Pentecost (A): I Corinthians 12: 3-7, 12-13
Many years ago, there was a popular game show called Truth or Consequences. A contestant in this show would be asked a difficult trivia question, which the contestant would usually get wrong. Getting the question wrong had consequences! The contestant would then have to participate in a potentially embarrassing stunt.
One unintended effect of this show’s title was to affirm that truth has consequences. If something is true, certain conclusions necessarily follow. For example, if we claim that Jesus of Nazareth is true God as well as true man, and that His Passion, Death and Resurrection are, together, the defining moment of human history, that claim has consequences. Our lives cannot be like the lives of those who do not claim this. Our perception of reality, our ways of thinking and acting, must be fundamentally transformed by this claim. If not, then we do not really believe that our faith in Jesus Christ is true. It may be only a slogan. It may be only political spin. But it is not truth unless it has real, visible, perceptible consequences for us.
Each generation and each culture has preferred ways of describing itself and defining itself. Contemporary American culture likes to define itself as embodying the virtues of diversity and inclusivity. When we use such terms, however, are they really truths for us, or are they mere slogans or spin? Truth has consequences; slogans do not. Truth changes the way we see things and respond to them. Slogans merely make us feel better about ourselves and help us ignore inconvenient truths. Truth is bigger than any group in society and challenges every group; slogans help us feel that our group is right and that other groups are wrong.
If we look openly and honestly at our American society, we can easily see that, in our allegedly “inclusive” and “diverse” culture, some groups are praised while others are subtly or openly despised. Some individuals become celebrities for their ‘correct’ viewpoints; others are ostracized and virtually lynched by social media for daring to declare that the slogans have no clothes.
This was first brought home to me when I began to travel from my predominantly Franco-American community to attend a Jesuit high school in Portland, Maine. It helps to know that Portland has long proclaimed itself to be the progressive, inclusive and diverse Mecca of Maine. It also helps to know that Jesuits have prided themselves on their techniques of Ignatian discernment. When I, as a high school freshman, first met with the Jesuit who was assigned as my guidance counselor, I was told that I would probably not do well in English because, you know, I had that French name. A classmate of mine was subjected to ten minutes of straight ridicule by a teacher who tried to convince him that he was not pronouncing his French surname correctly. Imagine anyone trying this on someone with a Jewish or Italian surname. That teacher – who was not at all French – later became a mayor of Portland. The day before a football game, there would be a rally in the school gym before the assembled student body and faculty. The rally before the game with Biddeford – a predominantly Franco-American working class community – was a series of French slurs strung together. The Jesuits did not object.
It was brought home to me in other ways. When I was a teenager, youth ministry was known as CYO (Catholic Youth Organization). Then, as now, the predominant model was to provide an intensely social, active and loud experience. That automatically excluded me. Years later, my growing attraction to contemplative prayer and lifestyle would not score me many points, either. Inclusive? Diverse? Not! Only certain kinds of people need apply. The rest must change in order to conform.
The use of such slogans to make ourselves feel better about ourselves – and not to see them as truths with consequences – is not unique to contemporary America. It has been around as long as humans have lived in social groups. Saint Paul encountered it among the people he helped convert in Corinth, as an example. The Corinthian Christians has their own slogans, their equivalents to our “inclusivity” and “diversity”. Like us, however, these were mere slogans. As others have said, “all are equal”, but “some are more equal than others”. The slogans were used to justify exclusivity and prejudice and to shield the community from acknowledging their existence. Our slogans perform the same function for us today.
Paul called this “slogan” way of thinking kata sarka (according to the flesh) – in other words, riddled by sinful attitudes while seeking to appear righteous and superior to others. For Paul, such slogans were a means of ignoring the demands of the truth of the Gospel. They were an effort to have it both ways – to claim to be Christian while still conforming to the prejudices of the age.
Paul then reminded the Corinthian Christians of the essential truths of Christian faith. By their baptism, they have been incorporated into the Church, the Body of Christ. The Church is not formed according to the social prejudices of any given culture but according to the will and purposes of God. The Holy Spirit builds up the Church by giving it members with truly diverse gifts. Some of these gifts are also valued in secular culture, while others are not. That is irrelevant. What matters is the truth given us by the One who is Truth. Christ builds His Church, not us. Christ determines, through His Spirit, what our needs are and blesses us with people who possess every needed gift.
The main problem we encounter is when we as Christians evaluate such gifts by the standards of the culture in which we live. Take this as one example. Since the coming of the pandemic, civil leaders have distinguished between “essential” and “non-essential” workers. So, too, we in the Church subtly distinguish between “essential” and “non-essential” gifts. The standard for such a distinction? The prejudices of our culture. The slogans.
But this is not the truth of the Gospel. Paul told the Corinthians that, in the Body of Christ, every gift is essential. Every member is essential. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you”; nor can the head say to the foot, “I do not need you”. In fact, Paul reminds the Corinthians, even many whom the culture dismisses as unessential have become privileged means of grace for others. Note that Paul does not say that the hand becomes an eye nor that the foot becomes a head. Each member, as he or she is, is essential to the spiritual health of the Body of Christ. If the Body of Christ is not as spiritually healthy as it should be, then this truth is being ignored. Some people are not valued as gifts of God. We have chosen slogans over truth once again.
Looking at history, it should be obvious to us that human effort alone cannot bring about a world that is really inclusive and diverse. This can only come about by accepting, in faith, the gifts of the Spirit. We must profess this as truth, not a slogan, and realize that, as truth, it has consequences. It matters. It changes everything.
Pentecost is the feast of this outpouring of the Spirit and the building up of the Church. If we call it truth, it has consequences – now and forever.