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Thursday, January 19, 2012

What Are Spiritual Gifts Anyway?

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

I Corinthians 12:4-11 New Revised Standard Version

⁴ Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵ and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; ⁶ and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. ⁷ To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ⁸ To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹ All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Yesterday over 100 of you were involved in a watershed training event for our faith community that will make a difference for a long time. I want to tell you about it in a moment as I set the stage.

I sent in my formal notice to our Bishop this week that I will be retiring from full time ministry on June 30. That date marks the end of 40 years of being pastor in charge of two very distinctive congregations. The first was in Colorado Springs and the second is here in this flagship church named after that inviting disciple Andrew. In my letter to the Bishop I noted that in the time I have been privileged to be pastor in charge, we have experienced together some remarkable things including voting to relocate from a wonderful, almost paid for site four miles north of here, to this marvelous larger site so we can fulfill God’s vision and mission.

I also had asked Shirley Tidd, our office manager, to look back over our records for the past 18 years, and she reported that in that time almost 2,700 persons have joined this church. Most of them joined on profession of faith or reaffirmation of faith. That is very inspiring to me since almost half of United Methodist Churches in the country rarely have anyone join the church on profession of faith.

I was also thinking about some of the resource people we have been privileged to have with us recently who have helped us take new steps in our faith journey as individuals and as a community. We have had some really formative speakers and leaders with us!

Five years ago Notre Dame Professor and theologian, Father Richard McBrien, whom I had seen interviewed in a one hour CBS special right after the Da Vinci code novel appeared was our special guest. During the  interview he was asked about the idea that Jesus could have been married, and he said that it was possible and it would not have mattered if Jesus were married or not. This was a very open and pioneering idea from a Roman Catholic theologian.

Father McBrien was then serving as the consultant for the Da Vinci Code film and was listed in the credits. We hosted him in our former sanctuary with an audience of about 300 persons. Half of those were our Catholic friends and neighbors. They were effusive in thanking us afterward because this was the only chance they would ever have had to hear this progressive Catholic theologian in Denver!

A little after that event we brought Rev. Jim Wallis who is a thoughtful evangelical writer of several books and has appeared many times in interviews on national news programs. We have read several of his books together in our book groups here recently.

We have twice hosted retired Methodist Bishop Dick Wilke, the co-creator and writer of the Disciple Bible Study series which 2500 of you have participated in and which has touched millions of church members and Bible students across the world and in many languages. Bishop Wilke is an example of how well one can stay very alive and vital in the later years of life and how a person can continue to grow and change one’s mind about some things.

Another very formative event and person we hosted, a little over a year ago, was travel guru Rick Steves. He was with us in our one month old Sanctuary. He very much enjoyed being with this congregation and with our friends and neighbors. We had 1,000 people for that gathering where he helped us get out of ourselves and our occasional insularity.

Well, yesterday, thanks to our newly organized servant ministry team and thanks to the vision and passion of staff member, Janice Colliatie, we hosted another internationally known resource person who has written THE book on helping involve every church member in using our gifts and following their calling. Sue Mallory was here with over 100 of you in what will prove to be another watershed weekend in our life together! She had retired from her full time work of leading congregations to equip each of our members for service to God and others, but because Janice pursued her and because she has a son in Boulder, she was here for us in what will be a transformational event.

If you have been with us so far in January, you know that our theme for a few weeks is HERE I AM LORD. This is a way of helping each of us look more closely at ourselves and our interests and talents and passions and then to discern how we can use those in some new and different ways to make a difference.

We know that when some people first get connected to a faith community they may need just to be recipients and consumers for a while. They may be at a place in life where they are wounded or hurt and need to be cared for. We fully understand that. In fact, Sue Mallory says in her pivotal book, The Equipping Church, that there are different chapters in our lives and we may be able to offer help to others at times and other times we need to just be able to receive help from others for a while. I like the image she uses in her book. She says, sometimes we will be able to carry others on the stretcher so they can get help, sometimes we will walk with them beside the stretcher, and sometimes we will need to be carried on the stretcher for a while!

Our aim these few weeks is to speak to those of us who are able and willing to look in a new way at some of the gifts and callings that God has endowed us with and to take some new steps, when we are ready, to follow those gifts and callings. Our assumptions are that when we see those gifts and callings and put them to work in service to God and others, we will feel better about ourselves, and we will be fulfilled because others are benefitting from our service. Our assumption was stated in the first sentence of Pastor Rick Warren’s book. It is not about you. Life is not about you, it is about your opportunity to make a difference in service, in your ministry with others because each person who is a follower of Christ is called to be in ministry, not just the pastors, but each person!

The passage from the Bible today identifies some of the roles, the callings that we may fulfill. The words that St. Paul uses may or may not be ours. People are given the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and faith. Our gifts are unique and distinctive, but they can all work together. In other places in the Bible we get different lists, and Dale Fredrickson in his excellent sermon last week gave us some of those roles from the book of Romans and the book of Ephesians. Some have been given the gift of administration, of discernment, of hospitality. Another may have been given the gift of giving. Some people are talented in making money and then sharing that, investing that in changing people’s lives. All those gifts are present in our congregation.

What we hope you will do as a result of our reflections each week is to be with one of our newly trained servant leaders on our equipping ministry team in the Harmon Library after this service and explore with them our spiritual gifts survey to see where God has called you and to discern where God may be calling you next.

I took the Spiritual gifts survey myself this week and learned that my gifts are in the area of teaching, proclaiming, shepherding and building up faith in others. I was glad to hear that since that is what I have been trying to do for a few years. I was not surprised because I have heard others say some of that to me since I was a teenager. By the way, I began to hear those callings and those nudges in high school and college, even though in high school I had a pretty serious stuttering problem, an issue that later showed up even in seminary, so I can identify with one of the call stories early on in the Bible in the book of exodus – The Call of Moses. When God approaches Moses, Moses says to God, “you really have the wrong person, I can’t talk very good so why don’t you go and recruit my brother Aaron instead?” We will look at that story Tuesday night in our Bible Basics class.

By the way, God did not accept Moses’ excuses. God has a way of being persistent.

And, that is another clue to your discernment of where God is calling you next. What do people say to you that they believe you are good at? What are the abilities people have seen in you and remarked about to you? Those gifts may vary at different stages of our lives and we may have new opportunities to fulfill some of those interests and passions at different points in life. What is it that you have always wanted to pursue and is now the time you may be able to do that?

We have some stories on our bookshelves about people making new choices and taking new directions. One of the best known stories about someone having a very successful career for the first twenty or twenty five years of life and then changing direction is in a book called HALFTIME by Bob Buford. It is on our shelves this morning. Buford says that after the first half of his life, when he experienced financial success in business, he was ready for something else and began to pursue a life of significance and a life of service. I have recommended that book to many people over the years and am pleased to see that the latest addition of the book has some additional material about these topics of being gifted and called to be servants.

I mentioned Pastor Rick Warren’s book, THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. One place that I differ from that book is that I don’t think that God has just one big PLAN for each of us. I believe God has more than one dream and hope and vision for our life and that as we listen and pray and discern together with our fellow followers of the way of Christ, those paths and those possibilities will unfold for us.

Our call to serve might be different at different times. And our call might or might not have to do with what we have been trained to do in our work or our profession. Let me give you a couple of examples of folks who are serving here in ways that complement their professional training and some that are in totally different fields from what they are trained in.

We have an excellent program of congregational care at St. Andrew. One significant part of that is our Stephen Ministry team. These are people who are lay care givers who go through fifty hours of training before they can be involved as Stephen Ministers. We now have about twenty active Stephen Ministers. We have trained over fifty during the time I have been here. Some of those folks have no professional training in pastoral care but they do have the gift of compassion and the gift of listening and they are very effective. They are an example of serving in a role that might be different from their job or vocation.

On the other hand, two of the persons in our church, who have been most effective as leaders in our Stephen Ministry program are Jim and Kathy Bartsch, who are professionally trained as a Psychologist and as a Social Worker so Jim and Kathy, who have given hundreds of hours in ministry, are serving in a way that fits with their professional training.

Here are some other examples. Judy Martz is one of the current Homework Helpers for a while on the team of volunteers working at East Elementary school in old Littleton where 80% of the kids are on a subsidized lunch program. Judy has extensive training and background as an educator and others on that team have formal training or no formal training but the whole team is doing an excellent job in a very important role with children.

Others of our leaders have that same diversity. Some of our members who helped us get into our wonderful new ministry space have extensive training and background in construction and design and they were incredibly helpful in bringing knowledge and skills to this project. They are Colleen Heldt, Brad McNealy, JR Casner, Allen Amis, and Mark Rudnicki. And, there are many others. In other areas, our members and leaders may not have that professional/vocational training but have natural, God given gifts of compassion and concern and hospitality. These are people like our new team of prison mentors, the Wednesday Night Lit meal team headed by Martha Thompson, and our inspirational team of bread bearers who take information and a loaf of fresh bread to every newcomer household who is with us for the first time in worship. We even did that last month with the 65 families who were here for the first time on Christmas Eve.

What is your life’s calling at this chapter of your life? Where do you feel God nudging you next? What are you most passionate about and most concerned about in our neighborhood and our country and our world? Our leadership team waiting in the Harmon Library can help you sort that out starting today.

We will end with a song snippet from The Calling by Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Maybe you’re the one waiting
For the ship to find your harbor
Maybe you’re the one looking
Past the forest to the trees
Maybe you still think
The older that you get
Life just gets harder
Maybe you would trade everything
For just one moment’s peace
Everybody strains to hear the sound
Of their heart’s calling
Now you can write yours down
It’s your life story.

What is the next step in your life story that you and God will be writing together?