Benefits for All

The scripture referred to is 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.

In the movie Up In The Air, George Clooney played a corporate downsizer, firing people for bosses who simply can't. Why would anyone do such a job? For Clooney's character it's to accumulate air miles. If he gets to 10 million miles, he will be only the 7^th person to achieve that goal. He will get Lifetime Executive Status, meet the chief pilot and have his name put on the side of a plane. Would that be enough for you to make your living taking away the livings of others?

People do all kinds of things for the benefits they receive. Usually it's money or power but there are other things people desire. People enter the costume contests at comic book conventions just to win esteem in the eyes of other fans for their authentic realization of a superhero's gear. Or it might be the chance to strut as their idol before others. These costumes often take hundreds of man-hours to make from scratch. It may not seem worth it to you but it does to them. And maybe the Barbie dolls a person collects by the hundreds bring back the excitement of getting their favorite toy as a child. Now why a person would spend tens of thousands of dollars on surgery to look like Barbie is another issue. But it has value, if only psychological, to that person.

When I wrote radio ads, I had to find and present the benefits of whatever the sponsor was offering. It could be high quality, low cost, convenience, prestige, variety, a fun or exciting experience, delicious food, better looking clothes or a better looking you. The unspoken question I was trying to answer was “Why should anyone patronize this sponsor?” The answer was always that the purchaser of the goods or services would receive some benefit, even if it was something intangible.

When Jesus proclaimed the gospel or good news, the chief benefits to those responding were forgiveness of sins and entering the kingdom of God. And that made it valuable enough for people to risk their lives by converting to Christianity, an obscure, unpopular and, for 3 centuries, an illegal religion. But it doesn't seem that forgiveness, citizenship in God's kingdom, or any other spiritual benefits are enough to attract many people today. At least in the affluent West. Christianity is attracting millions of people in the Third World.

Modern secularists attribute this to superstition or lack of education. But I think it is because those who live on the knife's edge of existence are less delusional about the amount of control they have in their lives. Yes, we in the West have better education. We who live in democratic countries have more say in our government. We have more money. But we aren't necessarily happier. The United States doesn't even make the top ten happiest countries on earth, according to the World Happiness Report from the Gallup Poll. In fact, we have the 5^th highest suicide rate in the world. The US ranks 48^th in life expectancy, coming in right below Panama. And on average the last 8 years of our life will be spent suffering from chronic or even terminal diseases. And this is despite the US having the highest healthcare costs per capita in the world.

While we know more scientifically about the things that can drastically alter our lives we don't necessarily have a greater mastery over them. For instance, we can detect breast cancer earlier but that hasn't significantly changed its mortality rate. In fact, we have become better at diagnosing a lot of things, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, and asthma, but we are still a long way from curing them. Meanwhile we are trying to increase the intelligence of our machines with the intention of having them make decisions for us without a clue on how we can keep control of them after doing that. In many cases, our knowledge only gives us the illusion of mastery over the universe. We are fooling ourselves.

The poor entertain no such delusions. So they know that getting right with God and being part of a community focused on living in loving harmony with God and with each other is still a major benefit. In the wealthier countries, however, the church has to sugarcoat the gospel and give it some “Right Here, Right Now!” benefits to get people to sign on. Many preachers talk not about how Jesus can transform your spiritually empty life into a spiritually fulfilling life of selfless service but on how he will enhance your life with material blessings like wealth and success. To paraphrase President John Kennedy, people are asking not what they can do for God but what God can do for them.

In today's passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he seems to be having a slightly similar problem with that church. But, ironically, the blessings people were coveting were not material but spiritual gifts, especially the flashier ones like speaking in tongues. And apparently their worship was suffering. It was a cacophony. People coming for the first time might think the worshippers were nuts! (1 Corinthians 14:23)

It is interesting that Paul first reminds them that they used to worship pagan idols that could not speak. What's the relevance? If the idol does not speak, then who does? The pagan priest who acts as a fortune teller, telling the person what he or she wants to hear. Or he may upsell the worshipper on needing to provide a bigger sacrifice. And because the idol doesn't speak, its professional spokesperson can say just about anything.

This is still a problem today in certain churches. A very charismatic preacher can get away with teaching any doctrine. Since he doesn't represent a voiceless idol, he learns to take the word of God and twist it into saying something other than the gospel of Jesus. He can even diminish the status of Jesus or deny his teachings in such a plausible way that people think he knows what he is talking about. And while you may immediately think of people like Jim Jones or David Koresh, you needn't go to that extreme. There are preachers in churches of what they call the New Apostolic Reformation who style themselves as this era's new apostles and prophets. And if they contradict God's word, they say that their new pronouncements supersede what the Bible says.

A subtler strategy is for preachers to publicly hold to orthodox Christianity but to put most of their emphasis on secondary matters, or pet causes, or to stoke the outrage or fears of those listening in order to get them to give more money. For instance, we have churches where people worship politicians or political causes more than they do the Incarnate God who said his kingdom is not of this world and whose message is that we, like he, must deny ourselves daily and take up our crosses. (John 18:36; Luke 9:23) The problem is that the work of spreading God's kingdom can be dismantled or diverted by such concerns for earthly power and benefits.

Now in the church the Spirit of God can speak through anyone. This can, of course, cause a problem if you have competing and contradictory spokespeople. One clue, says Paul, is whether the person can say, “Jesus is Lord” and mean it. Is Jesus calling the shots or is the speaker or someone else that he represents? Is what the speaker is saying serving Jesus or some other cause? Is the speaker manipulating what Jesus stands for or twisting what Jesus says so it seems to have the opposite meaning?

Since the common link between church members should be letting Jesus be the Lord of your life, while there are different spiritual gifts, they all serve God. And these manifestations of the Spirit all serve the common good. It's not like the Spirit is opening a box of toys so we can all fight for the most attractive ones and then run off and play with them by ourselves. It's more like the Spirit is distributing musical instruments and we are to learn how to use what he gives us and then learn to play them in harmony with each other, all on the same page and all playing the same composition, as an orchestra does.

Notice that in his list Paul starts with the less spectacular but more important gifts. He begins with wisdom and knowledge. The two really are separate gifts. As we have seen in the news and in history, having a lot of knowledge is not the same as having a lot of wisdom. Smart people can do stupid things. Knowledge is about accumulating a lot of facts and data. Wisdom is about evaluating things, including what you know. You need knowledge but you need to sift it to find out what is essential to the matter at hand, what is important and what is neither so you don't get distracted by what is trivial. While the gifts of knowledge and wisdom are to be used in tandem, Paul says that we may find them in different people. Folks with wisdom need those with knowledge to fill them in on details and technical matters. People with knowledge need people with wisdom to help them use their knowledge wisely. People with these two gifts need to work together for the common good.

Some people have the gift of faith, Paul says. Of course, all Christians must have faith in God but some folks really trust him. They are not discouraged, they are not stymied, they know that God is at work in the situation, however bleak or grim it appears. The church needs people like that. It's only when people lose their faith in God that things truly become hopeless. We need people who say, “Hey, our God is loving and trustworthy. So let's look for his hand in what is going on.” Thank God for those people!

Then Paul gets to the big, obvious gifts of the Spirit that the Christians in Corinth were striving for: healing, miracles, prophesy, the discernment of spirits, speaking in tongues and its necessary compliment: interpreting tongues. Why don't we see these gifts today?

We do in some churches and especially in parts of the globe where most Christians now live: the Third World. On NPR, I heard the story of an American Methodist pastor visiting a Methodist church in Africa. He was startled to hear them announce that he would be casting out spirits! Fortunately he knew the Bible well enough to do this as the disciples did. But it was not something he had ever been called to do for his American congregation. It wasn't that the African church's theology was totally different from his but that their culture was different. We also pray for God to heal people from diseases caused by beings invisible to the naked eye. We call them germs. They call them spirits. And science tells us that a patient's faith in a treatment is crucial to its effectiveness. I don't remember if he told the people there what he would tell his parishioners here after praying for them, that is, to see a doctor and avail themselves of his gifts as well.

Finally, Paul reiterates that as varied as these gifts are, they are all carried out by the same Spirit. Just because you or I can't see a reason for some of them doesn't mean that God can't use them. Paul also emphasizes that it's the Spirit, not us, who chooses which person gets which gift. In that way it's like being part of a theatre group. Not everyone can have a speaking part on the stage, but there is a place for those who design the sets and build them, those who make costumes, those who find or fabricate props, those who do the lights, those who play the music, those who sell the tickets, those who sell the refreshments, those who sell ads for the programs, those who do the budgets, etc. And they all work under the same director. Without all of those people behind the scenes, doing what they do best, the actors would be fumbling in the dark, literally.

I doubt that in this and in the other places that Paul enumerates spiritual gifts (cf. Romans 12:4-8) that he has exhausted all the ways in which God can be manifested in the life of the church. But the principles he lays down here still apply. All gifts come from the same Spirit, the one who leads us to recognize Jesus as our Lord and Savior. All gifts, spectacular or not, are important and all must be used for the common good.

But that means Christians need to keep coming together regularly to exercise them. Involvement in the church is also essential. Pull an ember from the fire and it will continue to glow for a while. And then it will go out. It needs to stay a part of the fire to keep being stoked. We need to be part of our common life if we are to be warm and to illuminate this cold and dark world.

So where is the divine spark in you? Please share it with us.

First preached on January 17, 2010. It has been revised and updated.