Spiritual Gifts

The Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, eternally breathed forth by the Father through the Son. Yet that life always has a shape, and the shape of God’s life is relational. Father, Son, and Spirit share an eternal communion with each other, without beginning or end. Out of the abundance of their eternal communion they created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. The Father spoke the Word, His Son, in the Breath of the Spirit and the world was made. Again, out of the abundance of their triune love, they provided salvation to our shipwrecked race. The Father sent His only-begotten Son to redeem the death-afflicted creation by pouring out the Holy Spirit to usher it into the fullness of life again. Our life as Christians is a life shaped by our relationship to the Father in the Son by the Spirit. We are what we are because of the life we have been made to share with them.

The life the Spirit gives is not a vague energy that God supplies for our arbitrary use. It is given with a shape and for a purpose. The life the Spirit gives is Christ-shaped. We are given the life of Christ to make us Christians—a life that endures and grows more glorious even as the life of Adam and Eve passes away from among and around it. The Church Fathers observed that as the Spirit moved over the Blessed Virgin Mary to conceive Christ in her womb, so the Spirit’s mission to us through Baptism and Confirmation is the reproduction of Christ in every Christian. As St. Paul said to the Ephesians, Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. As we continue in the new life we have been given, Christ is there where life from God emerges, giving us our being. We are, over time, configured to Christ who dwells there. He becomes the shape of our life. The end of this transformation is that every Christian is conformed to Christ while also being the distinct person they are. As the Persons of the Trinity do not lose their distinction through their unity, so the personality of each Christian is not obliterated as they share union with God. I am purposed to become Fr. Hayden-as-known-in-communion-with-God-and-His-Church.

Because the life the Spirit gives is Christ-shaped, it is also Church-shaped. The Church is the body of Christ, the continuation of Christ’s work with the Spirit in the world, the conscripting of Adam and Eve’s wayward children into the mission of Son and Spirit, the adoption of our orphan race into the family of the Father. The Church, by her very existence, bears witness to the fact that at the most foundational level, reality is communal. The gift of our transformation into the likeness of Christ is given to us through the community of the Church. It is there that Christ promises to be with us always to the end of the age. The community of the Church is held by what St. Paul calls “the unity of the Spirit.” The Spirit’s first gift to the Church is to uphold all its members in a union more profound than any social agreement we can imagine or invent. Our participation in this unity is what St. Paul calls “the bond of peace,” which is a relational pattern into which we are called that draws us out of the exile of self-interest into fellowship, which is where our life in Christ is cultivated and flourishes.

Assisting this participation in the unity of the Spirit as we are transformed into the likeness of Christ, the Church has been granted outward signs of God’s presence as deposits of the life we will know in the Resurrection at the end of the age. First and foremost, the Church has been granted the Sacraments to inaugurate us into new life (Baptism and Confirmation), to sustain and fortify that life (Eucharist, Confession, Unction) and to shape that life (Orders and Matrimony). As we participate in the sacramental life of the Church, we begin to find that the Spirit gives us yet more. What are often called the “gifts” of the Spirit are, as Fr. Francis Hall observes, “the inward dispositions of the Christian.” The gifts of the Spirit are named in Isaiah 11: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.” The gifts are the evidence of the Spirit’s co-mission with Christ (the root of Jesse). By virtue of sharing Christ’s life, the gifts are given to all Christians, but not in precisely the same configuration. The Spirit gives gifts to each according to the place they are called to inhabit in the Church.

On the foundation of the Sacraments and the inward dispositions of the Christian, the Spirit cultivates every member of the Church toward participation in a ministry. This term is short-hand for ‘administration,’ or the receiving of a gift in order to distribute it. The ministries of the Church are those avenues by which we give forth what we have received. We have not, after all, received life for ourselves, but to offer it in fellowship as it is offered in fellowship to us by others. St. Paul enumerates these ministries in a couple of ways through his letters. One way is by revealing a diversity of pastoral offices in the Church (as in Ephesians 4): “And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Another way is through the diversity of manifestations of the Spirit’s presence (as in I Corinthians 12): “For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.” Note that in both lists, it is clear that the gifts are given not for their own sake, but as a sign of God’s presence in the Church to the end of bringing all into Christ. They are aides to the common life shared by Christians with each other in their Lord.

The sacraments, the gifts, and the ministries produce in us, over time, the fruits of the Spirit. Perhaps the most well-known list of these fruits is in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “For the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” As each member is configured to Christ by the Spirit, they begin to show the outward dispositions of a sacred life together. Their fellowship comes to be characterized by traits that cannot be accounted for by any social contract—they are the workings of new life from within that become evident among. Life is received and life is given. As we pray in the Litany each week: “that all may perceive within our midst the presence of Christ.” The fruits of the Spirit are those works of mercy we perform in the lives of one another as we consider one another as more important than ourselves. We are each taken care of, but not because we are looking to get what is ours. We begin to live an interdependent life that freely gives and freely receives. We begin to walk in the love with which God first loved us.

Having been cultivated in this life together, the Spirit will then produce among us our mission. Again, we are not saved for ourselves. The more we take seriously the call to be formed in the Christian life, the more we will find doors and windows opening through which we are oriented toward those who do not yet know Christ, who have not yet received this new life. As Christ came to call the sick and the sinners, so we can expect the Spirit to lead us out as ambassadors of heaven into the world. Mission is the outward-orientation of a mature church. It looks locally to extend the love of God it has received out into the place it has been planted. It provides a diverse set of examples of Christian maturity and formation so as to call many new and different disciples into its fellowship. It never says, “We are enough for ourselves.” It always holds open a seat in hospitality for the least of these to enter in. Mission keeps the church from becoming insular. As the gates of the New Jerusalem never close, so in our churches we must always be vigilant for the opportunity to welcome the stranger in the hopes that he may become a brother. As one of my favorite folk song-lyrics goes: “There’s a sign on the barn in the cabbage town, when the rain picks up and the sun goes down: sinners, come inside! With no money, come and buy! No clever talk, no gift to bring, requires our lowly, lovely King. Come, you empty-handed, you don’t need anything!”

We should note that this is the fruit of a stable community over a generation. We cannot short-cut the life of discipline, prayer, and humility that participates in the Spirit’s transformation of our lives. We cannot skip ahead to the fruits of holy fellowship, or else we will either start to fake it or become more like a cult than a church. But if we persevere in the life the Spirit gives, we will become more and more like God the Trinity, whose life we share. We will still be creatures and ones in need of constant help. But we will also testify through our life together to the presence of something more, something unaccounted for by anything this world can provide. We will be an icon of God’s redemption, the first-fruits of the new creation—a sign of what the world to come will be in its fullness.