Isaiah 11.1-10
A shoot shall come out from
the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2 The
spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the
LORD.
1 Corinthians 12.4-11
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.
It is strange but true, that
one of the most divisive issues
for Christians over the past hundred years
has been a difference of
opinion
about the way in which the Holy Spirit
gifts and empowers people for ministry.
And this morning, I’m going
to invite us to think
about what the gifting of the Holy Spirit might mean for
us,
who gather for worship and witness here at Bloomsbury, week
by week.
Today also marks the
beginning of our new sermon series,
which I’ve rather cheekily entitled
the ‘Anti-Lectionary’.
If you’re wondering
what this is all about - let me explain.
The normal
lectionary, or the Revised Common
Lectionary as it is more properly called,
is a set pattern of readings,
which takes those
congregations who follow it
on a three year journey through the
Bible,
with each week
having assigned readings from a gospel, an epistle,
a psalm, and an Old Testament passage.
If you go to a
Church of England congregation, or a Methodist church,
these will be the passages you hear in
worship,
and if you go back
exactly three years later,
you’ll hear exactly the same passages
again.
Some Baptist
churches use it, and some don’t.
We’ve kind of used it here at
Bloomsbury over the years;
but by the same token, we’ve departed
from it if we’ve wanted to.
There are many
advantages of following the lectionary readings each week,
but there are also a couple of
disadvantages.
Firstly, I’m not
sure that I’ll always have something entirely new to say
on a passage just three years after I
last preached on it.
I suppose I could
just repeat sermons and see if anyone notices,
but that doesn’t quite feel right.
But secondly, and
more significantly from my point of view,
there are large parts of the Bible
which simply never make the cut,
and so don’t ever get looked at on a
Sunday.
The original idea of
an Anti-Lectionary preaching series
was to make space for us to spend time
with those passages
that are normally passed over.
It’s kind of
metamorphosed slightly in the making,
and now includes passages or topics
that you might not have thought
you’d ever hear preached at
Bloomsbury.
This morning’s
reading from 1 Corinthians
on the gifts of the Spirit falls into
that category.
If you didn’t get a
leaflet with the preaching plan for the rest of the year last week,
please collect one from the foyer
afterwards if you’re interested.
Anyway, back to the
gifts of the Spirit.
Many of us here this
morning will have come to faith in, or had experience of,
churches which emphasise the
exercising of the gifts of the Spirit.
If this happened in
the UK,
the chances are that the church in
question had been influenced
by what has become known as the
Charismatic Movement.
The name comes from
the ancient Greek word χάρισμα (khárisma),
which means ‘gift of grace’,
and it refers to the
belief that God freely gives to those who follow Jesus
the gifts of the Spirit which we heard
about in our reading earlier.
The idea here is
that each congregation should include people
who have the gift of wisdom, or
knowledge, or faith, or healing,
or working miracles, or prophecy, or
discernment,
or tongues, or interpretation;
such that all the
gifts are present in each congregation.
Also, the belief is
often expressed in Charismatic churches
that each person should have at least
one of these gifts to use, if not more.
The Charismatic
Movement has influenced churches across the world,
and across denominations, from
Anglican to Catholic,
from Methodist to Baptist, and so on.
This means that
whereas you used to be able to tell the difference between, say,
a Baptist service and a Methodist
service fairly easily,
with distinct worship styles
and different hymns,
these days a Charismatic-Methodist
service
will look very much like a
Charismatic-Baptist service,
just as it will a
Charismatic-Anglican, United Reformed, or whatever.
They will sing the
same songs, and say similar prayers,
which have arisen to create a worship
context within which
the gifts of the Spirit will be
exercised.
Does this sound
familiar to you?
Certainly, I’ve been
in worship services
where people have engaged in communal
singing in tongues,
in bringing words of prophecy,
in praying for healing or miracles,
in speaking in tongues and
praying for interpretation.
I remember once when
I was a teenager at Spring Harvest,
I went to a late night so-called
‘Spiritual Gifts’ seminar
with a famous Charismatic
leader,
and the expectation was very much that
each of us
should ask for and receive
these gifts,
and exercise them
there-and-then.
To begin nailing my
own colours to the mast,
I found it very intimidating,
manipulative, and didn’t stay until the end.
But that isn’t to
say that I am entirely cynical about these things,
as we shall discover.
Did you know, for
example, that I have on occasions
used the gift of speaking in tongues?
More on that later.
But first, a bit
more history.
The Charismatic
renewal movement of the 1970s
has its origins in Wales and Los
Angeles.
The 1904 a young Welsh
coal miner named Evan Roberts
experienced a personal awakening of
his already devout faith,
and started receiving visions which he
ascribed to the Holy Spirit.
He became convinced
of the idea
that all Christians should seek such
an experience of the Spirit,
which would be secondary to their
initial conversion to faith,
and he used the
phrase Baptism in the Spirit from the
book of Acts (1.4-5; 11.16)
to describe this.
So, you might be
baptised in water at your conversion,
but later you could be baptised in the
Spirit.
The mark of whether
someone had received this ‘second baptism’
would be whether they exercised the
gifts of the Holy Spirit.
He started training
for ministry, but never completed his course
because his preaching triggered what
came to be known as the Welsh Revival.
In October 1904 he
started speaking at small meetings,
which were soon attracting thousands.
It is estimated that
100,000 people converted within a few months,
and the meetings were marked with
people exercising Charismatic gifts,
and also changing their behaviour by
giving up alcohol, and stopping swearing.
There are stories of
pit ponies not responding to commands
because the language of their masters
had changed so dramatically.
Evan Roberts himself
suffered emotional and physical collapse after about 18 months,
and retired from public ministry to
devote himself to prayer;
and the influence of
the revival itself was relatively short lived,
with many churches emptying within a
generation.
You can trace the
Welsh Revival against the economic boom and bust
created by the coal industry,
but that isn’t the end of it’s story.
Revivalist
missionaries took the message of being Baptised in the Holy Spirit,
or born again in the Holy Spirit,
around the world,
and the next big
event was the Azuza Street revival of 1906 in Los Angeles.
Directly influenced
by the Welsh Revival, but rather longer lasting,
the Azuza Street revival ran for about
nine years,
and was
characterised by spiritual experiences
with regular testimonies of physical
healing miracles,
and worship services including the
public speaking in tongues.
The significance of
Azuza Street is that it brought revival
to the impoverished black communities
of the United States,
and sparked the
worldwide movement now known as Pentecostalism
- named after the story of the coming
of the Holy Spirit on the disciples
at Pentecost as described in the book
of Acts (2.1-11).
These days, you can
find Pentecostal churches in most countries around the world,
including our own,
and they directly
influenced the Charismatic renewal movement
where we began our trip down memory
lane.
Bloomsbury, as a
church, has typically resisted
the influence of the Charismatic
tradition in our Sunday worship
- to the best of my
knowledge we’ve not had speaking in tongues in worship,
or testimonies of miraculous healing
during services.
But does this mean
we’re immune from the gifts of the Spirit?
I hope not, and I will get to the
passage in a minute.
But allow me one more historical
example before I do.
Some churches,
particularly the Strict Baptists and the Brethren,
have adopted a belief known as
cessationism.
This is the belief
that the spiritual gifts ceased with the apostolic age.
These churches can’t
deny that miracles, healings, and speaking in tongues happened,
because their literal approach to
scripture demands that they believe
these things took place in the early
church.
But they teach that
these gifts were given to establish the church in its early years,
and died out when the last of the
apostles died.
I think it’s useful
for us here at Bloomsbury to know this other side of the coin exists,
because just as our tradition doesn’t
include
an emphasis on charismatic
renewal,
neither does it include the doctrine
of cessationism.
I don’t think we
believe that the activity of the Spirit in the world,
and in those who seek God in Christ,
finished nearly two
thousand year so.
So, after all that,
what are we to make of the Spiritual gifts?
Well, firstly, I’d
like us to hear very clearly what is said in verse 7
of our passage this morning, from
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
‘To each is given
the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good’.
These gifts of the
Spirit, whatever they are and however they are received,
are never given just for the benefit
or one section of the church,
nor are they given
for the primary benefit of the person gifted.
They may be given
individually,
but they are to be received
communally.
The phrase ‘for the
common good’ has a special resonance for me,
as I’ve done some writing on this in
the past,
and it is my firm
belief that no church should ever see itself
as existing for its own benefit.
It’s a slightly
hackneyed one-liner,
but the church is the only
organisation
that doesn’t exist for the benefit of
its own members.
So as we look at
these gifts,
I’d like us to keep at the forefront
of our minds
the question of how they can
contribute to the common good?
How they can be of
the benefit of those beyond
the community and individuals that
receive and use them?
In the analysis that
follows, I’d like to say how helpful I found
the writing of Anthony Thiselton,
who is one of the
great New Testament scholars of the last few decades.
With one exception,
I’m going to be taking these gifts of
the Spirit that Paul lists in pairs,
because I think he has this in mind as
he lists them.
The exception is the
third one in his list, the gift of ‘Faith’,
and I’ll start with this one.
We don’t often tend
to think of ‘faith’ as a gift,
but there it is, nestled in the list
between knowledge and healing.
I’m starting here,
because if there is one gift on this
list that I think I’ve got,
it’s the gift of faith.
But before I get too
big-headed,
I need to own up to the fact that I
hold the gift of faith
alongside it’s invisible counterpart,
which Paul doesn’t mention,
and that’s the gift of doubt.
There is something
in me that questions everything,
takes very little at face value,
and always wants to
ask ‘why?’ when someone tells me
I should believe or do something.
It’s this gift of
doubt that drove me to study Biblical Studies at University,
to try and ask the hardest questions I
could of my faith,
to see if it could
survive the onslaught of my mind
at its most logical and questioning.
I have, over the
years, seen others find their faith fading
in the light of the insights of
historical critical biblical scholarship.
And all I can say is
that mine didn’t.
My faith survived.
It changed, it grew
in some areas and shrank in others,
my faith doesn’t look the same now
as I did when I was 19 and off
to university,
but then, neither does my body!
However, despite it
all I do still have faith;
and that is, I think, a gift from God
- given to me to
enable me to offer my gifts
to the service of the church and the
world
through ministry, and teaching, and
service.
Not everyone has
this, and I’m grateful that I do.
But I also want to
make clear that this ‘gift of faith’
is different from the trustful faith
that every Christian has
- we are all of us justified by grace
through faith.
I’m not advocating
some Calvinist approach to conversion
where only those chosen can have faith
in Jesus.
We all of us have
faith, but some of us, it seems,
have an especial gifting of faith
to sustain not just
themselves but their church community
through times of uncertainty,
difficulty, and doubt.
Moving on, then,
what are we to make of Wisdom and Knowledge?
These are both what
we might call ‘Corinthian Catchphrases’
- they crop up again and again
as you read through this letter
to the church in Corinth,[1]
and interestingly Paul isn’t always complimentary about
them.
He says that his own
calling to proclaim the gospel
was not a calling to use wisdom,
because true faith
is built on an encounter with God in Christ,
not on the wisdom of words.
And he says that
knowledge puffs people up,
that it can be a stumbling block to
the weak,
and that in any case
knowledge will eventually pass away
leaving only love.
So those of us who
value knowledge, and prize wisdom,
need to hear that these are not the
be-all and end-all of faith.
As Paul puts it, if
we have these but have not love,
we are nothing.
That said, what are
they?
The gift of wisdom
traces its origin
to our Old Testament passage for this
morning,
from the prophet Isaiah,
where we read of the
Spirit of God giving wisdom and knowledge
to the messianic figure.
Within Judaism more
broadly,
Wisdom was sometimes personified as a
woman,
and in books like
Proverbs she is depicted as crying out in the streets,
longing for people to listen to her
words.
All of this is in
the background for Paul
describing wisdom as a gift of the
Spirit,
and he probably has
in mind the idea
that just as the Spirit gave wisdom to
the messiah,
so the same Spirit
gives wisdom to body of the messiah, the church.
On this
understanding, the ability to speak wisely,
which is the gift of the
Spirit,
is distinguished from speech which is
merely clever,
which is a human construction.
And in terms of our
criteria of the common good
- the world needs wise speech,
that cuts through the
cleverness and sophistry of so much of our discourse.
The ability to put
the deepest knowledge into words is a rare gift,
and it should be valued when it is
given.
By the same token,
the spiritual gift of knowledge
is again very different from just
knowing things.
You’ll have heard
Oscar Wilde’s saying that a cynic is someone,
‘who knows the price of everything and
the value of nothing’?[2]
Well, in our
information age,
we now have the capacity to know
everything,
but to still know nothing.
The Spiritual gift
of knowledge
is the gift of knowing things deeply
and well,
and of being able to
use that knowledge for the building up of others.
I tend to think that
a good teacher is someone who has the gift of knowledge.
They know how to handle knowledge, to
sift the wheat from the chaff,
and to share that with others
in ways that are beneficial.
What the gifts of
knowledge and wisdom are NOT, I should add,
are the permission to randomly speak
ad hoc messages
to individuals about their
condition.
That, it has always
seemed to me,
is an abuse of power predicated on
wishful thinking.
Enough said, let’s
move on.
What are we to make
of healing and miracles?
There’s a wonderful
story in one of the Adrian Plass books,
when he’s off to a so-called healing
meeting at a church,
and his wife
discovers him lying on his back in the hallway,
with his feet planted against the
front door.
She asks him what he’s
doing,
and he replies that he’s checking his
legs are the same length before he goes,
so no-one can claim to have
fixed his bad back
by making one of his legs grow
in response to prayer.
We may laugh, I want
to laugh,
but this is what people have reduced
the gift of healing to:
Random acts of capricious supernatural
intervention
to heal minor or serious
ailments in response to prayer or faith.
We need to get back
to the Greek, if we are to escape this nonsense.
Our church Bibles
translate this as ‘gifts of healing’,
which unfortunately misses the fact
that both ‘gifts’ and ‘healing’
are in the plural in the
original Greek.
A better translation
might be, ‘gifts for various kinds of healing’.
It’s not one gift, nor one mode of
healing.
But… I can hear you
asking… is there still a place for supernatural healing?
Well, you may be
interested to hear
that one of the founders of the modern
Pentecostal movement, Donald Gee,
stated that we should ‘not preclude…
the merciful and manifold work
of medical healing.’ when
talking about the spiritual gift of healing[3]
And interestingly,
Paul doesn’t refer to gifts of healing
anywhere else in his epistles outside
of this chapter from 1 Corinthians.
Karl Barth suggested
that Paul’s aim here
was to underline the source rather
than the means of healing,
and we need to
remember that in the first century,
very little was known about the
processes of healing.
They had no
knowledge of germs, or microbes, or the human immune system,
so perfectly natural processes could
appear miraculous,
and things that seem nonsense to us
were the bedrock
of what they held to be medical
science.
The best I can offer
here is that it seems to me
that the kinds of healing which are
offered for the common good
are the kinds of healing offered by
medical missionaries,
doctors, nurses, research
chemists,
and the whole of the rest of
the medical profession
that keeps most of us
alive a lot longer than we would be without it.
But still, even so,
not all are healed,
and we all die eventually.
As Paul discovered
in his prayer to be relieved of the thorn in his flesh,
sometimes the gift of God in the face
of illness
is sufficient grace to be content in
weakness (2 Cor 12.7).
But what about
miraculous healing? I can still hear you asking…
And my answer is
itself a question:
to those who want to assert a belief
in the spiritual gift of miracles,
where certain individuals have
a supernatural ability
to transcend the laws of
nature,
tell me how this serves the common
good?
You see, I’m not
really sure it’s possible
to divide God’s action into two
categories of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’.
If God is involved,
it’s ‘supernatural’,
even if it is also entirely ‘natural’.
We must be so
careful, you see, not to retrospectively impose
our post eighteenth century
enlightenment mind-set onto these ancient texts.
To say that some
things are miraculous, and some are not,
can have the unintended consequence
of reducing rather
than expanding our understanding
of the scope of God’s action in the
world.
My preferred reading
of the Spiritual gift of miracles
is that suggested by Anthony
Thiselton,
who says that we
should think of this as the ability
to perform actively affective deeds of power.
Not actions against
nature,
but actions which function powerfully
in the world
to affect the world for good.
Such interventions,
originating with the Spirit of Christ,
can change the world far more than
some parlour trick.
But more on this in
a future sermon. It’s time to move on…
Prophecy and Discernment
come next.
Prophecy can be
thought of
as ‘declaring or telling forth the
revealed will of God’.
What prophecy isn’t,
is predicting the future.
It isn’t this in the Old Testament,
it isn’t this in the New
Testament,
and it isn’t this today.
Prophecy and
prediction are not the same.
The Old Testament
prophets mediated the world of God to Israel,
and told the world what God was
saying.
Prophecy is, I would
suggest, therefore a kind of preaching.
Certainly this is
how Paul saw the gift,
and he presents prophetic speech as
that which builds up the church,
by nurturing the faith of
believers,
and by convincing those outside
the community
of the truth of the
gospel of Jesus (1 Corinthians 14.24-25).
And the test of
prophecy isn’t ‘whether it comes true’,
but rather it is the ability to
discern the difference
between what is generated by
the human spirit,
and what is prompted by the
Holy Spirit.
The spiritual gift
of discernment
is the ability to discern whether
someone’s claim
to be speaking at the prompting
of the Spirit is genuine.
And we need this
gift more than ever,
with voices on the internet and in
pulpits up and down the country
all trying to convince us that their
words are God’s words.
To which I say, test
it.
Ask for the gift of discernment.
Don’t just take my
word for it.
I’m just saying what I think God is
wanting me to say,
it’s up to you to discern whether I’m
right or not.
In a Baptist
context, the gift of discernment
is exercised primarily in our church
meetings,
when we gather to collectively discern
the mind of Christ
for our congregation and
context.
And finally we come
to the gifts of tongues and interpretation.
There could be a
whole sermon on this alone,
and I’ve already gone on long enough,
so I’ll keep it brief.
It’s not entirely
clear what Paul is talking about
when he speaks of the gift of speaking
in tongues.
Some have suggested
he means ‘angelic speech’;
others that he means the miraculous
ability to speak foreign languages;
others that he means liturgical
language;
others that he means ecstatic speech;
and others that he means a
verbal mechanism of release
for longing or praise that is
too deep for words.
I think it’s this
last one.
A kind of meditative practice, if you
like,
where the chanting of
inarticulate syllables
frees the mind from the
trammels of rational thought
to encounter God at
levels deeper than words.
As Paul himself says
in Romans (8.26-7)
‘The
Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs
too deep for words.
And
God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit,
because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God.’
So yes, I have, at
times, tried this.
Strictly in private, as most of my
spiritual devotions are.
And it can be
helpful.
Feel free to give it a go if you want.
Think of it as a
spiritual practice that might be of use
when you’ve run out of words to say
the thing you most need to say to God.
What it isn’t,
according to Paul,
is a necessary gift to prove some
second blessing,
or baptism in the spirit, or born-againness,
or even salvation.
But if the gift of
tongues is to meet our ‘common good’ test,
and to go beyond private devotion,
it needs something
more,
and this is where the gift of
interpretation,
of the intelligent articulation
of tongues speech, comes into play.
Many in charismatic
circles
have come to regard interpretation of
tongues
as a separate gift from the
gift of tongues,
but that is not the most natural way
to read the passage.
Paul is clear a
couple of chapter later in the letter (14.3)
that the tongues speaker should themselves be the person
who brings a public articulation of
their wordless longings.
And the best way to
read our passage this morning
is that while some people just have
the gift of tongues, which is for use in private,
others also have a secondary gift in
addition to the gift of tongues,
that they are able to put into
words what they have been saying wordlessly,
and share that for the benefit
of others.
The ability to
articulate deep emotions, longings, and experiences
for the building up of others is a
rare gift,
but it is valuable and precious
when it is given.
Communication in
intelligible, rational terms to others,
of insights revealed through a gift,
is important if the
primary gift of tongues is going to serve the common good.
And so we come to
the end, and a warning to close.
To envy someone
else’s gift, or conversely to question its value,
is to question the sovereign gracious
will of God’s Holy Spirit
in determining to whom he apportions
which gifts.
We need all these
gifts together
if we are to be good news to the
world,
and we need to use
them together,
for the common good of all.
x
[1]
‘Wisdom’ 1.17; 2.1, 5, 6; 3.19. ‘Knowledge’ 1.5; 8.1, 7, 10, 11; 13.2, 8; 14.6
[2]
Lady Windermere’s Fan
[3]
Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, p.199
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