Dear Lord, help us so to encounter you, that we may daily grow in faith, hope and love, open for all that you have for us, open for all that you would teach us, open for all who seek for you, and open to follow you wherever you lead us.
To encounter God and grow in him ... This expresses the heart of what we think God is calling us to do and to be here at St Michael’s. Jesus says in our gospel reading “I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known...” (John 17:26) Jesus makes himself known by his Holy Spirit who lives in us, and helps us to work with him by giving us gifts of the Spirit.
We have given ourselves the task of looking at these through the lens of Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14. Paul says that he does not want them to be ignorant of “spirituals”, and over three chapters lays out both general principles and particular practice. In chapter 12 we saw that the gifts are many and various. Every Christian has at least one. We do not all have, or have to have, the same gifts. Some seem to our eyes to be “normal” or explainable – teaching, caring, administration, etc. Some seem supernatural, outside of our experience and hard to explain – miracles, healings, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues. The key principle is that we are all one body, and each of us has our unique and essential part in helping the whole organism to thrive. In chapter 13 we learn that it is all about mirroring the self-giving love of God – there is no place for selfish ambition or grasping for position. And now in chapter 14 we turn to a detailed discussion of tongues and prophecy.
I want to ask three questions this week:
What is this passage really about?
Why all the talk of tongues?
What should we be doing?
What is this passage really about?
All through the letter we have been hearing of the need for maturity, to go along with wisdom and abilities. Put basically, the Corinthian Christians need to grow up! A primary school in Essex has been giving elocution lessons to eight year olds; there has been a noticeable improvement in reading and writing skills since they started. The youngsters have also being going home and correcting their parents. How like the young to know all the answers, and not be slow to tell us.
“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” ~Mark Twain
We saw this last week in chapter 13, “when I was a child, I thought like a child, reasoned like a child ...” and so on, and we will find that he mentions this in the second portion of chapter 14, and Kim will talk about it next week: “stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” (13:20)
So this is about encountering God for real, and growing in him.
Why all the talk of tongues?
Speaking in tongues, sometimes called glossolalia, occurs when someone speaks words that they do not naturally understand, being led or helped by the Holy Spirit. It is mentioned in the Acts as occurring at Pentecost when the Spirit came upon the disciples (Acts 2), on a group in Caesarea converted when Peter preached to them (Acts 10), and on another converted in Ephesus when Paul brought them to faith (Acts 19). In addition, something about the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the new Christians in Samaria was so noticeable and impressive that a local holy man called Simon tried to buy the gift, thus inventing the sin of simony (Acts 8). Each of these occasions is subtly different, and there are records of thousands of others who came to faith with no mention at all of speaking in tongues, backing up what Paul has said, that we each receive a gift or gifts of the Spirit, and that speaking in tongues is one of them.
As you read the New Testament, you will notice that this is the only passage which gives teaching about speaking in tongues. This has led some to speculate that the church in Corinth was unique in the way that they related to or employed this gift of the Holy Spirit. Some have speculated that Paul was trying to stop or tone down their use of tongues, that it was a fundamentally pagan practice that had crept in to this one church, otherwise Paul and other writers would have mentioned it in other places. Therefore, it is argued, speaking in tongues was not a marked feature of other first century churches.
I take the opposite view. It does seem that the Corinthians spoke in tongues a lot. They seemed to have seen it as a badge of spirituality and a mark of honour. Their services seem to have been noisy, boisterous and undignified. The problem, however, was not their use of tongues, but their immature, selfish way of being. They took what was arguably a normal feature of Christian worship in the first century, and magnified it and warped it to their own ends.
We could compare this with teaching about Holy Communion. This book is the only one that gives direct and specific teaching about Communion. One explanation would be that the Corinthians were recently converted from paganism, and were engaging in this strange practice that was not a feature of other churches of the time; therefore Paul has to write to them about it. The other explanation would be that every church celebrated Communion, but that it was the Corinthians who were taking things to extremes, missing the point, acting in unloving and immature ways, and needed to be corrected.
What should we be doing?
We should follow the way of love. This means that we want to do all in our power to bless and help others around us and to build up the church. This means that we seek for the gifts that God is giving us, so that we can be useful in the service of our dear Lord Jesus. Every time that we voice the words “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are asking God to show us his will and help us carry it out.
There are two opposite extremes to avoid. One would be to act as we can imagine the Corinthian church did, shouting in unknown languages in ways that are off putting and strange, revelling in a spurious spirituality that obscures the love and self-giving nature of God. Many of us have perhaps heard of, or experienced Christian worship services that have seemed alien and even threatening. Speaking in tongues may have been a feature of these.
Another extreme would be to close our minds and hearts to the possibility that God might want to give us the gift of speaking in tongues or prophesying, so that we are not “open for all that he has for us or would teach us, or to follow him wherever he would lead us”.
We should have the innocent joy of a young child running for an embrace, and the wise all encompassing love of a grown-up.
Let us be eager to have spiritual gifts, and especially those that God is giving to each of us, to build up his church.
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