“Living the Spiritual Gifts: Discernment”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
February 14, 2010
Matthew 13: 31-32; I Kings 3: 1-15
Wow! What a winter. What a series of storms. We all have our stories of how we tried to cope with the unprecedented weather. At our house, our kids are a little young to enjoy the snow so we have our stories of dealing with the stir craziness. But we know that so many others have stories far more serious. I was impressed by how we as a church community showed concern for each other and tried to call each other during the storm. We as a community are going to try and figure out how we can even better support each other in the future when storms happen.
During the storms, I enjoyed reading how people communicated about it. One friend in Denver emailed us, “Give us our snow back!” Another wrote that “She’d rather have a blizzard from Dairy Queen.” Other friends of my parents were going to Giant to buy sixty rolls of toilet paper "before the hoarders get there." Another friend wrote that “The snow has fallen and the flakes are on the road." But then most of us, me included, drove here this morning.
I especially liked how the media portrayed the storm. They developed a whole new vocabulary:
Winter wallop
Snownami
Snowmaggedan
Snowpocallapse
Snowapalooza
Snowoverkill
Snowzilla
Then “Snowmads” - people who have lost electricity and go from home to home until the power comes back on.
And Snow My God!
The blizzard did test the faith for many of us. It reminded us again that there are forces out there greater than us.
And the severe winter weather makes us long for spring. How many of us here cannot wait for spring? Ah spring. When the snow stops falling and we can see the grass again. When we think of spring we think about new life. We think about the plants that start to come up. Our second lesson today is a short parable, and it helps us look forward to spring. It is about plants and the seeds that sprout into them. It’s the familiar lesson from Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus tells about a seed, a mustard seed.
In cleaning out old files this week I came across an article I had clipped out and put away a number of years ago. This was before I even went to seminary and begin collecting things for sermons. It was a Fortune magazine article by Marc Gunther about the workforce, entrepreneurs and workplace success.
The article told of Richard Levy, an entrepreneur who started a pharmaceutical and energy company called Catalytica. Over 25 years, Levy built Catalytica into a significant corporation with over 1800 employees and a market capitalization of over $750 million. At age 56, Levy began to rethink his life. He received an offer to sell Catalytica and it made him think about his future and what kind of legacy he wanted to leave. Levy said he had never considered selling before. As he put it, “an entrepreneur wants to keep the baby and take it all the way.”
But he had been running the business for many years and felt compelled to seriously consider making a transition. So according to Fortune magazine, Levy, who was Jewish, “turned to the ancient Christian tradition known as ‘discernment,’ to help make his decision about the future of his company.” Discernment, as Levy experienced it, was a practice in which one “quiets the mind and surrenders to the unknown, attempting to discover the will of God.” Such discernment has roots in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Levy made his decision to ultimately sell his business by thinking about deeper questions than he ever had before. He brought forth his deepest values and spiritual core to help decide what to do with his property. Through discernment, he tried to figure out where his intellectual and his spiritual values interfaced.
This kind of self reflection is appropriate for us too as we approach Lent. Thinking about what our core values are, what God’s will is for our life, and what kind of legacy we want to leave to the future are appropriate questions to reflect on during Lent.
These are some of the questions that our Bradley Hills Planned Giving Program is inviting our congregation to ask as well. You may have heard or read that Bradley Hills is developing a Planned Giving program. This is an important development for the future of this congregation. As the Planned Giving booklet beings, “We are all indebted to the past, to those who have preceded us here. We drink from wells we did not dig. We enjoy liberties we have not won. We share faith whose foundation was laid by those who came before us.”
This church, our building, our programs and our outreach, can be much stronger in the future if we take seriously the invitation to participate in our Planned Giving program.
Planned Giving is not about giving something today, it’s about long term planning. It is important work. It is also spiritual work.
It involves both our intellect and our spirit. Planned giving encourages us to reflect on our values. On how we use the gifts we have been given. On what kind of legacy and ideas we want to pass on.
This intellectual and spiritual work is the work of discernment.
When we think of the word, “discernment,” we might think about how we figure something out. Like how the weather people discern whether it’s going to snow or not. Watching the weather reports last week, I kept wishing just once they’d be crying wolf. I think the weather folks are getting better at figuring out the weather than they used to be.
Discernment has religious roots. There are two basic types or threads of discernment in the Bible. They are each considered within both the Old and New Testaments. First, the Hebrew word, bin in the Old Testament, implies the ability to discern between good and evil, to make a moral judgment between the two. An example is found in our first lesson for today when Solomon asks God in his dream for the ability to discern between the good and evil. This type of discernment is similar to the Apostle Paul’s New Testament identification of the spiritual gift of discernment, or in the Greek, diakrisis, in I Corinthians 12 - the ability to determine whether spirits were good or evil. The author of the book of Hebrews uses diakrisis as well in describing an ability to discern between good and evil. Paul would say that some people have this gift in abundance.
This tradition of seeing the world as black and white, good and bad, Godly or demonic, reflected the Biblical culture’s focus on things being basically either pure or completely corrupted.
We today would likely see life as more nuanced and containing more gray areas. So perhaps the second Bible concept of discernment from the Biblical tradition might seem more accessible to us. Discernment has a broader implication than just the results of our thinking. It has to do with the process of our decision making. Discernment also means our combining our intellectual sides with our spiritual side. It has to do with our working to figure out the will of God.
Unlike the first type of discernment, this definition is not just a focus on results, whether one does good or evil, but also on the process by which a person makes decisions, that is whether one seeks to do the will of God.
This tradition of discernment begins with the Old Testament use of the word shama, meaning to discern. This is a common verb in the language and it means to “hear, listen or obey.” As in, listen for God’s call and try to do God’s will. Shama focuses on God’s guidance and God’s gifts. Shama also appears in our first lesson from I Kings. Solomon asks God for the ability to discern between good and evil, focusing on results. But because of Solomon’s process, because he asks for God’s guidance and seeks God to do God’s will, God is pleased and answers Solomon using a different concept of discernment. God answers that Solomon should have wisdom and understanding to discern what is right, and that all is given as a gift of God. Solomon impresses and pleases God with his process and priorities, not with his results.
Paul carries this type of discernment to the Corinthian church in the New Testament as well implying an ability to discern things of the spirit. Paul writes in I Corinthians 2 using the Greek anakrino, a word for discernment that is not just about distinguishing good from evil, but about process, about being open to the things of the spirit. It’s similar to the Hebrew tradition of shama – being open to hearing and considering spiritual things.
Paul would say that some people have been given a particular gift for discernment, but that we all have some capacity and responsibility to discern.
Listening for God’s guidance is a responsibility that we all possess. We all must be open to God and God’s will. We all must seek to listen to God, to obey when we perceive God’s will, and to be open to the spiritual side of life.
The idea of Christian living and Christian giving flows from this type of discernment. We start with God, with our recognition that all we have comes from God, and with the idea we are to seek God’s will in discerning the actions of our lives.
Such recognition helps us make spiritual decisions, as well as intellectual ones. It focuses us on the values we want to leave, not just the property. It compels us to think about our planned living, how we plan to follow the will of God.
With such discernment, results flow from our decisions and our decisions flow from God. The focus of discernment is on the legacy we are leaving with how we live our life. How our use of time, talents and treasure, of whatever size, reflects our spiritual values.
God’s response to Solomon shows us that God’s primary focus of discernment is on our process. On our commitment to God.
When we discover that, we realize that we should not defer helping others, we should not put off developing our spirituality, we should not wait to commit ourselves to the care of our church.
As Solomon discovered, such discernment and focus on getting the process right opens up new possibilities for spiritual living. Too often, we put off making decisions or contributions until we have our “ducks in a row” or have enough property saved to feel we can make a large enough contribution. The discernment focus on process helps us realize that we should not wait, but plan and contribute now.
All of us have something to contribute to the future of Bradley Hills. Gifts of time, talent and treasure of whatever size that reflect our values, can have a great impact on the future.
Jesus spoke with an eye towards the future.
Jesus often spoke in parables, such as his telling the parable of the mustard seed in our second lesson. This parable is about more than a seed or a plant. It’s a story about the kingdom of God. Mustard seeds are seeds of future growth. Jesus said that the kingdom of Heaven was like a mustard seed. Jesus was telling his disciples that while the membership in the kingdom will start with a few and will be small at first; it will grow to be large and plentiful. The small can become big.
The mustard seed was one of the smallest seeds available at the time. Yet the plant Jesus was referring to that the mustard seed would grow into was one of the largest plants in a typical garden at the time. When fully grown, the plant was so big that birds could even nest in its branches.
There is a smallness and an ordinary quality to a mustard seed. But from it comes a tree wrapped in the glory. Jesus was talking to disciples who needed motivation to continue to build the kingdom of God. Their tangible rewards at the time were few. But their gifts of time, talents and treasure would help grow the kingdom of God. They would help grow the church.
The beauty of the mustard seed theology is that small gifts that reflect our values can make a big difference in the future. Small seeds have potential to grow into something big.
Robert Egger is President of the D.C. Central Kitchen downtown. He’s a fascinating guy and a great communicator when it comes to motivating and building. Egger talks about how three of the great social movements of the last century started from small items. Really small seeds.
Egger talks about Cesar Chavez and the Labor Movement of Migrant Farm Workers in this country. About Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. And about Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian Independence movement of 1949.
Chavez used grapes, and the purchase of grapes, to lead to improved working conditions for the farm-workers.
King, “used the dimes it took to ride the buses of Montgomery, Alabama as his ‘weapon.’” On the day after Rosa Parks got bailed out of jail for protesting racially biased busing policies, King strode up to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to talk to the assembled group about God’s plan and the collective power of everyone pooling their dimes together for a common objective.”
Gandhi used a Salt March to help Indian people see that if they made their own salt, they would force the British to negotiate with them.
All three men were future oriented and had the improvement of lives as their objectives, and all were able to inspire their larger communities through “small, simple methods.”
A pastor at one church where I served told the story of conducting the funeral of a man who had helped develop the famous Boeing 747 aircraft. “After the service,” he said, “the man's widow was patiently listening as he commented on how remarkable it was that her late husband had helped design and build that great machine.” She said, "The truth is, he worked on one little switchbox smaller than a loaf of bread. That's all he worked on for 15 years. But when that 747 lifted off the ground for the first time, it was the happiest day of his life."
My friend responded, “The truth is, that huge plane could not have lifted off without that man's contribution.”
Contributions that might seem small now can have big impacts over time.
Chavez’s instrument was a grape. King’s was a dime. Gandhi’s was a piece of salt. The man who worked for Boeing used a switchbox smaller than a loaf of bread.
Jesus talked about a mustard seed. Robert Louis Stevenson once said, "Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant."
The seeds we plant now can have a great positive impact on the future. I hope you will consider planting a seed for the benefit of your church by participating in the Planned Giving Program that many in your congregation have worked hard to develop.
Planned giving might include your making a will. But planned living should include your discerning God’s will for your life, including your spiritual values in the process of your decisions, and in your passing on your values to touch the future.
Perhaps during this time of winter storms, you were forced to keep still. Our lives were stilled by forces outside of us. Over the past two weeks, we have had to be open to the stillness of life. And when we are still, sometimes we are more open to God’s will.
On Valentine’s Day, when we affirm God’s love for us and affirm that God calls us to love each other, let us affirm that we each have something important to contribute to help grow the kingdom of God. Amen.
