Gifts and Graces

Scripture: Romans 12:1-8

A couple of months ago, I was lifting a bicycle up and down the stairs to my apartment, and I aggravated an old back injury. Now for those of you who have had back injuries know, “aggravated” is a total understatement for the pain and frustration this kind of injury causes. I had to sit on the bed to tie my shoes. I couldn’t lean over to pick anything up. I had to breathe very carefully or I’d get shooting pains around the back of my rib cage. Driving was hard because I couldn’t turn my neck around to see without those shooting pains again. I couldn’t really even sit still for long periods of time, because I’d eventually start to ache. And the weird acrobatics I had to go through to get an ice pack to stay in place would probably be funny to me now, if they didn’t start making me feel a little of that old discomfort.

In short, I learned that the two inches of muscle and tendon on the right side of my back, below my shoulder bone, are much more important than I had remembered. Those two inches of muscle and sinew literally keep me functioning as a normal human being.
In our reading from Romans this morning, Paul talks about a different kind of body: the church. Like a human body, the church has many different parts that all need to be working for it to function like it should. Each of us, as members of a faith community, has our own place and our own function in the church and in our lives.

Each of us, Paul writes, has a different gift to share with the church and the world.
Paul goes on to give a list of possible gifts each of us might have. We might have the gift of prophesy, making us able to put into words the message God has for the community. We might have the gift of ministry, being able to serve people in the way the need most. We might be gifted at teaching, helping people learn new things. We might be gifted at exhorting, which is to say that we are good at really getting people excited, encouraging them and inspiring them to action. We might be good givers, who do without so that we’ll be able to make a difference to others. We might have gifts for leadership, helping people get organized and on track to meet their goals. Or we might have gifts for compassion—being able to sympathize and comfort people in their difficult times. All these could be things we’re good at.

So which gifts do you have? Are you a kind ear? A piercing eye? A strong calf muscle? Are you a hard-working stomach, or maybe two inches of muscle right under the shoulder blade, keeping everything together?

This body image works for people in a congregation—we try to work with each other as best we can, and we need each other to do God’s work in the world. But it also applies to each congregation as a whole, including this one. Congregations are like body parts in the universal Christian church. Each congregation has its own gifts that the whole church needs and that the world needs, too. Just like a person, every church has its own history, favorite ways of doing things, quirks, and special gifts. What are this church’s gifts? If this church were a single person, what would that person be like? What would that person be good at?

There is a second layer to what Paul is saying about gifts, which is this: when you use your gifts, the way you go about it is important, too. If your gift is to give, be cheerful as you do it. If you’re a compassionate type, have integrity and keep people’s confidences. If you’re a leader, do a thorough job. Teach with passion, because you love what you’re doing. Minister joyfully because you are ready to share what you have.

And this brings us back to how Paul frames this section of his letter to the Romans: he surrounds it with grace. By God’s mercies, he says, you’ll be able to do this. And I think that grace is really what’s at the center of this passage. Because grace is what makes our service possible.

I recently read this story about a little boy whose mother wanted him to clean his room. “Go clean your room now, please,” she said. He went to his room, but when she went to check on him, he was playing in a corner, the bed wasn’t made, and the room was still scattered with toys. The mother said, “What were you supposed to be doing in here?” The boy answered, “Cleaning my room.” “Did you do it?” she asked. “No…” “Well then,” she said, “let’s have a prayer, so that you can apologize for not obeying, and can ask Jesus to help you do what you should.” They had their prayer, and the little boy seemed encouraged and ready to clean his room. The mother, encouraged as well, left him to his work. But when she came back to check in again, the little boy was sitting in the middle of the floor. His room still wasn’t clean. She said “What happened?” He answered, “I’m waiting for Jesus to come help me clean my room!”

While I don’t think that Jesus is going to come help any of us clean our rooms, at least not in the way our little boy was expecting, I do believe that we can rely on God for a different kind of help in giving our gifts to one another. The way we can be ready to receive that help is through a regimen of regular rest, gratitude, and listening. This will allow us, over time, to present our whole lives to God as something sacred, what Paul calls a holy and living sacrifice. These practices allow God to renew our minds and transform us.


First, then, is regular rest. Human beings need sleep and good food and exercise. Our bodies aren’t just machines that carry our heads around like robots, they’re part of our whole self—who God created us to be, and taking good care of them allows us to be graceful servants to God.

As important as resting our bodies is resting our souls. This means taking time to unwind and enjoy being with family and friends. Taking time to sit and do nothing, or enjoy a hobby, or watch a sunset. God created us for work, but God also created us for pleasure. I think our Jewish friends have a good idea when it comes to keeping a Sabbath. One day out of seven, Jews who observe the Sabbath don’t do any work. They enjoy God and God’s creation, and rest their souls as well as their bodies.

The second practice for connecting to God’s grace is gratitude. God already gives us so many gifts. When we take time to rest, we can also take time to be thankful for those gifts. It might be something as simple as a beautiful garden, or a fun potluck dinner, or it might be something as long-lasting as family or friendships. We can also be thankful for the gifts God gives us, both as individuals and as the church, to share with the world. God gives all of us a great deal, and remembering that is our path toward connecting again to that sense of grace.

The third practice is listening. God will help us, but we need to make sure we’re headed in the right direction. Listen for what God has to say to you. Pause to spend time in prayer, read the Bible with an open heart, pay attention to what you’re passionate about. Sometimes our gifts are as much about what we really care about as they are about where we have skills or abilities. If you really care about something, if you really enjoy working on it, if you really hear God calling you to it, then you will go about that service as Paul describes: with passion and a joyful heart.

Like with giftedness itself, these practices are not just for people—they’re for churches who want to connect with God’s grace. Regular rest, gratitude, and listening help the church stay on track and present itself as a holy and living sacrifice to God. They help God renew the church and transform, or, if you will, reform it.

The good news for today, then, is this: God gives us many gifts, but does not expect us to use them without help. Instead, our gifts are a way to take part in a strange and mysterious circle of love, joy, and grace. Through God’s grace we receive and give those gifts. Through God’s grace, our minds are renewed and our lives are transformed. Through God’s love, we are called both to rest and enjoy, and to share that love with the world.

Let us go out into the world, then, to share that love in our own particular ways. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Conversation with God

Scripture: Matthew 15:10-28

This morning’s Gospel reading is not my favorite story about Jesus. As he is walking down the road with the disciples, a Canaanite woman comes running, calling out to Jesus for help. She’s noisy, pushy, knows what she wants, and won’t let up. The disciples, in typical style, try to make her go away.

Now this is where I start to wish there were a different reading for this Sunday. In many other stories, Jesus is much nicer. In the story of the children who want to meet Jesus, he tells the disciples, “Let the children come to me.” In the story of the paraplegic, Jesus sees the man being lowered through the roof and shouts his approval right away. In the story of Zaccheus the tax collector, Jesus looks into the sycamore tree and calls Zaccheus to him. And not only that, he goes to Zaccheus’ place for dinner!

So the first disturbing moment for me is when Jesus ignores the woman. Her daughter is sick! She’s shouting after him! But Jesus ignores her. And when she keeps persisting, it gets worse. Jesus insults her: “The bread I have is for the children, not for the dogs.” Jesus calls this woman a dog. We’ve just heard Jesus dismiss the Pharisees as “the blind leading the blind” and he’s often blunt—rarely pulling his punches, but still: it kind of ties a knot in the old “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelet, if you know what I mean.

So as I say, this is not an easy text. But I think there are two things going on in the story that we should examine.

The first thing to think about is this: Jesus had a way of meeting people where they are. If a man’s riches were getting in the way of a relationship with God, Jesus would tell him to sell them. If a woman needed to tell her story of long illness and pain, Jesus was ready to listen. If a person was thinking about following Jesus, but wasn’t ready to make a final decision, Jesus simply said, “Come and see.” For the Canaanite woman, then, I wonder if Jesus saw in her a real need to wrestle with him before she could receive a blessing. Sometimes we don’t want things handed to us on a plate. Sometimes we need to feel like the good things are worth struggling for. And sometimes we need to have a good matching of wits—a personal connection—before we’re ready to accept healing.

I went to my first visit with a new doctor a few months ago. And I left not wanting to go back again. It’s not that the doctor didn’t take my temperature, or listen to my heart or ask me if I had particular complaints. It was that she seemed rushed. She didn’t want to chat things over—she wanted to either get me the right pill or get me out of there.

Now it’s entirely possible that my doctor was having a bad day, and it’s also possible that Jesus was having a bad day, but I think by the time Jesus tells the woman not to expect any bread from him, she has his full attention.

And this may be where the real moment of healing is found in the story. Not when the little girl recovers from her demons and is free to be healthy and normal again, but when Jesus looks the Canaanite woman in the eye and sees her—really sees her. The healing is not only in the recovery of the little girl, but also in the conversation Jesus has with her mother. Jesus hears her, and it changes his mind.

This is the second important moment in the story. Granted, I’ve just said that Jesus may be pushing on this woman because he knows she is up to the fight. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t affect him. She makes a real change in his attitude.

Jesus focused most of his ministry on a specific group of people—what he calls “the lost sheep of Israel.” This group of people had its own vagaries, its own foibles, its own flaws. It included traitors, prostitutes, drunkards, and other sinners who were not accepted in polite society. These were the lost sheep, and Jesus felt called to be with them. He said, “Well people don’t need a doctor. It’s the sick who do!”

This drove the Pharisees nuts. Here is someone going around the countryside as a teacher, healing people and making strange pronouncements about God and God’s work in the world, yet he eats with sinners all the time! He wears the wrong clothes, talks to the wrong people, and doesn’t respect tradition.

Jesus fires back in the first section of our reading from Matthew: Respecting tradition isn’t the same thing as respecting God. When it comes to who’s in and who’s out of God’s kingdom, you don’t have any idea. Washing your hands is no good if your heart isn’t clean.

So Jesus had a very clear picture about what his mission was: to reach out to those lost sheep. And he also believed that his mission was limited to the people of Israel. This is not a new theme. Much of the Old Testament tracks what looks like divine favoritism—choosing Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David. Choosing Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth. The people of Israel for many years had a particular covenant with God, a relationship that was different from anyone else’s. Jesus’ mission statement read: “Bring the kingdom of God to the lost sheep of Israel.” No need to go further.

And this is where the conversation becomes so important. The Canaanite woman, ready to go to the mat for her daughter, opens Jesus’ eyes. She knows without question that he can heal her daughter, so she uses his own words against him. He says: dogs don’t get to eat the children’s bread. She says: yes, but they still get the scraps.

Because we don’t normally think of Jesus having his mind changed or learning something new, this story is shocking. Shouldn’t Jesus already know everything? But the Canaanite woman challenges him and wins—his ministry is not, after all, only for Israel, but for the lost sheep everywhere.

Prayer at its best is conversation with God. And what are we hoping to do when we pray, if not change God’s mind? The Canaanite woman is clever and courageous in her encounter with Jesus. He treats her as his equal and concedes her point. This is the good news for us today: God does not come to us as someone who is higher than the rest of us, as someone who never makes mistakes, as someone who has all the answers. God comes to us as a human being and listens to us—both our protests and our praises. God is ready to have a conversation with us.

This moment of grace in Jesus’ ministry is important for all of us in this sanctuary, because it marks Jesus’ willingness to not only minister to the Jews but also to the Gentiles. It is hurtful, at first, to hear the sting in the words—that we are the dogs and they are the children. But our salvation hangs in the balance, and without the persistence of the Gentile woman on her daughter’s behalf we might not be in the same place we are today. Jesus might not have seen through the false division between Jew and Gentile. Jesus might not have recognized that faith can be found in unexpected places.

We, then, were outcasts at first, but we’ve been welcomed into the sheepfold. We’ve been healed because of a change of God’s heart. We are the ones who stood outside and who have only belatedly been let in. God’s great gift of mercy is ours. And it is just that—a gift, not a birthright.

What does this story mean for our own ministries? For our own lives?

First, it means that as recently-welcomed sheep, we should always be wary about trying to decide who’s in and who’s out. Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees holds true today: washing your hands doesn’t mean your heart is clean, and respecting tradition is not the same thing as respecting God.

Second, instead of trying to decide who’s in and who’s out, let’s see if we can’t do what Jesus did: bring love and healing into the world through our everyday lives. There are people of great faith in unexpected places, and the Holy Spirit is stirring in hearts you might never suspect. Let’s not only stay open to that Spirit; let’s do all we can to help it.

Finally, in our personal time with God, the good news is this: God welcomes our conversation. God loves us as we are, not because we were born into the right family or because we say the right things, or even because we come to church. So tell God the truth. Strive for honesty. Because God is still speaking and God is ready to listen. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Through the Deep Waters

Scriptures: Matthew 14:22-33
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

My brother got back from a trip to Scotland a few weeks ago. He showed me his pictures of Loch Ness this weekend. The water, he said, was very dark and it looked deep. And in the pictures, the water certainly looks forbidding. It was a grey color, like iron, with only a hint of dark blue in it. Looking at the water, and recognizing how deep the lake is, it doesn’t surprise me that this is the legendary home of a certain fabled water monster named Nessie. Even on the mild day my brother was there, the water seemed to hold secrets.

The Sea of Galilee, where the disciples find themselves in our story today, could easily be compared to Loch Ness. It’s wider than the Scottish lake, but only about 20 miles long. When I was comparing them very scientifically in my college geography textbook, they seemed to be roughly the same size. Which is to say, large enough to be many fathoms deep with dark, murky waters.

The setting, then, for reading from Matthew, is an ominous one. Not only are the waters deep and dark, not only have the disciples have been sent out into the middle of it alone, without Jesus, but night is falling and a storm is rising. The little boat begins to rock and crash as the waves get higher and the rain is falling down. The disciples batten down the hatches. There are experienced fishermen among them who know what trouble looks like. The forces of chaos, the unknown, and destruction surround them.

In the middle of what must at least be considered a tense situation, Jesus decides to walk out to the disciples huddled together in the dinghy. Peter looks out on the water and sees him. Now, the last thing Peter saw Jesus do was to feed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. That was pretty impressive. But it’s the kind of thing that’s sort of not breaking the rules, if you know what I mean. More bread can be made, more fish can be caught. It’s just that this time they appeared without anyone knowing exactly how. But walking on the water is another story. In fact, this is the kind of thing that only the creator can do—tame the wild waters of chaos and disorder. So when he thinks he sees Jesus on the water (and remember that they didn’t have semaphores or fog lights in those days) Peter hesitates:

“Is that you, Jesus? Really you?”

Jesus says, “Yes, I am who I am.”

“If it’s really you, tell me to walk on the water with you.”

Jesus answers, “Come.”

Peter gets out of the boat, and at first he succeeds, but his success is short-lived and he sinks into the crashing waves.

“Save me!” he cries out.

Jesus runs up to him, lifts him back into the boat, saying, “Oh Peter, why did you doubt? Why did you vacillate?”

And as the disciples fall down worshipping Jesus, the waters of the sea smooth and settle into gentle ripples.

The ancient Israelites, who lived more than 1000 years before Jesus, did not imagine the act of creating the world, as we sometimes do, as one of bringing something out of nothing. Instead, God’s work was to bring order to the chaos of what already existed—water. In the beginning, Genesis tells us, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters. Later God begins to form the world by splitting the water to make sky and ocean, and then commanding the ocean to draw back, revealing land below. Water, in the creation stories, is unformed, chaotic raw material.

For the early Christians in Matthew’s community, who felt like they were out in the middle of the lake alone, the chaotic waters of our gospel story take on the added dimensions of persecution, helplessness, and loneliness. Numbers have already left because the going was too rough, and God seems very distant. They are in danger, with no help in sight, and they can’t see the shoreline.

How many of us have been in a similar situation, with the waves crashing ominously against the sides of our boat, and with no land in sight? The deep waters could be many things to us—grief and illness that threaten to drown us in pain, or a long-standing, deep-seated stuckness in the form of spiritual dryness, unemployment, or relationship problems that keep resurfacing.

And then there are the times when we are very conscious of our own deaths. In the church I grew up in, it is common to baptize babies, but it is important to remember that for both infants and grown-ups, the time spent underwater is symbolic of death. Joseph, in our story from Genesis today is in such a life-threatening situation when his jealous brothers throw him into a waterless pit. He will die quickly if they decide to leave him there in the desert heat. The waves crash hard against his boat. It’s not much of an improvement when the brothers pull him out of the pit so they can sell him into slavery. Joseph is going through the deep waters, with no shore in sight.

Of course, the fact that Joseph could die for lack of water may give us a different perspective on water as a symbol. That is, we need it to really live. Chaos and the unknown, persecution and difficulty, are baptisms that help us die to the old so that we can live to the new. Without water, I will die, but through the deep waters I will die and live again.

So what do we do in a situation like this? When the boat is rocking and the deep waters threaten to drown us? What do we do? Watch for Jesus. When Peter saw Jesus walking toward them across the water, as only the Creator-God can do, when Peter saw Jesus taming the waves and confidently striding toward the boat, he was, to say the least, surprised. More to the point, he did not believe his eyes. “Is that you, Master?” He called out. Jesus answered, “Yes,” but it a particularly meaningful way. He echoes God’s words to Moses on Mt. Sinai from more than a thousand years before: “I am who I am,” I am, in other words, your teacher and your God. I am the one who created you, and who walks beside you. I am the one who can tame the waters. I am.

And then comes the most critical moment in this story. For some of us hearing this story, we think it is a story about Peter being able to walk on the water with Jesus. If only—we think—if only we had enough faith to get out of the boat and start walking on the water. Peter almost did it, but then failed. But maybe with enough faith we can make the seas smooth and placid, walk over the water like it doesn’t affect us, calm the storms and stop the waves that are crashing against our boats.

But Peter walking on the water and then sinking into it is not the most important moment in the story. The most critical moment for us boat-dwellers comes now: Peter says, “If it is really you…” If it is really you, Jesus, show me a sign. If you are really God, prove it to me. If it is really you, make it possible for me to get out of this boat and walk on the waters with you.

This time Jesus gives Peter the sign he’s looking for, and Peter walks on the water, however briefly. And I think many of us have had those brief experiences that feel like walking on water—we are above and beyond the troubles of the world, and we feel the perfect love of God for the world, or the unity of all creation. But those are moments God gives to us as a gift. They are an encouragement for our faith, but what takes faith—real faithfulness—is for us to stay in the boat. To watch for Jesus coming across the water when we feel most alone. To feel the waves and know they are real and that we are in danger. To be ready to die to the old so that we can live again the new life that Jesus promises us.

For many people a hard question about religion is this: how can you believe in God when there is so much suffering in the world? And the question is often asked with a sense of incredulity, as in, “How can you possibly do such a thing?” But I think for today there is an answer for how we can keep the faith. It’s not by avoiding the deep waters, and it’s not by calming the waves crashing against our boat, and it’s not by walking on the water like gods. We can only do it—we can only remain faithful—if we are watching for Jesus.

Please pray with me:

Loving God, when it feels like we’re on the boat, with the storm coming up hard, be present with us. When we go through deep waters, comfort us. When we have to die to our old life, raise us up to new life in you. We pray, trusting in your Son Jesus, who walks with us now. Amen.