October 14, 2001

"Servanthood"

Sermon:

A little girl became restless as the preacher's sermon dragged on and on. Finally she leaned over to her mother and whispered, "Mommy, if we give him the money now, will he let us go?"

I'll try not to tax your patience too much today. I want to talk to you about servanthood. It's the next subject in our series of great Christian doctrines. Servanthood has to rank very highly as one of the defining marks of a disciple of Jesus.

Someone has said “Humility is not about thinking little of yourself, or thinkng poorly of yourself. Rather, humility means not thinking of yourself at all so you can think of others instead.” In a culture obsessed with the self is there any hope for recovering a culture of service? Just look at our magazines: “Self”, “People”, “Us”

Servanthood may be the hardest of all Christian doctrines to harmonize with American culture today. Servanthood is a very unpopular subject today, but Christians are not called to be popular. We are called to be faithful, in season and out of season.

Let's begin by looking at our Mission Statement. It's printed on your bulletin. Why don't we read it together: "The mission of St. George's is to know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to love Him, serve Him, and witness His love to the world"

First we are to serve Christ. That simply means to obey His teaching and follow His lead., do what He tells you to do. That's clear enough, isn't it? But then there is that part about "witness His love to the world." How do we do that?

To witness Christ's love is much more than merely saying to our neighbor, "God loves you." Something as important as this has to be more than words. To witness Christ's love means to serve others in such a way that they see and know the love of Christ. Now that's going to take some work.

Remember our baptismal vows:

Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

People I will, with God’s help.

And the call to be servants appears all through our worship every Sunday. In the Prayers of the People we say:

Grant that every member of the Church may truly and humbly serve you;

That your Name may be glorified by all people.

In the Communion Prayer we say

"Sanctify us also that we may faithfully receive this holy Sacrament, and serve you in unity, constancy, and peace..."

And at the end of the service we pray:

"Send us now into the world in peace,

and grant us strength and courage

to love and serve you

with gladness and singleness of heart;

through Christ our Lord. Amen."

Deacon Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

People Thanks be to God.

It goes without saying that servanthood is a major part of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. But servanthood sounds like work! And if there is one thing that people today do not want to hear about it's work.

Question: How can we make this easy?

Answer: You can't.

I think one of the greatest errors in the church today is the avoidance of servanthood. We seem always to be asking the question, "How can we make it easier to be a Christian?" when we should be asking, "How can we better prepare ourselves for the hard work of being a Christian?" I'm not trying to scare you, but have you noticed the poster in Ericson Hall on the right side of the stage? It's a classic portrait of a Christian martyr shot through with more than a dozen arrows. The caption reads, "If you think it's hard being a Christian today, try going back 1500 years!" Being a witness, a servant of Christ, is hard work. It's supposed to be. In this free land it might not cost you your physical life, but it will cost you your reputation, your comfort, your time.

As Christians we worship sacramentally. And we should also live sacramentally. What that means is that our Christian discipleship should stand as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. How well is your life demonstrating an outward and visible model of Jesus so that others can follow Him? Ask those closest to you.

After attending the baptism of his baby brother, little Johnny sobbed all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him several times what was wrong. Finally the boy replied, "That priest said he wanted us brought up in a good Chistian home, but I want to stay with you guys!"

How do you make a Christian home? Probably the first things we think of are things like getting the family to church and Sunday School. But a Christian family is more than just a family who go to church. It's about what we do the rest of the week.

Not long ago a group of us met in Jamesburg with our trucks to help a woman who was trying to get her life back together. She needed to move her belongings out of the apartment she had lost to a new apartment that some members of St. George's had helped her find.

We spent a whole evening going through a jumbled pile of belongings, loading up trucks with the furniture she was able to salvage. Then we drove it half way across the county and carried it all up two flights of stairs to her new apartment.

This is another praise report! She is now moved into a new home and she and her family have come a long way in these few months. I saw her last Tuesday and I thought to myself, she looks like a different person. God has done a great work in her life, answered a lot of prayers.

But going back to that day when we helped her move, what would she have thought if we had all stood around looking at the furniture and said, "This is too much work. Unless you've got something easier for us to do, we'll just be going on our way. God bless you, and have a nice day."

Servanthood sometimes means getting your hands dirty and straining your back. And it always means spending some time out of your busy day doing something for someone else that you might not have wanted to do. That's what the word "servant" means, someone who is under orders. Not someone who is free to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it, and walk away from whatever he doesn't care for. A servant is one who is commanded. And if we are going to be servants of Jesus Christ, the first thing we must do is place ourselves under His command.

What about Sunday School? It takes just as much work for our Sunday School teachers to prepare a lesson whether they have 2 kids or 10 in the class. How can we make their job easier? Well, I guess we could stop having Sunday School! That would make their life immediately easier. Thank God they have not asked us to do that.

Every week the Altar Guild comes in here and sets up the Altar for Communion. They polish the silver, shine the woodwork, clean the linens. It's work. How could we make their job easier? We could stop worshping. That's the only way I know. Thank God they haven't asked us to stop messing up the Altar with our worship. They continue to come in faithfully every week and clean things up and get it ready for us to worship again.

We have a Property Committee who put in a lot of hours working on this property, painting, rewiring, plumbing, cutting the grass. How could we make their job easier? We could tear down these buildings, then they wouldn't have anything to maintain. They aren't asking us to do that. They are asking for more helping hands.

Are you getting the point? Anything worth having is going to require work.

I can't make it easier for you to serve on Vestry. No matter what I do, it's going to involve some work. You're going to have to make time. You're going to have to study, read reports, pray, listen to other people, and take on some responsibility. None of that is easy. It isn't supposed to be.

Genuine service is never easy. Servanthood is costly. It's easy for us to forget that. Just like the apostles kept forgetting that. Like in Matthew 20:20-28

"Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”

“We can,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”

When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The worst moments in the history of the church have been when church leaders used their position to exercise power over people rather than serve in the name of Christ. Religion is a terrible thing when it is used to dominate other people.

One of the people who learned this lesson the hard way was the apostle Paul. As a zealous Pharisee he was accustomed to seeing his religious devotion as a reason for other people to honor him, bow to him, and yield to his learned scholarship. And when he saw the young church gathering people to become disciples of Jesus he was outraged. How could this simple Galillean peasant, the son of carpenter, be taking people away from such brilliant religious scholars as himself and his fellow Pharisees?

Paul went on a personal campaign to destroy the church. While he was on this mission he had what I would call a "Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind", that is, an univited personal audience with the Lord. On his way to Damascus he was literally knocked off his high horse by the power of the Lord. As he lay there on the ground he heard a voice calling to him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

Paul was struck blind. In an instant, the proud, powerful, religious leader who thought of himself as bringing the light to others is reduced to a helpless blind man who must be led by another to meet a man he doesn't even know, a man who is a memeber of the church he was on his way to destroy.

That man, Annanias, is also having an encounter with God who is preparing him to receive the blind Paul and minister healing to him. And this is what the Lord says to Annanias about Paul:

“This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

Suffer indeed. Paul's story is so dramatic because he went through such a sweeping change of heart. From the proud, threatening religious dictator to the humble, poor, preacher who made tents to provide a meager living to support himself while he preached the Gospel. He endured a lot of hardship along the way. The Pharisees who were once his closest friends, became his bitter enemies. He was harrassed and threatened everywhere he went. On many occasions he was beaten, once almost to the point of death. He was slandered and falsely accused, and finally he was executed by the government of Rome for preaching a religion that was not acceptable to the empire. In his second letter to the Corintians he described his situation this way:

2 Corinthians 4:5-10

For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body."

Can you say that about yourself? Do you "always carry around in your body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in your body?" What does that even mean? How do you carry the death of Jesus around in your body?

Well, one way you carry the death of Jesus in your body is by serving others. Jesus made it clear that He was sent into this world from the Father, not to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. And He also made it clear that He was sending us, His disciples, in exactly the same way the Father had sent Him- as a servant.

A few examples:

He washed the disciples' feet, and then he told them to do the same for each other. He healed the sick, and then He commissioned us to do the same. He cast out demons, and He gave us authority to continue the war against spiritual darkness. He fed the hungry, and He commanded us to continue caring for the poor. He proclaimed he kingdom of God as having higher status then any earthly kingdom, and He sent us to keep the message going out that God is to be served before anyone else. He blessed those who despised Him and prayed for those who killed Him, and He commanded us to do the same. When we do that, we are carrying His death around in our own bodies, that is to say, we are continuing to lay down our lives as servants for the One who first laid down His life for us, and that is how we get the world's attention.

One of the missionary families we support is in Northern Africa. They are called the Doulos Community. They have done something that no one else has ever been able to do. They have actually started a church in a rigidly Moslem country that has never had a church before. It has been the most unevelangelized place on earth. How did they do it? By serving. For almost twelve years they have labored, they have loved, they have given, they have fed the hungry, they have tended the sick, they have endured the theft of their property and threats against their lives - they have served. Now they are beginning to see the fruit of their labors.

So, when you look at the parish budget and you see an item under "Outreach" called, "Doulos Community", that's them. And do you know what Doulos means? It's a Greek word. It means servant!

Servanthood is serious business in the kingdom of God. Just how serious? Well, listen to these words:

Matthew 24:45-51

“Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, ‘My master is staying away a long time,’ and he then begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Three military recruiters were invited to a high school assembly to speak to the students about joining the military. The principal was a strict administrator. He gave them exactly fifteen minutes. Each of them would have five minutes and there would be no extension of the time. When the fifteen minutes were up the students had to be dismissed.

The Army recruiter spoke first. In his zeal to make his quota he went overtime and spoke for six minutes. The Navy recruiter, not to be outdone, spoke for seven minutes. The Marine recruiter came to the podium with only two minutes left. For a minute and forty-five seconds he stood silently and looked intently at the students. Then, with only fifteen seconds left he said, "I only see two, maybe three people in this room who have what it takes to be a Marine. I'll see the three of you in the teacher's lounge after this assembly" and he sat down.

When the Marine recruiter arrived at the teacher's lounge it was packed with students, all of whom were sure that they were the ones who had "what it takes."

I must tell you that for most of my life I would not have been one of the kids crowded into the teacher's lounge. I would still have been sitting in the auditorium. Why? Because I didn't think I had "what it takes" to do anything, especially not anything important. It took years of growing and encouragement before I was able to begin to use the gifts God had given me.

There are some of you here today who are feeling the same way. I want to pray for you this morning. Let us pray these words from the first letter of Peter:

1 Peter 4:7-11

The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.