How do we give gifts?
Usually we think of wrapped presents for birthdays and Christmas or for a wedding or a baby shower.
But there are other gifts, a dinner or an invitation.
Food and money to care for the poor and needy. The stewardship to support the ministry of being the Church.
A visit with the sick or lonely or isolated.
Or the gift of encouragement, of prayer, of invitation and hospitality.
There are so many kinds of gifts and so many reasons to give and so many ways to give.
How do we give the gift of God? How do we give the gift of Jesus?
How was that gift given to us?
The giving and receiving of the gift of Jesus, it’s a big deal.
Paul, in today’s reading from the book of Acts, struggled with giving that gift to the people of Athens. Paul used their ideas and language and culture to express the Gospel in such a way that they could receive it.
Paul didn’t come in and tell everyone how wrong they were and then set them straight. He looked for common ground. He admired the Athenians religious devotion, even though it was to many Gods rather than the one God, and was expressed with statues and idols rather than the invisible. Paul especially admired their altar to the unknown God, an act of hospitality and welcome to any other god that they may have left out or not heard about.
Paul took that as in invitation to hear and receive the gift of Jesus, and he spoke of the gift of Jesus using Greek poets and philosophers as further common ground to communicate the news.
Paul spoke of all humanity sharing a common origin, of all humanity having an innate desire to search and grope for God, to know God and that we are all God’s offspring.
A few received the gift, a few mocked it and the rest yawned and said come back another day.
The gospel always colonizes and translates itself into every culture and language it encounters in order that the gift of God in Jesus Christ may be received.
All Saints Day, Christmas, Easter all have seasonal pagan origins, but the Church chose them as invitations to express and receive some aspect of the Gospel such as the Communion of Saints, the Incarnation of God and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Rather than condemn the culture it transformed the culture, it found common ground to communicate the Gospel message so that the gift might be received.
John’s Gospel takes the language of Gnosticism which disdains the flesh and all physical existence and uses it to speak of the flesh of God, the abundance of wine and bread and fish. John co-opts and subverts the language of the Gnostics both to challenge their disdain of the corporeal and the material and to invite them to taste and see God’s goodness. John proclaims that physical life invites us into God, and that God’s Spirit abides in physical life.
This is what we do as Christians, we take the stuff of our frail and fascinating human lives, the language, the culture, the sights and sounds and we see them all as pointing to God and making the invitation to receive the gift of Jesus.
We speak the language of western democracies, of pluralism, of consumer capitalism, of technology and therapy, of huge corporations and Walt Disney, of southern sights and sounds. How do we give the gift of Jesus in our language?
The Gospel is that God in Christ is embracing the world.
How do we express and translate that gift?
The examples that we are shown by God and John and Paul and at times even the Church is to set aside condemnation and to look for common ground, for what we hold in common, and in that common ground we find evidence of God at work in the world, in that language we hear God speaking.
In the examples of hospitality and invitation we hear the echoes of God in creation and in the flesh of Jesus. In invitation and hospitality we hear the language of God and Gospel.
There are so many ways to give gifts.
There are so many ways to share the gift of God, so many ways to give the Gospel gift of Jesus.
How will we do that?
Somehow we have each received that gift, wrapped up and spoken to us in our own language.
How will we give that gift?
Our baptismal covenant speaks of seeking and serving Christ in all persons and respecting the dignity of every human being.
The scripture reveals the necessity of not condemning and seeking common ground.
In Jesus we see that invitation and hospitality reveal the heart of God.
The gift of love.
That is what we are really talking about, how do we love, how do we give and receive that gift?
So we listen for the Spirit speaking, in our hearts, in the lives of others, in the world, in the scriptures and sacraments, we listen for the way that is love.
We listen. And then…and then we speak.