Sermon: Pentecost Sunday, Year A
Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:4-6
I am an observer of people. As I live with and work with people I am amazed at the endless variety that God has created – each individual human being is an absolutely unique and mysteriously special one-off creation. It’s a mystery – we are all human but all different.
This causes tensions too, doesn’t it.
It’s hard to accept that others are not like us. They have different gifts and different strengths and different weaknesses. It is sometimes hard to accept the ideas and thoughts of others that are different from ours. And we may secretly say to ourselves “If only everybody was like me.” Diversity is often resisted. What is different we find strange and hard to adjust to. It’s not to our taste.
We may sometimes also be afraid that receiving others who are different from us might cause us to lose our own special uniqueness, and so we feel threatened by others. This kind of fear is what is behind Racism.
So although the world is a diverse place full of different people, we do not always embrace and celebrate that diversity. We may even try to recast those around us in our own image so they fit into our mould.
But God has not designed the world this way – nor has he, we find in today’s second reading, designed the church this way. Paul speaks here about Christ’s Body, the church in all its diversity. He speaks about a multiplicity of different gifts and abilities and expressions of the same Holy Spirit’s work. Huge diversity. Here in this text from 1 Corinthians 12, and elsewhere in the New Testament, there are altogether 20 different spiritual gifts listed. And each one of those gifts given to individual Christians will of course be expressed differently by that individual.
Diversity – many, many different expressions of the Holy Spirit’s work – but the same Spirit works in all: this is the key. And together these gifts enrich and make up the body, adding to the completeness of the church’s ministry and work in the world. This is the church, the way the Spirit woks through diversity, and it is to be celebrated and explored. Not feared.
Sometimes in the church we find that diversity hard too, don’t we. We want everybody to be like us, to like what we like and see things how we see them. I hear it a lot, believe me. Then sometimes we fear one another’s gifts – in our insecurity we feel that other’s gifts and abilities make us look inferior, or that other peoples’ gifts call us into things that we are not comfortable with, or make us grow or challenge us, or just rub us up the wrong way – we sometimes just get irritated by people’s different-ness.
But there is nothing to fear and nothing to lose – God has given all the different gifts and abilities. And he has made each one of us part of the Body. He has made us all different so that we will work together – each with our own unique place and our own unique way of making a contribution.
We experience this diversity in our relationship with Knox/Ringwood – two more differently gifted congregations it would be hard to find. And yet in his inimitable way God has put us together. (He has a sense of humour!) Sometimes we find the diversity in this partnership a bit challenging, don’t we. Well good. That is a gift from the Holy Spirit, who gives a multiplicity of different gifts all for the same mission.
Through this diversity in our two congregations we have all grown – grown to see beyond our own way of doing and seeing, grown in our service, grown in our service to one another and the community and the world, grown from the benefits of the wide variety of skills that available to our parish as Christ’s living Body.
The Church is full of diversity – and thank God for that, because it equips us to meet a diverse world and community. What a wonderful thing it is, and what a wonderful gift we are to the community in which we live – a moving, active, dynamic community, filled with the Spirit’s power. Together we are his diverse, yet unified, people – spiritually vital, differently gifted for one mission of God.