What are you looking at?: "Check the Box Sunday"

Nearly four months ago, I was invited to share a message on the topic of spiritual gifts at my church. And, as it does, "upcoming" quickly turned into "today," and "today" is now "yesterday," and it already feels like a lifetime ago that I delivered a 20-minute sermon about a journey that played a large role in my sporadic posting here over the last couple of years. In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown talked about the value of checking your intention before sharing a personal story, particularly while wounds are still fresh, and I'm glad I heeded her advice, because it took almost all of those two years to fully process this experience, mature my thinking and share from a place of insight.

Giving this sermon was one of the scariest, most meaningful and humbling things I've ever done. I'll write on the process another time, but for now, here's the transcript. The scripture I spoke on was 1 Corinthians 12:4-11.

Good morning, everyone!

I want to thank Pastor Elizabeth for asking me to give the message today. The topic of spiritual gifts has meant a lot to me over the last couple of years, so my goal is to share my story with you, with the hope that it might help you when you’re thinking about how your own gifts fit into your relationship with God.

My journey started in the spring of 2015, at the end of my Disciple 1 Bible study. If you don’t know about Disciple, it’s a series of Bible study classes, and Disciple 1 is essentially an intro to the Bible that walks you through big sections of the Old and New Testaments. So, the big finale to the class was for all of us to take a spiritual gifts assessment to help us find our calling for service, keeping in mind all the examples we had of God using people to do his work, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without God’s help.

So, before we jump into results, let’s start with what the church means by spiritual gifts. Disciple gave us some parameters.

Spiritual gifts are not talents. Talents are skills that we can pick up and develop in ourselves. We get them from God, but they fit more into the natural world that we live in. So when I think of talents, I think about music, cooking, gardening … something really tangible, that when we picture the skill in our minds, we have a clear idea of how it might be used.

They’re also not the fruit of the Spirit. Paul mentions these in the book of Galatians: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These aren’t skills; the fruits are more about shaping our character as Christians, and we’re all expected to live all of them to some degree.

So when the church talks about spiritual gifts, they are talking about special roles or abilities, but ones that come from the Holy Spirit, and we get these gifts to do the work that God says only we can do.

So, I was pretty excited about the assessment, partly because I love taking quizzes like this, that help you learn more about yourself, and partly because I really wanted the assessment to show me some new things about where God might be leading me in my faith life.

At this point, for context, my husband Luke and I had been members of PUMC for almost three years, and I had converted to Methodism after growing up Catholic, and I was finally at a point where the faith I learned as a child and my beliefs as an adult were all coming together, and it just felt like the right time to get a new piece of the puzzle figured out.

So, I took an assessment on the Ministry Matters website – I’ll share more on that near the end – and there were some really meaningful gifts like mercy, and serving, and wisdom, and I was so excited to see the ones I would get.

Maybe you can see where this is going. Of course, my gifts were none of those things! My top score was in … administration! Here’s how they described it:

Organized and detail-oriented.
Enjoy planning and organizing events or projects.
Like working with issues involving systems, structures and procedures.

I think the creators of the assessment knew that getting administration would be kind of a letdown, because they added guidance in parentheses, like they were trying to spin it into something more positive, when really, it felt like the consolation prize of spiritual gifts. At least it did for me.

I didn’t feel like I was learning anything new about my path or what God wanted from me.

Also, I like being good at administration, and those gifts have gotten me far in my career, but I didn’t want those traits to be the main ways I served God, because honestly, they didn’t feel Jesus-y enough. Yes, that's a technical term.

It’s like, mercy and teaching and serving are no-brainers as spiritual gifts because we saw Jesus doing those things in the Bible all the time. But when you hear “administration,” you don’t think, “Oh, yeah, Jesus’s mission was all about being organized and detail oriented.” Those things aren’t unique to Christianity, anyone can be good them.

So, I had these results, but they weren’t the ones I was hoping for, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so I was feeling kind of stuck. Then, in May, about a month after Disciple had ended, there was a service that was all about listening for God's call in our lives, and instead of a sermon, we heard from different members of the congregation talk about their calls to a certain ministry or type of service. A couple of examples that stand out for me are, Teri Walters talking about the T&T after-school program we help with at Van Buren Elementary, and one of our pastors at the time, Colin Cress, talking about switching from something like an engineering major to go into the seminary, and I was just eating all of this up. After everyone was done talking, Pastor Charlie got up to the lectern, and he held up a connection card. And he said there was a special check box on this week’s card that you could mark off if you wanted to speak to someone about exploring God's call to service. And I remember sitting in the pew next to Luke, and feeling all the blood in my body rise to my face, and my heart stopped, and I knew I had to check this box. Now, I did not know what I would *say* to a pastor about God’s call, but I knew God wanted me to check this box.

So, I checked the box, but I'm a very emotional person, so I could already feel myself getting worked up in the pew, and I was starting to cry, so I did the only thing I could think to do, which was to get up, leave Luke without an explanation and hide in the bathroom for the last 20 minutes of the service. I don’t even remember what I said to Luke and the kids when I finally came out, but clearly I was not in a good place.

I think of that day as “Check the Box Sunday,” and about a week later, Pastor Elizabeth and I met, and she helped me think about things I could do to help me try on different leadership roles at church. I became a liturgist, and I joined the church council, and read books about work you could do in the church, and I kept taking Disciple classes. And I enjoyed all of it, but on the inside, I couldn’t relax into anything that I was doing. I’m very type A, I’m very take-charge, and I don’t like uncertainty, so being in this ambiguous place was really hard for me.

In essence, I was having a measurement problem.

Because as we know, in our society, we love to measure things. Measuring helps us know our place, gives us information that helps us form our identity, and helps us see where we fit in the grand scheme of things.

And the old saying, “You manage what you measure,” really is true. In school, we measure how good you are at reading, and math, and science, because we know you need those skills to function in society and be successful adult. So, if you’re not doing well in one of those areas, we measure that, so we can catch you if you’re struggling, and help you get better. And if you are doing well, we want to catch that, too, so we can encourage you to keep using those skills as you get older. So if Suzy is in high school and she’s great at science, we might encourage her to take biology and chemistry, or study pre-med in college, or do other things that make sense for kids who are good at science. The drawback is that the science label might make it hard for Suzy to think about herself differently as she grows up and has different experiences. But society doesn’t like uncertainty, either — so, we do the measuring, and then the labeling, and hope it all works out for the best.

So that’s school. But there’s no end to it. We measure your abilities in sports, art, music, parenting, work — you can even measure your happiness level! Author Gretchen Rubin wrote a book a few years back, it’s one of my favorite books, called The Happiness Project. She studied what scientists, philosophers, and academics had to say about the makings of a happy life, and then over the course of a year, she put those ideas into practice.

Now, you might not think you could track your progress at being happier, but Gretchen Rubin did it. She created a resolutions chart for each month so she could see how well she was doing. Here’s an example:

This is Rubin’s chart for the month of January, and that month she was focused on boosting her energy. So she listed all the resolutions she was following to help increase her energy level. One of them was “Keep a food diary” to make sure she was putting healthy things in her body to keep her energy up. You can see the others here. And if she did well with a resolution on given day, she gave herself a checkmark. So on January 1, if she was good at updating her food diary, she got a checkmark, to say, good job. And if she didn’t do well, she put an X in the box, almost like a strike, and it was reminder that she needed to do better tomorrow.

So, this is kind of funny, but it’s also a great example of how driven we are to measure our progress in whatever we’re doing. Without measures, it’s really easy to lose sight of what you’re aiming for.

But when it comes to our faith, how do we know if we’re being the kind of Christian that God is calling us to be? What are we measuring to help us stay on track?

That’s where I was stuck. I kept thinking, What do I do with all of this? How can I use what I’m learning to get from point A to point B in my faith? What I can personally measure that will show me if I’m on the right track?

So, in our scripture for today, Paul gives us a framework to help measure this exact thing.

The reading comes from Paul’s first letter to a church in Corinth, and the audience was mainly Gentile, non-Jews who had recently converted to Christianity, and they came from lots of social classes, and they were all still learning how to live together as a community. In this letter, one of Paul’s biggest themes is to live the life assigned to you by God. In chapter 7, a few chapters before today’s scripture, he says, “Let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you. This is my rule in all the churches. Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision.”

He ends that thought with, “Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.”

This scripture is important to me because it reminds us that it’s OK to be who we are. It’s not an accident that our bodies are different colors, that our ways of speaking are different, that we have different ways of making decisions, that we’re good at some things and not good at other things, and that we’re affected differently by all the grief we see in the world. God made us different, because it takes that many kinds of people to bring about His kingdom here on Earth.

Paul keeps this thought going when he talks about spiritual gifts. In today’s scripture we read, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and … it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”

You can’t measure how well you’re following Jesus by comparing your path to other people’s. God never intended us to use each other as measuring sticks. He wants us to do what only we can do.

So this is one very real way to measure our faith as Christians. Are we taking the spiritual gifts we’ve been given, and using them to bring people closer to Jesus? We can ask ourselves, How are we using our gifts to do the work that God says only we can do?

This was all well and good. But it wasn’t a help to me two years ago, because I was so caught up in trying to nail down God’s big calling for my life that I couldn’t move forward in anything.

Meanwhile, during all this exploring on spiritual gifts — I was also taking an online class about living a brave life and how to work through the things that get in the way of being our most authentic selves. One of the exercises was to write a manifesto. The idea was to write down how you want to make a difference and the daily practices that would help you show up in your own life.

So I did. Here’s a copy of my manifesto:

The best thing about this exercise was coming up with a framing statement at the top, where you articulated your core purpose. I struggled at first because I kept trying to fit in something about my talents and spiritual gifts. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, I've always identified myself that way, and it's something I love to do, so I thought that had to fit somewhere, and now I had this administration label, and I still wasn’t sure how that fit in. But when I finally got quiet, and listened to God, He showed me I was making this too hard. So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? You get back to basics, and for me, the most basic, fundamental thing you can do as a Christian is follow Jesus’s two main commandments. Love God and love neighbor. That’s it, just those two things. So as you can see here, the guiding principle of my manifesto is very simple, and really, it could be anybody’s: I’m here to love God and my neighbor and say “yes” to Jesus. But the way I carry that though my life, using all those framing statements – I choose to, I have the courage to, I give myself permission to – how I do all those things will be unique to me.

And if I don’t know whether to go back to school, or leave corporate America, or do whatever else is tugging at my heart, that’s OK, because as long as I’m finding ways to love God and love neighbor in whatever I’m doing, God will take care of the rest. And if God wants me to use writing and project planning and building processes and showing leadership, He will guide me toward a path that includes those things. But my talents and gifts aren’t the purpose of my life, and that’s what I lose sight of. It took doing this exercise to remind me that my gifts are the how, but God is the why. If I stay anchored in the why, and open to whatever God is asking of me, wherever I end up will be the right place.

So, here are next steps you can take on your own spiritual gifts journey:

If you’ve never done one, think about taking a spiritual gifts assessment to see what comes up for you. The assessment I took is on the Ministry Matters site: http://survey.ministrymatters.com/SpiritualGifts

You’ll need to create an account, but it’s free and pretty easy to do.

Once you know what your gifts are, take a look at what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and remember to leave some white space in the margins so that God has room to bring these gifts through in your life.

And today, you can visit all the displays stationed in the church lobbies this morning. Find one or two that look like a good fit and talk to the ministry leaders there. They can answer any questions you have. Or you can also reach out to any of the pastors.

Before we close out the message with prayer, I wanted to share one of my favorite quotes. It’s from C.S. Lewis, from his book Mere Christianity, which I’ve come to again and again over the last couple of years, and it’s got a great metaphor to describe the work that God is doing in all of our lives.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

Let’s pray.

Dear God,

Thank you, that your plans for us are bigger, and richer, than we could ever imagine for ourselves. Thank you for equipping each of us, with spiritual gifts we can use, to make your world a more loving and welcoming place. Please help us come to know these gifts, and use them to the best of our ability, to do your will.

In your name, we pray.

Amen.