Saturday Morning Sermon (VI)

Here's another excerpt from our series last month on Spiritual Gifts.  Our text was 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.  You can listen to the whole sermon here.

Maybe it’s because one of my passions happens to be music that I always think of concert band when I read this stuff in 1 Corinthians 12.

When I was a teacher I played saxophone with our High School band for a semester (we’re keeping with the back to school theme here). And one of the things I liked about concert band is: when you got your part for a new song, you had no idea what the song was gonna sound like. Tenor Sax seldom got the melody, you see, so when you played it, it just sounded like random notes all over the place. Incidentally, that may be why when Dani was in concert band, her sister made her practice out in the garage. Because by itself, the clarinet part was just a bunch of squeaky high notes that barely sounded like music.

See: it was only when you played your part with the flute and the tuba and the trumpet and percussion and trombone—you know, all the different instruments together?—only then did it sound like a real song.

And the sax part, of course, sounded nothing at all like the flute part. But then again, the song would be pretty dull if all 70 parts were the same flute part. And the instruments are all pitched differently, too, so the different parts were all written in different keys. Which meant that the parts for a Bb trumpet and the Eb Alto Sax and an F French Horn looked nothing at all like each other. You couldn’t play the flute part even if you wanted to; but when you all played together, it turned out you were playing the exact same song.

And... do you see where I’m going with this? Paul says there’s different gifts, but one Spirit who gives them.

And he’s trying to set us free to play our part with all we got, even if it’s not the flute or the tuba—even if we’re not playing a melody part, or it looks like we’re in a different key, or we can’t quite hear how it fits into the whole song—to play it with all our heart and soul and mind and strength because—because that’s the part the divine composer gave us to play—and we can trust that it fits with all the other parts to make a single, harmonious song of worship for him.