During the American Revolution a man in civilian clothes road past a group of soldiers repairing a small defensive barrier. Their leader was shouting instructions, but making no attempt to help them. Asked why by the rider, he replied with great dignity, "Sir, I am a corporal!"
The stranger apologized, dismounted, and proceeded to help the exhausted soldiers. The job done, he turned to the corporal and said, "Mr. Corporal, next time you have a job like this and not enough men to do it, go to your commander-in-chief, and I will come and help you again." The man in civilian clothes was George Washington.
I don’t know if that story is true or like that other George Washington story, You remember the one about the cherry tree. But I do know we are drawn to leaders who haven’t been corrupted by their power or changed by their positions or impressed with their titles.
The past two weeks we have been talking about what it would take to make an impression on our community. I believe that God wants us to make a mark on our neighborhoods. I believe that God wants people to know who we are, and I believe that God wants us to leave our fingerprints everywhere we go.
Two weeks ago we discovered that that can be done if we will change the way that we see power and position.
Last week we discussed that fact that if we are going to make an impact then we must change and be like little children.
This week one more story about what we need to do to leave our mark. This story is a lot like the Washington story but I know this one is true. It’s in John 13. The most famous story of service of all. Let’s listen. (John 13: 1 - 17).
Our story today explains what it means to serve. And the points are pretty basic stuff, which means they are easy to apply and hard to excuse.
Here’s the first one; service is what we do while we still have time.
V s. 1. "Jesus knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father."
He knew his time was up. He had less than 24 hours. And he knew it. If they’d had mechanical clocks back in the first century, Jesus would have heard his ticking. If they had hung calendars on the wall, He’d have turned his last page. He was in the middle of his final meal.
Have you ever thought about what you do with your last 24 hours?
Take a day trip? You wouldn’t want to go too far.
Shop? What for?
mow the lawn? Clean the house? Wash the car? Maybe. Leave things better than you found them and all that. It’s an interesting question. What would you do?
On September 11 2001, a man named Todd Beamer was faced with the question. Except he had less than 24 hours. He had minutes. According to the conversation he had with a GTE in flight operator, he knew it, too.
Beamer was a 32 year old Oracle executive who was on United flight 93. Before he left that morning he called a friend he’d been praying with, called him from the airport to check in and see how he was. Then boarded his flight. When he realized his flight was being hijacked, Beamer and at least three other passengers decided to do something about it. They’d heard what had happened to other flights that day and were determined it wouldn’t happen to theirs.
Beamer knew his wife, Lisa, was at home, but rather than calling her, he called the GTE operator. He reported the hijacking, then asked the operator to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him. The last thing the operator heard Beamer say was, "You guys ready? Let’s roll."
On September 11th Todd Beamer became an American hero because of the way he spent his last moments. I suspect there are more heroics in us than we think. When you know you aren’t going to make it, when you know the time is short, you’ll do some amazing, sacrificial things.
The sad thing is, Todd Beamer was a hero before he boarded United flight 93. He was a hero because despite his athletic success in college, despite his business success as an Oracle executive, he was a servant. That’s what he did with his time.
And I suspect one reason Todd Beamer spent his time serving others is because he had a keen sense that every day he was potentially 24 hours away from the end. Everyone of us wakes up to what may be the last day we live. So serve.
Don’t say, "I’ll become a servant one day, when I’ve achieved my goals or when the kids are grown or when I’ve taken care of my responsibilities." You won’t. If you keep putting off becoming a servant, there will always be one more very good reason to delay taking up the towel. You’ll get to the end of your life having done everything you meant to do, except serve.
This past Winter you said “I’ll serve when the Spring comes.” and now that Spring is here you will start serving after you air out the house, clean the garage, unclog the gutters, put up the screens, seed the lawn, wax the car, and on and on. If we are not intentional it will never get done.
Service is what we do while we still have time.
Second, service is how we show our love in the here and now.
Vs. 1 says, "Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love."
I think it’s interesting at least, and potentially significant that John tells us where those Jesus loved were; they were in the world. Which is a curious phrase. Of course they were in the world. Where else would they be? Why does John tell us that?
I believe that sometimes Christians get a little hyper-spiritual you know a little spiritually overexcited. We get other worldly minded. Like what happens in the here and now isn’t the real thing.
You know heaven and eternity, that’s where it’s all at. So we check out emotionally. It’s all going to burn anyway, so why get all focused on the immediate, the tangible, the present. This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through and all that.
There is a sense in which everything we do, every word we speak, every breath we take is done and spoken and taken on a cosmic stage. Near the end of act one of Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town, George Gibbs and his sister Rebecca have an interesting conversation.
Rebecca : "I never told you about that letter that Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America."
George : "What’s funny about that?"
Rebecca : "But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemishpere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God -- that’s what it said on the envelope."
George : "What do you know!"
Rebecca : "And the postman brought it just the same.
Everyone of us lives within the presence of God. He is above us and below us and through us and in us and around us. And for some Christians it’s all too easy to get all caught up in the ecstasy and mystery and transcendence of this spiritual existence. But how is Jane Crofut going to get over her discouragement and depression and pain, how is she ever going to know she is loved if someone doesn’t send her a letter? If someone doesn’t come to visit her while she’s sick?
We discussed 5 weeks ago that love is not an emotion. It is an action. And the stage for the action of love isn’t in the human heart or the mind of God. It’s in the daily grind of living on this dirty planet. The promptings for love don’t come from some mysterious emotion; the promptings come from basic human needs. People get dirty feet and love washes them. People get sick and someone sends them a letter. Love expresses itself not in grand gestures of heroic proportion, but in menial renderings of humble service.
In his book A Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster writes, "In some ways we would prefer to hear Jesus’ call to deny father and mother, houses and land for the sake of the gospel, than his word to wash feet. Radical self-denial gives us the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we are banished to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial."
But when someone serves, then someone like Jane Crofut gets a letter when she’s sick and knows that someone loves her. Service is how we show our love in the here and now.
Third, service is the way we use our power.
Vs. 3 says, "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him."
For a long time now, since at least the late sixties, we’ve been taught that power is a bad thing. Especially in the University where academics study and comment on the culture, people with power are the bad guys, people who are oppressed or marginalized or in some way held down are the good guys.
You may have never attended the first class in the university setting, but the idea that power is bad and people who wield it are the enemy has seeped out and become one more widely accepted assumption. Well, of course power is a bad. It corrupts, you know, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They even made a movie about it with Clint Eastwood so it must be true.
Except there’s just all this evidence that power isn’t always a bad thing and that people who have it don’t always do bad things.
It had been a long day on Capitol Hill for Senator John Stennis. He was looking forward to a bit of relaxation when he got home. After parking the car, he began to walk toward his front door. Then it happened. Two people came out of the darkness, robbed him, and shot him twice.
News of the shooting of Senator Stennis, the chairman of the powerful Armed Forces Committee, shocked Washington and the nation. For nearly seven hours, Senator Stennis was on the operating table at Walter Reed Hospital. Less than two hours later, another politician was driving home when he heard about the shooting. He turned his car around and drove directly to the hospital. In the hospital, he noticed that the staff was swamped and could not keep up with the incoming calls about the Senator’s condition. He spotted an unattended switchboard, sat down, and voluntarily went to work. He continued taking calls until daylight.
Sometime during that next day, he stood up, stretched, put on his overcoat, and just before leaving, he introduced himself quietly to the other operator, "I’m Mark Hatfield. Happy to help out." Then Senator Mark Hatfield discreetly walked out. The press could hardly handle that story. There seemed to be no way for a conservative Republican to give a liberal Democrat a tip of the hat, let alone spend hours doing a menial task and be "happy to help out."
Bernard of Clairveaux once said, "Learn the lesson that if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a scepter but a hoe."
Everyone of us has some power. That doesn’t make us bad people. What we do with our power is what determines the morality of the contributions we make.
Jesus is the perfect model for what it means to have power, but to use that power to leave behind the fingerprints of faith. God had put all things under his feet, so he got up and washed the dirty feet of his disciples.
We balk at the thought of service precisely because we are concerned about keeping our power. If I become your servant, you have power over me. You, or others, can take advantage of me. I become vulnerable. Which is true. Service makes us vulnerable. So does humbling ourselves before God.
In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis talked about that very danger. "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell."
We really have two choices; either live our lives attempting to control other people, or live them in order to serve other people.
God never calls us to control. That’s his job. God calls us to serve. Ironically, that’s what God did when God lived on this earth in the person of Jesus. He served. Because if God is ever going to use as instruments of his power -- his power -- he can only do so if we serve.
The real question isn’t; "Am I ever going gain control?" The real question is; "Am I going to let God control me?" If he is in control, no one can take advantage of you, no one can hurt you, no one else can control you. You and I become free to serve others by His power for his glory for their good. And our own.
