Sermon for Pentecost Sunday

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

When I was in high school, I built my identity around being a “nice church kid.”

There’s a lot that was good about that:
I was earnest and well-mannered.
I cared a lot about doing the right thing.
And my parents didn’t have to worry much about what I was getting up to.

I was, as a friend of mine recently put it, “a good noodle.”

But there was a not-so-good aspect to this, as well:
I could be very judgmental toward my fellow Christians, who didn’t always live up to the high standard of conduct I set for myself.

I created a ranking system in my head, based on where they went to church, how often they attended, and most of all, whether they did any cussin’, drinkin’, or smokin’.

That last one loomed particularly large in my mind, because I was sure that no good Christian would ever be caught with a cigarette in their mouth.

And that’s the one that eventually got me in trouble, but I’m going to come back to that in a few minutes.

I was too polite to ever say anything out loud about this ranking system of good Christians and bad Christians, but I was definitely keeping it in my head at all times.

The Corinthian Church, during the time of St. Paul, was doing the same thing.

They had turned spirituality into a hierarchy.
They ranked themselves, and each other, along socioeconomic lines.
They ranked themselves according to which one of the apostolic leaders in the early church was their favorite.
They ranked themselves according to which of them had had dramatic spiritual experiences and which ones hadn’t.

Just like I did in my youth, they had ranked themselves, and each other, into a hierarchy of what they thought were “good Christians” and “bad Christians.”

Human beings are very talented at sorting people into categories.

We do it with politics, education, economics, and even religion.

Successful people and failures.
Winners and losers.

And usually, once those categories harden, we stop seeing each other as actual human beings. We just see the labels we attach to them.

Paul steps into all of that chaos in Corinth and says:

“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

Now that phrase, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ can sound almost ordinary to us because we’ve heard it so many times. We see it on billboards and bumper stickers every day. It seems like a generic Christian slogan.

But in St. Paul’s day, “Jesus is Lord” was a very dangerous thing to say.

The Roman empire was, by and large, willing to let conquered peoples keep their own culture and practice their own religion, so long as they also continued to honor the authority of Caesar.

The problem, for Christians, was that Caesar was honored with titles like, “Son of God, Lord, and Savior,” all of which were titles that Christians applied exclusively to Jesus.

So, when Christians proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord,“ the Roman authorities interpreted it as them saying, “Caesar is not.”

What Christians intended as an act of spiritual devotion was received as an act of political disloyalty.
Therefore, any Christian who said, “Jesus is Lord,” in public was risking serious consequences, possibly including imprisonment or even death.

And Paul’s point is essentially this:

If someone has enough courage to risk those kinds of consequences because they proclaim the name of Christ, then who are we to rank them spiritually?

And then Paul begins this beautiful rhythm:

“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.”

Many gifts.
One Giver.

Paul is trying to dismantle the whole ranking system.

The Holy Spirit does not enter our hearts to create individual superheroes.
The Spirit is incorporating various individuals into the one Body of Christ.
And bodies are complex things.

A healthy body contains all kinds of different parts doing all kinds of different work.

Your lungs are not trying to become kidneys.

Your ears are not competing with your elbows.

And thank goodness for that.

Imagine if your pancreas woke up tomorrow morning and decided it wanted to become an eyebrow.

That is not personal growth.
That is a medical emergency.

Living things remain alive not by eliminating complexity, but by learning how to hold complexity together.
No two parts are exactly the same, but neither is one better than another.
A body without a heart is just as dead as a body without lungs.
That’s why the whole ranking system of “more spiritual” and “less spiritual” Christians makes no sense, according to Paul.

“No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.”

And that’s how I got myself in trouble, back when I was younger.

After several years of privately ranking fellow Christians in my head, I came to find the weight of perfection to be burdensome.

I was tired of looking down on my fellow Christians and holding myself to a higher standard of holiness.

I came to realize that there was more to being me than just being a “good church kid.“

Like the Corinthian church, I was beginning to realize that I was more complicated than I wanted to admit.
There was more than one part of me.
And somehow, the Spirit was still moving through all of it.

In a misguided attempt to shed my “perfect Christian” image, I started to do the very thing that I had judged so many others for doing: I started smoking cigarettes.

Now, this was a very stupid thing to do. Everyone knows that nicotine is addictive and smoking is very harmful for the body.

I thought it made me look cool and edgy, but cigarettes are not cool; they’re just expensive.

As a wise person once told me, “A cigarette is like a squirrel: perfectly harmless until you stick one in your mouth and light it on fire.”

I eventually managed to quit the “cancer sticks” and manage my nicotine habit, but the irony is that I had become the very thing I judged.

That was a humbling experience for me.
No longer could I claim to be the “perfect Christian,” who followed the rules and always did what was proper for “good Christians.“

Getting addicted to nicotine forced me to confront something uncomfortable about being human:

The parts of ourselves we repress do not disappear.
They come back sideways.

The fear we refuse to acknowledge becomes control.
The shame we bury becomes judgment.
The insecurity we hide becomes arrogance.

And sometimes the qualities we judge most harshly in other people reveal something unresolved inside ourselves.

Human beings do this kind of thing all the time.

We pass judgment on others and then become the very thing that we judge.

The good news is that, if we find the grace to face ourselves honestly, we gain the ability to extend that same grace toward other people.

We may even discover that the thing we are so ashamed of contains an important truth that we need to hear.

For me, it was the truth that there is more to me than just the “perfect Christian“ image that I display to the world.

Mercy is the one thing in this universe that has the power to help us see beneath the surface of outward complexity and recognize the one Spirit that holds us all together.

And maybe that is what Pentecost is really about.

Not the elimination of difference.
Not the creation of perfect people.
But the grace to recognize one Spirit moving through many complicated human lives.

Many gifts.
One Spirit.