Musings on the Daily Lectionary - Gifted

In today's reading from First Corinthians, Paul speaks about spiritual gifts. In recent years there has been a lot of interest in spirituality and spiritual gifts in many congregations. And there are spiritual gift inventories designed to help people realize their particular gifts.

Some of these inventories, however, seem mostly to identify talents and gifts that people were born with. Now certainly such gifts can be of great use in the church. Singing in the choir is a great example of using one's gifts to worship and honor God. But is that musical talent a spiritual gift?

We were having a discussion the other day in a class about what marks or distinctive characteristics give someone a Christian identity. And aside from belief in Jesus, the class had some difficulty naming anything specific. The things they did name such as being good or helping others are things Christians should do, but lots of non Christians do such things as well. How is it that being Christian makes someone different than if he or she were not a Christian?

I think that the difficulty many of us have answering this question is of a piece with the difficulty we have naming our spiritual gifts -- at least when defined as gifts we have by virtue of being a Christian. If a musician renounces his Christian faith, he will still be musically talented. If the CPA who is church treasurer renounces her faith, she will still be good with numbers.

How are you gifted because of the Spirit at work in you. To borrow from Paul, how is the Spirit equipping you to play your part in so that the Church can be a living manifestation of Christ in the world? And if most of us cannot answer this question, then it seems that we need to start working together to figure this out.

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