Sermon for Year C, Pentecost Proper 4
By The Rev. Torey Lightcap
June 2, 2013
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
“Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Week II
– Understanding”
Last Sunday, we began a series
on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.
If you were here, you may
remember that I asked this question:
Isn’t it time to start giving
to the world what God has given to you?
That leads naturally enough to
the question, “Well, what has God
given to me?”
Or, as I tried to say it,
“What has the Holy Spirit given us as a
trusted guide and mentor
That it’s now our responsibility to give
away?”
I said last week that my goal
was quite simple,
And that was to give you the chance to fall in love with the Holy Spirit –
Not as an idea or an abstraction or a
doctrine, but as the vibrant presence of God.
The Spirit of Holiness. The
Spirit of God.
The person of God present in
the room at the moment of Pentecost
Who is also present in this room at this very
moment,
Giving us everything we need to be Church
together.
The basic reading for this
series comes out of Isaiah chapter eleven: quote,
“A shoot will come up from the stump of
Jesse;
From his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The
Spirit of the Lord will rest on him —
The Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
The Spirit of counsel and of might,
The Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the
Lord.”
Last week we thought and prayed
a little on the Spirit’s gift of wisdom.
Today we consider the gift of understanding.
Whenever people are baptized into
the Household of God,
Whoever’s officiating the service (whether
Priest or Bishop)
Prays the following prayer out of the
Prayer Book
Over the people being baptized:
“Heavenly Father, we thank you that by
water and the Holy Spirit
You have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin,
And have raised them to the new life of grace.
Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit.
Give
them an inquiring and
discerning heart,
The courage to will and to persevere,
A spirit to know and to love you,
And the gift of joy and wonder in all
your works.”
There’s a beautiful, logical
thread running through this prayer.
But there’s also a kind of
urgency – because we need a lot of help to get the job done.
It highlights the fact that we require
so much assistance in our life’s
journey with Christ.
That we can’t do it without God
or without others whom we hold in community.
That life will most likely be
hard and not without pains.
And accordingly that prayer at
baptism asks God the Holy Spirit to heap up upon us
All the skills of inquiry and discernment
that we will need.
In effect, it says,
Behold, dear Lord, this your
creation: help him understand how things really are.
The Holy Spirit’s gift of understanding
is multifaceted:
At one level, yes, understanding is intellectual capacity –
The ability to comprehend something, to
take it apart and put it back together;
An intelligence given to us that allows us
to reason, and discern,
And make a way in the world.
We all have tremendous gifts,
And a rare few have transcendently tremendous
gifts –
And all of them are useless unless they are
shared –
Unless their potential is converted into
some form of action.
The truly exceptional are the
ones who may excel others,
But in doing so, they don’t shame the rest of
us –
They only show us how much we can do when
the time is right.
Upon his death at age 76 in the
year 1955,
Albert Einstein’s brain was removed from its
body, probably without his consent,
Just seven-and-a-half hours after he passed
from this world.
Following a few routine tests,
the brain was suspended in solution
And divided up and then put into a couple of
mason jars
Which were placed in a box meant for
transporting cider,
And the box sat around for 20 years waiting
to be discovered.
When at last the brain was
noticed and tested,
It was found to be of average size and weight.
Average!
In fact, with a few odd
exceptions no one can explain,
It followed all the usual standards for gross
anatomy.
In other words, even Einstein’s
brain was pretty much normal.
Now, Einstein was a believer:
An imperfect, but highly intellectually
gifted, mathematical mystic.
He believed in a Creator-God
who “does not play dice with the world.”
Even though his discoveries
threw the world of physics into complete chaos
And completley reordered how we see
everything working in our universe,
Still he believed, and he maintained it into
his grave.
He believed in an order and an
intelligence beyond our ability to calculate.
In his ethnic, cultural, and
religious background, he was thoroughly Jewish.
He was a German-born Jew whose
work was targeted by Nazis like Joseph Goebbels,
Who declared that “Jewish intellectualism
[was] dead.” Ha!
It seems no stretch of the
imagination to suggest
That in every way Einstein would have found
deep resonance with Psalm 139:
“Darkness is not dark to you [O
God];
the night is as bright as the day;
Darkness and light to you are both alike.
For you yourself created my inmost parts;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I will thank you because I am marvelously
made;
Your works are wonderful, and I know it
well.
My body was not hidden from you,
While I was being made in secret
and woven
in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in
the womb;
All of them were written in your book;
They were fashioned day by day, when as
yet there was none of them.
How deep I find your thoughts, O God! How
great is the sum of them!
If I were to count them, they would be more
in number than the sand;
To count them all, my life span would need
to be like yours.”
But.
How do we understand ourselves in this grand equation?
Or is it just Einstein and God
walking the beach, hand-in-hand, counting the sand?
If we say that the Spirit
grants to us intelligence of mind only,
Then every Episcopal parish should rename itself
Saint Albert’s and call it a day.
I daresay that in our wonder, we
risk missing the wider point
Of what people like Einstein really put
before us.
Because understanding comes in
many flavors.
It is a gift that seats itself,
grounds itself, in all the places we need –
In all the inconvenient and lovely places
Jesus commands us to go,
In all those we are called to serve.
Together we make the Church,
And together the Church’s collective
understanding is there
For the good of all.
To some is given understanding
and intelligence of the heart.
They are compassionate and they lead with compassion.
They listen so as to
understand.
They are willing to allow their
own lives to become deeply intertwined with others’,
And when trouble comes, they will not let us
go.
I want to affirm that in you as
the gift of the Holy Spirit,
And I hope that you will speak about it that
openly and that unashamedly.
I want to affirm that this is
what you need to be Church.
To some is given understanding
and intelligence of the gut.
The gut is smart along the same
channel as the voice.
Together, they only speak the
truth, and they lead from the truth,
And you want to be near them because of this
As much as you don’t want to be near them for the same exact same reason.
Like any good gut, they expel
toxins and they encourage better food.
They point to reality and love
it and embrace it
And sometimes it’s like sandpaper on your
mind the way they talk.
I want to affirm that in you as
the gift of the Holy Spirit,
And I hope that you will speak about it that
openly and that unashamedly.
This, too, is what you need to
be Church.
To some is given understanding
and intelligence of the hands.
They set themselves to craft
and to art,
And they serve other people because doing is what they do best,
And they know that and they don’t apologize
for it.
It’s what they lead from:
They don’t know the meaning of the phrase
“Do as I say and not as I do,”
Because what they do is the most
self-evident thing about them.
It is righteous behavior
offered up to God.
And I want to affirm that in
you as the gift of the Holy Spirit,
And I hope that you will speak about it that
openly and that unashamedly.
It’s what you need to be
Church.
To some is given understanding
and intelligence of the feet.
They know, deep down in their
feet,
That the Spirit gave them feet so that they
could kick people –
Not kicking someone who’s down, mind you;
Just kicking a person or a people until
they get going on a path they need to take –
Gently nudging, or sometimes swiftly
prodding.
They go on long walks and
excursions.
Sometimes, when Church is
feeling particularly unhealthy,
Their smart feet will take them far away and
may not bring them back.
They take big goals and they
suggest ideas to implement them,
And they lead from their feet, and they’re
not the least bit ashamed.
I want to affirm that in you as
the gift of the Holy Spirit,
And I hope that you will speak about it that
openly and that unashamedly.
It’s what you need to be
Church.
Finally, to some is given
understanding and intelligence of open
eyes.
They bring in the ordered
intelligence of the God-ordered world –
Not as something automatically foreign to
Church,
But as understanding to be admired and
possibly even imitated.
They’re always saying how it’s
done somewhere else,
Or else telling how Church needs to respond
to what has been seen,
Be it good or be it evil.
This is how they lead, and
Church is blessed for them.
They never cease exploring or
integrating.
I want to affirm that in you as
the gift of the Holy Spirit,
And I hope that you will speak about it that
openly and that unashamedly.
It, too, is what you need to be
Church.
A few thousand years ago, Saint
Paul wrote a letter
To the little church of Jesus-followers in
Corinth.
It survives to this day.
He said, “Now concerning
spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters,
I don’t want you to [go] uninformed
…
There are varieties of gifts, but the same
Spirit;
And there are varieties of services, but
the same Lord;
And there are varieties of activities,
But it is the same God who activates all
of them in everyone.
To each is given the manifestation of the
Spirit for the common good …
For just as the body is one and has many
members,
And all the members of the body, though
many, are one body, so it is with Christ ...
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized
into one body …
And we were all made to drink of one
Spirit.
Indeed,” he says, “the body does not
consist of one member but of many.”
So, he says, a foot can’t decide it isn’t part of the
body
Just because it isn’t a hand;
And an ear can’t ditch the
body on the grounds that it is not an eye.
An eye can’t can’t kick out a hand,
And a head can’t just get tired
of a foot and walk away on its own.
Paul says, Try to imagine a body that’s nothing but an
eye.
Not much of a body, is it? Sort of ridiculous, isn’t it?
Where in the world would you put the ears or the nose?
No, he says, quite the
contrary.
Everything we think is less
respectable or less honorable or weaker
Actually deserves the highest possible
respect.
What’s more, God does this
So “that there may be no dissension within
the body,
But the members may have the same care for
one another.”
Because, he says, “You are the
body of Christ and individually members of it.”
You’re the body of Christ. What
a kicker.
Let us pray.
Gracious Spirit, keep giving to us those things you know we need,
And more than that, those
things we need to give away.
Above all, give us the spirit of Jesus. Amen.
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