Gifts for the Common Good

Next month, as he does each year, our Bishop has invited the clergy of the Diocese to a 3-day retreat designed to focus on an important current issue and to share in study, prayer, worship and conversation.  This year we have been asked to read a book titled “People of the Way”.  This book begins with a story about a boy who grew up in a secular family.  It is a common story; here is a brief excerpt:

“Even though there was enough residual Christianity in his family for him to be baptized as an infant, the story of Jesus had long ceased to shape his family’s life.  He spent his childhood and adolescence in California, where the church has never been well established.  This boy inhabited a narrative that dominates American life today – that you are what you earn or achieve, that identity must be cobbled together from a wide array of shifting possibilities, that you must work incessantly at securing meaning and community because these things are not given…. Life is what you make of it, largely on your own…. In a world where the modern myths of endless progress have been exhausted…the future is ambiguous.”

I thought about this boy’s story during the past week following our hosting of the annual meeting of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association.  About 200 people attended the WBNA meeting in our newly restored church.  They were seated in the center section which had been specially cleaned so we could accommodate them.

When their Board Chair asked how many were in All Saints’ Church for the first time about 80% indicated they had never been inside our building.  These are our neighbors and I imagine the story of Jesus, like the boy in the story, no longer shapes their lives.

Returning to the story, it was later in his college years that the boy came into contact with the Christian story by reading the works of Dickens and Dostoyevsky.  Through these writers and through Christians who knocked on his college dorm door he discovered that human life is “precious beyond measure, created for loving relationship with the source of all life.”

The boy developed into a Christian leader and is the author of the book we are reading.  Questions to be considered include, “How do we make disciples of Jesus out of people who don’t bring the Christian story with them?  What does it mean to be a church member?  Who are we as Episcopalians and what are we here for?”

Your Senior Warden and I have appointed several people to serve on a strategic planning committee.  When I first came to All Saints we went through a planning process to discern our mission and vision, and we looked at ways to realize the objectives and goals we had identified.  That was six years ago so it is now time to update this process and focus on a new or renewed direction for our future.  The Planning Committee will begin its work this Tuesday and will report to the Vestry and the parish sometime this Spring.

St. Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians responded to questions in the Corinthian community about “spiritual gifts.”  Paul told them, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ”

One of the things we will be asking members of the Planning Committee is to share their story as one of many gifts for the common good.  Along the way in the planning process they may be asking some of you to share your story as we work in understanding God’s call for us in our present time and place.

The followers of Jesus in Corinth were divided along lines of ethnicity, wealth, social status, and gender.  They each had separate gifts but they came together to break bread, and to work and empower one another as members united in the Holy Spirit for God's mission.  The challenges of life together uniting different people come from within the community and also from external forces.  It is all part of our mission to restore all people in unity with God and each other in Christ.

Paul’s understanding of spiritual gifts included a lengthy list: he noted varieties of gifts, services, and activities and mentioned wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discernment, languages, and interpretation.  His list was not exhaustive but its purpose was to unite each individual’s particular gift to the Spirit for the common good.  The same is true today.  Each person in our church community has a particular story and skills, talents, and experiences that are unique.  It is in our coming together as a Christian congregation that we are united with God and each other in Christ.  And, it is by ministering to the needs of others focusing on health, love, and peace, that we offer our spiritual gifts for the common good.  Amen.