All Together Now (Pentecost, Confirmation ,Senior Recognition; 1 Corinthians 12:1-13; May 15, 2016)

All Together Now

All Together Now

Pentecost  Confirmation  

Senior Recognition  

1 Corinthians 12:1-13  

May 15, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD  

First United Methodist Church  

Decorah, Iowa

This service came to be by the joining of two streams. The first arose from the planning for Confirmation. I wanted to have a relatively short but meaningful process to prepare for Confirmation and I wanted to celebrate this not-quite-a-sacrament on Pentecost. Pentecost began as the Jewish harvest festival that was observed fifty days after Passover. For Christians it marks the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, descending in dove-like flames or flaming doves and resting upon the Jesus followers who were cowering in Jerusalem and driving them into the world as Jesus’ witnesses. This, it seems to me, is a good time to confirm the promises of baptism made for our young people, to pray for the power of the Holy Spirit, and to send them into the world as Jesus’ ministers.

The other stream met up with this one by accident. Looking for a time to celebrate the academic journey (thus far) of our high school seniors, we proceeded by a process of elimination. Next Sunday was out of the question. That’s graduation day itself. No one would come. Last week might have made sense since we were thanking our Sunday School teachers then and that sort of connects with high school graduation. But we didn’t have the people available to get everything done, so we were left with today.

At the same time that we embrace some into the church in a new way we are sending some others off to schools, colleges, and universities in parts known and unknown. There is a time, says the preacher, to embrace and time to let go. We seem to be doing both at once.

But here we are, all together, to celebrate, to make merry in our subdued Iowa way. We celebrate the step of faith that five of our middle school students take today. We celebrate the step that our high school seniors take toward entry into the world of adult responsibility and freedom. We celebrate above all, the Holy Spirit, who in the absence of Jesus is the presence of Jesus among us, giving us the gifts and power we need to be Jesus’ people in the world.

What can I say to our confirmands, our graduates, and the rest of us who are unaware of taking any steps in particular this day? And do it in twelve minutes or less? I would like to tell the guests of honor, “Well done. Congratulations. Good luck.” To the graduates in particular we might add, “Write when you get work.” I’d like to leave it at that, but once again the Apostle Paul is here to spoil our fun.

We find ourselves once again in 1 Corinthians, the first or perhaps second letter of Paul to his problem church at Corinth. This time Paul is talking about spiritual gifts. These were abilities that were thought to be supernatural and some of them were pretty spectacular. People there were talking in languages neither they nor their hearers understood, while others could translate that speech. People were performing miracles and healings. There were people whose faith was so strong that they could move mountains, or at least molehills. People showed wisdom they didn’t have, knowledge of things they didn’t know. People were seeing God’s future in their present. We might explain or explain away each of these gifts, but let’s not.

The point is that each one seemed to have some gift. They were proud of these gifts. Each one seemed intent on making sure that they got the credit for it, too. They viewed their own gift as the most important of all. Worship must have been a little like America’s Got Talent. As a Jesuit priest I used to work with liked to say, “Behold these Christians how they shove one another.”

To be fair, they each wanted to be special. They wanted status in the new Christian community. They wanted to be as comfortable as their means could make them. They wanted to get something out of worship and their participation in church. They and we are not that different.

You confirmands have given up several Sunday early evenings. You have made an extra effort to be in church. You have taken leadership roles in worship. You have been required to read the Gospel of Mark, looking for what it has to say about being a follower of Jesus. (Quite a lot, it turns out.) Some of it has been fun. Some of it has been boring. Now you’re done. If past experience tells us anything, we can expect that some of you will stick around. Others will disappear until it’s time for your own senior recognition. Somehow some of you have gotten the idea that you are graduating from church. I’m pretty sure you didn’t just make it up. If you tell your parents, “I’m just not getting anything from church,” you can probably get out of coming altogether, if that’s what you want.

To parents and church leaders I’ll offer this: Our best bet for challenging the “graduation from church” syndrome, surprisingly enough, is most emphatically not a youth group. The biggest single predictor of youth participation in the life and ministries of the church is the enthusiastic participation of their parents. Parents, if you thought you’re job was finished, I’m here to tell you that you’re just coming to the hard part. The other thing that we can do is to involve our younger members in our mission and ministry as if they were full-fledged members, which in fact they will be in a few minutes. Every program of the church should have to answer the question, “How have you included young people?” If we are willing to love them without any other agenda, they will respond. This isn’t easy. Churches have hired youth ministers precisely to avoid having to do this work, but we can do it.

Otherwise, our young people will fill up their lives to overflowing. Their biggest challenge in the next few years will be getting enough sleep, not because they have no ambition, but because their ambitions have left them exhausted.

You graduating seniors really are graduating. You’re only taking a step, but it’s a pretty big one. Next fall some of you will be off to college or university. There, you’ll be free from your parents’ watchful eyes. The days in which colleges served in loco parentis are long gone. You don’t have to study. You don’t have to go to classes, especially those early morning ones. Of course, if you don’t study (about two hours outside of class for every hour inside class, making for about a forty-five hour week) and you don’t go to class I can guarantee you won’t like the results. And neither will Mom and Dad.

College or vocational training programs are your biggest chance to grow your native talent into real ability. You’ve probably figured out roughly what those talents might be in a general way. Funneling that into a college major may take a couple of tries, but you’ll figure that out.

You’ll discover quickly enough that your classmates will have a variety of motives for study. Some will be there to avoid having to get a job for a few years. Others will be trying to position themselves to make obscene amounts of money. Still others are looking for fame and recognition. And you will be free to do those things, too, if you choose.

Paul’s Corinth was every bit as ambitious and self-seeking as ours. In our passage Paul has two things to say to them.

First, he wants them to be clear about their allegiance. There were and are all sorts of things we can give ourselves to, obey, be formed by, or aspire to. People in Corinth, like people today, were fond of wealth. Some of them gave themselves to the pursuit of money. Others wanted power, so they involved themselves in the circles of power in their city or perhaps even in the empire. Still others wanted to enjoy themselves so they sought pleasure in all its forms.

Paul tells them that there is only one allegiance that counts, only one allegiance that is empowered by the Holy Spirit and that is the allegiance to Jesus. “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” This was and is a profoundly political thing to say. There was someone else who was proclaimed in this way. "Caesar is lord," they said. Paul countered, "No he isn't. Jesus is lord." Being a Jesus follower means putting allegiance to Jesus above everything else, every other claim, every other loyalty. It means putting allegiance to Jesus above allegiance to nation, to school, to team, to family, to social class, to race, to gender, to money, to pleasure, to power, even to our own lives if it should come to that.

The second thing that Paul wants them and us to be clear about is a "what for" question. We are who we are. We have abilities and gifts. We live in particular place and particular time. You who are graduating have a time ahead when it will be relatively easy to change some of that. You can develop new abilities and gifts. You can plan for life in a different place. Paul wants you to remember the "what for." What are your gifts and talents for? Paul tells the Corinthians that every gift that they have-- and they are understandably proud of them-- is for a purpose. It is for the common good.

I know that this is not a phrase that is very popular. We are individualists. We measure everything by how it affects us. We vote our own interests. We want to show a profit of benefits over costs from everything that we do. We come to church expecting to "get something" we can use to make our lives better.

So a demand that we seek "the common good" sounds very strange. But, contrary to David Copperfield's expectation, we are not the heroes our own stories. We are characters in a story about God and God's dream for the whole of creation and all who live in it. The common good is what that dream looks like when it comes even a little bit true. As strange as that sounds, a lot of us will have to seek the common good if our world is going to continue to be a host to our species.

So, I'd like to say, "Well done! Congratulations! Good luck!" to graduates and confirmands (and their parents) alike. But now I see that I have to amend that to say, "Well done! Congratulations! Go seek the common good under the direction of Jesus!"

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