February 16, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Servants

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:1–8
Deuteronomy 30:15–20
1 Corinthians 3:1–9

“For we are God’s servants.”
1 Corinthians 3:9 (NRSV)

Won’t you let me be your servant,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace
to let you be my servant too.

Richard Gillard

“We are God’s servants,” writes Paul, in our text this morning. The text from this letter soars to the heights of the great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. We are God’s servants. The concept of servant, the theme for reflection this morning, is perhaps something that is a bit complex in our own context and culture.

Perhaps the first thing that pops into our minds when we think of the word servant is Downton Abbey or Upstairs, Downstairs, one of those costume dramas set in the Victorian or Edwardian era in which the class structures are so stratified and being a servant is one of the opportunities for the lower classes to survive. Or others might think of P.G. Wodehouse’s great satire on servants, Jeeves and Wooster, or perhaps even worse as we would have read in the New York Times op-ed page yesterday, how indentured servitude is something that is so prevalent in Asian countries that it’s oppressing thousands and thousands of young women who leave their homes, in this case Indonesia, to go to Hong Kong where they are treated woefully.

And so culturally and socially, the concept of servant is a difficult one, and yet it remains one that is central to our faith, this concept of servanthood. Jesus himself says, in the twentieth chapter of Matthew, “I came not to be served but to serve.” To serve is at the heart of Jesus’ earthly ministry.

But it goes back even further, to the foundations of our Judeo-Christian tradition, as we read in the books in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. In our reading this morning from the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Torah, the Law, the fifth book of the Old Testament, we hear, “Choose life. Choose life so that you may live, loving the Lord your God and obeying him.” That is what it is to choose life.

A great friend of Fourth Church and teacher to the whole church, Walter Brueggemann is helpful when we’re exploring texts like this. Brueggemann reminds us that there is no single Old Testament theological understanding of God. There are many plural theologies in the Old Testament. One single example he gives is that when you look at the first four books of the Old Testament, you find there the influence of what’s known as the priestly tradition. Think of the book of Leviticus and all those lists of commandments that are about being pure and keeping holy so that the Holy God will dwell with the children of Israel. That’s the thrust of those first four books, and Brueggemann points out that Deuteronomy and onward from there has a different theme. It doesn’t throw out the concept of holiness or purity, but it says there’s more to God’s living in the land than that, that choosing life for the Deuteronomist, as the writer is called, means to live into a world of social justice and economic justice. So in Deuteronomy you find not lists of laws for purity, but exhortations that the people of the land should serve the widow and the orphan and the stranger. That’s the Deuteronomist’s formula for saying to the people, “You must care for those who are at the margins, who have the least. You’re to serve those in the ways that you live your life and the way that you glean your crops.” Ultimately, in the commandment, that after seven years, any slave should be freed in order to be able to live their life in freedom. Choosing life, for the Deuteronomist, is about serving God though serving God’s people on the margins.

There is a story from the Hassidic tradition of Judaism in a congregation is intrigued to see their rabbi disappear each week on the eve of the sabbath. They suspected he was secretly meeting with the Almighty, and so they deputized one of their number to follow him, and this is what the man saw. The rabbi disguised himself in peasant clothes and went to a hovel and there served a paralyzed gentle woman, cleaning out the room and preparing a sabbath meal for her. When the spy got back, the congregation asked, “Where did the rabbi go? Did he ascend into heaven?” “No,” the man replied. “He went even higher.”

To be a servant means to employ the quality of empathy. What do we mean when we talk about empathy? A good working definition for us this morning comes from a writer called Lynn Mayer, who has written extensively about the Catholic saint and martyr of the twentieth century Edith Stein, who died in Auschwitz. When Mayer speaks about empathy as being one of the qualities of spirituality that led Edith Stein from her Jewish upbringing to converting to Catholicism, this is what she says: “Empathy constitutes for us an experience of another human being in all of his or her complexity, body and member of a body, fallen and redeemed, vulnerable and transcendent, and perfect and loved.” She writes, “It was axiomatic for Edith Stein that emotions move one to act. Empathy, however, moves one to love.”

Empathy is the quality that moves us to love like the rabbi in our story and therefore to act out of love in service. Empathy is more than kindness; it is certainly more than sympathy. It’s about emptying one’s self in order to live in another’s shoes and recognizing our common humanity. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of this in one of his sermons on the Good Samaritan: “The real tragedy,” said Dr. King, “is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We see men as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Chinese or Americans, Negroes or Whites. We fail to think of them as failed human beings, made from the same basic stuff as we, molded in the same divine image.” In the same divine image. I wonder sometimes if Dr. King had been reading the English poet William Blake before he preached this sermon. Listen to the words of the final stanza of Blake’s famous poem “The Divine Image”:

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

A few weeks ago I was in an email conversation with an old friend of mine, John Bell, who is a well-known hymn writer and liturgist. John travels the world, leading workshops and preaching. We were both preaching on the day we know as the Baptism of the Lord, and John shared this story with me, which I want to share with you this morning, a story about servitude and empathy.

It’s a story about a pastor, a friend of John Bell’s, who lives in England. He’s a priest in the Anglican church. His name is James. One day, he, James, and a nineteen-year-old boy went together to the local hospital and found the clinic that deals with sexually transmitted diseases. Now James is not married; he has no partner, and anyone from his church who happened to see him going into this clinic with a nineteen-year-old boy would have had something to gossip about. But they would probably never have known the background. This boy was the son of a very well-known businessman in the community. His father was a prominent member of the local Anglican church. He was known to be a man of high moral values. His son was very different. He had always been made to feel a failure. He was not as clever as his sister and had no desire to go into his father’s business. He and his father did not get on well, and so a bit like the prodigal son, the boy left home and went to London, where he had unsafe relationships and spent the little money that he had. Like the prodigal, he eventually came back home. There was a blazing row with his father, and the boy walked out. It was a long time since he was last near the church, but because he knew that the priest, James, was a gracious man, he went to speak to him. They had a long talk about the boy and his father, about his past and his future, and about what had happened in London. And that is when the boy said that he had been having unsafe sex and was afraid that he might be HIV positive, but he did not want to go to the local clinic in case someone saw him and also in case he discovered that he had caught the virus. That is when James, the priest, said to him “You really need to go. You must find out your status. But go soon and I’ll go with you. I will get tested as well.”

As I said earlier, these are the waning days of my ministry among you. As that time comes soon, as a preacher, one wonders what to say to the beloved congregation. And then one realizes that what to say is to be honest and simple, to exhort you, the people of Fourth Presbyterian Church, to be the church, the faithful community of Christ gathered here as Christ’s body, called—as we said in Project Second Century—to love and serve. So people of the church, serve and be served, as perhaps put most simply in Richard Gillard’s contemporary hymn.

Won’t you let me be your servant.
Let me be as Christ to you.
Pray that I may have the grace to
Let you be my servant too.

Amen.