The Indestructible Light

Paul lists famous gifts: wisdom, faith, knowledge, healing, miracle-working, prophecy, discernment, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. Apparently some of these gifts were disruptive enough that they needed calling out.

Presumably other gifts and talents are worth honoring too. I think of patience, trustworthiness, serenity, reliability, hospitality. I also think of the quiet competence needed for musicianship, liturgy-planning, and bookkeeping. Churches couldn’t function without them. In other words, there’s room for all kinds of people, even though it can make for a swarming, combustible mix.

The world these days is obsessed with dividing people. It’s always some version of us against them. It drives an addiction to conflict, the temptation to call opponents evil. The real world, God’s world, isn’t like that.

Paul spells this out. The gifts he lists look irreconcilable. Yet this hodgepodge forces us to acknowledge a truth about the divine creation: Its prodigious diversity is to be grasped and respected, not feared.

Why is there so much diversity and pluralism? Evidently God didn’t want a monochrome world, a place of gray sameness. This is God’s work, and we’re privileged to share in it, for all our differences. I should have the humility and good humor to honor it. We still have individual identity—ultimately in God, not in race, tribe, or party. Those things are too finite—too impermanent, flaky, soon embarrassingly out of date—to bear the weight of eternity.

Paul says to focus on the gifts divinely allotted to each of us and acknowledge that others have been similarly bestowed in turn—all under God.