11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B

11th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13B August 5th, 2018 There are many things about parish ministry that surprised me in the early days of my ordained life, and there are many things that continue to surprise me, even after 14 years. But one of the ones that fits into both of those categories is the holiness of funerals in the life of a parish. Before I was ordained, I knew intellectually that funerals would be hard for everyone involved, parishioners and preacher alike; but I didn’t understand how hard they would be—burying someone who we all loved and who had been an integral part of the body of Christ in that particular place. But I had no idea about the gift that funerals could give a community. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are still very difficult. I have never had what I would call an “easy” funeral. But there is a certain rightness I feel in being the preacher at the funeral of someone who lived life well in our particular community of faith, someone who contributed his or her gifts to the building up of the kingdom of God in a particular place. I have the privilege of getting to name the gifts of that particular person in the funeral homily and to lift them up on behalf of the gathered church, their faith community, in thanksgiving. It is a huge responsibility and also a huge gift for which I am most grateful. Later today, we will join together for the funeral of Dick Wilson, a faithful member of our church. In that homily, I will talk about Dick’s particular gift. You don’t need me to articulate it; if you knew Dick well, (and even if you didn’t), you probably had the opportunity to see his gift at work in this community. And I’ll give you a spoiler alert for the funeral homily later today: Dick’s gift is that he cherished people. And even if you wouldn’t necessarily articulate it in that way, I suspect that’s what you were thinking as you sat there in your pew, Dick loved well, and in the way that he loved, he made all of us feel loved. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking about gifts. I got to participate in a pilot group of a spiritual gifts workshop yesterday with a handful of our parishioners. We learned about a sampling of the variety of gifts that God bestows on people. We uncovered or unwrapped which of those gifts had been bestowed on each of us, and we have been challenged to grow in the ways that we both nurture and offer our gifts to this community and the world. Our epistle reading for today, the portion of the letter to the Ephesians which has echoes of the beginning of our baptism liturgy, is a reminder that, as another writer has put it “our Creator has embedded gifts in each person…and that every person is called to participate in God’s ongoing and creative and healing work on earth…Our deepening relationship with God, both as individuals and as entire communities, is a gradual process of becoming aware of the great gifts we have been given and the tremendous trust that our Creator has placed in us by calling us to be partners in this wondrous work of God.”i The Ephesians passage articulates a list of gifts as a starting point for discernment. (But this list is not, by any means, exhaustive.) It reminds us that all these gifts are a part of Christ’s own onetime and also ongoing gift to the church and to individuals, and that the purpose of these gifts is that they be used “for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” We are called to use our individual gifts and the gifts of our whole church, so that we all may grow more and more into the image and likeness of Christ. The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “Every creature is a word of God and is a book about God.” What does the book of your life say about God? What are the gifts God has given you specifically, and how have you been using them? Uncovering or unwrapping our spiritual gifts is a lot of work. One member of our group yesterday shared with us this image: imagine that you open your front door to discover a beautifully-wrapped, gigantic present on your door step. Do you think “boy, that’s just too big for me to deal with” and then close the door? Or do you start to unwrap it to see what’s inside, maybe asking for help to drag it inside the house? If you are interested in starting that process as you ask yourself “what does the book of your life say about God?” then I encourage you to talk to one of the participants from this pilot workshop. Rick Lantz was the leader, and those who participated were Margaret Minis, Sandy Champion, Steve Calver, and Charlie Barrow. My prayer for all of us this day is that we may live and use our gifts as fully as Dick Wilson lived and used his, so that everyone in our church may know the taste of our own unique gifts when we, too, pass on into the eternal life that God has waiting for us. i. Trumbauer, Jean Morris. Created and Called: Discovering Our Gifts For Abundant Living. Augsburg: Minneapolis, 1998, p 18.