Theme: We have been created to serve God and we do this by serving
each other, one person at a time.
When I was called to my first church, a few years ago in Spokane,
Washington, I was just thrilled, though I knew what I was getting into—a
pulpit and position that could only afford a half-time pastor. So, I went
out and looked for a job, and I found one that was just perfect, or at least
I thought it was perfect: it was working overnight, from 11 PM to 7 AM,
working with the developmentally or physically disabled in their homes,
doing the routine things most of us take for granted, but which they
needed a little bit of help with. Most of the time I had to stay up all night,
and, let me tell you, TV at 3 AM is a wasteland. I watched a lot of cable
television and a lot of the GAMESHOW cable Network, watching old 70’s
gameshows. Do you realize that Charles Nelson Riley seemed to be on
every 70’s gameshow ever made—the man made a living playing
games! What did this man do, before gameshows? Anyway, I thought
this was the perfect job , because, you know, I could be more available to
the congregation during the daylight hours. Quite a martyr I was, but
stupid was more like it—you can imagine how it pretty much wiped me
out the next day, even with a few hours of sleep in the morning. There
were a few times you could find me in my pastor’s office, stretched out on
the couch, trying to catch some sleep before the next appointment.
But I tell you, I met some incredible people doing that job, the people we
actually served, but also the incredible people who did the serving—I
mean, there were people like me who found some meaning in this, but I
was always impressed by those I met who felt great passion around the
work they were doing with these folks. The pay was bad, the hours were
lousy, and the job benefits few, but there were people who had been
there for years, turning over those we served over in their beds every
couple of hours or placing them differently in the bed, so as to avoid
bedsores. I met this one guy who I worked with in a few places, who
actually trained me overnight in a couple of the apartment homes I was
going to be placed in, and I asked him one night, probably at about 2 AM
why he did what he did, why he stayed in this profession, with so few
apparent benefits? He answered me by pointing to the door of Joey, one
of the people we were helping that evening, and then listed the names of
a couple of other people he had served and cared for over the years.
He did this job because of people like Joey, out of care mostly, because
it certainly wasn’t for the money, he did because he genuinely loved
them, and even though he had sort of accidentally fallen into the
profession years earlier, it had now become his calling. An incredible
man, really, and, as I was later to find out, a fellow minister. Actually, he
got his clergy credentials over the internet—did you realize that you too
can become credentialed and ordained over the internet? There are
some good deals out there—$19.95 will make you a minister of the
Gospel! He actually did it so he could do the marriage ceremony for a
couple of his friends. A year later he asked me to do the re-commitment
ceremony for him and his wife, which was a great honor, to be honest.
And I keep thinking that I could have saved myself a lot of money and
about 7 years of schooling if I had only just looked on the internet first!
What a deal!
Nonetheless, I loved how he described the reason why he did what he
did—he pointed to a person, to particular people, that he served over
the years. I think he got it right, to be honest, that he knew that in the
end, we point to particular people, to particular moments, even, when we
have to describe why we choose to serve other people, in any given
moment. In our series on the Purpose-Given Life this week, we are
reminded of something that we have been created to do, we humans,
and that is to serve each other, to lay down pieces of our lives for the
sake of others, to help them recover pieces of their own shattered lives,
and in the midst of doing so, in the midst of helping the friend, the
stranger, we find ourselves again, oddly enough—we find one of the
purposes we have been created, which is simply to serve God by serving
each other.
But before I tease out what that means, I want to look at this story in
Matthew, where the mother of two disciples asks Jesus for a favor, a
favor around power, and greatness, and what Jesus says in reply is
powerful and challenging. In fact, the story so stuck in the mind of the
early church that every Gospel except John contains some variation of
this story. It’s a simple request: make my sons your right and left hand
men, the second and third persons in charge in your coming kingdom.
As much as its kinda distasteful to see this mother go campaign so
blatantly for her sons, it shouldn’t surprise us—mom should be our
biggest fan, our biggest advocate, the one willing to get into the mud in
order to see her children succeed. This request by this mother comes
late in the story, everything is starting to roll down hill, down towards the
cruel fate of the cross, and Jesus has warned his disciples of what is to
come, his death, his horrifying crucifixion, the disappointment they will
feel, but they don’t hear it, or maybe they don’t want to hear it. And then
comes this request, this campaign by the mother of two of the people he
has shared this journey with—this woman and her sons, they didn’t seem
to get it, that he wasn’t going to kick the Romans out of Israel, and that
the kingdom he was going to build wasn’t about power—it was about
giving away power, not acquiring power, of serving rather than being
served.
And then Jesus simply asks them if they are willing to drink of the cup he
is going to drink, the pain and suffering he will experience in the coming
days, and they quickly say they are more than willing to, though I suspect
they don’t know what they have agreed to. And then Jesus, in almost
quiet remark, says rather cryptically that they will indeed suffer the same
way he is about to suffer—they will suffer and die for their faith. Still,
positions of power are not his to give, he says, it is God’s job to dole out
the rank and order of the places of power in the coming realm of God.
But then the rest of the disciples find out about what has happened and
they get mad at the two disciples—and I suspect they’re mad not
because of the arrogance of this request, but because they didn’t get to
ask first. Other versions of this story hint at this dynamic, but here we
are just given the other disciple’s outrage. Jesus calls them over one
more time and says simply to them, in so many words—you know how
people in this world rule each other, through fear and ruthlessness?
Well, that is not my way and it will not be your way. If you want to be
great in my coming kingdom, give your greatness away and become the
servant of others. In John’s Gospel he lives this out in the Upper Room,
right before he heads to his death—he bends down and washes their
feet, scrubbing off the grimy dust of Israel’s roads, of Jerusalem’s dirty
streets. The God of the universe, the one who has created us and
sustained us, who has set the rhythm of our hearts and the rhythm of the
universe into motion, the Creator of all, this God we stumble upon in
Jesus, this God bends down to gently wash the feet of those who whom
he has loved, and he evens gently cleans the feet of the one who hours
from then will betray him, this Judas.
And I can’t help but connect the story from Matthew and this story from
John because of something, which is the particularity with which Jesus
asks us to serve. You know, its fine for me and other preacher types to
tell you that we ought to serve people—its sort of like telling people that
they ought to love others. It’s those moments I know that people in the
pews are either rolling their eyes, literally or figuratively. I mean, we all
know this, and we all try to do it, and sometimes we succeed, but most of
the time we don’t, mostly because the whole thing seems so daunting.
Serve everyone? Love everyone? Please, I barely can stand most
people, a lot of us are probably thinking. But I think what is important is
not the big picture—in another words, we get the focus all wrong. Let’s
be realistic—I can’t serve everyone, I can’t love everyone. But you and I,
we can love particular people, we can serve particular people. Jesus
bends down to clean the feet of a few men thousands of years, not all
the people of Jerusalem. Its too much, too impossible, and too
discouraging, to try to save the world, the pain and suffering of the world
is too much, and we feel helpless in front of it all. I know I do. I saw a lot
of those begathon commercials for the starving children around the
world during those late nights at that job in Spokane, and more often
than not, I just skipped right on by, because the enormity of the problem
seemed too big and it just left me saddened more than anything. But
you what? You and I, we can help one person, or a few people, we can
do what Christ did, doing the work of servanthood by serving these
people, these particular people, this particular person. I don’t have to
serve the world, and neither do you—that is God’s work—but I am asked,
commanded to serve this person, or these people, in my little part of the
world. That is why Jesus in our story from Matthew today says that the
disciples need to serve each other, to start where they are at, to do this
thing amongst themselves—“whoever wishes to be the first among you
must be your slave.” Start small, start with what you can do, and give up
on saving the world—you and I are not asked to do that, we are not
God—you and I are simply asked to serve the people in the room, or in
our corner of the world, friends and foe alike, like Jesus did on that night
thousands of years ago.
In the story we heard for our first lesson today, you have this same idea.
A teacher tells a student to put together a map he has shredded,
thinking this will keep the upstart busy, but amazingly he comes back with
the map put back together. The teacher is just stunned, and asks him
how he did it—the map had a picture of a man on the back of it, and he
just put this man together, and when he looked back on the other side,
the world had been put back together. Exactly. The larger world we
cannot help, but this person, or those particular people, or even our
friends, these ones we can help. And yet, by serving this one person, by
helping to put each other back together again, we, in some odd sort of
way, we serve the whole world, we put the world back together again.
We are asked to find those we are called to serve, the particular people
we are asked to help, the people in the room whose feet we are asked to
bathe, in some sort of way.
But I’ll tell you something else, these act of service to others, its an
amazing thing. Its something that people who serve others know
already—that you get more than you give, that in the act of serving
others, something miraculous happens, and it is this, the miracle is this:
we get what we need when we give what we need away to others. Stay
with me for a moment, because this has been a surprise to me over the
years, something I discovered later in my life, though you may have
gotten it a lot quicker than I did. If you and I are in need of hope, then
we are asked to serve others by giving hope away to others. If we are
discouraged, then we are asked to be the person who encourages
another person. We are asked to give away what we need, to give hope
when we feel hopeless, to share in someone’s joy when our lives feel
joyless, to give kindness to others when the world has been especially
unkind to us. If the world has offered you and I no mercy, we are asked
to be the first ones in line to give away that same mercy.
And something magical happens, something miraculous happens—all of
sudden we get what we need. I can’t tell you how many times, in the
midst of encouraging someone during a time in my life when I felt no
hope, I somehow got exactly what I needed—hope, encouragement, a
reminder that indeed, God was present, God was here, and that the end
of the story is always resurrection, not crucifixion. It wasn’t about
comparing suffering with someone else—to be honest, that feels creepy
to me, this comparison of suffering, and somehow coming out of thinking
that someone else suffering is worst than mine, and somehow getting
some solace out of that. No, when I sit with someone else in the midst of
their lost and pain, sometimes wordless, its just at that moment, I
remembered what I have always known—that God is love, and that I am
loved, and the world can be hard and difficult at times, but it is never
hopeless, because this is God’s good and beautiful world, and the
beauty of it all is somehow contained in this one moment, when I have
chosen to give hope to another when I am feeling especially hopeless, or
when someone has done the same for me. If there is something you
need right now—hope, joy, presence, peace—the only way to find each
of these things is, oddly enough, to give them away, to give away the
very thing you need so desperately right now—to give away hope when
you feel especially hopeless, to be present with someone else when you
are particularly lonely yourself, to be the calming presence with another
when your own heart feels like it will never have the peace you are
helping another person find in that moment. You may feel like that such
a thing is impossible—how can you give away what you do not have,
what you crave so deeply!? But you and I, we do have it within us, God
has promised us peace and hope and joy, the goodness of the world is
here, within us, we have the very Spirit of the living God within us. But
the way to unlock each of these gifts is service to another, to give away
the very thing we feel like we do not have within us. We were created to
serve, to give away the impossible, so that we can receive the impossible
within us. Maybe the way to find out the way God wants you to serve is
to do this: ask yourself what you desperately want in your life right now—
and then find some way of giving that very thing to those around you.
Hopeless?—then find some way of giving away hope to someone else.
Discouraged?—then give away the very last bit of encouragement you’
ve got within you to someone else. And do it one person at a time,
because in the end, that is all is asked of us, to wash one set of dirty feet
at a time. It’s the truth my friend and co-worker in Spokane pointed to,
when he literally pointed to Joey’s barely cracked door that early morning
years ago—he, Joey is the reason, that one person is the reason to do
this work. We find what we need in particular moments, in particular acts
of service, and we find God in moments like that, where we push
ourselves to serve another, and then we find that we get what we need
the moment when we looked beyond ourselves. We put back the world
back together when we point to our own barely cracked doors, when we
help another person put back their life, and we give away to another that
which we desperately want for ourselves. And then, it comes, once
again, the miracle happens, and then we find it, the very thing we
thought we had lost forever. God is so good, God is good, may God be
forever praised. Amen.
