"Spirituality of Service" Sermon 11-12-06
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian
Spirituality of Service
Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk and writer of the 50’s and 60’s, had wise words to say about acts of service. In so many words, he said that service is so much about results as it is about the quality of the relationships among people that happen in the course of doing it. I have found that to be true in every situation where I have tried to be of service.
When I started my years of work with homeless people, I fancied myself a crusader, sallying forth to solve the social ills that led to people being without housing. It was a noble quest. But once I got into the work, and saw just how incredibly complicated homelessness is, how many different kinds of problems have to be solved to address it meaningfully, I sobered up. I worked toward more modest goals, and even those goals were hard to reach. I was surprised to find that my satisfaction in the work came from the relationships I had with the people on the streets. I learned the hard way that I wasn’t personally capable of solving the homelessness problem in general, and not even in any individual case of it, either. There were some homeless people who declared that it was I who saved them from the streets. But as time went on, it made less and less sense for me to claim that I had been their savior. Almost always, they got themselves off the streets and I just happened to be around at the time. Sure, we accomplished things but none of those achievements compared to the comradeship and the warmth I experienced with the people I met on the streets.
Likewise, in my work in churches, it took a while for me to get cured from measuring my success by the size of church budgets, the percentage of membership growth, or the snazziness of churches’ programs. I started out with grand visions of ideal congregations that I would shape or create. Sure, some of those visions approached reality. But I got over making such achievements the mark of my success. And I was better for getting over it. The only success that ever really mattered was the love in the congregation. Everything else was a side-show at best.
One of my earliest paid church jobs was at First Methodist Church in San Rafael, when I was in seminary. I think I got paid $200 a month to be the youth director for just a handful of teenagers. But the pastor was going through a personal crisis – his wife was dying of cancer, and during that process, he had fallen in love with his wife’s good friend. He was so emotionally confused that he could barely preach, couldn’t really do his job. So in effect I became the interim minister. The church seemed dried up to me; there were very few younger folks in the congregation. Their worship service was kind of fuddy-duddy. Serving that church seemed more like hospice work than anything else at the time. I didn’t think the congregation would last very long. But there was a lot of love there. The people cared a lot about their minister, despite his confusion; they treated me like a member of their family, they watched out for each other and they had a positive attitude about themselves as a church. They had a faithful and trusting attitude, and the longer I worked there, the more I came to believe in them. The longer I was there, the more their compassionate community glowed in my eyes, and the less anything else about them mattered to me. It was a great experience. It was one of the experiences that got me hooked on this profession. To my lingering amazement, that church is still alive and well. It’s still small, still has its struggles. But it has retained its sweet and loving energy. That’s all that matters.
It’s all that matters there, and it’s all that matters here. I could go down the list of what makes us a better church according to the world’s standards of what “better” is. But none of it much matters. Only love matters, really. When people pour out their truth here, and that truth is lovingly received, that’s what counts. When people watch out for each other, check up on each other in times of trial, that’s what matters. When people here ignore the artificial distinctions that might separate them, and just accept each other as we are and take genuine interest in each other, that’s what matters.
About fifteen years ago I was asked to help out at a high school in San Mateo. They were having a sensitivity training event for the whole student body and they needed adults to monitor the process. As the day began I was trying to figure out who was in charge. There was supposed to be a consultant making a presentation, but I didn’t see her around. Then suddenly a woman took the stage. I’d seen her milling around but never would have dreamed she was the person in charge. She was quite overweight, her hair was messy, her glasses were too big, and was wearing a sloppy sweatsuit and worn-out sneakers. She got up on the stage and just stood there with her mouth hanging open for a few seconds. O God, I thought, this is going to be awful. The kids were already groaning and squirming. Then she reached through her sweatshirt into her ample bosom and pulled out her keys which were hanging from a cord around her neck. “Yeah,” she said to the crowd of about a thousand kids. “I really do keep ‘em in here!” Then she put the keys back between her breasts. In that instant, the crowd was hers, and it was hers for the rest of the day. She let everybody know she accepted herself just the way she was, and that instantly allowed everybody to accept her the way she was, and to accept each other the way they were. Which was the whole point of the day’s exercises. All the jockeying for social position, all the posing and posturing of high school kids was out the window at least for that one day. It didn’t matter what was cool or sexy and what wasn’t. All that mattered was love.
That woman served those high school kids by sharing herself. She emptied herself of any pretense. That was very refreshing to the kids in her audience. Her example got them to think differently about themselves and each other.
St. Paul said that Jesus emptied himself and became a servant. He served by emptying himself. It’s easy for people to get hung up on Jesus as a supernatural miracle-worker. A superhero who could do superhuman things like walk on water and raise people from the dead and heal people’s diseases instantaneously. This image of Jesus is widespread and I think it shapes a lot of what people think it means to serve others. They think that since Jesus was a superhero, they have to be superheroes, too. They think they have to be incredibly effective problem-solvers for others. It’s certainly good to be effective at helping others with practical needs. But it’s even better to do what Jesus really did, which was to empty himself and give himself fully to the relationships he had with people. The healing miracles he did with lepers were not so much that he cured their skin disease. In those days, it was commonly believed that all sorts of people could do those things. Reports of resurrections and miracle healings were no news in the first century. The really impressive and memorable thing that Jesus did was to violate the social convention against touching or even being near lepers and other low-status people. He emptied himself of any claim to higher social or religious position, and got down with the people who were on the other side of the tracks. The women, the Samaritans, the lepers, the tax-collectors, the gentiles. What made him a wonderful servant was not how well he dispensed medicine. Instead, what made him a wonderful servant was how well he dispensed himself. He gave himself, his presence, his being, his essence, to the people he served. In other words, he loved them. That was what mattered.
What matters to me as a servant is how completely I empty myself, how fully I love you, give myself to you, offer you my presence and my acceptance and my attention. What matters to all of us as followers of Jesus is whether we can empty ourselves of our egos and our pride and really offer our compassionate presence to each other.