September 29, 2024
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Micah 6:6-8; Philippians 2:1-11; Mark 1:29-31
We Lift Our Hands
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
We lift our hands. Hands are amazing things. There are 27 bones in a human hand and wrist. Our hands are capable of amazing dexterity. Just consider a concert pianist. Their hands fly over the keyboard with the greatest of ease. Surgeons need a steady hand. I just saw basketball player Caitlin Clark on 60 Minutes last Sunday. She related how she practiced and practiced 3-point shots since she was a small girl. That practice paid off. Caitlin said she can tell when the ball leaves her fingertips if the shot is going to be good.
What wonders our hands are capable of! Today we consider our hands. “We lift our hands” looks at the stewardship of our service, our vocation.
That word “vocation” comes from the Latin “vocatio.” It means “calling.” We are called into the service of our lives. Certainly, we wear many hats. We answer to many callings at once, hundreds across the span of our life.
Are you aware that you are called? You might think that just holy people like ministers are called. But that’s not true. We are all of us called, called into service in this world. We serve to God’s glory through these amazing hands, amazing bodies, amazing minds that we’ve been given.
St. Teresa of Avila said it so beautifully:
Christ has no body on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless others now.
We lift our hands up to you, we are an offering. Our Bible readings today all center on the stewarding of our actions.
Our actions are an offering. In the reading from Micah, the prophet considers what offering is pleasing to God. He proposes some offerings of astonishing size and scope.
“What is pleasing to you, God? What can I give you?” He suggests enormous offerings. “How about thousands of rams? Would that impress you? Maybe something even bigger! How about 10,000 rivers of oil?”
Picture an endless caravan on its way to the temple in Jerusalem. Tied on the backs of every camel are large casks of oil, followed by a mass of bleating rams.
But maybe something even more spectacular: “Lord, what about my firstborn? What if I sacrificed my firstborn child for you? Would that satisfy you?”
Then we get the reveal. God isn’t interested in such offerings. What God really wants is a life focused on justice and kindness. God calls us to the humble path of service. We fulfill this through the actions of our days. This kind of holy service doesn’t necessarily mean actions tied directly into holy and pious living. On the contrary, God calls us into the world, into service to our neighbors.
In the words attributed to Martin Luther “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”
What is the work of your hands? Charles Plumb was a graduate of the US Naval Academy. He attended what we now refer to as Top Gun school. During the Vietnam War he was a jet pilot. He had flown 74 missions. On his 75th mission, what was to be his final mission, Charles Plumb’s jet was shot down from the sky. He ejected from his cockpit and parachuted into enemy territory. He then spent the next 6 years in a Vietnamese prison cell.
Years later, now back in the States, Plumb and his wife were eating in a restaurant. A man approached him. He said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
Plumb was amazed that this man knew who he was. He asked the man how he knew him. “I packed your parachute,” he said.
Plumb gasped in shock. He felt such gratitude for this man who played such a vital role in his survival. That night he found it hard to sleep. Reflecting on the moment, Plumb said, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”
What did this man do with his hands? In the lower decks of the ship, he very carefully folded the silk of each parachute he packed, knowing that someone’s fate was literally in his hands. To use Luther’s metaphor, he didn’t embroider little crosses on the parachutes. He just made sure they were folded properly. In his humble service, he committed the offering of his hands.
Through the winding avenues of our lifetime, we are led through an unimaginable number of service opportunities. Through our jobs, our families, through friendships and volunteer opportunities, through our shared life here as a community of believers, each day unfolds ways to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.
In our reading from Philippians, Paul urges us to look to the life of Christ as our example. Jesus lived the life of a servant. In taking on our human flesh, he poured himself into our humble, mortal form. He grew up among a simple family in a small town. Throughout his ministry, he served and healed with lovingkindness. And in his dying, he gave us the greatest gift imaginable. He sacrificed his everything that we might gain heaven’s greatest gifts.
In short, his life took a downward path. From heaven to earth, and from the earth to the grave. This was his earthly mission. From the beginning, it was focused down, for our sakes.
The Swedish theologian Gustav Wingren considered this when he wrote about our own vocation. Our vocation, the offering of our hands, isn’t focused up towards heaven and God. Just as Jesus did, it’s focused downwards. It moves away from self-interest and towards our neighbor. He writes:
“So vocation belongs to this world, not to heaven; it is directed toward one’s neighbor, not toward God. This is an important preliminary characteristic. In his vocation one is not reaching up to God, but rather bends oneself down toward the world. When one does that, God’s creative work is carried on. God’s work of love takes form on earth…”
With our hands, we are called into the vocation of our service. As we use our hands towards serving our neighbor with lovingkindness, God’s love takes form on earth. And this is the offering most pleasing to God.
And the greatest surprise of all is that, in our service, we find joy and purpose. Our third reading for today comes from Mark’s gospel. Jesus has just begun his ministry, and he finds himself at Peter’s house. Peter’s mother-in-law lives with him, and she’s in bed with a fever. Jesus heals her. He takes her by the hand, and as soon as he does that, the fever leaves her.
And what happens next tells us something very important about the source of our joy and purpose. This woman shows her gratitude through serving Jesus and the others there. She immediately gets up and begins to serve them. She, who had been healed, now serves.
This is the great mystery of our service. Serving our neighbor becomes a vehicle to express our thanks for all we have received. And in losing ourselves in service, in the giving away of our selves, our time, our energies, our exhaustion, in this way we discover who we really are, what we have always been.
For Christ has no body on earth but yours;
no hands but yours;
no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless others now.
Lord, we lift our hands up to you, we are an offering.
