September 23, 2012
The 17th Sunday after Pentecost,Year B, Proper
20
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
“Whoever wants to be first must
be last of all and servant of all.”
Jesus is telling us that the
one with the greatest needs get priority in the eyes of God, and if we are to
be followers of that, disciples even, we must do the same. If we are to be the
church that we can be, we need to listen to Jesus.
We need to welcome the least of
these in the name of Jesus. When the
broken arrive in this place, we need to continue practicing our habits of
hospitality, radical hospitality to all.
We are doing it, let’s keep it up and keep opening our arms wider and
wider. We need to keep up our ministry
to those who are suffering: the home
starter kits, the 2nd Sunday Breakfast, Shelter Week and bringing
food in for FISH. We need to keep
writing checks through the Outreach Commission and sewing dresses for kids in
Haiti and blessed sock monkeys for St. Vinnie’s. …all those good works, we need
to keep doing them, work like that is part and parcel of the Christian
life. But that is the easy part, the
doing. A challenge, Jesus is pointing
out, is more subtle than that, more subtle than doing, it is an ontological
challenge: it has do with being.
Being the servant of all is a
real challenge to us when we need to start practicing it where we live. Here.
The great spiritual lesson we are being presented with is not about
charity or mission of any kind, it is not about how much of our wealth we
share, or how often you serve breakfast, that is all external, we have obvious
control and decision power about who we engage with and how. Serving the needful from this place is
largely done on our own terms. Placing ourselves in the role of servant is easy
when it is a clear choice in the matter. Would we ever be dismissive of a guest
we are serving breakfast to at First Christian?
Begrudge a young parent staying here during shelter week? Of course not. Serving folks, putting our own needs second
in relation to people with such obvious needs is obvious. But when we are in a community such as this,
a voluntary community of peers, friends, fellow citizens of the Kingdom of God,
the distinction of choice, whom we choose to serve, whose needs get holy
priority, whose needs get the day in, day out welcome in the name of Jesus
Christ, that gets a lot more complicated.
That gets a lot more challenging.
That gets a lot more personal.
Why are we talking about this
this morning? Why are we talking about
the challenges of service within Resurrection?
____ Change. Things have always been changing, but the pace of that
change in this place is accelerating.
Look around. Really, look
around. How many of us were not here
three years ago? Last year? Last month?
Think about how many people are here in this church with you whose name
you don’t know. How long has that been going along? Things have always been changing and at this
point in the life of this parish, things are changing more and more. More and different people, new ways of
praying and organizing ourselves, new ways of communicating with each other,
new ways of serving and new ways of simply being in the world are all around
us. We even have a new listserve! The Spirit is alive in this place and that is
thrilling, it is titillating, it is encouraging and heartening and it is
challenging and scary. It is challenging
and scary because we are being called into new forms of relationship with
people we have no control over and it is happening right here, in our
community, in our church home, our church family.
I was at a retreat this past
week, obstensably reviewing the preaching lectionary for the coming year. Besides Fr. Bob Totten, the priest from
Florence, everyone there was United Methodist.
If you are going to work on preaching, one could do worse than working
with Methodists, they’ve got the whole holiness thing down. The leader of the retreat is a church
consultant and he had the fire of Christ in his belly. He spoke with great urgency about what makes
vibrant and vital parishes, what makes a church an outpost of God in the world. In his decades of church service, as a parish
pastor and consultant, he is convinced that the only churches that are long
term viable, or even worth making an effort on, are the ones mid-wifeing and
equipping disciples of Jesus for service in and to the world. I went to work on our preaching ministry for
the coming year, I come home thinking about discipleship.
That is why we are here, or why
we should be here. We should be here to
learn about ourselves, discern our relationship with God, we should be here to
practice living in relation to each other.
We are here to practice loving God with everything we have and practice
loving our neighbor as ourselves. We are
here to be disciples, servants in the name of God. There is a lot of fun and socializing here,
but it is not a social club. There is a
lot of fun and serving here, but this is not a service organization. This is a church. We are The Church, the Body of Christ. We are an athenaeum of sacred learning and
discipleship. We are an academy of
practice. We are a boot camp for
recruits on God’s way. And all are
welcome to join us in our work and witness.
This is the change and the
challenge we most critically need to pray on together. Following that winding path up the holy
mountain into God, we will encounter pilgrims that we will not encounter
elsewhere in our lives, and we will not be able to do this on our terms. We will sit next to folks in church, sit on
committees with, serve pancakes with, eat pancakes with folks we do not
encounter anywhere else, and we must be glad for that. As time goes on, as our message is delivered
more widely, as more join us in our work and presence in the world, this
caravan of pilgrims will look less and less like it does now and will look more
and more like the kingdom of God. In
this we are challenged, we are ordered
by Christ to be the servant of all.
We cannot just tolerate these changes. We cannot just tolerate those who join this
caravan. Tolerance is not a Godly
virtue. It is a bare minimum requirement
for civil living, it does not meet the bar of Christian living. Welcome. Acceptance. Embrace. Maybe even Celebration. Those are the kind of words Jesus would use,
well, at least Paul would. Accepting,
embracing, celebrating each other is a requirement for life in this
community. Where and when we fail, which
we will from time to time; where and when we do not measure up which of course
we won’t from time to time, we must be willing to try, we must be willing to
learn to try, because it is so hard to do.
Serving the broken; helping the
needful; lifting up the downtrodden… that is simple. Loving the annoying; working with the low
functioning; cooperating with the kookie, the cranky and the confounding;
working, serving side by side with those whom you couldn’t dream of relating to
anywhere else in your life…now that is holy living. That is higher practice math. That is what makes a church family, a
Christian community, a full part of the body of Christ. That is welcoming one such as a child. That is being a servant of all. That is another step on our journey in to God
in Christ. As St. James reminds us,
“Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.” AMEN
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