Sermon for Sunday, November 12, 2023 || Proper 27A || Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
I began my very first paid job when I was fifteen. I worked at the independent bookstore, which my mother managed. I served the customers by offering recommendations, ringing up their orders, and gift-wrapping their purchase. I loved that job. My second job was waiting tables at the Logan’s Roadhouse, which is one of those steak restaurants where customers are encouraged to throw their peanut husks on the floor. I served the guests by taking their orders, refilling drinks, and sweeping up those countless peanut shells. I did not love that job. I worked at Olive Garden as a busser, as a camp counselor, and as an assistant at my seminary’s teaching library. Then I got ordained and started serving as a priest. Serving in the church is the only, what I would call, “adult” job I’ve ever had.
In each of those early jobs, I knew my role exactly. I knew whom I was serving, and I knew how they wanted me to practice this service. Find that book that the customer swears has an orange cover and whose title maybe starts with the word “The.” Clear those five tables in that section so the hostess can seat the waiting patrons. Make sure the campers get their teeth brushed and to bed on time. In most jobs and most roles in our lives, we know how to serve. We know whom to report to. We know the expectations set for us. Maybe we even get evaluated on the performance of our services from time to time.
With this fairly clear cut understanding of our service to our bosses or our customers or our families, we might not have thought too much about how we serve God. Serving God is much less clear cut. In today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Joshua implores the people of Israel to choose God over the false gods of the peoples around them: “Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua leads by example. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Now, serving other people is easy (not necessarily healthy or mutual, but easy, yes): they tell us what they want and we do it for them. Pretty simple. But how do we serve God? That’s the question that’s been on my mind this week. How do we serve God when God isn’t necessarily giving us turn by turn directions?
Before I attempt an answer at this fairly impossible question, we need to acknowledge a horrible reality in the history of the world. A lot of the worst things that have ever been done were done by people who justified their actions by saying they were serving the God of Christianity: religious wars throughout Europe, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, colonialism, genocide of native peoples, human enslavement. All of these death-dealing paths were chosen by people who said they were serving God. This awful historical reality warns any of us who are trying to discern how God calls us to serve because it is all too easy to choose what you want to do and then just decide that God called you to do it.
Okay, so we desire to serve God. But God isn’t just giving us our duties for the day’s shift. We need to work a little harder to discern how God yearns for us to serve. Thankfully, that work of discernment is part of our service to God. We actually serve God when we’re trying to figure out how to serve God. So that’s pretty cool. Discernment involves deep and prayerful listening at the overlapping of three voices. The first voice is the wisdom of Holy Scripture. The second voice is the collective witness of our community of faith. And the third voice is the Holy Spirit nudging us from the depths of ourselves. Taken together, these three voices help us discover where God is calling us to serve, what theologian Frederick Buechner describes as the place where our “deep gladness” intersects the world’s “deep hunger.”
The first voices, the wisdom of Holy Scripture, offers so many ways to serve God. There are even some lists! (Romans Chapter 12 comes to mind. You can look it up later.) But two places in the Bible give the most succinct summaries of how to serve. We talked about the first a couple of weeks ago: Jesus’ command to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. The second is the famous verse from the prophet Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”
We serve God by working for justice; that is, making sure everyone is treated equitably so they might thrive. We serve God by being kind; that is, being generous, hospitable, loving, and open. And we serve God by walking humbly; that is, treading lightly upon the earth, always remembering that we are not the center of the universe.
The second voice, the witness of the community, identifies our giftedness and encourages us to use our gifts. We serve God by cultivating our gifts so they build up the community – the community at all levels of organization, from our local church, to our town, our state, our country, our world. Each of us has a constellation of gifts unique to ourselves that burns with the Light of Christ. Our collections of gifts differ which is precisely why we need one another.
And that brings me to the third voice, the voice within, the Spirit sweeping over the waters at the core of our beings. If there’s one way we can serve God above all else, it is being ourselves. We serve God by discovering and celebrating the unique individuals God created us to be. It does no good wishing we were someone else because God only made one of each of us. Like stained glass windows, God’s light shines through us, telling a special part of God’s story that only we can tell. We serve God by telling that story and by making sure all people, especially those whose identities have been outlawed or silenced, have the opportunity to share their authentic stories too. In the end, the third voice invites us to live fully into ourselves. Theologian Howard Thurman once said this, and I agree with him wholeheartedly; he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Serve God by coming alive. Serve God by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly. Serve God by discerning God’s call in your life. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Let’s serve together.
Season 6, Episode 5
“Freedom in Andor”
The Podcast for Nerdy Christians, where faith meets fandom. In the 5th episode of Season 6, we’re talking about arguably the best of the Disney+ Star Wars live action shows – Andor.
Where the Wind... 