Every so often, an idea pops into my head that is so random, so inexplicable, so unexpected, that I have to write a sermon about it. Here goes:
John 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Psalm 36:5-10; Isaiah 62:1-5
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Science Fiction books; one of my favorites is the 6-book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (don’t ask). In one of the books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the main characters, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, find themselves on a space ship in the ancient past, populated by a race from the planet of Golgafrincham.
These people amounted to a third of the population of their planet, mostly frozen in stasis – they were, account executives, telephone sanitizers, “hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants”, and the like.
They thought they were sent with 2 other ships to colonize a planet, as their own world was, so they were told, doomed. The first ship would be the great thinkers, leaders, scientist, and artists. The second ship would be, so they were told, “all the people who did the the actual work, who made things and did things.” Then the third ship, their ship, would hold all of the “middlemen”.
The issue arose when they started to realize that no-one knew exactly what the planet was “doomed” by; each person had been told a slightly different story. It turned out that this was a complicated plan by the upper and lower thirds of the population to, as Douglas Adams puts it, “rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.”
While, of course, this whole scene in the book is meant to be simply humorous, it immediately popped into my head while thinking about our reading from 1 Corinthians. I’m also going to talk a bit about next week’s 1 Corinthians text, because it works so well. Paul is saying that we are all part of Christ’s body, and that we all, through the Holy Spirit, are given spiritual gifts and those are our function within the body. Some have one gift, some have another, but all come from the Spirit.
So it just won’t do if a person with one gift wishes they had another gift so much that they neglect the gift they have. As Paul says, the ear can’t say, “I wish I were an eye!” because if every ear was an eye, no-one would be able to see. If every nose was an ear, no-one could smell. So we are all given gifts, so that every role within the body of Christ will be filled.
Sometimes the gifts aren’t as glamorous as others; Paul mentions a lot of the “big deal” gifts – healing, prophecy, tongues, and the like – but I truly believe there are others, too. One of my friends when I was in seminary was convinced that I had the spiritual gift of making copy machines work. Now that’s not the most glamorous of gifts, but in an office environment, not having it is problematic.
So we all have spiritual gifts: some are like the first group of Golgafrincham, the leaders, teachers, pastors, and so on; others are like the second group of Golgafrincham, the workers and the do-ers; but then there’s others who may feel like they’re the third group, those whose gifts just don’t seem as important – like the telephone sanitizers.
But remember what happened to the Golgafrincham – their destruction came as a direct result of the lack of telephone sanitizers! What Paul is saying to the Corinthian church, and to us, is that no gift is unimportant. Each part of the body is as important as the other.
A mentor of mine in college once told me, “You have a job in the Church that you are the best at; if you don’t do it, someone else will, but they won’t do it as good as you.” That’s always stuck with me – the idea that God has something for us to do that we can do best. It’s not an easy thing to always figure out, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error, but there’s always something.
That’s what this whole spiritual gift discussion in 1 Corinthians is – what is your gift, and how will you use it. No part of the body of Christ is unimportant, especially the unglamorous ones. As he says in verses 23 and 24, “the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it.”
So I challenge you this week to spend some time with God, praying about what your gift is – something that you are passionate about, something that brings you joy, or something that you’re good at – and how you can use it to further His kingdom within the body of Christ.