Sermon preached by by Dave Skidmore, 26 Aug 2007
Bob Dylan sings:
You may be an ambassador
To England or France
You might like to gamble
You might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite
With a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Yes indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well it might be the Devil
Or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Some months back I heard that song -- I think it was background music on a Sopranos re-run -- and I had an immediate, indignant reaction. I thought, “What do you mean? I gotta serve somebody? I don’t have to serve nobody. I serve myself -- buddy.” Then I asked myself, “Why the pique?”
Well, part of the pique just lies in a common, everyday self-centeredness that rebels when challenged. Many of us struggle with that, to one degree or another. Or, maybe sometimes we don’t struggle with it enough. Do any of you recall an old Saturday Night Live routine by comedian Al Franken? In the skit, he’d play a newscaster delivering what sounded like a straight newscast about war, politics, natural disaster, whatever. Then, in the middle of each item, he’d pause, grin toothily and ask, “But what’s in it for me, Al Franken?” and then launch into a hilariously Al Franken-centered version of the news. This newscaster character of Al Franken was all about serving himself.
Anyway, I believe something more fundamental than mere inertial self-centeredness lies beneath my pique at Bob Dylan’s exhortation to serve somebody. It arises, I think, from the natural tension between two deeply human and seemingly contradictory impulses: The urge to serve, the urge to follow, the urge to admire -- someone else, and the need for autonomy, for an identity as an individual. As Americans, we celebrate the individual. And so much that is positive flows from that -- democracy, the rule of law, human rights, freedom. Our Universalism -- the belief in the final harmony of each and every soul with God -- is a form of individualism. The first line of our denomination’s principles -- affirming “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” -- reflects this. And the impulse toward autonomy lies deep within us. But that other impulse -- the impulse to serve somebody, not ourselves -- lies deep within too and cannot be denied. Tribal peoples of all lands follow their chief. Knights of old swore fealty to their lord. It’s a very human, even animal, impulse. Birds have their pecking order. Every wolf pack has its alpha male and alpha female. (I’ve even read that there are “alpha girls” in high school cliques.)
On the one hand, some of the most sublimely moving and touching human expressions can come from this impulse to serve somebody. Think of an adult child tenderly caring for an aged parent, or Clara Barton (whom District of Columbia Universalists claim as their own) caring for the wounded on the battlefields of the Civil War. Think of the best teacher you ever had and how attentively the class listened. Think of how a younger kid naturally looks up to an older kid. We have good positive examples of this right in our own church. Irina, an elementary school girl, looks up to my daughter Emily, a high-schooler, and Emily looks up to Linnea, who will soon be returning to college in Minnesota for her senior year. These relationships enrich their lives.
On the other hand, as twenty-first century Americans, as religious liberals, as much as we extol the notion of “service,” we’re not always so comfortable with making it personal, with serving “somebody.” We may be more comfortable with the idea of serving abstractions. Here in this capital city we could think -- at our most idealistic, anyway -- of the lawyers among us as serving justice, the economists as serving prosperity, the military people as serving freedom, the diplomats as serving peace, the journalists as serving truth. But we also know that sometimes it is difficult to follow, or even define, an abstraction. We need something more concrete. So maybe all those pictures you see in lobbies of federal buildings -- of the president, the vice president and the agency head -- have a purpose other than just to feed the vanity of the people in those positions. And, of course not everybody in Washington is part of a faceless bureaucracy. Those who work on the political side or on the Hill are quite comfortable saying, “I work for Senator Smith or Representative Jones.”
Nevertheless, the discomfort with making it personal, by serving “somebody,” makes a lot of sense to me. We give away our personal power at our peril, indeed, sometimes at the world’s peril. You don’t have to think too long to conjure up images ranging from the sad to the utterly evil that resulted from uncritically yielding to the impulse to serve somebody. I see images of high Nazi officials following Hitler on the path to genocide and then, in April 1945, following him into a bunker in Berlin to commit suicide. I see followers of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana quite literally drinking the Kool-Aid and falling dead by the hundreds. On a more everyday level, just this Friday night, I saw a young prison inmate appearing in a television documentary talking about being the youngest member of a group that robbed a jewelry store.
Yet, if Bob Dylan is correct, if we indeed gotta serve somebody, what do we do? We can’t not serve somebody -- at least if you accept the premise of the song. So, our choice becomes, not whether to serve somebody, but who to serve. That answer is critical. Hitler, or Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill? Bill Clinton or George Bush? (I won’t say which is which.) The gang kid who lives down the block or the youth leader at the recreation center? Your supervisor at work or someone else?
Well, I’d like to suggest that for us, as liberal Christians, there is an obvious answer to the question, “Who?”, or at least an obvious possibility. We can serve Jesus. So, the next critical question is, “What does that mean?” Before I address that, I’d like to tell you a story that Mary Simmons told me. Most of you know Mary and know that her arthritis has prevented her from getting to church for a while now. (By the way, her 87th birthday was this past Wednesday. I’m sure she’d love to get calls or cards from her many friends here.)
Anyway, Mary’s story involves herself; Dr. Seth Brooks, who was minister of this church from 1939 to 1978; and Dorothy Chapman, another great servant-leader of this church who died this summer. It would have taken place, I believe, thirty or forty years ago. The thing you need to know to appreciate the story is that Dr. Brooks was (Mary says this gently) “a wonderful preacher but not a very brave man.”
It seems that, at the time, not now, there was a bit of a problem with rats in the tower of the church. So, the decision was made to place rat poison around the large storeroom located about halfway up the tower. Many of you will be able to picture the scene thanks to one of our deacons, Perry King, who delights in cajoling newcomers and anyone else he can corral into climbing the tower to see the view from the top. If you are one of these lucky folks, you will know that the stairwell up to the tower storeroom and the storeroom itself are dimly lit at best, kind of dirty and kind of spooky, even without rats.
This was not a place that Dr. Brooks wanted to go alone. So, he enlisted the help of Dorothy and Mary. Before they embarked on the mission, Dr. Brooks secured a poker from the fireplace in our parlor, the Romaine-Van Schaick Room. They climbed the stairs to the second floor, unlocked the heavy door to the passage leading up to the tower storeroom and proceeded in single file. Dr. Brooks went first, periodically rapping the railing with the poker so as to disperse any loitering rats. Dorothy came next, bearing a package of rat poison on a silver tray from the Romaine-Van Schaick Room. They were followed by Mary, who was there for moral support. I imagine the tension was almost palpable. When they had nearly reached the storeroom, Dr. Brooks paused and turned back toward Dorothy and Mary -- and exclaimed with some feeling, “The things we do for Jesus!”
So, one answer to the question, “What does it mean to serve Jesus?” may be that it means ascending a dark stairwell to put rat poison in a dusty church storeroom. But what else might it mean? One obvious difficulty to answering the question is that Jesus is not, in a literal physical sense, here. So, it might at first glance seem to make no sense to serve someone who last walked the earth thousands of miles and thousands of years from where we are today. But, it’s not so strange really. Most of us probably, in some way, follow or serve somebody now who we don’t see or see only occasionally. A teen-ager, confronted alone by a dilemma or moral choice, might have to choose between what the “cool” gang kid would want and what the recreation center youth leader would advise. You may be middle-aged and your parents may be dead or living far away, yet I’ll bet that the values they held or things they said influence the decisions you make here and now. Many of us work in government or corporate bureaucracies; we may have only occasional contact with the agency director or CEO, but if we’ve been paying attention to what they say and write, we have a pretty good sense of what they want from us as employees.
So, to learn what it means to serve Jesus, we should turn to what the gospels have to say about what he said to his disciples. One thing that he says unambiguously, many times, is, “Follow me.” And, there are numerous passages in which Jesus asserts his leadership takes precedent over the rabbinical law of the time -- though he shows respect for most, but not all, aspects of that law. In today’s lectionary reading from Luke, Jesus heals a woman who was crippled and rebuts criticism for doing it on the Sabbath. Indeed, our opening words this morning, in which Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you,” can be read as an assertion of the pre-eminence of his leadership over religious law. The rabbis referred to the “yoke of the law” and his listeners would have understood that he was contrasting “my yoke” with the “yoke of the law.”
So, what does it mean to take up Jesus’ yoke. It doesn’t say specifically in this passage, but for me the answer is in the passages sometimes called, “The Great Commandment.” It is in three of the four gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke. Jesus is asked, depending on the version, by a lawyer or a scribe what is the greatest commandment or what the questioner must do to inherit eternal life. He answers, according to Luke, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
So, first -- love God. When we can do so, we embrace our universe in a positive and transformative way (for ourselves and the universe). Next, love your neighbor as yourself. (Note that it doesn’t say, “Don’t love yourself” or “Love your neighbor more.”) Luke follows this Great Commandment with Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan. This shows that Jesus’ definition of “neighbor” was broad and universal, not narrow and tribal.
What does it mean to serve Jesus? It’s just that simple: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. As we strive to do that, it will be in this sense -- at the very least -- that we can truly say, along with Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb, “I have seen the Lord.” But, if it is simple, it is also difficult. So, as we strive to serve Jesus, let’s remember his words of comfort, “You will find rest for your souls. For my yolk is easy, and my burden is light.”
Amen.