Self, Skills and Spirit

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Sunday 9 May 2021 by Revd Dr Sam Wells.

Readings of address: John 15: 9-17

I became a priest because I failed to be a lay person. I found being a lay Christian so hard. How much should you strive to earn? How much is too much? What kind of house should you live in? Should you rent or work for years to buy? How should you balance living for others and looking after yourself? By contrast, being a priest is easy. You live in a house provided for you. You receive the same stipend as all the other priests. You don’t earn it: it’s simply a gift to enable you not to have to earn money.

So I’ve always regarded my being a priest as a bit of a failure. When I was first ordained, I did a PhD. Like many such enterprises, it had a fancy title. But what I was really writing about was, ‘What does a holy life look like for a lay person?’ The title ‘spiritual leader’ always makes me think of becoming an ayatollah, but nonetheless I found myself a spiritual leader for a wonderful group of honest, faithful, struggling, fragile Christians; and it was part of my job to help them answer that question, ‘What does a holy life look like for a lay person?,’ for themselves. And the irony was, I hadn’t been able to answer it for myself; which is why I’d become a priest.

I haven’t entirely wasted the last 30 years, and I’ve discovered a few things about being a holy lay person which I’d like to share with you this morning. It comes down to three words. All three words are about humility – if by humility we mean a proper estimation of our place in the world: not too exalted and not too lowly. So here are the three words.

The first word is self. Most of life is showing up. Self is about just being there. It’s a statement that your individuality, your amazing qualities, and your unique sense of humour are sometimes less significant than your belonging, your willingness to surrender your agenda and way of doing things for a greater whole. It’s saying ‘I’m prepared to perform humble tasks, even if I won Mastermind at the age of 24, even if I’ve received a string of Oscars, even if I find some of those tasks tiresome or tiring.’ To run a community, everyone needs to give something of themselves like this. There’s cleaning to be done, leaflets to be handed out, food to be prepared, clearing up afterwards to be stayed-around for. It can be a liberating experience if you’ve spent all week in a professional or domestic role and on a Sunday or Wednesday you set aside that role and do something simple, communal, and largely invisible.

The second word is in some ways the opposite of the first. It’s skills. We work hard on our skills. We become an 80-word-per-minute touch typist. We increase our running to 10k a day. We excel at quilting. We win the World Town Crier gold medal for the third year running. Sometimes our skills coalesce around our work, and we become proficient at teaching geography or driving a fork-lift truck. But sometimes we invest so much in such skills that, when we’re made redundant or retire, our sense of self has shrunk so much we don’t know who we are.

Skills can be a mixed blessing for a church. At first glance you’d think a congregation was a pooling of all the talents – the bus driver drives the minibus, the accountant does the money, the comms expert runs the website, the teacher does the Sunday School. But the danger here is that a church starts to look just like a bus company, a financial services firm, a communication consultancy or a school. Skills can be a fantastic asset – but only if the skilled person is willing for those trained abilities to be baptised and reframed to equip the body of Christ. Reading the story of the exodus out loud might be something you’d ask a professional actor to do; but sometimes the refugee from Egypt with poor English and a voice faltering from many hardships can speak those words of liberation more beautifully.

The third word is Spirit. Spirit is different from the other two. Self says, ‘Take O take me as I am.’ Skills say, ‘Melt me, mould me, fill me, use me.’ Together they offer ourselves and our skills as a humble gift. Spirit is different. It’s about transformation. The little boy with loaves and fishes offered what he had – and Jesus made it food for 5000. Peter and Andrew knew how to fish from a boat – but Jesus taught them to fish for people. Spirit fits you into a much bigger story than you thought you were in.

I remember taking a service with around a dozen people present and being so caught up with what I was going to say in the sermon that I hadn’t realised the person leading the intercessions hadn’t shown up. So when I was about to say ‘Let us pray,’ I saw we had a vacancy. Taking a risk, I said, ‘I wonder who would like to lead our prayers today.’ One person volunteered. She’d come to the church initially because we ran a literacy programme on weekdays. She hadn’t made terrific progress with the literacy course, but she’d started coming to the weekday service. When she stepped up I have to say I had second thoughts, because she wasn’t habitually the most lucid participant. But how wrong I was. She told God precisely what was needed. ‘Do something about the environment,’ she demanded; ‘Get jobs for these young people hanging around the common,’ she went on. ‘Get that joker out of Downing Street and give us someone who knows what they’re doing,’ she concluded. She taught all of us how to put our lives and the life of the world on the table for the Holy Spirit to transform – which is what intercession is. That was how the Spirit enables us to do things we and others never knew we had in us: which is what true calling is.

Self, skills and Spirit. I want to ask you to do two things now. I want to start by inviting you to take an inventory of your life, and consider whether you’ve got a good balance of the three. Is it possible you’re overemphasising your skills, and you have a tendency to turn every new endeavour into an opportunity to exercise your undoubted talents? Could it be you’re allowing your shyness and fear of rejection to prevent you taking the risk of putting yourself forward to serve in areas where you don’t have experience but you’re sensing the Spirit might be equipping you? Is there something going on where you may not be playing a decisive role, but you can offer something precious simply by showing up and mucking in? You might want to get a person who knows and loves you to help you identify how to offer yourself, cultivate your skills and make yourself open to the Spirit – since you may not always be the best judge. I remember in one congregation of about 25 people we started the Pentecost service by going round and each saying to the person on our right a gift in them we cherished and we wondered if the person should let the Spirit develop further. I wonder if that was the best Pentecost service I ever led.

Now for the second and last thing I want to ask you to do. I want to invite you to take these three headings, self, skills and Spirit, and use them to think about you, money, and the church. Notice how each heading suggests a different approach. If we start with self, we can keep it simple. Just as most of life is just showing up, so investing in the church and what it’s doing can be very straightforward: you just assign the first percentage of your income to your church. The traditional figure is 10%. We can argue about pre-tax or post-tax and about other charitable giving till the back end of tomorrow. The point is not the exact percentage, but that there is a percentage and that it’s the first percentage and that you use a system like direct debit so you don’t have to think about it. Keep it simple.

If you take the skills approach, it quickly gets very complicated. You start calculating how much you give in time by showing up and in skills by offering your talents and create an algorithm by which this much of one thing take away so much of another thing yields a third figure; and too often it just gets so complicated you never get round to the money part at all. You get into elaborate mental debates saying this church needs this much money for those things of which I like these things and don’t care for the other things and I bet those other people don’t give very much and wait till I know if I get the job I’m interviewing for. And it never happens.

If you take the Spirit approach, be warned. Because the maths gets out of control. It stops being about a simple conscience-salving gift or a complex logarithmic not-getting-round-to-it – and it starts being about extravagant generosity, sacrificial investment, joyful abundance. It’s no longer careful calculation and elaborate sophistry – it’s now saying, ‘Tell you what, if I believe in this, I want to invest in it and I realise it’s beyond percentages, because it’s about gratitude for life, and love, and faith, and truth, and existence itself. I want this community to be everything God’s calling it to be, and that requires my heart and soul, but also my hand and my wallet. I’m going to make a gesture, take a risk to reflect the risk God’s taken on me, and if in a year it’s not been that bad, I’m going to make a bigger gesture, and trust that God will honour those who honour God.

Keep it simple, make it complicated, or let it be joyful. Self, skills and Spirit. We get to choose how we want to go about giving. But however we do it, recall one thing. When God invested in us, God came in person: Jesus is the self of God, who for 30 years didn’t do anything special, but handed out leaflets and put out chairs and cleaned up afterwards. Then Jesus started exercising his skills – a bit of healing here, teaching there, and, for a flourish, raising the dead. But what really changed everything is the work of the Spirit: for in Jesus the Spirit made one who was fully human and fully God, something never known before or since, that takes us on an adventure in which all we know is that God and us will be forever inseparable.

That question, ‘What constitutes a holy life for a lay person?,’ I didn’t stop asking when I completed my PhD. I’m still trying to find out. But what I’ve learned applies to money as much as, or more than, to everything else. It’s about our self, and that’s simple, straightforward, and a good guide most of the time. It’s about our skills, and that can be fulfilling, but it can also drift away from true service, and also get impossibly complicated. But finally it’s about Spirit, which leads each one of us to do things we never imagined we could do. The way we invest our money is perhaps our biggest witness to what we believe about what is true forever. The life of forever beyond self and skills: it’s the life of the Spirit. The joy of the gospel is to start living that life now.