Sermon for Sunday, December 29th 2024

Sunday After Christmas, 2024, SJE

The Sunday before Christmas we heard the boisterous, world-upending prophetic song of a young adolescent girl in Mary’s Magnificat. Now the Sunday after Christmas we peak in on another ‘tween’, a not nearly adolescent boy Jesus. In the time since the angel’s announcement, Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, she together with Joseph have held the newborn and protected him. Together they have fed, bathed, taught, guided, cajoled and disciplined and loved little Jesus into the boy he now is. They can be forgiven the shock that they experience on finding him teaching in the temple. They were probably frantic in trying to locate him in all the bustle and busyness. There must have been joy and relief in the finding, and perhaps a touch of pride to discover him teaching adult men… but probably also a large dose of sober realization. This, our boy, the gift of God to us, is, was, and has always been and will always be, a gift to which we cannot cling, not even as his parents. 

Twenty or so years later, Mary Magdalene and all the disciples will need to learn this terrifically important lesson: that they, too, ought not to cling to Jesus, to hold him back from his own world-challenging provocative actions and words; they cannot keep him and all his lovely teachings safe to themselves alone, and they cannot keep him in their midst after his resurrection. 

Mary and Joseph would have had to lean quite intentionally into their own form of discipleship, listening to God’s will, shaping themselves in constant self-giving for the bigger purposes of launching – and themselves following – God’s child, Jesus. 

The problem with being about doing the will of God, being about the will of God, is that we always carry with us the draw, the pull, the temptation, to make it our own. As soon as we think we know what God is about, it is so deeply difficult not to turn what God is about into our own project. And then before you know it, we have projected our desires and wants and needs on to God, and impose our will on what we perceive to be God’s will. 

This is the way it is with all spiritual gifts. Ultimately, like Jesus himself, they are gifts which we are meant to receive. But in the same moment of the receiving, we are also called to release the gift. Not to cling to it; not to appropriate it as our possession. That would be to warp the gift itself. No, the spiritual gifts of which St. Paul speaks today are gifts that are intended to be received in order to be engaged, to be entered into, rather than owned. 

St. Paul is addressing a community and the challenges of living in any human community. I’m struck by how simple, how childlike are the virtues of the spiritual life that he lists: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience (well, perhaps patience isn’t so childlike!). With all these virtues active in our midst, we are better equipped to bear with each other through disagreements and to help to sustain one another in hardships. We may even find forgiveness when the peace of Christ is active in our hearts, and be able to live in gratitude. 

All of these virtues are spiritual gifts that could very well make up a ‘rule of life’. To receive these virtues is to recognize them as gifts of grace that are meant to be put into practice. Practising the presence of God through a spiritual rule of life, repeatedly forms us. 

But it’s important to get this: it’s not a chore list or a task list of things to accomplish. And it’s also important to ‘get’ that what we understand by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness – all of our understanding of these is clouded and constantly needs the corrective of God’s inbreaking to correct us, to point us to the Holy One who is constantly opening, forming, and releasing these gifts within us. They are not ours to hold on to; neither are they ours to define. 

There are two main reasons I think it is so important to think of spiritual gifts in these ways. One is simply because the pressurized world of competitive individualistic winners and losers for the most part forms us against compassion and kindness, for example. Humility and meekness and patience are not the ways to get ahead if you want to rule the world, and so very many of the powerful people and forces that do rule the world economically and politically model rather other ways of being for us, and subtly or not so subtly persuade us against these virtues.

But the other is more subtle. Even virtues have been used against God’s intentions for abundant life for all. This is what I mean in cautioning against the danger of appropriating them as though we own them and can define them. There have been centuries of bad theology and insidious spiritual practice that have, for example, held one set of definitions over particular populations. Centuries of teaching about gendered order – how things ought to be in a household and also in society – instructed women to be compassionate and kind and humble and meek and patient and forgiving in ways that were self-effacing. How many women in situations of spousal abuse were told that they were likely at fault for not being humble enough, for being too much? How many enslaved and economically exploited Black workers have been told it is their lot in life to be humble’. In both situations the virtue of humility has been poisoned by those wielding the power of the word within a hierarchically dominant power system. We could go through the list and find our own examples of how kindness itself can get manipulated into passive-aggression, or be a performance of kindness that is intended to manipulate or coerce. 

No, as spiritual gifts these are all gifts of grace, and their unifying wisdom is God’s gift in the incarnate Jesus. The way we make spiritual gifts our own is not by clinging to them and even less by enacting them within the ways that power works in the world. We live spiritual gifts within the wider gift of grace, the wisdom that pulls them all together – not as a task list or even a bundled package of spiritual riches, but as active parts of the life of God in which God has invited us to participate, and in which we will find our true selves and our true lives. 

When we are given spiritual gifts, we are given the welcome in to a relationship of communion – with God and with each other – in which these and further gifts abound, and in which the gifts will continue to reveal themselves to us in their always-newness. 

At the beginning of Advent I recommended some questions to begin some spiritual practices work. As we’re turning into a new season I find myself revisiting St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians and his instructions on life in communion by asking some new spiritual practices questions. Given our propensity to think we know what the virtues are, I wonder what it might do to remind ourselves in little moments of discernment to flip what I know for me is a normal sort of way of thinking about things. 

For example, I might find myself in a complicated situation of conflict with a co-worker. I might ask what is the kind thing for me to do in the context. Ah, but what do I think is actually kind? Hm…  What if I ask myself “what does God’s kindness require me to be and to do in this moment?” I need to pause and take that in a bit deeper. Similarly, I may have my own impressions of what meekness means for me in a context where I think I’m being treated unjustly. It may not actually mean what I might want it to mean – which could be, if I’m honest, just giving up and retreating quietly. If I ask “what does God’s meekness require me to be and to do in this moment?” I’m asking a different sort of question. God’s meekness in Christ looks like the Jesus who held firmly to God and to God’s truth whilst being treated unjustly, thus showing up the injustice for what it was. Similarly, it is a very different thing to ask in a given situation what does God’s forgiveness require of me?  – instead of just ‘how do I forgive this person?’ To cast the question in terms of God’s spiritual gift of forgiveness is to bring something very new alive, both in terms of a better awareness of how forgiveness works within my own reception of that gift, as well as in consideration of how I live that forgiveness in my relationships. 

Each of these spiritual gifts is as it were a portion of the prism refraction of God’s grace. Not ours to appropriate as though they belonged to us, but living, colourful lights in which we are set free to receive their beauty and to refract, through our own lives, their beauty through us into the world.