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TEXT: ROMANS 12: 1-8 CEB
Today is Mothers’ Day. I attended seminary somewhere on the cusp between first and second wave feminism when women would walk out of chapel services if others persisted in referring to the God of Scripture with male pronouns. Some insisted that God be referred to as he/she, or at least that we refer to God from time to time as Mother.
I refused, not because I’m a male and using male pronouns for God can reinforce patriarchal privilege which I—as a male—benefit, but rather because I take the whole “Father/Son” thing as part and parcel of God’s self-revelation. God was Father/Son/Holy Spirit infinitely before there was a cosmos, Earth, animals, genders, or human beings.
Still, I uphold that Scripture sometimes proclaims that God is like a loving mother as a simile. Jesus, in both Matthew and Luke’s gospels, mourns over Jerusalem, saying he would to gather them like a mother hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings. This image is especially appropriate today.
I have recently read of cases wherein barnyard fires, once burnt out, have revealed mother hens on the ground, dead but covering chicks who survive. This is a perfect image for our text, where Paul says we are to “present our bodies as living sacrifices.” This is a perfect image of divine, agapé love--perfectly manifest in a mother’s love for her children. Yes, God is certainly like this!
Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, says Paul in our text. I need to talk about a few Greek words to demonstrate how things come together in today’s text. The first word is chara, which I’ve also seen as a woman’s name. Chara means joy. Charis means grace and it might be the most important word in the New Testament. It means that unexpected gift of love and mercy which comes to the undeserving. Charism means gift and charismata gifts plural. See the common thread? Grace is a gift that bestows gifts by which we find joy at the core.
These words also suggest another word: charisma. I think we wrongly use the word charisma to describe individuals of enormous personal charm. People with charisma are often thought to be the Pied Pipers and elegant orators who exercise tremendous influence over the crowds. The problem with this definition is that it also includes those narcissistic salesmen and politicians—everything from revolutionaries like Che Guevara to Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Scriptural charisma is not like that. In the Old Testament, charisma was embodied by the prophets whose main function was to steer Israel back into obedience to the Law. Charisma meant honoring the Lord and condemning evil, manifested in chosen individuals like Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea, etc. But in the New Testament, charisma is transformed from chosen individuals to a chosen community, the Church. The gifts of grace are given to the Church in order that righteous actions would flourish.
The gifts of grace exist for the purposes of righteousness—justice, if you like—and they are the substance of Christian obedience. We are no longer called to adhere to the terms of the Mosaic Covenant—the Ten Commandments, etc.—but to obey by practicing the gifts given by the Holy Spirit. God’s grace has saved us, but that does not exempt us from doing what is right. Grace is not a substitute for right action, but its basis.
We don’t so much obey the Law as we do the Spirit by means of the gifts. These spiritual gifts are our specific form of obedience—the discipline of faith. We are a charismatic community because of these gifts. To practice our gift is to renounce self in service to the Lord, and thus to present ourselves as living sacrifices. How do Christians obey the Lord? By exercising our gifts.
Seven Gifts of Grace
Verses 6 and 7 constitute what has been classically called, “The Seven Gifts of Grace.” Let’s look at all seven and consider how they are present in our own lives.
1. PROPHECY
First, prophecy is not about fortune telling or predicting the future. It may come to that but that is not its basic nature. The basic nature of prophecy is Word-bearing. A prophet is one who bears the word of God to the people. It is truth-telling, particularly when it involves the truth about who God is and who we are in relationship to God. The gift of prophecy today occurs whenever you or I bear the good news about Jesus with family or friends. Prophecy is preaching, but it is also truth-telling done with love.
2. SERVICE
Service comes from the word from which we get “deacon.” In short, it is volunteerism. For all the ring-leaders and front-line visionaries in the Church, the real credit goes to those who simply show up and get the work done. Those who pitch in, step up, roll up their sleeves and serve are the ones who give real traction to our mission.
3. TEACHING
Teaching should be obvious, but I’d like to add a distinction. Teaching means training. This is more than just words into one ear and out the other; it is training that prepares people for action. Imagine someone teaching a group of people to be firefighters—exactly how much can be done in the classroom compared to getting outside, gearing up, and truly training how to fight fires? Our teaching is in vain if it doesn’t lead to concrete actions that make a difference.
4. ENCOURAGING
This comes from the word paraclete, which is another word for the Holy Spirit. It includes both comfort and advocacy for others. If you’ve ever received a thoughtful note or card just at the right time, you’ve been on the receiving end of this gift. Likewise, if you’ve ever had someone stick up for you when you’ve been wronged, insulted, or oppressed, you’ve experienced advocacy. The Holy Spirit is certainly active and present in such acts of encouragement and advocacy.
5. GIVING
Mary Catherine Prather was the grand-daughter of the man who donated all the land for Texas Tech. She had lots of money, but she knew what to do with it. Mary Catherine Prather was famous in Lubbock, Texas for her incredible generosity. “Money’s like manure; it ain’t worth a thing unless you spread it around,” she said. She would have cringed if you asked her to lead a group in prayer or teach a Sunday School class, but she stepped up for every mission, every building project, and every local outreach her church attempted. To give freely is a gift indeed, and those who have it are the camels who sail through the eye of the needle. All who give sacrificially are the same.
6. LEADERSHIP
The word for leadership suggests those who put forth goals and focus the work of themselves and others on getting there. Leadership is focused work and includes the ability to cast vision and draw others along for the journey.
7. MERCY
Last but not least is mercy. We can think of this as pastoral care for the sick, the sad, the poor, the naked, the imprisoned, and the lonesome. We communicate the mercies of God whenever we show love and mercy to someone who is down on their luck.
So now consider where you are with these gifts of grace. God has redeemed you and the Holy Spirit has given you gifts—what do you think they are?
Now as soon as you have an idea, I’m going to mess with it, because I think churches have erred in their attempts to classify people by their spiritual gifts. “Here, take this survey and we’ll put you in our database so we’ll know to call you if we need your gift! and so forth.
The chief problem with identifying “our” spiritual gifts is that it is so limiting. “What? Help in the nursery? Well, you see, it’s not my spiritual gift to do that, so.…” To say you have “a” gift seems a patent way of denying your Christian responsibilities in all the other areas. We need to see these gifts much more broadly and accept them as more mysterious than whatever ways we might like to put them to our use.
While we may have our strong suit, so to speak, what about those gifts that we do not feel we have in much measure? Can we simply dismiss them as “not ours”? I think not for several reasons. First, the Holy Spirit is wild and not tame, which means you might be given any gift at any moment as needed. The area you feel is not your gifting may become your gift if put in the right context.
Imagine we broke up the congregation into groups of 7. Do you really think it’s guaranteed that you would have the same strengths and weaknesses in every group? What happens to you if you are put into a group with five others who have “your” spiritual gift in much greater measure? Likely, you’d develop other gifts and that’s what we all ought to be doing anyway.
I would say: what is not my gift is my discipline. What does not come naturally to me yet is needed by the church is the gifting I develop, so if it is not my native gift, it becomes my discipline.
Our natural strengths and weaknesses are probably all over the spectrum. God empowers us with gifts—even different, unexpected gifts—as we are put onto the front line of mission and we obediently step up. Prophecy may not be your chief gift, but put into a situation where bearing the Word will make a life-and-death difference, I believe you’ll be given that gift.
THE TWO MOUNTAINS
David Brooks is a cultural commenator and Op-ed writer whose pieces are syndicated internationally. The New Yorker magazine recently reports that he has been having significant spiritual development of late. Following a divorce and something of a dark night of the soul, he reported to friends that he was experiencing “religious curiosity.” Though raised Jewish, his Jewish faith declined through adulthood. When a friend challenged him on the notion of God’s grace, some bells went off for him:
“You cannot earn your way into a state of grace—this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition.” The article continues:
An informal competition opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own estimation, three hundred gifts of spiritual books, “only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s‘Mere Christianity.’ ”
[ ALL QUOTES: “David Brooks’ Conversion Story” Benjamin Wallace-Wells The New Yorker, April 29, 2019]
One morning, passing through Penn Station at rush hour, Brooks was overcome by the feeling that he was moving in a sea of souls—not the hair and legs and sneakers but the moral part. “It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth on each of these thousands of people.
“Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. Souls riding the train to work. Souls yearning for goodness. Souls wounded by earlier traumas. With that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them—some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.”
Brooks’ book, The Two Mountains, presents a principle that may appeal to us all. Says Brooks:
“It’s gotten so I can recognize first- and second-mountain people,” he writes confidently. Those on their first mountain of life tend to focus on themselves: on establishing an identity, on managing their reputation, on status and reward. The second mountain is normally reached only after a period of suffering (“the valley”), and those who make it there come to focus on others. “The second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self,” about contribution rather than acquisition, egalitarianism rather than elitism, Brooks writes. The satisfaction of second-mountain people is deeper (it is a “bigger mountain”) and leads not to happiness but to joy.”
This idea of two mountains seems to sum up the Christian life very well. Some people never have a second mountain; they spend their entire lives in service to the acquisition of wealth, influence, and reputation and may never come to the realization that these things are all in and of themselves vanity.
A few special people start their second mountains early, giving themselves to lives of mission and service. The idea is that the “pursuit of happiness” may lead to little more than glorified self-gratification, whereas the second mountain can become our soul’s true home and a source of endless joy and fulfillment.
So how is your second mountain coming? That second mountain is all about your gifting and the exercise of your spiritual gifts are how you and I climb it. Grace saves us and it changes us. To be in a state of grace means that our sins are forgiven but it doesn’t mean that right action is not expected of us. That right action is not about a self-absorbed piety—you and me putting all of our energy into trying to make ourselves holy—but rather about exercising our gifts with risky, costly love. Together we constitute the Church, which is a community of charisma. We are a “Charisma Collective” and we are to encourage, upbuild, prepare, plan, and execute mission that will communicate the good news of Jesus Christ to our neighborhood and world.
The picture is this: that God’s grace is given through gifts that we would build 2nd mountains and know deep joy.
May we all be grown in our areas of giftedness, ever mindful that the Holy Spirit can at any moment supply us with power beyond our imaginings, and may we seek to develop all our gifts with diligence as we daily die to ourselves in service to our Lord and his kingdom! †