Not For You

1 Corinthians 13, Luke 4:21-30 

Have you ever waited and waited for a gift you longed for? For the fulfillment of a promise?

And then when you see that bike you’d been dreaming of in your hands, open up the tickets to Disneyland or Paris, get a good look at the breath-taking engagement ring… then just as the fulfillment and joy break over you, you hear, “But it’s not for you.”

We’re giving that bike to the most annoying, unlikeable kid in your class. This perfect ring is for someone you’ve never met or heard of. That trip of a lifetime is booked for some Russian oligarch’s family.

You’re getting nothing.

And yet the giver beams with accomplishment, insisting that the promise you’ve been waiting for is now kept.

How are you feeling?

Angry? confused? frustrated, disappointed?

The folks in Nazareth felt the same way.

Jesus shows up and proclaims to them that all God’s promises are being fulfilled now, here, in him, and promptly announces that his hometown friends and family will get none of the benefits. That God’s healing and miracles are going to foreigners while God’s faithful people need them just as much and get nothing.

No wonder they try to throw him off a cliff!

It just seems unnecessary. Deliberately provocative and offensive. Taunting, even.

“See this marvelous thing? Haha – not for you!”

That’s not how God is supposed to do this, right? Right????

But Jesus does just that.

Tantalizes and withdraws, displaying the singing joy of God’s gifts and promises, bringing them right home to us – to me, you, now, for real – and at the same time, with whiplash speed, reminding us that the miracles and gifts aren’t for us, but for the stranger, the foreigner, the undeserving.

My heart hurts. And my head.

I’m all for God’s ridiculous generosity, for grace that heals the unlikely and undeserving,

for miracles that transform life for outsiders and strangers. I enjoy giving and reaching out to help make that happen. But Jesus is pushing us to hear and feel this disturbing truth that God’s fulfilled promises are not for us, that they are for others instead.

And that God giving the miracles we’ve longed for to others is how God keeps promises to us.

It doesn’t make any sense,

which is why Paul resorts to love.

Paul’s spent a lot of ink and effort on trying to help his Corinthian congregation reconcile their differences. He’s been trying to explain to them that spiritual gifts – miracles, prophecy, discernment, wisdom, healing – are for cooperation, not for competition, that God gives these gifts to us not for our individual salvation or benefit, but for the community, for others.

He’s drenched his ideas in metaphors trying to get that across, but it’s not enough, until he says:

speaking in tongues, prophecy, knowledge, martyrdom, even faith that can move mountains, is nothing.

None of this is anything without love.

And love is deeply, fundamentally, about others.

About the people who are separated from us, who are not easy to love.

Love is patient; love is kind;

love is honest, humble, generous, adaptable,

bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Words we’re used to hearing at weddings, words that are easier to associate with romance and marriage than with irritating inside-the-church struggles, rivalry and doubt, or even with prophecy, healing miracles, and speaking in tongues – but that is exactly what Paul is talking about.

It’s his way of saying to his friends and congregation in Corinth what Jesus said his family and neighbors in Nazareth: The gifts of God that we long for, the promises and miracles and glory and wonder, are given not to us, but for others.

And not to and for the others we would have chosen, either.

But Paul, like Jesus, still seems to think that this everything-for-others is something to rejoice about, to accept and revel in as a gift to us.

It’s hard enough for me to wrap my head around, harder for me to try to explain to you, but it’s consistent enough in scripture that I think we have to believe it.

God fulfills promises to us – to you, to me, to the church – by giving the miracles and healing that we long for to others. And the gifts that God gives us – the things that make you special – are actually not meant to make us special, but to unite us to one another, and to benefit others even at real cost to ourselves.

This morning we’re headed into our Annual Meeting. It’s our annual day to receive the gifts of the community and the gifts of God to this community – the people, your actions, the money, the time – even fellowship and laughter and food (lots of food!). It’s a day we give thanks for those gifts, as we look at how we use them by reviewing the budget and electing leaders.

Perhaps you’ve read the preview copy of the Annual Report this last week, and seen the ministry thanks for the ushers, the choir, the bodacious bagel brigade…

How would those reports look if the ushers and the musicians and the folks who offer pastoral care and prayer to our sick, hurt, grieving members aren’t actually meant for us,

but for the folks who have never been into a church and aren’t really all that interested in our Sunday mornings?

How can acolytes and altar guild be meant, by God, for the folks who don’t belong to our church?

What about our budget, where our expenses are greater than our income, and that income never stretches as far as we need?

What if Jesus were sitting down among us, telling us that God had sent that not-enough money to pay the salary of a community social worker in Mexico or Russia, or to fix the roof of some political action group in Oklahoma that horrifies your soul – not for the children and staff and volunteers of Calvary?

My head hurts.

And my heart, a little.

But God insists on stirring us up this way, reminding us that we don’t get miracles and healing and wonders for being faithful and good, and that God is all about using grace and wonder and transformation beyond our boundaries to fulfill God’s promises to us.

Our heads are going to hurt a bit, this year, as we try to be responsible and adventurous with your gifts, our resources, and God’s gifts.

Our hearts may be a little disturbed.

For – as Paul says - now we see through a glass, darkly. Now we know only in part.

Now we see some truth, some of God’s grace, but not clearly.

But then – in God’s time -  we will see face to face…..then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known.

Because even without Jesus showing up today to make provocative pronouncements,

God insists on stirring us up,

until we’re ready for the tumultuous, transformative, demands of love.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

and the greatest of these is love.