Spiritual Gifts - An Intro.

I'm a project person. I like to have a goal in mind so I know what I'm working toward.  Since I'm finished with the Bible study on the environment, I thought it was time to move on to a new topic. This time around I thought I'd take a gander at spiritual gifts.

I started out by doing an online search on spiritual gifts and I ended up with a bunch of tests. The consensus seemed to be that I have gifts in administration, teaching and writing.  ... I'm not making that up -- writing.  (Pssst, if you can find a verse in the Bible regarding the gift of writing, I'd love to see it.)

What struck me (as I pointed out in the post that I linked to above) is that I could have skipped the spiritual gifts tests and just looked at a description of an INTJ to tell you what my gifts were.  *scratches head*  The Holy Spirit seems to prefer giving gifts that match a person's Meyers Briggs type.  Isn't that convenient.

So my goals in this study are shaping up to be: 1) What the heck is a spiritual gift and why do we call it that? 2) What's the difference between a spiritual gift and a personality trait? 3) and my favorite topic (just ask the gals in my Bible study) how are we to be using these gifts for the benefit of one another?

So far all I've written is an intro.  But I thought I'd share it here in case anyone would like to get a head-start on picking my writing apart.  ... Don't be intimidated by the fact that writing is one of my spiritual gifts. ;-)


The phrase “spiritual gifts” is fairly common in Christian circles today. It’s not a common phrase in the Bible, however. In the NIV and KJV translations of the Bible, this combination of words only appears 4 times, and three of those times the word “gift” doesn’t actually appear in the original Greek.  Only Romans 1:11 puts the two words “spiritual” (pneumatikos) and “gift” (charisma) together.  On the other hand, the idea of gifts from God is quite frequent in the Bible and encompasses quite a bit more than we usually associate with the term “spiritual gifts.”

Labeling some gifts differently than others and having workbooks and online tests that help you to determine your spiritual gifts set these gifts apart as being quite different than the other gifts that God gives. The way we talk about them also tends to put the focus on us rather than on God.  “What are my spiritual gifts?” or “How should I be using my spiritual gift?” Contrast that with, “What gifts has God given to me?” or “How does God expect me to use these gifts within the church?”  In the first two examples we have ownership and authority to control our gifts as we please. In the second two we are entrusted with something from God, and we have a responsibility to use what has been given to us for a purpose other than our own.  I’d like to suggest that the second way of relating to gifts is more in keeping with what we find in Biblical texts.

(cartoon was snagged from this Grasping for the Wind page)

Beaver Dams Lead to Spiritual Maturity

High Country News published an article about beavers a few weeks ago. Beavers are considered by many to be nothing more than a pesky nuisance. Their dams have been known to cause flooding across popular hiking trails and even threaten some lake front mountain properties. But there's a new movement to bring back the beaver, and in the end, letting the beavers return may not only restore some mountain habitat, but it could also save taxpayers money. Beavers can help to restore soil that has been badly fire damaged along the Rocky Mountains. And their dams might do a better job of slowing water release from the mountains, which would provide water storage, at no cost, to the people and farms down slope.

The article points out that for millenia, beavers have been an integral part of the mountain ecosystem. It wasn't until trappers invaded en masse that beaver populations plummeted from what the trappers described as "60 to 80 beaver" per mile of stream to an estimated 100,000 total after a century or heavy trapping. Because of that, as European settlers moved into the areas where beavers used to live, they found streams that were wide, shallow and fast moving. Despite how beautiful such a scene might be, with the sun glinting off quickly flowing water, these water systems have actually been corrupted. They are out of sync with how they had been running for thousands of years prior. As a forest service hydrologist explained, we have "internalized a degraded stream as natural." 

That line particularly grabbed my attention. What this hydrologist was saying was that we had not only come to believe a lie, but that we had looked upon that lie as something natural -- beautiful even.

From a Christian perspective, these streams are no longer flowing the way God made them to flow because they no longer have the large beaver populations that God had put in place to manage the water. And yet, looking upon these streams, unless you knew how the stream was supposed to look, it would seem to be just fine. One might even go so far as to say that its beauty somehow reflected the glory of God. And yet in saying such a thing, we'd actually be giving high praise to a system that has been perverted from the way it was created to be!

I began to wonder how often we do that. How often have we not only come to believe the lie, but we even elevate it as something extraordinary, something wonderful?! How many things in our lives -- the way we interact with others, the way we do church, the way we set goals and make decisions -- are predicated upon an understanding that is warped by our constrained knowledge of how things are compared to how God meant them to be? How often do we let the culture we grew up in dictate to us what is right and what is wrong? And how often do we tag those "right" things as being God's right things (whether or not they actually are)? 

The mountain ecosystem can be a metaphor in which the beaver filled landscape represents our lives as they would be in God's perfect world, in Eden. The beavers are managers put in place to care for the water ways, and yet these God-chosen managers are seen by us in our fallen state as pesky vermin. I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be with the beavers. Perhaps they are the people in our lives who can speak the truth to us in love. Perhaps they're the people who slow us down long enough to help us reflect on our lives, our actions, our beliefs. How often do we shut the beavers our of our lives thinking that our speedy, sediment filled rush down the hill is how life is supposed to be? How often do we choose what is wrong in the misguided impression that we're doing what's right?

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/reviews/item/36
I've mentioned Rob Bell and his book, Velvet Elvis a few times here in this blog and I finally got a review of the book finished today. Click through on the link above to read the review.

What does forgiveness look like?

When a person feels that they have been wronged, they can carry that relational transaction forward in one of two directions -- either they head toward the goal of forgiveness (though they might not actually reach it) or they can head toward revenge (though again, they might stop along the way, at holding a grudge, perhaps, or maybe just clinging to the hurt within them). Though I’ve been practicing walking down the road of forgiveness for years, I still struggle with the last bit of the path that will get me to that ultimate goal.

Cognitively I recognize that there should be a restoration of relationship. Somehow you get past the hurt and you embrace the one who did the hurting. I can envision that part. I’ve even seen it in action as painful and broken relationships have been mended between myself and others and among my friends as well.  But those times  seem more like outliers in my life. There’s still the day to day little interactions that bite and sting and yet still need to be forgiven. And that seems more impossible to me, some days, than any of those larger cases of severe pain and miraculous restoration.

According to Psych Central, forgiveness “is letting go of the need for revenge and releasing negative thoughts of bitterness and resentment.” I agree with that definition. Sometimes we say that we forgive someone, but we still feel gleeful inside when we think of things going wrong for them in a way that will prove in the end that we were right. When that happens, that’s a sign that forgiveness might have been extended but it wasn’t heartfelt (and therefore is a rather iffy form of forgiveness). But I think there’s more to forgiveness than just getting rid of the negative.  There’s a positive component that replaces that need for revenge and those negative thoughts with the need for relationship and hopeful, even excited thoughts of restoration.

I think there are different types of forgiveness as well.  What we usually think of is a reactive forgiveness -- the hurt has been done, the forgiveness is brought to bear after the fact. There is also proactive forgiveness.  This is the kind of forgiveness that’s required in those day to day relationships. It’s an overall attitude of forebearance and care for people even when they’re grumpy and dour and are needling us in all the most tender places. But what has dawned on me recently is that in the very moment when someone is annoying me or needling me or doing that thing they do that makes me feel small and unloved an unappreciated, it is right in that exact moment that my forgiveness needs to be active. And it is that in-action-forgiveness that I’ve been mulling over lately.  What does that look like? And how do I do it?

This is where I can take a lesson from my dog.  Laika loves me. When I wake up in the morning, pet her and let her out, she loves me.  When I take her for a walk or feed her or rub her belly, she loves me.  But what always amazes me about dogs is that when you accidentally step on their tail or leave them home alone for a long time or forget to feed them one day, they don’t crawl off to a corner and sulk.  They don’t put tacks on your chair or poop in your shoes.  No, what they do is yelp at the pain in their tail, hop up and come to you for comfort -- wagging their tail and nuzzling you. When you’ve left them at home all day and they’ve been lonely and miserable, they don’t berate you for your absence, they run up to the door, jump up and down, spin in circles and wag their tail like crazy because they love you.  In other words, even when you do those little needling or hurtful day to day things to your dog, they respond with overwhelming love because they forgive you right then and there.  In the very moment you have injured them, you are forgiven. They don’t treat you as your actions deserve.  They treat you as if your actions had  been the exact opposite of what you actually did.  They seek immediate and complete restoration of the relationship. Dogs are the ultimate forgivers.

So I’m trying to learn to be more like my dog.  When my mom or my kids or my husband does one of those little needling or annoying or bothersome things that humans are prone to do, I’m trying to pretend in my mind that they’ve really done just the opposite.  This doesn’t mean that when my kids hurt me by leaving a mess in the living room that I don’t ask them to clean it up.  But attitudinally, I’m trying to still love them in that moment as if they’d already cleaned it up. ... ... ... This is hard.  This is really hard.

The thing that keeps me going, that keeps me trying to think this through and act upon it is the thought that this is how I wish people would treat me. When I do something stupid or hurtful or arrogant, I don’t want people to treat me like the turd I am.  I want them to embrace me and love me as the person I could be. It’s not when someone gets mad back at me that I want to change my behavior so much as when someone loves me back even when I’ve been hurtful.  That’s when I am overwhelmed with the desire to shed my selfish ways and embrace relationship.

Are Christians Bad for an Empire’s Economy? Should They Be? - Julie Clawson - God’s Politics Blog

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/05/06/are-committed-christians-bad-for-empire-economy/
This is an interesting take on whether we're living out what we believe and what affect doing so might have upon the economy (of all things).

Quote from the post:
"What if we all choose not to buy products made by slave labor? What if we choose not to invest in companies that provide brothel visits with trafficked children as incentives for businessmen? What if we only bought clothing or food for which workers were paid a living wage? Would we maybe then be known for being something other than the lapdogs of Empire?"

Doctrine as Nutrients

I recently finished reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.  I had already read his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and agreed, in large part, with what he had to say: that our food is far more processed than we probably realize, that there are political, environmental, health and relational problems with the great eating experiment taking place in America, and that changing the way we grow and eat our food could very well improve our land, our health and even our relationships. In Defense of Food, rather than building upon the themes in the Omnivore's Dilemma, explores instead the ideological and market forces underlying the problems that he described in the previous book. Why are we so nonchalantly galloping further and further down this experimental food path? Pollan's answer? Nutrients. Well, more precisely, Nutritionism.

nutritionism: thinking about food strictly in terms of its chemical constituents

-- In Defense of Food, p. 102

Pollan walks the reader all the way back to the early 1800s when a man by the name of William Prout "identified the three principal constituents of food -- protein, fat, and carbohydrates--that would come to be known as macronutrients."  A German scientist, Justus von Liebig (the same guy that identified nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as the macronutrients needed in the soil), grabbed Prout's insight into food nutrition and developed a meat extract, which we now call bouillon, and the first baby food formula, which he modeled upon his understanding of the three nutrients that he thought fully embodied the functionality of food. Unfortunately, many of the babies raised on Liebig's formula failed to thrive. By the early 1900s, biochemists started to realize that there was more to food than just the big 3 nutrients. There were vitamins... and minerals... and lipids....  And within each of those groups, scientists have been discovering a greater variety of nutrients and a greater importance within the human diet. In other words, Pollan points out that as much as we want to, and think we have, locked down all that is required for health and happiness, history shows us that we tend to keep missing stuff. 

It's an ironic situation in which the western world finds itself.  We are learning more and more about food and nutrients all the time.  We are more interested in the component bits and pieces that make up our food than at any other point in history. Much of what we eat is labeled so that we can be informed and eat more of what scientists have found to be good for us and less of what they've declared to be bad. And despite all of this acquired knowledge, nutrition training in school, labeling on packages, etc. we continue to have rising rates of obesity, hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers -- a panoply of health issues that are known to have a direct relationship with a Western diet. 

Pollan goes into the politics and market forces that keep nutritionism a reigning ideology in the American psyche. The book is well worth the read, and the last half of the book gives many specific ways to avoid the traps of nutritionism and instead eat healthier by maintaining a diet that is summed up in his opening statement:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

But what intrigues me about this book is not only its description of nutritionism and its ruinous affects upon our diet, but a parallel that jumped quickly to mind as I read Pollan's description. Nutritionism is a matter of taking something good--food--and reducing it to the sum of its parts--nutrients (which are also good). But, as Pollan points out (and he lists studies on this), simply consuming those parts separately, rather in the form of the whole food, is not equivalent and doesn't bear the same health affects. There is something about the relationship of those nutrients (and perhaps the inclusion of nutrients that we haven't discovered yet) that is beneficial when eating an apple that we don't get when we consume vitamins that have an equivalent nutritional value. Could it not be the same with Christian doctrine? (phew! Now there's a leap. But hear me out.)

Doctrine is essentially a reduction of Biblical teachings into succinct bits (just as a vitamin or an amino acid is a part of a piece of food). That doctrine might be incredibly important as a teaching within the church (just as protein is important for the regular functioning of our body). But when our spirituality becomes founded upon the sum of the parts (or at least the parts that we've identified and called out as a specific doctrine), are we still getting the "nutritional value" of the greater whole? As much as it might be important to identify vitamins, minerals and lipids, there is still greater value in eating those identified bits within the context of the whole food. As much as it might be important to identify God's sovereignty, his omniscience, his great justice and mercy, it's still interesting to note that God did not give us those identified bits in a list or a confessional format. He gave them to us in the greater context of the story of a people. He gave us a whole--the Bible.  The whole contains the bits and pieces that Christians have teased out in various confessions and creeds over the years.  And those confessions and creeds certainly have value.  But they are parts.  They are identified bits. They are pieces of a greater whole. 

As members of a church that is, in turn, a member of a larger nation-wide denomination, we (my husband and I) are continually struck by the way in which the denomination and many of its members turn first to a confession, catechism or book of church order before turning to the Bible to resolve an issue or to state a case. The bread and butter of the denomination seems not to be the Bible, the basic text upon which Christians base their faith, but a confession written over 1600 years after the time of Christ. Of course, if you were to say as much to those that do this, they'd deny it in a heartbeat. They'd point out that whichever text they're using to support their point was derived from the Bible and that, therefore, their argument also relies squarely upon Biblical statements. But in so doing, I venture to point out that they're making a common nutritionist mistake. They're depending upon a belief that vitamins out of context are just as valuable as vitamins in context. (I should add that certainly not everyone in the denomination does this. But it is quite prevalent.)

Nutrition is important.  Doctrine, in my opinion, is also important.  It's a succinct way of outlining what a particular group believes and holds to be dear.  But nutrition or doctrine alone is an insufficient foundation upon which to base your health or spirituality. God created vitamins, proteins, minerals, etc. in a context of whole food. And while God did give us some summary statements that guide who we are and how we should live as Christians -- 

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
-- Micah 6:8

or

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.
-- Mark 12:30-31

He gave those statements in the context of a greater whole -- a whole text, a whole story, a whole history of a people that spans time and place.

Doctrine is like nutrients.  They both have value.  But both are more valuable in the context of their greater whole. When we focus on the nutrients, it's sometimes easy to lose site of the context.  If we're only checking the nutrition label on the bread package for iron and folic acid, then we might miss the ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides or the azodicarbonamide listed in the ingredients section.  If all we're focused on is T.U.L.I.P. and the "proper" form of baptism, then we might not notice the other ingredients such as arrogance, anger and self-righteousness. Just because we want to consume vitamin C doesn't mean that we have to go about it by also consuming a bunch of processed carbs, highly refined sweeteners, and preservatives.  

When Christians focus on nutritional/doctrinal bits and pieces and ignore the larger context of the food/Bible story, I believe they open the way for non-food/non-doctrine to slip into their spiritual diet in much the same way that prepackaged, highly-processed, sugar-filled, preservative-laden "food" has been added to supermarket shelves with labels that make them look healthy, while the reality is that the overall processed nature of the food will cause disease in the end. 

God has provided a whole food for us.  Shame on us for reducing it to the sum of its parts (and missing out on bits and pieces while we're at it). Doctrine certainly isn't bad. But overly focusing on it can lead otherwise healthy Christians toward diseases of pride, arrogance, self-righteousness and anger.  When you find yourself tempted to jump on a doctrinal band-wagon, remind yourself that Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if your doctrine is spot on if you love one another."

Liturgy

An old college friend posted this on Facebook and I think it's right on.  Although I think N's (or is it T's?) can feel constricted or constrained by liturgy, when we understand it the way that Jonathan describes it, then it feels much more natural and comforting and important. 

We have little songs for our kids, too.  Nathan has a song and the girls share a song, and though we don't sing them much any more, I make a point of singing them on the kids' birthdays after telling their birthing story (a tradition as I put them to bed on their birthday night). 

Jonathan on Liturgy from Journey Training on Vimeo.