At Your Service (Reflections on Pentecost 4, Year c 2022)

 

“Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:20) 

Yipee! 

I rejoice and give praise to God for the NBC streaming service Peacock. Why? Because it has allowed me to binge watch all fifty marvelous, beautifully shot, elegantly acted, and sumptuously costumed hours of Downton Abby. I missed most of Downton when it was on PBS, so now I get to see the whole series from the beginning. I am, perhaps, betraying both my American democratic patriotism as well as my ancestral Welsh sensibilities when I derive so much pleasure from watching the fictional goings-on of an English earl’s palatial estate, but this sojourn into a genteel past offers me a bit of respite from the lousy present we’re all enduring. Can you blame me?

 As much as I enjoy Downton’s aristocratic family drama, I’m equally fascinated by the stories of the “below stairs” staff—the butler, housekeeper, maids, footmen, and valets who so precisely keep the house running. As a class, the servants take their work extremely seriously, and they find “service” to be a noble and honorable profession. They are loyal and dedicated, and often provide a quiet but comforting presence to the lord and ladies they serve. We may look down our noses today at the kid who asks us, “Do you want fries with that?” but, if COVID has taught us anything, we should consider that those who do the “menial” tasks might not be as menial as we previously thought. There’s something to be said for those who take service seriously. Take Jesus, for example, who said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”[i] He didn’t have any issues with getting down on all fours to do the servant’s job of washing the feet of the disciples. 

There is a heroic humility in the alternate First Lesson assigned for Pentecost 4, Year C (2 Kings 5:1-14). In this taie, the servants are the heroes. The Bible always seems to favor the underdogs. Naaman, the great general and leader of Aram’s armed forces, has no power over the disease which afflicts him, and no notion of how to get relief. It’s his wife’s slave who comes up with the solution. To me, it speaks powerfully that this young girl, captured in a raid and forced into servitude, has so much compassion for the suffering of her captor that she directs him to a cure. She’d be perfectly within her rights—don’t you think?—to let her oppressor suffer, but the oppression of her servitude to Mrs. Naaman doesn’t outweigh her servitude to God. Even as a slave she is an instrument of healing. 

So Naaman has his king write a letter to the king of Israel, which, as happens at top bureaucratic levels, screws things up and almost starts a war. The prophet Elisha is certainly willing to do some healing of Naaman’s skin disease, but even he messes up by showing an indifference to protocol. The prophet, who you would think knew better, rather rudely fails to meet the foreign dignitary himself. Instead, he sends a lackey out to give the Aramean general the prescription for a cure, which, as you can imagine, incenses Naaman who rides off in a fury. 

Fortunately, Naaman has some servants who have cooler heads than he. They reason with their boss and get him to calm down and try the cure. It works, and Naaman rides back, meets Elisha, and offers thanks. In this tale, the ones who take servanthood seriously expand its definition to include speaking truth to those they serve—even when this means risking the master’s wrath. 

In our gospel lesson (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20), Jesus instructs 70 of his followers in the right way to be servants of the gospel. They’re asked to go out into the world and be a healing presence, proclaiming the nearness of God to those who need to feel that nearness. They are told to be present with people, stay in their homes, and eat of their food. Essentially, Jesus is teaching them to get to know the people so the people can feel that they’ve been seen and acknowledged. The 70 are instructed to be bringers of peace and healers of the sick. If they are treated rudely, they are not to respond in kind, but simply to move on, trusting that their peace will be restored to them—just as any good waiter or store clerk who valued professionalism would do. 

Christianity is a service industry. We are called to be here for one another, to be a healing presence in the world. In his 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian, Martin Luther wrote, “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” He taught that any good work we do must be a work of service for our neighbor. We don’t do anything for God. After all, God doesn’t need our help. We are called, rather, to be in community and to consider how our work or our daily actions bring the Kingdom of God closer to those around us. As a church, we should always be asking how our neighborhood benefits from our presence. As individuals, we should always consider how our labor, words, or presence has been a form of service. Whether you work behind a wheel or behind a computer terminal, in a convenience store or a machine shop, doing what you do enables someone else to keep doing what they do.

We don’t get to wear the fancy livery, the white tie and tails of a butler in Downton Abby, when we perform our duties; nevertheless, a humble, loving attitude about what we do clothes us in righteousness. Our challenge is to see ourselves as if we were among the 70 Jesus sent out. How have we been a healing presence? How have we born the burden of others? How have we brought the Kingdom near? 

God’s peace, my friend.

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[i] See Matthew 20:28, Mark 10:45, and John 13:1-17