1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, the church in that city caught the fever of the city, we know this, because Paul spends most of the letter treating the symptoms. The church had split into rival factions, each one rallying around a favorite teacher and looking down on the others. They were taking each other to court in public lawsuits, airing the family’s dirty laundry in front of the pagans. They had taken the shared meal that was supposed to bind them together as one body and turned it into a humiliation where the wealthy arrived early and ate and drank their fill while the poor who could not leave work as easily showed up to scraps. Paul writing to them calls them infants, not because they lack spiritual experiences, just the opposite, because they had a whole pile of spiritual experiences and were using every one of them to rank themselves above each other.
That is the room Paul is speaking into when he starts the gift conversation, these were not believers who were short on the spirituals and needed more, they were drowning in them and they had turned the abundance into a competition. The flashy gifts, the ones you could see and hear in a packed assembly, were prized and paraded. The quiet gifts, the ones that did their work without an audience, were treated as second rate. People who could speak in tongues apparently looked down their noses at people who could not, the body of Christ had quietly sorted itself into first class and economy with everyone painfully aware of which cabin they were sitting in.
So when Paul opens this whole section with that one carefully chosen Greek word charisma, grace thing, he is already performing surgery before he defines a single gift, before he lists one ability, he reminds a room full of people keeping score, that not one of them produced the thing they are bragging about, you cannot boast about a gift. The boasting is a category error so basic, it would be funny if it were not tearing the church apart. Boasting is like a child showing off a birthday present as proof of their own greatness, the present says nothing about the child, it says everything about whoever loved them enough to give it. That single reframing planted right at the start is the seed of everything Paul is about to grow.
That is the room Paul is speaking into when he starts the gift conversation, these were not believers who were short on the spirituals and needed more, they were drowning in them and they had turned the abundance into a competition. The flashy gifts, the ones you could see and hear in a packed assembly, were prized and paraded. The quiet gifts, the ones that did their work without an audience, were treated as second rate. People who could speak in tongues apparently looked down their noses at people who could not, the body of Christ had quietly sorted itself into first class and economy with everyone painfully aware of which cabin they were sitting in.
So when Paul opens this whole section with that one carefully chosen Greek word charisma, grace thing, he is already performing surgery before he defines a single gift, before he lists one ability, he reminds a room full of people keeping score, that not one of them produced the thing they are bragging about, you cannot boast about a gift. The boasting is a category error so basic, it would be funny if it were not tearing the church apart. Boasting is like a child showing off a birthday present as proof of their own greatness, the present says nothing about the child, it says everything about whoever loved them enough to give it. That single reframing planted right at the start is the seed of everything Paul is about to grow.