A Call to Serve

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Sermon Notes, Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020 Proper 21 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. In my experience as a golfer I've never had a caddy accompany me around the golf course. But I'm intrigued by the relationship between a golfer and caddy. The relationship is often close, especially at the professional level. Pros and caddies work together throughout a season or longer, sometimes over a career. It's a deferential relationship where the caddy gives the golfer his best insight, weighs the golfer's skill against the challenge of the shot, then concedes to the golfer's decision. Even if it differs from his own. To do otherwise might undermine the golfer's confidence especially when the caddy is right and the golfer is wrong. Paul's admonition to the Philippians might well serve as a caddy's proverb. Set aside your own ego and build up the pride of the one you serve. That's easy in the PGA when the golfer is invariably more skilled than the caddy. But in real life, Paul says, the maxim applies all the more when the roles are reversed. When all the skill, and grace, and self-confidence belong to the caddy, he must set all that aside to serve the woeful golfer. Because the real-life stakes are higher. We aren't playing golf, we're the church trying to live out the Kingdom of God on earth. It is not a trophy for the taking, but a soul, two souls actually: yours and mine. Today's focus is on the soul of the one who serves. We don't need to stop and think if that is us, because Paul already determined that we are all servers. If we are in the church and serious about following Jesus, we are servers. Servers on two levels. We serve God and we serve each other. What makes us servers? We are servers because we have been served ourselves. Paul says take stock of what you have and see if you haven't received an abundance of spiritual gifts. Have you been encouraged in Christ? Of course we have. For many of us that encouragement began with our earliest recollection of being part of a church family. I still have occasional contact with my 3rd grade Sunday School teacher. He encouraged me to stick with Jesus no matter what life threw at me. Parents, friends, and other teachers reinforced that encouragement until it became a pattern of life for me, and I try to encourage others to do the same. Do you take any comfort from love? Who in the church has not taken comfort from love? We do that when we pray for each other, visit each other when someone hurts, take up an offering for someone in need. Not to mention the love in Christ that sustains us all and gives meaning to our lives. Do you participate in the Spirit? John Stott says we participate in the Spirit every time we access Christ through the Holy Eucharist. The Holy Spirit is not the exclusive domain of the Pentecostal church, but belongs to the whole church. Have you received affection or sympathy? Servers excel in times when they share love or grief. The church rises above itself in weddings and funerals. We bless those who come together in love and we mourn with those who suffer loss. We set aside for a time our own concerns to celebrate or weep with others. If someone comes up beside you and places their arm across your shoulders, you have been served. Paul says to the Philippians and to the church today, if this describes you then we are one together in Christ. We are of one mind. He goes so far as to say his joy depends on us being of one mind with him in the need to serve and be served. But Paul isn't looking for like-minded individuals. The point isn't to be like Paul, the point is to be like Jesus. "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus," which leads him to open the book on Jesus. We have one of the earliest expressions of Christology handed down through the centuries. This is what Paul and the early church believed, in beautiful and poetic language, and sings today just as it sang in the first century. I wish it had been translated into poetry by the composers of our ESV Bible. But even in prose it is a glorious statement. who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Where have we heard that before? Kudos to those who recognize it as the Epistle reading for Palm Sunday. We read it every year as the preamble to the passion narrative. It tells us that Jesus' glory, God's glory, is made perfect in human likeness. It tells us that Jesus did not resist being human as he might have being God. But instead became abjectly human, suffering the worst that humanity could endure. Even death on a cross. It tells us that the mind of Christ, the mind we want to adopt as our own, is the mind of a servant. If only being a servant was a job we could do. Something we could give to God and others 40 hours a week, then revert back to our true selves, assume an identity a little less than that. Be a servant while we are in church and focusing on godly things. Love everyone who loves us and hold out hope for the others. They might yet come to love us, and then we could love them back in return. In Matthew 16:24 Jesus says, "If any of you wants to be my disciples, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me." It is not going to work for us if we compartmentalize the servant role. We can't enter into it and step out of it as it suits us. Jesus doesn't say take up your cross until it gets heavy. He doesn't say lay it down when you need to take a break. Jesus continues to say in Matthew 16:25: "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." It's all or nothing at all. And somehow that word "selfish" keeps cropping up. Paul said, "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit." Jesus said, "Turn from your selfish ways." Am I being selfish if I take a little time off from being the servant? A little time for myself? This servanthood is looking harder and harder all the time. Ezekiel said, "Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!" Paul wrote, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Not that we can save ourselves, or create a new heart and a new spirit ourselves. But that these things are needed and we must work at them diligently because that is what servants do. Servants work for their masters not counting the cost or the time. It's who they are. It's who we are in Christ, who alone gives us of himself, serving us so that we can serve him. There's a Cursillo hymn that goes: Brother (sister) 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.
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