United Methodist Church
Celebrate Father’s Day, June 18, by ordering carnations! Honor or remember your father with this gesture. Please download, print, and fill the PDF form below, then submit it to Flo Black at the church. Ensure to include your contact number.
Each flower costs $1 and all orders and payments are due by Sunday, June 11.
Get ready for Fairhaven’s traditional Dollar Market. This event sells new and lightly used items, from clothes to housewares and shoes, all at a dollar or less.
Your shopping directly benefits the Fairhaven community, as all sales proceeds are put back into our local area.
Mark your calendars! The Dollar Market begins at 9 am and continues until approximately 2 pm. Join us for this annual tradition in Fairhaven, and take part in an event that combines bargain shopping with community support. We look forward to seeing you there!
Pastor Dylan Parson’s sermon delves into the concept of spiritual gifts. He begins by discussing a spiritual gifts inventory, a tool designed to help individuals identify their unique gifts within the church community. The idea is akin to viewing the church as a puzzle, with each person’s gift being an integral piece. However, Pastor Parson also highlights a concern, the 80/20 rule, indicating that a small proportion of the congregation tends to carry most of the ministry’s responsibilities.
In the second part of his sermon, Pastor Dylan offers a nuanced view on spiritual gifts. According to him, these aren’t merely our natural talents or skills; rather, they are divinely bestowed abilities by the Holy Spirit, intended to further God’s mission on earth. He invokes the story of Pentecost to illustrate that when used for God’s mission, these gifts can have miraculous impacts. He emphasizes that a skill becomes a spiritual gift only when used for the betterment of the world in alignment with God’s work. In his conclusion, Pastor Parson encourages the congregation to remain open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, allowing their spiritual gifts to fully manifest and make a positive difference.
So how many of you have taken a spiritual gifts inventory? Yes. So it’s fairly frequent, right? I know this is something we looked at about a year back. We did a project with the annual conference on mission and outreach consultation. We did that across the partnership.
But even if you didn’t participate in that, this is something that’s been around for a long time, and you’ve probably maybe seen it before. So you sit down basically and you take a quiz. It can be really abbreviated or it can be a few hundred questions. And you answer how true a bunch of statements feel to you.
So a couple examples, this is pulling from the one that’s on the general board of discipleships webpage. Through prayer, I see God’s miraculous work in my life. You rate that on a one, never, to a seven, always scale. I’m able to organize human and material resources to serve the needs of others.
One to seven scale. I enjoy teaching Bible study to a group, 1 to 7 scale, and so on. So this particular version, which is my usual preference because it’s easy and accessible, it asks 80 questions, which is pretty small as far as these things go. And then it gives you your top gifts in the end.
And there are 20 possibilities, many of which, not all, but many, come from our Corinthians passage today. got wisdom, faith, knowledge, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, and so on. That’s about half of them. As the Apostle Paul writes here in the seventh verse of 1 Corinthians chapter 12, A demonstration of the Spirit is given to each person for the common good.
Everybody’s got something, some or multiple gifts that makes them a particular part of the body of Christ, invaluable to the way it functions in the world in serving God, you know, no less than an arm or an eye or an ear enables a human being to fully engage with the world around us. And Paul is making a clear argument here and that’s that there is a role for everyone in the church. Not just a place, a spot, an opportunity, but a vital role, something that is a place that you have to be, that you are called to be in. When we are baptized by the Spirit into one body, as Paul says, that means we act like one body.
Your body would have a noticeable problem. You would notice its functioning got a lot more difficult if your ear decided not to hear. That’s happened to me a couple times the past few weeks with sinus stuff, I wake up and I notice there’s something wrong. Things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to.
Or if your foot decided not to walk or stand, you would notice you have a problem. Things wouldn’t work the way they’re supposed to. And so, in the body of Christ, you are needed. And a body is not this loose association of pieces that are off doing their own thing, mostly with what they’re doing independently, a body is one unified unit where every single cell is working in the same direction to keep things alive, to keep it moving forward, to keep everything functioning.
And so is Christ’s body. From many parts, one body, each freely giving everything they have for the good of Jesus’ work here on earth. The body is moving through the world as Jesus’ body. And this is an extremely high expectation, obviously, and yet one that Paul and Jesus are clearly making of the early church.
And it’s an expectation that, you know, as far as I know, has never been rolled back. And yet what’s called the 80/20 rule—I don’t know how many of you have heard this—is a well-known adage both among pastors, among leaders in churches. And this is true in all kinds of organizations, but churches is our relevant one here. And the 80/20 rule is that in the vast majority of congregations, you know, 80% of the ministry is done by 20% of the body.
And you can easily see how this becomes really tremendously unhealthy. First, that 20% tends to burn out really quick. Second, the life-changing message of the gospel and the power of Jesus isn’t all that compelling to the outside world if most Christians don’t really seem all that interested in it, right? When I was serving at a pretty sizable church in suburban Raleigh, I worked with a pastor and a congregation that took this issue pretty seriously. And so in the summertime, the end of summer, as we started moving towards, you know, back to school, the kind of kickoff of the church year that seems to happen in September, we took a couple Sundays in worship to look very closely at spiritual gifts and service, helping everybody recognize what their role in the body might be and then how to live into it.
And so everyone took a spiritual gifts inventory the first Sunday of this thing, and then the following Sunday, tables were set up where all the leaders of various ministries and teams could talk about and answer questions about their ministries. Everybody from the hospitality group to, you know, the music ministries, things like that. And so then in worship, you know where the sermon would normally be, everyone filled out a sheet that included basically every single job in the church, from greeting people in the parking lot, to making the coffee, to teaching Bible study, to running the nursery, to being in the choir or the band. And every person ranked on a three-point scale, whether they would be happy to do it right now, whether they would be willing if they were asked and needed and trained to run the coffee pot, or whether they would never, no matter what, do it.
And then the staff got to work– by staff, I mean me. I was the intern– got to work gathering all that information, plugging it into a spreadsheet here. And we did our best to plug every single person in somewhere where they’d be willing or where we might be able to raise them up to do some particular task. And now this is really important.
So this is what I want to take away here, is that this sort of connection and expectation of service here is crucial, but not because there’s jobs to get done. Like in every church, yes, there’s jobs to get done. Someone’s got to make the coffee, right? But it’s not about frantically recruiting volunteers to fill holes, right, or filling committee slots as it comes around the nomination seasons every year. That’s not the point.
The reason this all matters is because we a body serving Jesus and the world together. And a body needs fingers and an ear and eyes and a nose. This is all for God. You know, every single one of those committee slots, every single person saying hello in the hallway, every folding of the bulletin, this is all for God.
All of this is sacred work. You know, running the PowerPoint, putting all these things together, playing the piano, all these things are sacred work. And all of us, if we’re seeking to faithfully follow Jesus, need to be offering of ourselves in our significant, special, whatever that gift is, way. But I will say something else and push this even further because today’s Pentecost.
Here’s the thing about how we tend to approach spiritual gifts. Even at that particular church where I think we did a really unusually good job with it. It’s still pretty domesticated. It’s almost like in some churches whenever you break out a spiritual gifts inventory, it can function like a churchy version of the Myers-Briggs.
I don’t know how many of you had to take those at work or in school or a personality profile or you know and your senior year in high school you take one of those tests to figure out what jobs are good for you. What makes this different than that? Because that, who cares, right? What about the Holy Spirit? Last Sunday, as we read the story of Jesus’ ascension and his farewell address to the disciples, we heard Jesus tell the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they are clothed with heavenly power. So think about this for a second. If the gifts that are poured out upon us by the Holy Spirit are just things we happen to be good at, whether that’s teaching Sunday school or preaching or working technology, then what Jesus says before he ascends doesn’t make any sense really.
Why would the disciples wait? Presumably those who are good teachers were good teachers then. Those who were good preachers were good preachers then. Those who were good at praying for people were good before the Holy Spirit came. So why should the disciples wait and why should we want the Holy Spirit? I mean I like to think I’m a passively competent preacher and teacher but plenty of Christians who have, non-Christians rather, who have never even heard of the Holy Spirit can also give a great speech, can also teach a mind-blowing class.
There’s people who don’t believe Jesus who can teach the Bible really good. So what does the Spirit have to do with it? What do the tongues of fire that descend upon those gathered at Pentecost make possible that wasn’t possible moments before? The difference here is this inescapable, uncomfortable element of supernatural power. The Holy Spirit activates within us our God-given gifts, yes, but then it empowers us to do something with them. For the body of Christ, for the kingdom of God, those gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost, the Judeans, the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the Romans, the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Cyrenes, Cretans, Arabs, Phrygians, Asians, all those people.
They experienced the Apostles speaking in their own native language, you know, the gift of tongues. And not only was that a wonderful skill or something, like that could be a cool party trick, but the point is that it was a mechanism by which God miraculously grew the church. That God spread the good news of Jesus from Italy in the north to Greece to Egypt to Turkey to Persia all the way to India and China because of what happened in that moment, because of that gift. Like do you see the difference here? Like yes, first God did miraculously give them the power to speak foreign languages by the Holy Spirit, sure.
That’s cool. But what’s important is God’s use of that gift and their cooperation in receiving that gift. Your gift of wisdom or healing or knowledge or prophecy or faith or tongues becomes a spiritual gift, a gift of the Spirit when it’s used in the Spirit. Otherwise, it’s just a talent.
Every one of those gifts that any of the apostles had, that any of us have, can sit dormant. They can be wasted. You can use them for things that don’t build up the kingdom of God. But when you are using them as a part of the body of Christ to make disciples of Jesus Christ to transform the world, only then does a gift become a spiritual gift.
And only then, maybe, will you be miraculously empowered with new gifts. didn’t know you had. Think of the hymn we sang this one a few weeks ago. Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. There is a crucial piece here where receiving the gifts of the Spirit requires cooperation with the Spirit that break me, melt me, mold me, fill me. It’s not just working harder or finding more ways to serve, that’s probably there. It’s not saying, You know, I’m a good speaker.
I should speak in church. It’s, Holy Spirit, use my gifts for the kingdom of God. God, pour out your spirit on me that I can love you and serve your people in the world in the special way you called me to do it in your church. Gifts become spiritual gifts when they’re accompanied with a spiritual commitment and a spiritual vision.
Listen once more to the Apostle Peter as he quotes the Prophet Joel. In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young will see visions, your elders will dream dreams. Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy.
God has every intention of including us all in the work of renewal, of transformation, of salvation in the world, but it is so much more than each of us deciding what we’re good at and then taking a stab at it by ourselves. Pentecost reminds us that the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the body, united with Jesus as our head. And Paul says this really beautifully, I think, in 1 Corinthians 12, chapter 13, or verse 13, We are all baptized by one spirit into one body, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free. We are all given one spirit to drink.
I never noticed that little piece there. We’re given one spirit to drink from, to be nourished by. Each and every one of you has gifts, and I suspect there are gifts that are more than you know of that you have, that God is just waiting to open up in you. And there is a magnetism in your soul, in everybody’s soul, that causes you deep down to long to use those gifts in the service and love of God.
Drink this day of Pentecost from that one spirit. Receive the Holy Spirit that you may prophesy, see visions, and dream dreams, and watch your gifts become spiritual gifts. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Reverend Peg Bowman draws a parallel between the essence of Mother’s Day, as intended by its founder Anna Jarvis, and Ascension Day, urging her congregation to honor Jesus by living the reality of these days rather than merely marking them as holidays. She discusses the significance of awe and how moments of divine intervention, such as Jesus’ miracles and his ascension, left people in awe, stressing that awe and wonder should be an integral part of our spiritual life. Rev. Bowman then explores the path Jesus and his disciples took during the ascension, from Jerusalem, up the Mount of Olives, to Bethany, highlighting that Jesus used this journey to impart the entirety of Old Testament teachings to his disciples, unveiling the connections between the prophetic texts and himself, the Messiah.
She emphasizes Jesus’ approach of teaching disciples gradually, comparing it to learning to cook in school, where simple dishes are taught first before advancing to complex ones. She notes that just before his ascension, Jesus offered a comprehensive review to his disciples, preparing them for his departure. The disciples would require the Holy Spirit’s power to continue Jesus’ mission, an aspect that is emphasized in the context of the Pentecost. This power is likened to a battery needing to be fully charged before use, suggesting the disciples needed to be spiritually ‘charged’ to fulfill God’s plan.
In addition to being a power source, the Holy Spirit is depicted as a source of memory and knowledge, bringing Jesus’ teachings to mind and providing deeper insights. Before leaving, Jesus gives them a mission to be witnesses to God’s truth and love, extending their faith into all aspects of life, ranging from personal interactions to the global community. The sermon concludes with the note that the disciples and all believers never go forward alone, and that Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, can do more in this world than he could alone.
Well, last week on Mother’s Day, I was talking to the other churches about blessing and about how mothers bless their children and about how children can bless their parents. And I also mentioned the founder of Mother’s Day, whose name was Anna Jarvis. She was a Methodist who lived in West Virginia, not terribly far from here. Anyway, what she really meant to create when she created Mother’s Day was a holiday that would honor women for their sacrifices in much the same way that Veteran’s Day honors the deeds and sacrifices of our servicemen and women.
Anna Jarvis never meant to create a Hallmark holiday. And when she saw people making Mother’s Day into that, she was horrified and tried to put a stop to the holiday that she had created. And I mention this today because today is Ascension Day, which we celebrate. It was actually last Thursday, but we celebrate it today.
And this also is a time of remembrance and blessing. And like Mother’s Day, it’s much more meaningful if we honor Jesus by living its reality rather than simply celebrating a holiday. I’m kind of diving into the deep end, so let me back up and start at the beginning here. So today’s scriptures begin with the psalm that we read responsibly.
The version in the hymnal is a little bit different than the version that I was reading, but one of the first words in the version that I had, one of the first words in the psalm to describe God was the word “awesome.” And I remember back in the 1980s, for those of you who remember back that far, the word “awesome” was spoken so often it was practically worn out, right? It’s like things that were awesome back then included things like doing jazzercise in spandex outfits, or watching Matthew Broderick movies, or fighting over Cabbage Patch Kids at the small, or listening to big hair bands on our boom boxes, or watching Back to the Future. Totally awesome, right? Speaking as a teacher and a lover of the English language, I think it’s a crime to wear out a good word like that. But the word “awesome,” according to the Britannica dictionary, means something along the lines of feelings of fear, respect, and wonder. And I think the shepherds who saw and heard the angels on the night that Jesus was born were filled with awe.
And the people who witnessed Jesus saying to a paralyzed man take up your mat and go home, and then saw it happen, were filled with awe. We know the feeling, but it’s hard to put into words both the feeling and whatever it is that causes the feeling. Awesomeness so often leaves us at a loss for words, but in a good way. So when it comes time to talk about Jesus’ ascension like awesomeness, it’s hard to find the words to describe it.
And for the same reason, the events of that day are filled with awe. On the day that Jesus ascended, He basically led the disciples on the same path that they had traveled on Palm Sunday, only backwards. Instead of coming down into the city, they walked away from Jerusalem, up the Mount of Olives, out to Bethany. And if it hadn’t been made clear yet, it was certainly clear now that Jesus was not going to take on the powers that be in Jerusalem, Jesus had not come to replace the current King of Israel.
Jesus’ kingdom, as he said, is not of this world. Instead, Jesus spent his last day on earth reviewing with the disciples all the teachings of the Old Testament and the writings of Moses and the writings of the prophets that have to do with the Messiah, with himself. And Jesus put it all together for the disciples from beginning to end, probably for the first time for many of them, hearing the entire story from start to finish, from Genesis up until that day, all laid out in a logical order. Because up until now, Jesus had given the truth to disciples in bits and pieces, bite-sized chunks, which is what a good teacher does.
Good teachers know that students can’t master a subject without starting at the beginning and learning one lesson at a time, and practicing what they learn. I remember as an example, when we were in home ec class in high school, learning how to cook. Now they don’t start us off with baking wedding cakes, you know what I’m saying? (laughs) Right? We started out with something very simple. I think the first lesson was how to make scrambled eggs, which was something my mother had taught me years before, and it astounded me that the teacher told us that you had to actually measure the milk and the salt and the pepper.
That’s not how mom showed me. But the point was to learn to be disciplined and consistent in our cooking, and which I have to admit I still am not. But anyway, the teachers start at the beginning for a good reason. And that’s what Jesus had done when he first started teaching the disciples.
He had been with them for three years. And the subject matter was the truth of God, and the love of God, and how to live a life that pleases God. And he started with the basics, like any good teacher, which happened to be things like turning water into wine at a wedding, or teaching fishermen how to fish for people. After three years, the disciples began to understand that miracles are a part of life, or at least they’re meant to be, which is a lesson that I think our culture today has largely forgotten.
And that’s another sermon for another day. On this particular day, though, Jesus was about to go home to God the Father. So he did what any good teacher would do. He had a review.
And he reviewed Moses and the prophets and the Psalms and how Jesus was the fulfillment of them all, how Jesus was the one who would provide forgiveness of sins through his death and resurrection for anyone who wanted to change the direction of their lives. There was just one piece missing. The disciples, after Jesus left, would need God’s power to carry out Jesus’ mission when he was gone. They needed something Jesus had always had, something that Moses had, something that David had, something Elijah had, but something that most people did not have.
And that’s the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And that’s the subject of Pentecost next week. For now, for today, what is it that we and they are seeing here on this mountaintop? Well, first off, I want to show you a couple of photos. You got those up, okay? This is the Chapel of the Ascension in Jerusalem, in Israel.
This is, to the best of our knowledge, I mean, nobody’s absolutely exact after 2,000 years, but to the best of our knowledge, this is somewhere near where Jesus and the disciples were standing when all this took place. And of course, any place that Jesus stood that we’re kind of aware of, people built a chapel on top of it. That’s what they do. So this is the spot.
The chapel, of course, was not there. This was just a mountaintop at that point in time. But if you stand in the door of this chapel and turn around, next photo, this is what you see. Jerusalem at your feet, ready to be prayed for, ministered over.
That’s something. Thanks. That’s good. In this place, all that Jesus taught the disciples began to come together in the minds and hearts of the disciples, sort of, to a point.
One theologian makes this suggestion, just kind of come at it from a different angle. She says, “Think about your cell phones.” She says, “If we don’t charge the phone, it dies.” Now of course it doesn’t actually die because it’s not alive, right? But that’s what we say when the batteries have no more power. So we charge them. And charging is an ongoing process.
Every battery has an optimum charge time, the amount of time it takes to charge up the battery. Most smartphones, it’s about three hours. And you can’t just pull a new smartphone out of the box and start using it right away. It has to be charged first.
And if we use it frequently, before it’s fully charged, eventually it will shorten the lifespan of the battery. So optimal charging, fully charged, is the best way to start. In a sense, the disciples need to be charged. They need power before they can do and fulfill what God has in mind for them.
Jesus needs to essentially charge them, but He can’t do that before He goes home to God. So that’s He’s heading out. He’s heading back to God, back to the right hand of God. So Jesus tells the disciples to go back to the city of Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit.
And in actual fact, the Holy Spirit is far more than just a power source. It is that. But the Holy Spirit is also a source of memory and knowledge. The Spirit brings to our minds the things that Jesus has said.
The Spirit gives us insights deeper and more accurate than we could realize ourselves. And the Holy Spirit picks up where Jesus left off in terms of teaching. So Jesus says, “Wait until you’ve received power from on high.” He wants to make sure the disciples, both back then and now, were 100% taken care of before he went back home. He also gave them and us a mission to be witnesses to God’s truth and love in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
This does not mean going out and doing street corner preaching. Also does not mean that all of us are sent to minister to the entire world. We are not, all of us, called to travel. When Jesus was talking about taking the faith to the world, He is speaking of taking our faith into all aspects of life, into our personal lives, into our homes, into our families, our relationships with our friends, and the people that we work with, and our neighbors, as well as the community around us, as well as the world through the church’s ministries.
The world includes all of these things. The world includes the people who come to dinner for living stones. The people in our neighborhoods who are struggling to learn English. The people in our communities who need food or medical care or even just friendship.
All of this and more is the world that we are called to. Someone once said to me, “Think of Jerusalem, “Judaea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.” Think of it this way. Jerusalem is the neighborhood we live in. And Judea is the region we live in, so Pittsburgh or Western PA.
And Samaria is our next door neighbor nations, that would be Canada and Mexico, and then to the ends of the earth. And each one of us has a part to play in this calling. We are not all called to all four areas. Each one of us probably called to just one, whatever our gifts are.
Back in Jerusalem, after Jesus ascended, after the Holy Spirit came, the disciples broke bread together, faced opposition from the authorities together, healed people together, prayed together, cast out evil spirits and restored the dead to life together. And they learned to forgive together. And all of these things and more in the power of the Holy Spirit. Last thing before he leaves earth, Jesus blesses the disciples.
They do not go forward alone, and neither do we. So why does Jesus leave? Well, because Jesus can do more in this world through us in the power of the Holy Spirit than he can do alone as a single human being. And Jesus also gives us a glimpse of our future, Because resurrection and ascension is where we are all headed. While we wait, we pray, “Thy kingdom come because that’s home.” That’s where our loved ones are who’ve gone before us.
That’s where we are headed. This is, as the Apostle Paul says, “the greatness of His power for us who believe.” We are headed where Jesus is. We will follow in his footsteps, even though we can’t see exactly where they lead right now. But for now, we declare our God an awesome God.
We sing songs of joy and praise to Jesus, who is king over all the earth. Luke says Jesus’ followers are always in the temple blessing God. And this is a good thing for us to do too, while we’re waiting. We don’t just come to church because the building is open on Sundays.
We are here, we come to this place to be in God’s presence, in the presence of God’s Spirit, and to bless God as God has blessed us. We worship with great joy like the disciples did back then. And we look forward to blessing God and being blessed by God in that great and awesome reunion, awesome reunion in God’s kingdom. Amen.
You must be logged in to post a comment.