About Me

My photo
My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, July 30, 2017

“The Gospel in Storybooks: Stone Soup” Romans 12: 4-5 Matthew 18:20

We are now in the final week of our sermon series on finding Gospel truths in storybooks. This week is another favorite book of mine, Stone Soup. Stone Soup by Marcia Brown tells the story of three soldiers who found themselves to be very tried and very hungry one day as they were walking through the woods. As they crested a hill, they saw a village and wondered if it would be a good place to eat and sleep. But the villagers saw the soldiers coming and they became fearful of them. They hid all of their food and as the soldiers went from place to place, home to home, asking if they had anything to eat they came up with creative lies all emphasizing that they didn’t have anything to offer. 
So one of the soldiers came up with an idea. He called the villagers together and told them that they were going to just have to make stone soup. They were intrigued. They had never heard of stone soup before. So a large kettle was brought, water put to boil, and three stones added to the pot. The solider started to call out ingredients that would make the soup even better, and one by one those ingredients were brought forward. 
When the soup was deemed perfect the table was set and the people feasted together, bringing even more food from their homes to go with the soup. The villagers and soldiers danced, laughed, and shared stories around the table well into the evening.
Sometimes we remember the first time that we hear a story. Other times we remember engaging it in a different way at various points in our lives. While this story was read during my elementary school years, I remember it most fondly from some of my first years pastoring. In seminary, I had been trained as a faith-based community organizer. One summer, my job was to go down to Texas and work with connecting church and the community together for the sake of serving those in need. While I was pastoring in State College, I continued my training in order to train others in these types of intentional partnerships for a week in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. There folks gathered from around the globe to figure out how to build up communities using scriptural principles to do something more amazing together then they could ever do apart. While at that training we heard again the story of Stone Soup. As a child a game we would sometimes play was “what are you bringing for the stone soup?” where you went around the circle and had to remember what each person was bringing. But here we asked a different question - what gift do you bring that helps build up your community?
The apostle Paul writes in various place in his letters about folks having different gifts for the sake of building up the body of Christ and sharing the good news. “For as in one body we have many members, not all members have the same function.” Part of being in the body of Christ is learning what our gift is and using it and part of being in the body of Christ is honoring the gifts of others.
How do we go about finding out what our gift is? There are inventories that you can fill out, online and in books, that speak to what your spiritual gift is. You can think about areas that you are passionate about - like being generous or evangelism. You can take account of the places where you are most fulfilled when serving the church - those places where you know that your gift and the need come together in a beautiful way.
Part of knowing your gift is not getting caught up in the gifts of others. At a retreat I attended, the pastor speaking says folks always want to come up to her and talk about the gift of tongues for example. And she always asks them if that is their gift. If they reply no, then she encourages them to spend more time discovering and cultivating their particular gift then being worried about the gifts that others have.
We cultivate our gifts by using them. Using them inside the church and outside. If you have the gift of mercy, wanting to care for or help others, have you considered using that gift to help with the new congregational care ministry visiting and uplifting our homebound members? If you have the gift of knowledge or teaching, connecting life to the scriptures, have you considered teaching a Bible Study class? 
Like any gift we receive, it is meant to be used, not set on a shelf for a different time in life. We are given a gift not so we can say that we have it, but so we can use it!
The other side of spiritual gifts are honoring the gifts of others. In the words of the Apostle Paul, “Individually we are members one of another.” How can we honor one another? Have you ever thanked someone for using their gift in the church? Or have you encouraged someone to discover what their spiritual gift is?
One of the best ways that we can honor the gifts a person has is to use our gifts and our gifts only. There is a tendency in churches to see a need, be it in a committee or facility or as a volunteer, and even though we know that is not our gift, we rush to fill it. We don’t like to see vacancies, so we rush in to help. The problem is when we fill in a spot where we know that it isn’t our gift, we are denying someone the opportunity who does have that gift to serve in that way. When we rush in because we are uncomfortable with letting things simply be for a while, we could be taking away the Holy Spirits opportunity to work on some folks heart and bring to their mind that this is really what they are supposed to be doing to use their particular gift.
We also need to build each other up in our gifts. I’ve shared with some folks before that when I was younger in the church I loved to sing. Then, probably around middle school, we got a praise team coordinator at the church who made an offhanded comment about me singing off key and needing to be quieter. He may have thought he was being helpful, but the way he said it actually resulted in me not singing for years in public. Part of honoring one another gift is walking the line between what needs to be done and how we want it done, and knowing the difference.
The beauty of the story of Stone Soup, is when the people came together, each offering their small gift, they made something that they could have never imagined making on their own. The annual conference’s theme for the next four years is Better Together. Do we truly believe that we are better together? Better when we find and use our gifts together? Better when we put our energies together to make something new? 
In my last parish we did this out of the box thing where five United Methodist Churches felt a calling to come together, for what they weren’t quite sure yet, but to pray for the community and figure out how they can serve better together. Here, when we came together for cluster worship we showed was it looks like to be the body of Christ together to lift up God’s name. 

The age when we can silo off in churches based off of our individuals gifts is over. The time when we can do our thing and you can do your thing and then we can try to see if it fits tougher is done. The years of each church insisting on doing their own thing without working with other churches is no more. We need each other. What we do effects one another. And we honor and glorify God best when we come together, for in the words of Jesus, “Where two or three are gathered in my name. I am with them.” Let us use our gifts to honor Christ. Amen. 

No comments: