Not preaching tomorrow, but if I were, I’d talk about my plumber.

It just so happened, due to some time away, a favor for a friend, and the upcoming Summer camp season, that I’ve only preached once this month.

This was the first week I’ve missed it. The daily study and prayer I put ito a sermon. The last minute, final scribbled outline, among the many I come up with during the week, that I’ll preach.

So this morning, looking at the text our guest preacher is using tomorrow, I thought that If I were preaching tomorrow, I’d start by talking about my plumber.

When things break around the house, I usually give it a go trying to fix it myself. And so when my toilet quit flushing, I figured I’d try and replace the inner mechanics myself.

TWO WEEKS AGO.

Yet after several goes at it, only resulting in leaks and more leaks, I conceded that I was not a plumber.

Let me clarify — I can fix a jammed garbage disposal, unclog the drain under the bathroom sink, but toilets, come to find out, aren’t my thing.

But they are someone’s thing. And so I finally called in a professional.

To my credit, when they say “universal replacement”, that doesn’t apply to every toilet, and certainly not mine. That was the first thing I learned from the plumber.

The second was that it took him less than two hours (inluding supply run) to fix what I had fought over for two weeks.

That’s a gift.

Which leads me to Paul’s thoughts on gifts in Ephesians 4.7–13. He said that each person has been given a portion of grace, and gifts. He goes on to place those gifts within the context of ministerial offices — i.e. apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Ultimately, though, he said that those gifts (and more, by implication) were to be used together to “equip God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and knowledge of [Jesus] and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ”(Eph 4.12–13 NIV).

In short, Paul taught that each person has been given a portion of grace, reflected in unique giftedness, so that together, the Body of Christ might grow.

John Calvin put it this way:

On no one has God bestowed all things. Each has received a certain measure. Being thus dependent on each other, they find it necessary to throw their individual gifts into the common stock and thus to render mutual aid.

Everyone is gifted. Uniquely, as apportioned at an individual level. But God’s intent was that we see our individual gifts as intended for the common good.

This goes along with last week’s sermon (and my only sermon of the month) during which I talked about how we are called as believers not to make a name for ourselves in the world, but to make a name for Jesus through good works, which are our response to grace freely given.

The world tries to sell us on the idea that our gifts are meant so that we might go out and make a life for ourselves — the cultural myth of the grandeur of the self-made person.

But God offers us this idea that our gifts are meant so that we might go out and share the life of Christ with others — the biblical truth of true koinonia, where all have worth and together we are greater than as single individuals.

And we are only greater because of the portion of the grace God has given us, that thrown together into the common stock (ala. Calvin), we can bear more fruit than one individual life, besides Jesus’, could ever hope to bear.

As I said before, I am not a plumber. But I thank God for those who are.

And I’ll admit. I got frustrated with myself that I couldn’t fix that darn toilet. It even gave me a nasty bruise, early on in my battle. But I didn’t so much concede defeat as I chose to acknowledge this diversity of grace that God has bestowed on us all.

If I could do everything, what good would that be? For one thing we need to learn in life is how much we need each other. How I need your gift as a plumber as much as you need mine as a preacher.

The way God set this all up was that we are dependent on one another — that we need each other, more than we dare acknowledge.

That’s not personal weakness — it’s the ideal of community wholeness and maturity.

And it’s the example Jesus set for us, because his gift was his life that he freely offered for the benefit of the common good.

By his example may we offer the gifts of our individual lives so freely for the good of all — pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, lawyers, parents, grand-parents, students, artists, musicians, athletes, retail sales clerks, cooks, waitstaff, and for me, recently and especially, plumbers.