Sunday, January 19th, 2025: "Gifts: The Gifts of the Spirit"

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The First United Presbyterian Church

“Gifts: The Gifts of the Spirit”

Rev. Amy Morgan

January 19, 2025

I Corinthians 12:1-11

12 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be ignorant. 2 You know that when you were gentiles you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. 3 Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.

4 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 powerful deeds, 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.I’ve preached on this text 3 times in the last six years, so apparently it is one of my favorites. In my previous sermons, I’ve emphasized the idea that we’re all given unique gifts, and that we’re all called to use them, not for our own benefit, but for the common good. So if you haven’t gotten that message by now, well, you can go back and listen to those other sermons. 

Because today what I’d like to do is focus on these gifts of the Spirit that Paul names in this passage. Each of these gifts had some relationship to the practice of Judaism and to Greco-Roman culture, and so I want us to understand a little bit about that so we can see how these specific gifts translate into the life of the church today. 

Now this passage begins with Paul telling the Corinthian church that he does not want them to be ignorant about spiritual gifts. This word translated as ignorant is the origin of the English term “agnostic” and can kind of mean “willful ignorance,” like, “I don’t want to know, or I don’t want to think too hard about this, or I don’t want my ideas to be challenged, so I’m just going to say I don’t know.” 

The Corinthian church, and much of early Christianity, had a jumble of ideas about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, how they were all related, and what they were supposed to do about it. On top of that, they were a very small minority in a very religiously diverse society. We can easily see how someone might just shrug and say, “I don’t know.” Spiritual shmiritual. Whatever. 

Paul wants to provide some clarity, some definition, around these matters to counter the Corinthians’ agnosticism. Paul wants the Corinthians to understand that even though spiritual gifts, spiritual expressions and experiences and even practices and theological beliefs may vary, within all this diversity is a coherent unity. It is all from the same Spirit, the same Lord – Jesus Christ, the same God. And it is the same people – the whole community – who are served and encouraged and cared for through these gifts. 

Now, let’s take a look at each of these gifts Paul names. 

First, there is the utterance of wisdom and the utterance of knowledge. 

In the Hebrew scriptures, wisdom is personified and seen as a divine attribute of God, encompassing both practical and spiritual elements of life that enable people to live a life pleasing to God. In the early Christian community, true wisdom is something that comes only from God and is contrasted with the flawed and inadequate nature of human wisdom. Wisdom was highly valued in the Greco-Roman world of philosophy and intellectual pursuit, but it lacked the spiritual dimension recognized by Christians. 

Knowledge in the first century was associated with wealth and status. Only wealthy families could afford to educate their children, and that knowledge was intended to give them an advantage in a culture that loved to debate and discover new ideas. But for Christians, knowledge meant something deeper. It meant experiential and relational knowledge of God, knowing God’s truth and God’s will. This wasn’t intended to be secret knowledge, in contrast to the Gnostic communities that emerged in the early church. But it was knowledge that was considered to be a gift, not something you could buy or that was whispered in secret to those who could hear. 

The spiritual gifts of wisdom and knowledge are gifts that can be given to anyone – young or old, wealthy or impoverished, educated or uneducated. They are different from human wisdom and knowledge because they come from God and equip people to live in ways that are God-honoring and life-giving. Whereas human wisdom comes from life experience, the spiritual gift of wisdom comes from our experience with God. Human knowledge is built from what we know of the temporal world. The spiritual gift of knowledge is built from what we know of God through our relationship with God. 

The next spiritual gift Paul mentions is the gift of faith. Now, it seems like every Christian must be given the gift of faith, otherwise, how can we be Christian? As Paul says elsewhere, we’re saved by grace through faith. So it seems pretty essential for everyone. 

But the way Paul is talking about faith here is a little different. The Greek word for faith is connected to the idea of persuasion, but not in the sense of talking somebody into something. It was a word that in the surrounding culture was associated with trustworthiness and reliability, and in Judaism faith meant trusting in God’s promises. The gift of faith given by the Holy Spirit was the gift of being persuaded by God’s trustworthiness and sharing that conviction in such a way that others could come to rely on God. 

Most of us experience times in our lives when we struggle with faith, when we even find it impossible to trust God, to have any hope in God’s promises. In those times, I often invite folks to allow the faith of others to carry them for a while. Sometimes it is simply enough to trust that other people still trust God, and that maybe they have good reason for it. Those with the gift of faith are those who will walk alongside us in our moments of deepest doubt and despair, helping us pick up the shattered pieces of our faith and put them back together in a new way. 

Okay, so wisdom, knowledge, faith – those things don’t stretch the imagination too much. We know people with those gifts. Maybe we even see them in ourselves. 

But then we get into some gifts that are maybe a bit of a stretch. Healing – which, in the first century, was pretty much always considered to be a divine miracle. Working powerful deeds, which meant God intervening in some supernatural, miraculous way. Discernment of spirits doesn’t sound too out there. We experience the gift of being able to discern what is true, right, or beneficial in faith and practice. But this also entails discerning between actual evil spirits and the Spirit of God, which is maybe not the way we’re used to thinking about discernment today. And then there’s prophecy and speaking and interpreting tongues. Not something we see in the church every day. At least not the Presbyterian church. We leave that to the Pentecostals. 

Wisdom, knowledge, and faith – these are all gifts that equip and empower God’s people to live faithfully. This second set of gifts, however, are all signs of the in-breaking of God’s reign on earth, and they enable us to participate in that reign in tangible ways. So let’s not write them off too quickly as creative inventions of pre-scientific people. 

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time, said that “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” 

Healing today is attributed to medical advances and scientific study. Even though there is much we still don’t know and still can’t heal, we don’t normally consider it a spiritual gift when a doctor prescribes antibiotics and our strep throat is healed. We wouldn’t consider it a miracle because we know how and why it works. But does that really make it any less miraculous? 

When someone sits with us through grief, or speaks just the right thing to our broken heart, or brings a meal or shares a needed resource or refuses to pass judgement when we are overwhelmed by shame – all of these things are healing. We don’t think about why or how they work. We just know we feel better. That presence, that tenderness, that kindness, that hope, that love and compassion and grace – feels like a miracle. A miracle is simply the arrival of something we’d given up hoping for. And the Spirit still gives people the power to heal – to heal in ways that go beyond antibiotics and surgery and chemotherapy. We can see that healing as miraculous, or not. Either way, it is healing. 

In ancient Greek drama, there was a device known as the deus ex machina, literally “the God machine.” It was a plot twist where a deity swooped in to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. But it was called the “God Machine” because the deity was lowered from the sky onto the stage by a crane. 

This is the image that comes to mind when I think about the spiritual gift of working powerful deeds. Paul writes, You know that when you were gentiles you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Paul is contrasting a God who will show up and do something with the silent, impotent statues that adorned the pagan temples. Powerful deeds – miraculous divine interventions – were evidence that proved the God of Jesus Christ was real and active through the Holy Spirit, no crane required. The powerful deeds that Paul is referring to in the early Christian community are acts that testified to God’s work in the life of believers. Christians who risked their lives for the gospel, who gave up their wealth to follow Jesus, who spoke truth to power to fight injustice – these are powerful deeds. We might cringe at calling these things miraculous. We might see the crane operating behind the scenes. But the plot twist remains true. God shows up and changes the course of the story. 

There are those people in our lives who have done that, who have shown up in just the right place at just the right time to change the course of our story in ways we never could have imagined. People who powerfully encouraged us, guided us, inspired us. They may be public figures or personal relationships, but the Spirit still gifts people with working deeds of power. 

When we think of prophecy, we typically imagine that lunatic on the street corner holding a sign saying, “the end is near.” But for the early Christian community, prophecy was the gift of communicating revealed truth. It encompassed both the foretelling of future events and the forthtelling of God's will, often for the purpose teaching, comforting, and encouraging the church.

Prophecy may look like warning the church that if we keep doing things the way we’ve always done them, we’re not going to innovate and participate in the new thing God is doing in the world. It’s not like gazing into a crystal ball to see the future, but it’s a pretty good prediction, or at least a very educated guess. Prophecy literally means to speak before something happens. Like when we’re watching a scary movie and you yell at the screen, “Don’t go in that dark room!” right before the monster jumps out. Some people are gifted with the ability to see what’s coming. Some people are gifted with the ability to hear where God’s calling us to go. This gift of prophecy is alive and well today, if we are willing to acknowledge it. 

There was a lot of confusion in the Corinthian church about how to tell if someone was really a Christian. Discernment of spirits, distinguishing between what was of God and what was not, was a real challenge. Especially in the diverse context of Corinth, discernment was needed to understand God’s will and navigate the challenges of living in a world of competing spiritual influences. Paul tries to make it simple by telling them that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. Discernment begins just by listening to what someone is saying. 

And that is still true today. We may not understand why people do the things they do. We might wonder if they are under the influence of evil forces or if they just have new ideas we ought to consider. Those with the gift of discernment are able to listen without judgement to other people and listen with clarity to the Holy Spirit. And after all that listening, they can perceive God’s will and God’s truth. 

And finally, we come to speaking in tongues and interpreting tongues. This comes right out of the Pentecost story when the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to speak so that people who spoke many different languages could understand them. Now, in the Pentecost story, it’s not entirely clear if the disciples were speaking a bunch of different languages they didn’t know or if the Holy Spirit was acting as a kind of interpreter. But it’s clear that Pentecost was not the last time this gift was given. 

If you’ve ever visited a country where English is not the predominant language, you know how essential it is to either speak a second language or have an interpreter. But you don’t have to travel abroad to find folks who are hard to understand. When Dean talks about Computer Engineering, I’ve told him I literally understand Greek better than the English he’s speaking. We have trouble communicating across generational divides, political divides, professional divides, and ideological divides. We really don’t understand each other in this society, which leads to all kinds of challenges when it comes to living together and trying to follow God’s will together. 

Those who can speak a language other than their native tongue or who can interpret for those of us who are monolingual are invaluable to restoring relationships and empowering us to serve God together. 

Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working powerful deeds, prophecy, discernment of spirits, speaking and interpreting tongues. These are actual gifts of the Holy Spirit that Paul recognized in the early church. And these are gifts the Spirit still gives today. May each of us recognize the gifts we have been given, celebrate the gifts others have been given, and use all our gifts for the common good and to the glory of God. Amen.