Serving the Lord

"Serving the Lord"

A sermon delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson

November 5, 2017

at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Zuni, Virginia

Romans 12:11c

Deuteronomy 31: 1-8

Luke 9: 57-62

Let us pray,

Help us to see despite our eyes

Help us to think outside our minds

Help us to be more than our lives

           For your eyes show us the way

           Your mind knows the truth

           Your being is the life.

Amen.

If we think back to last week, we talked about enthusiasm. It was about Zeal and being ardent in the spirit. We talked about how when you are being what you are, what you were made to be what you are called to be, then the energy it takes to just simply be whatever that is, is equal to the energy you have, and your cup is overflowing, it never runs out. . . and so there is the sense that we are each called to bring ourselves to the table, to not hold back, but to be all in. . .and that we wouldn’t necessarily then be doing what every one else is doing, not looking to mimic what other churches are doing, but instead find our own way that is right,  and that the rest would then take care of itself. But then came of course the inevitable question, “What then do we do?” And the answer comes quick on the heals of last week’s lesson with this one, right after “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in the spirit,” closing out the verse is this week’s “Serve the Lord.” Which then is the answer, this is what we are to do. Simply, serve the Lord, but let’s take a quick look again at the entire picture, these according to Paul are the Marks of a Christian.

⁹ Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; ¹⁰ love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹ Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹² Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. ¹³ Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

¹⁴ Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵ Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶ Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷ Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸ If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹ Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ²⁰ No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” ²¹ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

So the answer to what we are to do, is to serve the Lord, and if you put that together with last week, the basis of our life, what we are created to do is exactly this. If we were to look at our Book of Confessions, the Book in our denomination that contains the conversations about what we believe, one of the things we find in there is the Catechisms of our Church, and the first question of the Catechism is what is the chief end of man? And the answer, “To glorify God and enjoy him forever. . .” we have a sense then that we glorify God when we serve him, and we also enjoy him in this service. . . but what is the enjoyment of serving God like? What does it mean to serve God? How is God served? How is God glorified through our service?

This week we celebrated and marked the 500^th year anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, and as children of the Reformation we look to scripture for answers to our questions like this. So in my study this week I started to think about, what are some of the Old Testament Models of service to the Lord? I could have chosen so many, but I went with Moses, having led the Israelites out of Bondage, has reached the end of his service. This is Deuteronomy 31: 1-8

31 Then Moses went out and spoke these words to all Israel: ² “I am now a hundred and twenty years old and I am no longer able to lead you. The Lord has said to me, ‘You shall not cross the Jordan.’ ³ The Lord your God himself will cross over ahead of you. He will destroy these nations before you, and you will take possession of their land. Joshua also will cross over ahead of you, as the Lord said. ⁴ And the Lord will do to them what he did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, whom he destroyed along with their land. ⁵ The Lord will deliver them to you, and you must do to them all that I have commanded you. ⁶ Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”

⁷ Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the presence of all Israel, “Be strong and courageous, for you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their ancestors to give them, and you must divide it among them as their inheritance. ⁸ The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

So if we were to look at Moses as an example, we find the sense of serving the Lord is that you do God’s will, you set captives free, you stand up before the rulers and in God’s name defy them, and lead grumbling people into and then through the wilderness, and just when you are about to find the fulfillment of all your labors, you hand the job over to someone else to finish it. Hmmmm. . . .

Well maybe we can look at Jonah, he’s another servant of the Lord in the Old Testament. . . he runs away at first, because he doesn’t want to do it, but the reason he doesn’t want to do it is because God wants him to go to Ninevah and preach to them about repenting and turning to the Lord, or else. . . . but he knows that if he goes, they will repent, and then there will be no, or else. . . and this makes him mad. . . but he does it anyway, and he is right, the Lord relents, and Jonah is angry sitting in the shade.  . . hmmm.

Ezekiel serves and gets in hot water with Jezebel and Ahab. . . Daniel serves and finds himself in the Lion’s den, Shadrach Mesach and Abednego serve and they find themselves in a fiery furnace. . . Noah has to built a big boat and fill it with animals. . . then of course there is the man that God refers to as, “my servant Job” have you considered, “my servant Job” he asks. . .

You see what I mean there are a lot of different models and paths for servanthood that we find there, and many are challenging, to say the least. . . the very act of serving the Lord seems to be fraught with many different paths, and many different obstacles. . .

If we were to look at history there are many different understandings on what it means to serve the Lord. You can look in the Gospels and find Jesus embodying the idea of servanthood, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, caring for the lowly, eating with outcasts, and of course going to the cross, bearing the cross himself, he even says to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew 20: 25-28,  

But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ²⁶ It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, ²⁷ and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; ²⁸ just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

So we can see that Christ is an original model for this notion of service. The early church had some ideas about service, and if you look at all of Paul’s letters, including this one of the Romans, you can get a lot of different ideas of what it means to serve the Lord, many connected to serving those around you, serving your brothers and sisters in the faith, being united together, etc., and then there was another generation of Christians who was forced to face persecution at the hands of the Romans, and if you read the Book of Revelation you can see a view of service that was about witnessing, proclaiming the idea that Christ is Lord in a society where such things could cost you status, could cost you business, and in some cases could even cost you your life. But then eventually things change as the church has more success than it has ever had before because the church and the state gets combined when Constantine converts the Empire to a Christian one, and then being a Christian gets connected to serving the state, being a good citizen, etc. As the Roman Empire Falls and Kingdoms develop in Feudal Europe during the middle Ages, serving the Lord might be connected to serving your Lord if you are a peasant, it might have to do with being a good vassal, serving in the military if you are asked. . . during the Crusades, serving the Lord meant going to the Holy Land to fight the infidel Muslims. In the late Middle Ages serving the Lord took on many faces, the claim of tradition included things like indulgences, where serving the Lord somehow got connected to making payments to restore your soul back in the grace of God, but then during the Reformation serving the Lord took on new meanings, like studying the Bible, believing, having faith. Here in America even more meaning, perhaps serving the Lord meant having the right political views, attending church, wearing the right clothes to church, but also teaching Sunday School, feeding the poor, finding ways to help those in need through financial contribution, etc. If you study it closely, there are as many different ways of serving the church as there are people, and some are problematic and some are very noble, and why would that be. . . it is because of the Lord we serve, and the fallibility of human beings as servants. . . let’s look to our Gospel reading from this morning: Luke 9; 57-62

⁵⁷ As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

⁵⁸ Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

⁵⁹ He said to another man, “Follow me.”

But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

⁶⁰ Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

⁶¹ Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”

⁶² Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

You see, one of the reasons serving the Lord looks so diverse is the very nature of our Lord. God in the Old Testament cannot be tied down. He is the God who is. . . the Hebrews believed that they could not even say His name because even a name trapped him too much. They couldn’t put him in a box, they couldn’t depict him in anything made by humans, he defied such things, and so since he is the God who created everything and cannot be nailed down into any one thing. . . serving Him takes on as many different modes as he does. . . and Christ  is the same, he says follow me, leave all behind and follow me, and do so right now, again the Lord we serve is a God on the move, and when given the chance to serve himself. . . he himself goes to the cross.

Serving a God like that then takes on a life of its own. . . and we are lucky enough to live in a time where we are free to serve him, individually and as we are created to because now, in 2017, we have mostly rid ourselves of the trappings of power, where we stand with only Christ as our intermediary between ourselves and God, where Church and State are mostly separated by a wall, where Christianity is not imposed on us by any state, and where we as individual followers of Christ need nor have anyone between us and the Lord to tell us what it means to serve him, yes that means even me, even Pastors, no, the question comes to us each again, what does it mean to serve the Lord when we are completely free as Christians, as Americans, as Presbyterians, as members of Bethany Presbyterian Church to do so? How can we get back to following the Lord, rather than all the Lords of this world?

One answer and maybe the most important is that we cannot trade back our freedom for something else. . . . even though it is in our nature and in our history to do so. We cannot flee from the danger of serving the Lord, we cannot cling to the safe, we cannot avoid the difficult questions seeking common answers. . . but instead each individually wrestle with what we are, and what we are called to do as servants of God. Because though we are all here together, each of us has a unique path, and so I cannot tell you exactly what your path is, though I can seek to help you find it, because just like we can learn from the great servants in the Bible, we can learn from history, and we can learn and help each other on our way. We can’t do for, and we cannot take the place of, but we can seek to discern together, and walk our own paths, side by side and parallel, for it is true that the Lord we serve has brought us each to this point.

I believe that serving the Lord takes on a 7 part pattern. . . and I’ve developed this by looking at the common threads between those who I think have effectively served the Lord in their lives, those characters I have seen in the Bible, those saints throughout history, whom I have admired, and the great saints that I have been blessed in my life to walk this Earth alongside. . . . and the beautiful thing about these 7 patterns is they are always occurring, constantly and repeatedly throughout our lives. . . they aren’t really stages that you go through once in life, but rather ones that you constantly find yourself in.

These are Humility, Discernment, Resolution, Perseverance, Fulfillment, Legacy, and Retirement. I want to take a minute to go through each of these, and say a little something about each one, and then walk through an example or two. . .

Humility is the point where you admit that you don’t know what to do, and you give up yourself. . . the idea of being a servant means that you are not doing things for your own benefit, nor your own purposes, but instead are aligning your purpose to what you are serving. . . so this unselfing is an important part of it. . . so many people who claim to be serving the Lord throughout history do not begin with this important piece. . . they hold on to themselves, and either do not have the staying power to finish the race, or corrupt the God’s purposes to achieve their own. . . I think of all those Medieval kings and Popes who used the name of Christianity to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others. . . and we can still see this today. . . Humility says, it is not about me, but thee Oh God. . . and this is the crucial step. . . but the great thing about it, is there is the constant and recurring chance to start over if you go astray because realizing you are or have been wrong is . . . yes. . . humility. . . kinda like the Go space on the Monopoly board. . . you can always get back to that grab your $200 and start your way back around the board again.

So you are standing there in humility, and you ask the next question. . . what am I to do? This is called discernment. . . discernment as the question, who am I and what am I being called to do? Where do you go to find out? Since we begun with humility, the first thing we must do is ask, and ask anew, and ask again and again, seek and keep on seeking, ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking. Never stop asking until you have a good idea of what you are supposed to do and be, and not just on the big full life scale, but in the little questions, remember these are patterns that are constantly repeating. Am I called to do this? Am I called to do that? What are these things? It may not be what you have always done, remember starting with Humility opens us up to whatever God is calling, whatever God is doing in and through our lives. Sometimes it is a major shift in what you may have thought about yourself previously. . . but alas God’s will is what is to be done. . .

And that brings us to the next step, which is Resolution. Having discerned what you are being called to the next step is to take it. To do it, to dive in, to go all in,  to commit yourself. . .

The next two often happen interchangeably and simultaneously and that is Perseverance and Fulfillment. . . .  . They go together because God gives us a little of both when we are serving. Sometimes the challenges come and we have to persevere, and we can if our Resolution was strong. . . but also along the way our cup runs over, and we feel that fulfillment, we feel like we are at the right place at the right time, and it all just works out right. And that brings us to the next part:

Legacy, people will see your energy, your attitude, your accomplishments, your strength, all of it, and it makes a difference, you leave behind that kind of legacy, you are remembered for what you have done, and then you give God all the glory. . . because the last part is the most difficult, modeled by Moses in this morning’s Old Testament Lesson.

The last is Retirement. . . . stepping away, passing on what you have done so that some one else can finish. The play goes on, and you have contributed your verse and now it is time for someone else to finish. You started with humility, you were serving the Lord and not yourself, can you remain humble enough to let go, and move on to the next thing? So very important, but so very challenging.

Now I know that I have built up serving the Lord to a high level, using big words to describe it, but I want to close with a reminder that this is about the small things as much as the big. If you can do everything in life, as part of your service to God, then you will always be in the right place. . . George Herbert’s poem which I quoted in the bulletin gets at this idea. Let me close with it.

All may of Thee partake:           Nothing can be so mean,  Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—           Will not grow bright and clean.	A servant with this clause           Makes drudgery divine:  Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,           Makes that and th' action fine.
This is the famous stone           That turneth all to gold;  For that which God doth touch and own           Cannot for less be told. From “The Elixir” by George Herbert