Are You Using Your Gifts?
by Dr. Graham Standish
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Did you watch the Baltimore Ravens/Indianapolis Colts playoff game last night? It was a pretty good game until the fourth quarter. I have to tell you that it took me about the whole first quarter to be able to watch the Ravens’ offense when they had the ball. That had nothing to do with any kind of lingering Steelers/Ravens rivalry. It all had to do with the fact that when the Ravens had the ball I was focused on only one player: number 74, their right offensive tackle. I was fascinated by him.
It’s a strange thing to just watch an offensive lineman when watching football. You miss the whole play and don’t see what really took place until the replays. So why was I watching number 74? Because he is an inspiration to me. Number 74 is an African-American player named Michel Oher. Normally I wouldn’t mention his race, but it has something to do with why I was watching him. You see Michael Oher is the subject of a wonderful film, The Blind Side. The film is about how Oher went from a wandering teen living in the slums of Memphis, Tennessee to become a college All-American offensive tackle and an eventual NFL first-round draft choice.
Oher didn’t start out as a football phenom. His introduction to football came about accidently (although I believe it happened providentially). Oher, almost by accident, became a student at the Briarwood Christian Academy, an elite private school in Memphis. He became a student mainly because the basketball coach saw him fooling around with a basketball shooting baskets. Oher was 6’ 5” and 300 pounds, but he had the agility of a guard. So the coach advocated for the board to admit Oher, not because he was such a great athlete, but because they had a duty to be Christian in reaching out to a poor young man.
When they admitted him, they didn’t realize that Oher didn’t have a home. His mother was a full-time drug addict, part-time drug dealer whom social workers guessed had something like 12 children with 12 different men. Oher had been forcibly removed from her care when we was seven years old, and he had bumped around from foster home to foster home. In the process he gained a reputation as a “runner,” meaning that he would be in the home for a bit, but would eventually run away. At the time he entered Briarwood he was sleeping on the couches of anyone in his neighborhood who would put him up. His possessions were several pairs of shirts, some extra underwear, and socks, all of which he washed in the sinks of Laundromats.
He had been attending Briarwood for a month or so when a white family, the Tuohy family, noticed him. The parents, Leigh Anne and Sean, were at a volleyball game with their son watching their daughter, and noticed Oher sitting in the upper bleachers. Sean Tuohy is somewhat well-known. He owns something like 80 Taco Bells and Kentucky Fried Chickens around Tennessee, and is the color analyst for Memphis Grizzlies basketball games. As Leigh Anne and Sean drove their family away from the volleyball game, they noticed Oher walking in the cold rain wearing nothing but a shirt, shorts, and shoes. They asked him if he needed a ride, and he said he was just going to the gym. As they drove away, Leigh Anne realized something wasn’t right, and went back to Oher and asked him why he was going to the gym, since it was closed. Oher said he was going there because it was warm. She realized Oher had no place to sleep.
They brought him home and let him sleep on the couch for the night. That one night turned into two, then three, then a week, then two weeks, and finally they gave him a room of his own. As they got to know him they realized that he was a special man, a gentle giant, who needed to be loved. They felt is was their calling to give him the home and the love he had never before received. And Oher blossomed. Eventually they adopted him and he became part of their family, causing some of their extended family and friends to question them. The Tuohy’s didn’t care. They knew that caring for and loving Michael was their calling.
As I said, Michael Oher blossomed in their home. He became a great football and basketball player, a good student, and eventually received a full scholarship to play football at the University of Mississippi, after which he became a first-round draft pick of the Ravens. Oher not only inspires me, but so do the Tuohys, who sensed the Holy Spirit moving in their lives, and responded with faith, love, and action.
Who inspires you? Which people, by the example they lived out in their lives, have taught you to live a better life? Gwen and Larry Mellon are another couple who’ve inspired me. Do you know who they are? If you haven’t, you may have heard about their legacy, a legacy that is now crucial in helping the earthquake victims in Haiti. Both Gwen and Larry started out living the lives of the super wealthy. Larry Mellon grew up here in the Pittsburgh area as part of the Mellon family. After graduating from college he joined the family business overseeing investments and their work with Gulf Oil, but after two years he couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted a different life. He ended up getting divorced and moved to Arizona, where he bought a ranch, herding cattle from sunup to sundown. This was around 1937.
Meanwhile, Gwen grew up in New York City, and went to elite eastern private schools and colleges. She married shortly after college, and had three children. But when her husband told her that he was moving to Europe for a business opportunity, leaving his family behind, she decided to divorce him and move to Arizona. It was there, while working on a dude ranch, that she met Larry Mellon. They were soon married and, along with her three sons, they raised cattle. Still, Larry was restless.
One day in 1946, Larry walked into the living room of their home, holding a Life Magazine that had an article on the efforts of Albert Schweitzer to start a hospital in Africa. He told Gwen that he wanted to do something similar. She agreed, so they moved the family to New Orleans so that both could engage in medical studies at Tulane University. Larry became a medical doctor in 1950 at the age of 44, and the two of them moved to Deschapelles, Haiti to create L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer. Deschapelles is about 90 miles northwest of Port au Prince in an area that had no doctors for a population of a about 195,000 people. The people of the region were so poor that they couldn’t pay money, and often paid in rice, chickens, eggs, or pigs (Mellon believed that people should pay for their care, if only a pittance, because they would be more motivated to take better care of themselves if they did).
L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer is more than a hospital. It also teaches people how to farm more effectively, how to ensure their water supply is clean, and how to read. The hospital has had a huge impact on the life of Haitians for half a century. This hospital has been one of the main ones responding to earthquake victims this past week.
What inspires me about the Mellons is that though they were rich, which could have caused them to become self-focused and self-consumed, they were selfless. Their lives ran counter to our culture, which equates happiness with being rich and selfish. Our culture is persistent in thinking that wealth leads to happiness, despite the fact that in studies people today are less content than 50 years ago, and that something like 80% of people who win the big prizes in the lotteries are decidedly less happy than before they won.
What has inspired me about the Tuohy’s and the Mellons si that they are people who understood our passage at deep levels of their lives. Our passage tells us that God gives each of us gifts from the Spirit, gifts that are used to build up the body of Christ. It also reminds us that it is our choice whether we act on our gifts or not. The problem of our culture is that it is such a narcissistic culture that we have a hard time unleashing our gifts. Why? Because the more self-focused we are, the harder it is to want to use these gifts, which are always given to diminish ourselves and lift up others.
Our passage for this morning teaches a whole different mindset from our cultural mindset:. Each and every one of us has been given gifts by God to make the world better. They have been given to us to use in serving God. We were given a great example of how true this is this morning when Kim Sebring spoke to us about Project Hope. Project Hope is a mission she and her family started five years ago after the death of her son, Tyler, at age seven due to a congenital heart condition.
It would have been very easy for Kim, Mark, and their family to turn inward after such a hard tragedy, but they didn’t. They were inspired themselves, during Tyler’s stay at Children’s Hospital when they were given a basket of goods to make their stay easier. The basket had things such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, note cards, snacks, and more.
A few years after Tyler’s death, they decided to turn their inspiration into a mission of creating similar baskets for other families. The list of items in these baskets (actually now they are tote bags) can be found on their website (http://projecthope-zelienople-pa.com). They produce 60 tote bags a month, and have given Children’s Hospital, and thus parents of sick children, 3300 bags over the past five years. Kim, Mark, and their family found their spiritual gifts by tapping into their compassion for people who had struggled like them. By being open to the Spirit, they turned tragedy into love.
Whether you know it or not, you have a gift. Sometimes we aren’t so aware because we just aren’t that open to God, or at least to tapping into God all the time. But the truth is that you have been given a gift. You’ve been given many gifts. And the amazing thing about these spiritual gifts, the more we use them in life the more our basket of gifts from the Spirit overflows. Conversely, the less we use them, the more our basket shrinks. So the question is, what are you doing with your gifts? Are you keeping them for yourself, or using them for God? Are you making the world a better place through them, or are you keeping it the same?
Amen.
