This is a tool that is available in the life of our congregation. It is like a tool that most congregations have available as a part of their community life. It’s a daily devotional guide. This particular one is called These Days, and it is written by a variety of Christian traditions across the United State (also Canada and Mexico). There is a reading for each day. It has a Scripture verse, then a paragraph about the verse, and then a prayer and a concluding action step as well. It’s not the only devotional tool, but it is a good one, and one that you can pick up at the church office here. If we suddenly have a rush on them, then maybe Bruce Farnell can order more of them. But we do want you to know it’s available.

 

I like it because the thoughts and the Scripture texts that it uses, most weeks, are intersecting with the Lectionary text. They very often are the same texts that preachers around the world are going to be preaching on in the coming Sunday. So it’s a way of kind of peeking into the Scripture and thinking about it before you get to church on Sunday. At least for me, that’s helpful.

 

I was particularly touched this week by one written by Nancy Ferguson, and she talks about this text from Corinthians. Many gifts, one spirit. Many parts to the body, one body. She remembers how growing up and going to Christian camps and conferences, this text was a favorite to be acted out in the camp skit. You may have acted it out. It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, how some skits can be passed from one generation of campers to another, from summer to summer, until they get to be kind of a ritual in the life of camps. She talked about how, in this skit, which a group of campers would perform before the camp as a whole, they would act like one camper was drowning in the pool, or the lake, or the Alafia River, wherever the body of water was that was a part of the camp. So then suddenly, the body would have to try to help the camper. The eyes might see the camper drowning (the camper who was acting like the eyes), but without the legs (the camper who was supposed to be the legs), the eyes seeing the camper drowning was to no avail. The eyes had to have the legs to be able to help the drowning camper. So the person who had the eye mask on would sit on the back of the person who was the legs, and then crawl over toward the pool that way. But when they got to the side of the pool, the eyes seeing and the ears hearing the camper drowning, and the legs getting there weren’t any good unless the arms could reach in and pull the camper out. And what good was that if there weren’t lungs to breathe air into the drowning camper? In this way, skit acts out how there are many parts to the body, but unless the parts come together in unity and in service, there is no good end reached.

 

The apostle says the gifts are given to the body, different gifts, but the gifts are given for the common good. For the common good.

 

On the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national observance, it made me think of another story about two women in my life, who I think did a particularly good job of discerning gifts and using them for the common good: Mrs. Ruth Martin and Mrs. Edith Kope. Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Kope were children’s music directors respectively at the Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Orlando (Pre-Disney), where I was growing up, and Mrs. Kope was the children’s music director at the Washington Shores Presbyterian Church in Orlando. The Washington Shores Presbyterian Church was a black congregation, and the Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church where I grew up was a congregation that was completely made up of Caucasians.

 

They each had boys, boys from about nine to age twelve, in some abundance in the midst of that congregation. So they came together to start, from about 1965 to maybe about 1969, what they called the Grace Covenant Washington Shore Boys’ Soprano Chorus. At that time, at that particular age, the name was not an obstacle to my joining it or being a part of it.

 

Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Kope worked together to bring boys between the ages of nine and twelve, black boys and white boys, together into this chorus. They were quite effusive in their praise in standing before us and telling us that our voices were of a very unusual quality. “In fact,” they said to us together, “you are silver sopranos!” Eat your heart out! I would tell you now that I know in retrospect that it was a con, except that I really am not convinced that they weren’t convinced that we were extraordinary voices, silver sopranos, and that we just had to be pulled together because of the beautiful sound we made in the world.

 

They pulled together this chorus in Orlando at that time, and had us practice on Sunday afternoons. We would sing together. Usually Mrs. Kope, from the Washington Shores church would play the piano and Mrs. Martin would lead the chorus. I remember still what they looked like. Mrs. Martin had a very wonderful full head of white hair, and she almost always wore a straight line skirt, very often maroon, and a white blouse and a string tie with it. Mrs. Kope had kind of a paisley dress that she wore. I can see her at that upright Sunday School piano still, banging out those songs as Mrs. Martin led us singing together.

 

We began, lo and behold, we began to get some invitations to go out and sing, The Grace Covenant Washington Shores Boys’ Soprano Chorus around in the neighborhood! In remembering this, in thinking about it, I called my mother to ask her what she remembered about the history of this. I was thinking that there was some big community event, some crisis, that we came together to sing at, and that was our genesis. She said, “No, no. I remember very clearly the first thing that they had the chorus sing at was a meeting of the Women of the Church at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Don’t you remember? Because one of the boys, Jeremiah Johnson from the Washington Shores Church sang ‘O Danny Boy’ as a solo in the midst of it.” And then I remembered him singing ‘O Danny Boy’ and how good he sounded on that Irish song, that young black American with all of these other white and black voices around him. I don’t think there was an Irish head in the mix, but boy -- we sang the schmaltz out of that song when we sang it.

 

We got other invitations to sing. We wore our dark pants and white shirts and long, skinny ties, clip-on ties, but ties nonetheless. I remember we got invited to sing at the Extension Office celebration of the County Agricultural Department. We sang at something at the Bob Carr Auditorium downtown, that the mayor had us sing for. And then we got invited also to sing for a community event where they were dedicating a building, and we sang and the laying of a cornerstone of it. And we sang, literally in black and white, at the public television station, a public education program where they featured us singing.

 

We began to build up a little bit of a reputation. And I think it was a good reputation. We sang here and there, and we began to feel ourselves connected with each other, to feel life together amongst us.

 

Like so many other things in our Christian walk, it’s clear now in retrospect that what made us unusual… I wasn’t as aware of it at the time, but it’s clear to me now later… that what made us unusual was not our wonderful silver soprano voices, as sweet as those might have been, but the image in 1966 in Orlando of a boys’ chorus made up of black boys and white boys together. The image was more powerful and healing for that community than our particular sound that we made.

 

At any rate, this is how we came to sing on an April evening in 1968 at a community memorial service in the Washington Shore’s church for Martin Luther King, Jr., following his assassination. I remember the solemnity of the congregation assembled that night. I remember the fear of my own parents in taking us, about what would happen, and how they gathered the boys as a group and told us to walk in together as a group. I remember Mrs. Martin crying while she led us, and Mrs. Kope crying while she played the piano. I remember we sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with Leslie Nordman and Jeremiah Johnson dueting together on the “Lilies of the Valley” verse. In retrospect, I am able to see now that that chorus was a great help to that community in 1968 because of the image that it lifted up. An image of people of other races being able to come together in actual harmony at a time when it seemed that the world was just fraying apart.

 

In retrospect, it’s clear to me that it’s a testimony to the astonishing power of the friendship of those women to attempt to transform a larger problem. It really was a witness to their ability to come together to discern gifts and to use that discernment in coming up with some blessing for the common good, for the body as a whole. I don’t know how they did it. I like to imagine them, to try and figure out how they got that course together. Was it some joint meeting of church musicians that brought them into exposure with each other? Did they work in the school system together? I know Mrs. Martin did. I don’t remember whether Mrs. Kope did. Did they go to lunch together? How did they discover that they each had a disproportionate number of boy sopranos in their congregations? Did one suggest that they risk having to practice together, or did they bring them together for the purpose of singing at that St. Patrick’s Day lunch?

 

Somehow, in the context of their friendship, and seeing the gifts they had, they found the call to come forward in what turned out to be a blessing, I think, for the larger community. It speaks to the remarkable power of friendship working together to create a positive synergy, larger than the task at hand.

 

I wonder about what kind of hospitality they had to extend to each other to find the ground for that common work?

 

I believe this is something like what St. Paul is saying to us in the text from Corinthians today, about there being different gifts in the body. In a difficult situation, these two women, from very different communities, saw a problem and moved to discover what their own particular gifts were (not that they had every gift), but what gift did they have and what gifts did they have in the body around them? And they looked at a fairly pitiful resource, ten-year-old boys whose voices hadn’t changed yet, and saw in that a means to come and bring this positive energy to bear on the problem they had at hand.

 

What gifts of the body do we need now, on the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday celebration? I focus on that, particularly examining our welcome to the entire community. What gifts do we need in our body to be extending to the wider community around us?

 

One of the things we heard at the Session Meeting this week was the announcement that in Uganda, in Popoli, they are very close to completing the second school that you have been a part of helping them build there. They have finished the pre-school, and now they are just about to finish the primary school. We were talking about ways we might celebrate the completion of the school there, even as they celebrate it there. There are several hundred students in the school. One of the folks at the meeting said that this congregation, in conjunction with that Christian community there in Uganda, built these two schools for something over $200,000. They said it didn’t cost the $40 million it’s costing Oprah to build one in South Africa, either.

 

You know, that’s true. It bears some investigation – what gifts did you find in yourselves and with them that lets you build these two schools for that very reasonable price in two, not only countries but continents, separated from each other. What was the spirit drawing out of the bodies.

 

I think, Bill, in retrospect, it had a lot to do with your openness to hospitality in taking Emmanuel Ofambi, who was here visiting us because his niece was having heart surgery, out to breakfast. You decided you would take this stranger in our midst to breakfast one morning while his niece was recovering from surgery, simply because you didn’t like the idea of his being here alone in our community. He was sitting over at Dr. Campbell’s house. And in the narrative as I have heard it from you, you found a common parallel, a commonality in the fact that you each like grits! Which you were very familiar with, and which he hadn’t seen before, but which delighted him. Now that’s a meager resource to start with, the power of liking grits together! But we can tie pretty closely that openness, that hospitality, that can-I-take-you-to-breakfast, to your discovering a friendship that led to our friendship, that led to the realization they have the ability to build these schools and we have an ability to partner with them, and we are just about ready to open the primary school.

 

What do we need to find within us to open us in that way to the community around us? Who is there in the community that needs some giftedness from us to be drawn in? To be included? What gifts of the body do we need now for the common good?

 

James Forbes, who is the preacher at the Riverside Church in New York, says, “When your need intersects with God’s agenda, that’s when things are going to happen.” I paraphrase that into saying When your gift, whatever it might be, or the gifts around you (whether it’s ten-year-old boys whose voices haven’t changed yet, or willingness to take somebody you don’t know to breakfast), when that gift intersects with God’s agenda, that’s when things are going to happen. That’s when the world starts getting changed.

 

The City of Tampa, in their celebration of the MLK holiday tomorrow, has a motto they are lifting up. You may have heard it. The motto is  Not just a day off, but rather a day on. Not just a day off, but rather a day in. A day in service to the community as a whole. Read scripturally, a day in service to the needs of the body. The common good. That’s what our gifts have been given to us for. To bless the entire body.

What gift do we need now? Which of your gifts does the body particularly need? What gift are you being called to bring forward now? Forbes says, “When your gift intersects with God’s agenda, you may feel the Spirit tugging you forward to be a part of blessing the body as a whole.

 

It is a great act of personal courage sometimes on discerning that a community needs a particular gift. To examine one’s own self to see if it is present within you. And then to risk the vulnerability and the sacrifice required to bring that gift to bear for the community’s good.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, of course, a pastor in the Christian church in America. And he was, I’m quite certain, familiar with this text from First Corinthians that the Christian church has to read this morning. He once said this, “We need the vision to see the problems of this time as the opportunity to transform ourselves and our community. We have a responsibility to discover what we are called to do. We have to look within ourselves and discover what God is calling us to do.” It sound to me there like he is reading I Corinthians 12, about the different gifts within us. And after we discover that, he says, we should set out to do it with all of the strength and the power we find from the knowledge that there is at the core of the universe, at the very structure of the cosmos, something that ultimately is going to result in the triumph and the fulfillment of all that which is right.

 

That knowledge that ultimately God’s truth is marching on and will triumph, ought to give us the courage and power we need to pull forward the gifts that the Spirit is tugging out of us to try and bless the common good. To try and transform the problems we see in our community. The knowledge of that power is a part of what pushes us forward, even when the going may be very difficult indeed.

 

Now there are varieties of gifts, but it is the same spirit. In Popoli, here in Tampa, in Washington Shores and Grace Covenant.

 

There are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates them in all. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another, according to the same Spirit, knowledge. To another, by the same spirit, faith. To one, gifts of healing by the Spirit. To another, gifts of prophecy by the Spirit. To one, various kinds of tongues; to another, the ability to interpret tongues. All of these gifts are activated by one common Spirit, by the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually, individually, just as the Spirit determines and chooses.

 

God has equipped you to enable you to be a part of transforming the difficulties and the problems that are in the common community around us. Let us open our ears and our eyes to hear and discern where the Spirit is calling that equipping, those gifts, forward, that we might be a part of bringing us closer to the Kingdom of God.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2007