SERMON, EPIPHANY 3C, 1 CORINTHIANS 12:12-27

(Preached at VC by the Senior Warden)

Last week we were asked to think and pray about our gifts for ministry. We are all gifted in one way or another, and we all have different gifts. Those gifts, according to Paul, are all used for the common good. Not one gift is unneeded, and every gift can make both our parish and the larger church stronger.

In addition to thinking and praying in an effort to identify gifts, we were also asked if we would be willing to use those gifts for the common good of the parish. It is one thing to know your gifts, and quite another to put them to use. It’s one thing to know you are a good cook, and another thing to sign up for Soup & Scripture.

One of the great things about St. Paul’s is that it is small – we all know that. It’s bigger than it was three years ago at this time, but we are still small. Being this small pretty much guarantees that we will all participate in some capacity. Additionally, we don’t have the “opportunity” to sit back and maintain the status quo. We are continually forced to look at our future. That future presents us with two clear options: 1) we can choose to close up shop and let the parish die; or we can choose to be like little David, slay the enemy that would destroy us, and live.

“What enemy?” you may ask. The enemy of apathy, where we think, “Why bother?” The enemy of defeatism, where we think it doesn’t matter what we do, nothing will work. The enemy of burnout, where the same people do the same thing year after year after year.

It’s easy to think, “Why bother putting on Soup & Scripture, nobody shows up.”

It’s easy to look at Easter and Christmas services and think, “The numbers keep going down, we’re losing.”

It’s easy to think, “How much longer until these ten or twelve people get tired of doing everything?”

It’s also easy to sit on the couch, eat Ding Dongs and milk, or chips and pop, and watch ESPN all day. But that doesn’t accomplish anything.

We can’t afford to do things the easy way. We do Soup & Scripture because people still come. As long as people continue to come, we’ll continue to offer it.

The mark of success is not how many people show up at Christmas and Easter. Yes, the numbers for those services are down, but if you look at the overall attendance for 2006, our average Sunday attendance actually increased over 2005. Success isn’t numbers, success is much deeper and more involved than simple numbers.

As for burnout, that’s a little trickier. When the same five people are on the vestry year in and year out, that could be a problem. But burnout isn’t simply always doing the same job. There are at least two things that keep people from suffering burnout: 1) Is it fun? And 2) Is it challenging?

St. Paul’s appears to offer both. Granted, we could possibly have more of each, but we are making progress. If we are having fun, if we are being challenged and stimulated, then that means we are alive. We haven’t given up. We didn’t curl up and die. We are not some forgotten corpse lying in the ground. Our body, small though it may be, is alive. And this body has work to do.

We need people with eyes to give us the vision of where we want to go. We need people with leg power to get us there. We need people with hands to do the work needed. We need people with ears to listen for what’s working and what isn’t. In short, we need each other, and we need the different gifts and talents we each bring.

We are each a different member of the same body and we are unified through our diversity. In that diversity, things get done. Not only do things get done, but it’s possible that we might also learn of a new way of doing things or looking at things.

But our body is incomplete. The mission of the church, according to our catechism, is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. In other words, to help make the body complete: to help bring those outside the of the church into the church, and to help the members within the church tolerate each other (because sometimes tolerating family members is a difficult thing to do).

The mission of the church is to restore all people to unity; it is not to make them all Episcopalians. The mission is to restore all diverse members to the unity of the body. That means we welcome those different from us. We listen to other viewpoints than our own. We don’t insist that everyone think like we do, dress like we do or interpret scripture like we do. Unity can be untidy. Unity should never be mistaken for conformity.

That seems to be the big question around the church right now. Will we strive for unity, or will we strive for conformity? If we strive for conformity, then we have already failed in the mission of the church. Conformity says that we all must see things from the same point of view, interpret scripture the same way, and not ask questions. To follow up on Paul’s analogy, if we strive for conformity then we will all be the same body part; we will all be eyes, or ears or hands or feet. Conformity says that diverse gifts are not important; what’s important is that you sign off on a statement of confession and never deviate from that.

If we strive for unity, however, then we will succeed in the mission of the church. Unity recognizes that we are all part of one body, the Body of Christ, but that each member of that body has a different function and a different gift. Unity doesn’t try to eliminate or remove those different from us because they don’t look the same, talk the same or act the same. People who are in unity don’t try to separate themselves or withdraw from the body because other people with other gifts might have other ideas.

Every part of the body serves a needed function, but body parts and functions are not interchangeable. Ears can’t smell, eyes can’t hear, legs don’t have the dexterity of fingers; and sometimes, when the function of one part of the body intrudes into an area for which it wasn’t designed, the results can be deadly. Just ask John.

That analogy can be used with the church as well. If you are great at manual labor but suffer from dyslexia, it would be a bad idea to ask you to be the parish treasurer. Not only do you not have the tools for that job, but the results could be financially deadly.

This is why we need to examine the gifts we do have. Volunteering because “nobody else will do it” may work in the short term, but it will do nothing for the long term success of the parish. Eventually it won’t be fun, it will become too much like work, burnout will set in and you might be apt to leave the parish. Nobody wants that. What we do want, though, is for us to take stock of our gifts and then volunteer the talents we are good at.

By naming our gifts, by using them in such a way as to build up the body, by recognizing that every gift is valuable and has its place in the parish, then we can see that we are unified through our diversity. When we invite others to join us, and invite with no strings attached, we are opening ourselves up to becoming more diverse than we already are. We open ourselves up to receive other gifts and talents that we might soon wonder how we got by without them. And we open ourselves up to completing the mission of the church – restoring all people to unity with God and each other.

We are all members of the Body of Christ. Let us celebrate our individual, diverse gifts, and let us take comfort that that diversity is the basis of our unity. And more than anything, let us not succumb to the myth that we have to be big to be successful.

Amen.