Realizing our Gifts

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

January and February are anniversary months for me, marking important milestones of a few things in my past that are worth sharing. For my wife Sarah and I, February 23rd is our 7th wedding anniversary. In my relationship with you as a congregation, February 6th will be the 5th anniversary of me preaching for the call here… It follows come the beginning of April, it will be the first time that I have ever marked a 5th Anniversary with a congregation. Just to head off any speculation, I hope to celebrate several more anniversaries with you.

Apart from these fairly straightforward milestones… there are some others… February 9th will mark the 13th Anniversary of my Ordination to be a Minister of Word and Sacrament… and this coming week marks the 19th anniversary of me realizing my call to be a minister of Word and Sacrament.

With today being a service led by the Worship Committee, I wanted to take a slightly different approach… by sharing some of my own personal story. Despite what many might think, my decision to become a minister was not something I aspired to from an early age… anything but. I was not particularly involved in my own church community, I didn’t feel I had anything to contribute. I didn’t like the youth group that was there, because to be honest, I didn’t go to the right school… therefore I didn’t feel welcome. I only went to worship on Sunday mornings, because my Dad was the organist… and I was often dragged kicking and screaming. Welcome to the angst of my teens.

When I was eighteen, I started my studies at the University of Calgary in the music program. I realized that it might help my marks if I take opportunities outside of the department. In fact, it was ‘strongly encouraged’. So I asked my Dad if he minded if I joined the choir. Prior to this I had not really been all that keen on singing… so after Dad picked himself up off the floor I found myself as a member of the choir at Varsity Acres Presbyterian Church… first as a Bass, and then forcibly a tenor. Although in reality, my gifts in singing were much better suited to the tenor range… but it took Dad to point it out.

It was through this opening, this avenue that I became more involved in the life of the church. Not in the youth group, not in any particular program that was geared for young people at all… but simply exercising my gifts in helping the people worship. Of course, I couldn’t phrase it that way then at all. I just thought I was boosting my music mark.

I didn’t think my gifts mattered, but someone proved me wrong.

Towards the end of my first degree, someone in the congregation asked me if I had ever considered going into the ministry. I really hadn’t to be honest… and I wondered why they had even mentioned it. But even so, there was this odd reality that I had continued to be part of the choir and the worship life of the congregation where my actual time as a music student at University had only lasted one year. I forgot to mention that small detail, didn’t I?

The person who had asked me that question was not someone who would have asked this frivolously. At the time, he was the Chair of Christian Thought at the University of Calgary.

It got me thinking… thinking about why I was where I was… why it was that people often turned to me in times of crisis… why it was two weeks later I helped talk a friend back from the edge… it was in that experience that the light came on. I had realized that my call to ministry went back long before Dr. Sell asked me that question… that there had been hints and nudges going as far back to when I was seven years old… and maybe even earlier. It was in that moment that I really recognized that God had been there from the beginning. It’s been 19 years since I realized that… and so far so good. My life has changed, developed, grown in ways that I never expected when I was 21… and while there have been some bumpy parts along the way, I wouldn’t change a thing.

My story should not be the exception. All of us have our own stories, our experiences of faith… but often there are a few things that get in our way. A major one is that we don’t recognize that God has already given each of us, all of us, special unique gifts to make the world a better place… but we don’t see it. We tend to think that we don’t matter, that we don’t have anything to offer. We let others do it on our behalf.

But Paul begs to differ. He writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

Oddly enough, he was writing it to a group of people that made a point of elevating certain gifts and talents as being superior in the church, while denying or degrading what others had to offer. It created this attitude of “we are better than you” that threatened to tear apart the early church.

These days, the same thing manifests itself in the attitude that “I have nothing to offer.”

But Paul begs to differ.

Nobody is exempt from this… everybody has gifts. You may notice that in Paul’s writing, he doesn’t say that the only people who have gifts are ministers… He says that all of us have gifts for the common good. All of us have gifts for ministry… they’re not limited to clergy types like me. In fact, Christianity in North America has suffered greatly because of this whole cultural thought that only certain people have gifts for ministry. We’ve placed this huge expectation that this small group of people will do it for us. It’s not surprising that the burnout rate for clergy ranks amongst the highest of paid professionals. I actually feel fortunate that I still love what I do… but I have a number of contemporaries who are no longer working in a church. Some of it has to do with the expectations that others have, or worse yet, we make of ourselves… and even us clergy types forget Paul’s words.

“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

While it is true that not everybody is cut out to be a minister of Word and Sacraments, everybody has a gift to make this world a better place.

The tragedy is that while we may have these gifts, they can be squandered. They can be wasted deliberately, misusing them for personal gain, at the expense of others… but they can also be misspent simply by not recognizing that each of us really does have something to offer. The point is that too often we undervalue ourselves… too often we undervalue others…

But to each us is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good… but maybe we just don’t give ourselves the opportunity to either recognize it or talk about it as such. Sometimes we become convinced that we have one particular gift, and hold onto it greatly… not realizing that in fact our true gift of the Holy Spirit is something else. There can be a whole raft of barriers that get in the way of us realizing the potential that God has instilled in each of us. Maybe that’s something that needs to change. Maybe we need to take Paul’s words to heart. Maybe we need to take ourselves a little less critically and realize that we have many gifts to share…

So here’s a good place to start: You know all those things you’re good at? Those things that you enjoy doing? That’s a big hint as to where your gifts are… pay attention that, and you may learn that in fact God has been there from the very beginning.

Amen.

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