Ordered by Love
It’s July 4, 2012. A Wednesday evening. You’re in San Diego, California, and you’re heading to the annual firework show—or as it’s known there, the Big Bay Boom. All your families and friends are coming down to the water, where it’s beautiful, you’re setting up your blankets and chairs and hoping to have a good seat for the event. We’re getting close now, and the show is supposed to start any minute. The breeze is blowing in off the bay and just as you’re about to take the last bite of your third hot-dog, all 7,000 fireworks go off at once. A deep thunder rumbles across the water and a white, mushroom-shaped orb gathers over the bay, brighter than anything you’ve ever seen. You can feel the heat from the explosions but you can’t hear anything else, and you can’t take your eyes off of it. And then it ends, nearly as quickly as it began—what was supposed to be a 20 minute show is finished in about 20 seconds. And in the aftermath, streams of gunpowder and shreds of paper drift into the night sky, and you’re left in a state of utter confusion bordering on terror. You have no idea what just happened.
Some of you may have seen video from this event. It kind of makes the rounds on social media every year. I wish I could play it for you right now, because there are some videos that really show how big of a failure this was—like just a little bigger than what you’re currently imagining. There are five barges of fireworks spread out across the bay, and a half a million people there watching and every single firework goes off at the same time because of a computer failure. It’s total chaos.
Our passage this morning is sort of like Paul’s attempt to keep all the fireworks from going off at the same time. Because while something like that might be kind of fun and exciting, it could only ever remain a spectacle, something to look at but at its core it is basically nonsensical to us, and even a little bit dangerous. Fireworks are meant to be choreographed and in sync, not erupting all at once.
The real challenge here is to see these spiritual gifts as simultaneously ordinary, mundane things and at the same time as profound manifestations of God’s presence. A small prayer of thanksgiving here, a simple word of encouragement there, brought by members of the whole body for the building up of the whole church. These gifts come not all at once, but each one decently and in order, each one in the season we need it. In this way, the Spirit gives us God’s own life, revealed in our midst like fireworks of grace.
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From a sermon on 1 Corinthians 14.
