The Abundance of Talent
“Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”
In the last week, I have been in a few conversations in which the phenomenon that has come to be called the Great Resignation came up. In the years of the pandemic, people grew to like the flexibility that they were granted because of how companies shifted work away from office buildings. For many, the ability to work from home and to flex their work hours around their family and not the other way around opened to them a new way of thinking about work. It was a moment in which people began to ask new questions about the work they are doing and how they want to do that work in relation to their family lives.
It seems that people got a small taste of what an abundant life might look like as we move forward from the years of pandemic into a new future in which different things begin to take priority in the lives of ordinary people. They wanted their work to take into account the needs of their family more fully. People experienced a freedom in their lives that they had not had prior to the pandemic. It might be that this one small thing is a silver lining of the pandemic for many people although it is not true of all types of work. There are still many jobs that require us to be in a different place than our homes in order to do the work. And, there are still many types of work that do not pay people enough to live securely. We still have work to do in our communities to shape the working of our economy to the vision of the abundant life, to the way of love, and to the Gospel.
In one of the conversations about the changing nature of work, one person referred to it as the Great Reflection, which seems quite fitting to me. Instead of looking at the changing nature of work through a negative lens, it invites us to see how people reflected on what they needed in their work and home lives, and they made changes in order to place a priority on their family. They sought out jobs that allowed them to spend more time doing the things they loved on their schedule. People found a way to prioritize the things most important to them and then shaped the rest of their lives around those priorities.
I think this might be a good way for us to think about how we serve the Gospel through ministry at Church of the Epiphany. There are plenty of things that need to happen at Epiphany and that need committed lay ministers to lead the way in the doing of those ministries, but it is also important for us to shape the ministries of the parish around the priorities that we hold dear for our parish. And, if lay people do not lead the way for those ministries, it is equally important for us to have the courage to let go of those ministries. In our own way, we are being invited to reflect on what ministries are absolutely essential to our common life as a parish, and we are being invited to discover a new way into the abundant life offered to us through our Savior Jesus Christ.
The abundant life is a life is experienced through our ways of being with one another in the world and celebrating the gifts that each one of us brings into the community. We are living the abundant life when the ministries that we are doing bring us joy every single time we show up for that ministry. We get a glimpse of the abundant life when we are able to use our God-gifted talents for the building up of the kingdom and when we are able to use those same talents in our family life, our work life, our social life. The abundant life is not abundant because we have been able to store treasures for ourselves. It is abundant when we take the treasures we have and find innovative ways to share those treasures. The abundance is found in the joy that we experience when we take up the invitation of the Gospel and use our talents to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the sin that we need to let go of in this day and age is the sin of focusing on where people are incomplete - what we might call weaknesses. Perhaps, the way that we begin to enter the abundant life is by focusing on the ways that people are gifted unique talents and inviting those talents to be used in a glorious harmony.
As we move forward together in our 60th year, what might it look like for us to build ministries around the places that people are naturally gifted? I am pretty certain that we would begin to get glimpses of God’s kingdom being lived out here on earth. I am pretty certain that we would get a glimpse of what it might mean for us to experience the liberty of the abundant life made known in Jesus Christ.
In Christ,
Hunter+
