Jesus had a life verse

Year C

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

Psalm 19

Has anyone here ever heard of a life verse?

Simply stated, a life verse is a verse from the Bible (or a small passage) that you choose to be your most favorite verse; it is one that you commit to memory to share with others. It may typically be a verse that inspires you, gives you hope, and speaks to a particular moment or situation in your life. 

Does anyone here have a life verse they would like to share? 

[Don’t be shy.  Remember 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”]

I hear about life verses more often in evangelical settings than Episcopal settings in that I’ve never been in a group of Episcopalians, and had one of the gathered ask everyone to share their own life verses.  Maybe that just speaks to my own limited experience.  When I've brought it up with my friends, I more often hear "I don't have a particular verse, but wow, do I only get to choose one?"  It's hard to whittle down from the (over) 31,000 verses in the Bible. 

So, as I was thinking about life verses this week, I went to Facebook and gave my preaching friends this scenario:  “Suppose you were invited to preach at an event, and you were being allowed to talk on anything you wanted to, but particularly to talk about that which gives your life and ministry hope, joy, purpose, direction. You just needed to pick a scripture reading to go with your message.  What would you choose?”

It’s a little different from asking what a “life verse” is, but it’s the first time I’ve really asked some of my friends this question. 

Such wonderful choices!  Most of those who commented were folks I knew pretty well, but some of the offerings gave me a greater insight to people I was close to. 

For one, it was 1 Corinthians 15:

Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ 
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
   Where, O death, is your sting?’ 

Romans 8 was mentioned a few times, which ends with one of the greatest promises of the faith, as Paul asks:

Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

And for one particularly close friend, the resilience that she has amply shown in her life—a resilience that has often left me in dumbfounded awe—comes to such clarity with her choice from 2^nd Corinthians.[1]

“We have this treasure in clay jars [God’s power through us], so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh…So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure…”

It was great fun to read through the choices, and they often left me wondering “Wow, there must be a great story behind that choice.  I wonder what that story is.”

For two of my friends, our gospel passage from today is what they chose.  This seemed to me to be so very appropriate, as this passage from Luke gives us one of Jesus’s life verses. 

Consider the scene:  Jesus, filled with the Spirit, comes home; he has just recently begun his public ministry. That same Spirit filling him with power had recently driven him into the wilderness to face 40 days of trial and temptation; and he went from that experience into his ministry. He hasn’t even called his disciples yet.  Still, he was beginning to create a buzz wherever he went.  Now, he’s coming to his home congregation. 

In the synagogue, there were some rules about how one goes about reading scripture.  There was a planned schedule of reading the law (the Torah), but passages from the scrolls of the prophets were free choice.  The teacher could choose the passage he wanted to talk about.

Jesus is handed the scroll of Isaiah, and intentionally goes looking for this passage to read:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

(Let’s stop here for a second. Notice that this first line from Isaiah matches the first line of the Gospel passage.  That is no accident.)

because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."[2]

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  And I wonder what the gathered people were thinking. Were they expecting him to preach about the messiah?  Might he be the messiah?  Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Sometimes preachers have to stretch a little bit to make a point fit into the text.  Not here. This was a carefully chosen passage, and Jesus is being absolutely clear about who he is, what he is here to do, and what the Kingdom of God come near would look like—a kingdom in which the poor receive good news, care, and justice—a kingdom in which oppressions are overthrown and freedom will be the inheritance of all—a kingdom in which healing and mercy and love are the root of all power.  This was Christ’s manifestation of his purpose and his announcement that the Kingdom has come near.  This was his mission statement.

If that sounds like too bold a statement to make:  consider this.  Later in Jesus ministry, John the Baptist gets thrown in jail.  In Luke 7, John’s disciples come to tell him what Jesus has been up to, which includes healing a centurion’s servant and raising a widow’s son from the dead.  John’s reaction isn’t quite happiness. Remember how he was proclaiming the coming of the messiah—winnowing forks, chaff thrown into unquenchable fire.  This ministry of Jesus is looking quite different. So, he instead sends his disciples to ask Jesus “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” ’Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And [Jesus] answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”[3]

Jesus echoes the very message from Isaiah that he preached.  This moment in Nazareth isn’t an isolated moment in which Jesus finds something that sort of matches his call.  It is his call.

Here is the wild thing about all of this.

In his life, Paul experienced—and articulated in his writings—a mystical and yet incredibly carnal, fleshy vision of who we are in Christ.  While he speaks in our reading from 1^st Corinthians as being different members or parts of the body of Christ, he goes beyond metaphor.[4]  This is clearer in the 2^nd Corinthians passage my friend gave me— Paul says that the life of Jesus is made visible in our mortal flesh.  We truly are the extension of Christ’s incarnation in the world.  We are God’s skin in the world.  And as such we are heirs of that same mission.

So I’m going to leave you with a few questions.

When that feisty, unpredictable Spirit of God settles upon you, or gently nudges you, or kicks you in the shin to get your attention, what in our/mine/your ministries means good news for the poor?  How are we bringing release, healing, freedom, and justice to a world tarnished by sin, fear, death, decay, and oppression?  How are you being the skin of God in Christ in your life?

Was there a particular message from the word of God that set you down your path, or that gave you light in a darkened place?  Won’t you share that story, which even one person may desperately need to hear in order to understand your joy and the reality of God's love?

Amen.

---

[1] 2Cor 4:7-18.

[2] Isaiah 61:1-3.

[3] Luke 7:18-24.

[4] 1 Corinthians 12:12ff. 

Giftedness, and Gifting

St. Augustine’s

2nd Epiphany

Year C

Isaiah 62:1-5

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

John 2:1-11

Psalm 36:5-10

A common dictionary definition of ‘gift’ is that it is “something given voluntarily without payment in return, as to show favor toward someone, honor an occasion, or make a gesture of assistance.”

Does that sound like a good definition to you? Does something seem to be missing?

What the dictionary definition does not quite get to is that even though we say a gift is something given voluntarily without the expectation of payment in return, gift-giving is an act that is embedded in complex social conventions.  There are rules about gift giving.  Lots of rules.  This makes gift-giving a fascinating thing for sociologists to study.  You learn a lot about a culture by its gift-giving practices.

Take Christmas for example, which is a national observance of a time for gift-giving in the U.S.—and so it is more complex than gift-giving around birthday.

Think about it:  There may be different tiers of gift giving.  The lowest tier might be those you know but there is no expectation of gift-exchange.  Maybe they get a candy cane if you happen to have one on you.  The next tier might be the people close enough to you that they get a Christmas card.  Co-workers might get something—maybe not because you like them, but because some of them will give you a little something and you do not want to be the scrooge of the office.  Good friends and family perhaps start the next tier.  These gifts typically involve more thought, more money—hence the relative value of the relationships are monetarily expressed. 

So that’s one aspect of it, the tiered system of giving.  There are also perceptions about how to measure the value of a gift by how much thought is put into it.  For instance, a book specially chosen for us by someone may register as more meaningful than a gift card.  We think that gift-card giver may have just given up when they got to us.

But the social rules about gift-giving are nowhere quite so visible as when those rules are broken, or an unforeseen circumstance throws a wrench in your holiday.

For instance, imagine the reaction if you give the paper-girl something five times more expensive than your own child.  Or your personal assistant gets something nicer than your spouse.  People might assume the gifts represent a set of implications about the nature of those relationships.  Parents, y’all know this if there are situations in which one sibling thinks another sibling got more or better gifts.

And, some of my students told me a story about how they were going to have a get-together and a gift exchange.  All is well until one of the guests called and said “hey, can my roommate come, too?”  Well, they didn’t want to be inhospitable, so they said yes.  But this interloper, by virtue of coming into the circle of friends close enough to get each other gifts, needed to now get something.  Because it would be rude to go through the ceremony of gift exchange—and that’s a ceremony, right?  There is a way these things are done—and not give something to this interloper.  So you rewrap that gift you got from someone else the day before, or you go through the closet and find that wedding gift from seven years ago that you never opened.  By the way, Laura and I have never done this. 

And it is difficult to overthrow the social scripts around gift-giving.  I know; I tried it one year by asking family to donate to worthy causes in my name.  It didn’t go over well.  Gift-giving is complicated.  So much is symbolically communicated through the practice.  How much more so when we try to make sense of spiritual gifts—the topic of our lesson from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

Just as gifts we give are thought to signal relative importance in relationship, and just as those who are considered ‘gifted’ are thought to have an ability that lifts the individual above others, the Corinthians placed a high value on ecstatic speech.  This is because the population of Corinth placed a high value on those abilities in the pagan rituals of the time, and this carried over into the church in Corinth as folks converted.  As a result, people who were either speaking in tongues or prophesying were possibly exhibiting some toxic levels of self-importance in a community already plagued by division and hostility toward each other. They—and others—probably saw themselves as uniquely inspired by God, and as such they could interrupt the community at worship, or run roughshod over others while taking places of greater importance. 

Paul ain’t having it, and in today’s lesson he begins his argument—not a dispassionate teaching, but an argument—about the gifts given by God through the Spirit: how and why they are given, how to tell their value, and more importantly that the nature of their bestowal shows us how to value those who manifest them.

And there are three main points to pull out from the reading today:

First: every person who confesses Jesus as Lord has been gifted by the Holy Spirit, as it is only by the spirit that such a confession can be made.  This might seem like a small matter, to merely utter the words “Jesus is Lord.”   It might be hard to appreciate this in a religiously pluralistic society, but imagine what it means to be gifted with the grace and courage necessary to confess Jesus as Lord when “Caesar is Lord” was the reigning cry of the people.  This first gift of the Holy Spirit was for the first Christians the strength to utter the truth that was also treason in the world around them. 

Second: Spiritual gifts are to be used for the common good.  The Holy Spirit gives to us the measure of our gifts not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the entire community of faith.  The exercise of these gifts may bring us joy, but they are not meant for us to use for our own enrichment, nor are they to be treated as a private inheritance to horde in secret. 

Third: These spiritual gifts are meant for all, and given to all, each and every one of us, and all of our gifts are equally activated by the grace of God as God chooses.  The implications spin out as Paul continues his argument.  Next week’s reading will make the point that we all make up the body of Christ, and no part, no matter how small, no matter how maligned their contribution may be, is expendable. [For the whole of Paul's argument, see 1Cor 12-14.]

This passage speaks to us today, as well. I began by talking about how social convention governs our sense of gift-giving and receiving.  How might we put those conventions in conversation with Paul?  A few things come to mind.

Whereas we weigh our relationships to find the appropriate level of giving that is socially acceptable, and we may be continually gauging the appropriate way to reciprocate on a gift we receive, we find something different in God.  Our relationship with God is not one of an apathetic God only deigning to give us attention when we show an interest.  The first gift of God is one we experience as God’s love for us, and a sense of place in the relationship.  God’s love is not earned. God gives love lavishly and freely, not reciprocally.  And actually, our turning into our relationship with God is only the first conscious receiving of a gift.  Our very existence is a gift prior to our knowledge of God. Thanks be to God!

Let us not disparage the small gifts when we witness or seek larger gifts.  Our gifts in ministry find their source in God, and that which is God-given is never a small matter.  Paul tells us elsewhere that God works all things to the good, and the sort of goodness God is capable of has reach far beyond our own vision.  Let us be pleased to know that there is goodness we may only see in part, and greatness yet to come from our exercise of spiritual gifts.

Lastly, our gifts are not trophies and trinkets or collectibles meant for pristine packaging placed on shelves and walls.  Anything so freely given to everyone cannot be a collector’s item.  They are not meant to be left in the closet collecting dust because we do not see the value. That really weird gift may be just the thing the world needs to see your joy and God’s love.  God loves you regardless, but these gifts are meant for the world to see.  So break the package, take your gifts out, and let’s go play!