The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
October 7, 2007 Pentecost
19
The sermon for today is taken
from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 17, verses 5-10.
One thing I have learned from
almost thirty years in the ordained ministry is that Christians are funny
people. I read about a lady who wanted
desperately to go on a tour to Israel to see the holy sites, but she wanted a
sign to confirm that it was God’s will.
The morning after she began planning the trip, she woke up at 7:47
a.m. The tour group to Israel was
planning on flying over on a 747 jet.
That was her sign that confirmed that God was going to bless this trip.
Another young man needed to
buy a car, but he wanted to know that whatever car he bought was in God’s will
for him. One night he had a dream in
which everything he saw was yellow. The
next day he went to a car dealership and bought the yellowest
car that he could find. True to form,
the car was a real lemon.
These well-meaning people,
looking for a sign, remind me of Jesus’ disciples asking him for more faith in
our Gospel reading for today. Now
already in Luke, chapter 9, Jesus had given the disciples the power and
authority to heal and to cast out demons.
You would think that this would be enough. They were with Jesus daily. They saw miracles that would make our hearts
stand still, and they wanted more faith.
What more could Jesus possibly give them? The answer is, he
doesn’t give them anything more. Notice
how Jesus answers their request. He
replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this
mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it will obey you.’”
I believe that Jesus is
saying to them and to us, your problem really isn’t a lack of faith. It doesn’t take much faith to do sensational
things. What it takes is
commitment. What it takes is
determination and persistence and a will to see it through to the end. A little faith and a lot of hard work can
make all of us disciples.
The problem, Jesus was saying
to his disciples, is not that you have too little faith. The problem is that you are not applying the
faith you have. Then Jesus tells them a
strange little parable. He said,
“Suppose one of you has a servant who has been plowing or looking after sheep,
and when that servant comes in from work, would you say to the servant, ‘Come
along now and sit down to eat?’ Not
likely. You would probably say, ‘Prepare
my supper, get yourself ready, wait on me while I eat and drink and after that
you may eat and drink. And then after
dinner would you thank the servant because he did what he was told to
do?’” Then Jesus adds these interesting
words: “So you also, when you have done
everything you were told to do, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have done
our duty.’”
And here I think is a
teaching that is so out of step with our times that it will take some
interpretation. Jesus lived in a world
in which slavery was a fact of life; in such a world that if the master of a
house saw a servant in the field, he would he would not say to him, “Come on in
and get cleaned up while I fix you some dinner.” No, he would say, “When you finish your work,
come in and prepare my meal. I’m getting
hungry.” Then after he had eaten the
meal, he would not have gone out of his way to thank the servant, nor would the
servant expect to be thanked. After all,
he had simply done his duty.
You and I would not fare well
in such a culture. We would like to be
appreciated for our work. We would like
to be patted on the back and rewarded.
We would not like being a faceless servant.
Actor, Anthony Hopkins, once
spent some time with a professional butler in preparing for a role in a
movie. This butler measured his success
by how well he could be of service, while not drawing attention to himself. “The real
test of a butler’s excellence,” he said, “is that the room seems emptier when
he’s in it.” And that is a concept that
is alien to us. We don’t want to
disappear into the woodwork. We like people
to recognize us when we’ve done a good job and to say, “well
done!” Or, even on occasion, to give us
extravagant praise.
In fact, there was an article
in a leading magazine about the challenge that many companies have today giving
their younger workers constant, positive reinforcement. And because of the high self-esteem movement,
that is what many of today’s young adults have gotten at home and in school
from the day that they were born. You
are the greatest, there has never been anyone like you
before. It’s getting hard for people in
our society to imagine doing anything simply and solely because it’s our duty.
To set Jesus’ words in a more
contemporary setting, I want you to imagine paying your light bill. When you send that small fortune off to pay
for your utilities, you don’t expect a letter back from the president of the
power company saying, “Well done, you paid on time, super job, keep up the good
work, we are proud of you.” No, we pay
our bill because that is our responsibility, particularly if we don’t want our
lights turned off! Or when we pay our
taxes, we don’t expect a letter from the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service
saying, “You are a super citizen. I wish
we had ten million more like you.” No,
we pay our taxes because that is our duty as citizens.
So, also says Jesus, when we
serve God, we are only doing our duty.
We don’t deserve any special reward.
And neither do we need any special gifts to carry out our work. We don’t need any special spiritual insights. We don’t even need an abundance of
faith. What we need is to show up
willing to do our part.
In my former parish in
Connecticut we had a soup kitchen that served about seventy-five people a
day. One day I was in my office, and I
got a call from one of the teenage girls in the parish. She called to tell me that she wanted to do
something to help people. But, she said,
she could only help on Saturday after two and before five because she had a
sports and studies and a busy social schedule, and she didn’t want to do
anything outside that involved bugs. Her
mother said to be sure it was with people because “that looks best on her
college resume.” She liked the idea of
working with the hungry, but she really didn’t want to cook anything. And she definitely didn’t want to do
dishes. But helping people was something
that she really wanted to do.
The truth of the matter is
the way too many people want to serve today:
when it is convenient for them, when it is within their area of
expertise, when they can receive recognition and appreciation. Servant-hood is really an alien concept for
many of us. If I were to ask what it
would really mean for you to take up a cross and carry it, many of you would
look at me like I was from Mars. The
disciples thought their problem was that they lacked faith. Jesus told them that that was not the
problem. The problem was the lack of
commitment. And that’s our problem too,
isn’t it? Are we too affluent, too
pampered, too comfortable to hear and appreciate to
words of the Gospel?
One of my favorite
parishioners at St. Paul’s in Southington died of old age. She was ninety-five and her name was Dr.
Helen Edic.
She was a retired professor of Christian education at Hartford
Seminary. I would have to say that she
was one of the most interesting people who I have ever met. She was very lively and an outgoing
person. She was involved in many good
causes, including the struggle to help the Palestinians in the Middle
East. Before she died, which was a very
sad time for me, she said to me, “Father McGinn, I think I have figured out the
meaning of life.” I said, “Oh,
really?” She said, “When you are a child
and a teenager, you serve. When you are
in your twenties and beginning life and starting a family, you serve. When you are in your thirties and forties,
you serve. When you are middle-aged, you
serve. When you are in your sixties and seventies and starting to retire, you
serve. When you move into your eighties
and start to slow down, you serve. When
you get sick, you serve. When you are
dying, you serve. And on your last day
as you die, you serve. That’s true. You serve without a fuss, sometimes with very little recognition
and not a lot of glory. It is only when
you pass over to the other side, to be received into the arms of Jesus that you
hear those ultimate words of commendation, “Well done, my good and faithful
servant. Come and share in my joy.”
That’s who we are: servants.
We serve because there is one who first served us. We are not seeking to work our way to
heaven. That is already taken care of
because of what Jesus did on the cross.
But our salvation came about because once, long ago, the creator of all the universe was willing to take upon himself the role
of a servant.
Now God
calls us to service; not because it will look good on our resume, not because
we will be praised for it, but because that is who we are. We are the
followers of the man who became a servant of all, that we might be sons and
daughters of the most high.
Now, does that make sense to
you this morning? Can you sense that we
have a crises of commitment, a crises of servant-hood
in our society? Can you sense the
look-out-for-number-one attitude has taken something very important out of our character. Sometimes
that crisis makes itself felt even in the church when there is a job that needs
to be done, a job for which there is little opportunity for recognition and
praise; only hard work; toiling and relative obscurity, sometimes without even
the sweet scent of success - teach
a Sunday school class, sing in the choir, be a part of the alter guild, serve
on the vestry or stewardship committee…“Oh, Father McGinn, I couldn’t do
that. I’m too old…I already have
served…I’m not the right kind of person.”
The disciples asked Jesus for
more faith. There is no record that Jesus granted their request. They didn’t need more faith. What they needed was simply to show up for
duty. Jesus would give them what they
needed, but they first needed to show up.
They needed to say with Isaiah the prophet, “Here am I, send me.”
Amen