Gifts of Character – Br. Lain Wilson

SSJE Sermons

John 7:16-18

When we hear “south of France” today, we may think of sunny beaches or fields of lavender. A nice place to go on vacation. But in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the association was with heresy. Followers of a heterodox form of Christianity, whom history has come to know as Cathars, were prevalent throughout the region. Combatting their beliefs posed a particular challenge for a Church mired in its own problems. Actual combat followed the murder of a papal official in 1208: the Albigensian Crusade was a brutal war to cleanse the region of heresy.

This was the time and region where Dominic, whom we remember today, discovered his own vocation. He had been in the church his entire life, but it was during a trip through the region, before the outbreak of war, that he found his own gifts of preaching and teaching, and his personal asceticism meeting the Church’s need to engage, teach, and convert those caught up in heterodox belief. It is perhaps no accident that in his own life he modeled the very characteristics that were most highly prized by so-called Cathars in the region: he didn’t eat meat, he refrained throughout his life from sexual activity, and he voluntarily accepted simple, even rough way of life.

Twelve years after Dominic’s death, in 1233, nine members of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, which he had founded, provided testimony for his canonization process. All focus on his character, and almost all provide some version of the following: “He was always speaking of God or to God, and I never heard any idle or harmful word from him.”[1] This sounds stereotypical—of course a saint would do that—but I think there’s something else here. Dominic was aware of his own gifts for preaching and teaching. He was aware from whom his preaching and teaching came: “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me,” Jesus says—and we can imagine Dominic quoting this verse (Jn 7:16). He was aware that this was a gift of the Spirit, not to be abused but used for God’s glory, both in extraordinary conversions as well as in ordinary, unremarkable interactions with his brethren.

So too for us. If our spiritual life is about the way we live into our gifts of the Spirit, then it is just as much about how those gifts make up who we are, in the ordinary, the everyday, as in what we do with them in the rare or extraordinary.

What gifts has the Spirit given you? Teaching, leadership, companionship, consolation? We each have gifts for ministry—but these are equally gifts of character: equally what we do and how we are. And accepting both, living into both, is how we can live a spiritual—Spirit-filled, Spirit-gifted—life.

Amen.

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[1] S. Tugwell OP, ed., Early Dominicans: Selected Writings (New York, 1982), 66-85, passim.