular, dangerous, and difficult to do so. Diligence to seek again and again the truth path of our faith whenever we feel we have lost our way, which seems to be pretty often. [A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 30]
As Congregationalists we don’t check our heads at the door, they come in along with our hearts and here we struggle, we learn, and we grow – together. Ours is a reasoned, pilgrim faith seeking solid grounding and authenticity. Like Paul to the Romans, we don’t judge people as weak or strong in faith or judge where they are in the journey of faith. Rather, we open our doors and our hearts to people wherever they are on their journey to God, knowing that all-together, “we are the Lord’s.” The operative word in all of this is “generous” – we stand on classical Christian faith, but know how little we know and how much we need to learn. The best verse of our closing hymn today, “We Limit Not the Truth of God” isn’t in our hymnal. It goes like this: “Who dares to bind to his dull sense the oracles of heaven, for all the nations, tongues and climes, and all the ages given? That universe! how much unknown, that ocean! unexplored: the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.” That Lord has yet more – and we’re to be open.
Third, I envision this to be a place where we take our gifts seriously and use them. The message of Jesus in Matthew and of Paul to the Romans is clear: we are accountable for what we have been given. Part of being gifted is accounting for the gift – we have been given much and now we are to use it for the good of others. There has been a strong core of folks who make sure this place runs – they’ve been around for years and some new folks come along and join it, but that’s not the way the church, especially a Congregational Church, is supposed to run. It’s all of us that make it go. We are all called upon to be intentional in living our faith and we do it in the context of mutual care and concern – the old 80-20 rule doesn’t work here. It’s all of us because we’ve all been given the gift. Remember our businessmen in The Meaning of Life? We’re to get around the distractions, move beyond the everyday trivia and be about living the gift.
We are a gifted people and I see a place of welcome and safety; a place where a generous orthodoxy is practiced, and where we take our gifts seriously and use them well. Faith, Freedom, and Fellowship are gifts given to us so that others might know what we know and be loved and as we are loved. It’s that simple, and it’s that difficult. We are gifted and now we have to use the gift so that others might be blessed – as we are blessed. We are a gifted people.