Grace United Methodist Church
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
James 1:22
Today is the final Sunday of our three week emphasis on stewardship of service. I said this same thing last week, but let me say it again: the point of this is not just to find volunteers to fill all the positions within the church. The point is that God is calling us to be in service and that through joyful service in God’s name, we can be the salt of the earth, spreading God’s love and transforming the world that surrounds us.
Since this is the final week of this emphasis, I thought I would get right down to the real nuts and bolts of this thing. Honestly, there are about a billion reasons not to be a servant.
Often when I preach, I can imagine in my head what a lot of people are thinking. Don’t worry, I can’t actually hear what you are thinking, so if your mind is elsewhere, I don’t actually know where it is (but God does). But I can imagine that a lot of people are thinking to themselves, “well that is all fine and good… but.”
Usually I just let those buts hang out there, but today, with the help of scripture, I am going to hit them head on.
I think that most of us get that we are supposed to be doing something. Maybe. Let’s start today with the most complex excuse for not serving.
I am made right with God through faith (believing) not by doing.
If that is the reason you use for not serving, congratulations! Your excuse is theologically sound!
Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.
Do you think I am running around spending my life sharing the Good news of God because I am trying to earn my salvation? Absolutely not! I am running around sharing the Gospel because I know that God already loves me.
This is one of those places where are relentless pursuit spreading the word of Grace actually gets in our way. The most important thing to understand is that God loves us no matter what. Sometimes, we just stop there. But, as a response to that love, God wants, expects us to care for our brothers and sisters. God expects a response, a response that reflects that love and shares it with all who surround us. Repeating a piece of scripture I read last week from 1st John 3:
17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
And from today’s reading from the Letter of James:
James 1:22 But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.
I am not too worried about people using excuse number 1. If you truly believe that God loves you for you not matter what, it won’t be long before you start serving for God.
Let’s move on to some other reasons for not serving. I think these fall into two categories, which I will call for reason of simplicity, “I am not good enough” and “I am already good enough.” Let’s start with the first one. A lot of people, when they do realize that God is calling on them to respond to the grace of God with action think, “I am not good enough.”
This can manifest itself in a lot of ways, some of them practical, as in “I am just not equipped for this ministry,” some of them more personal as in “I am not good or righteous enough for this ministry.”
Matthew 4:18 18As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea-- for they were fishermen. 19And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." 20Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
What has always bothered me about this story is the “Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Wasn’t there a training session? Didn’t they go to seminary first? Think about what their resumes looked like.
I have tried to use this excuse myself, many, many times and my first time wasn’t that long ago. If you look on my office wall, just a couple of feet from the piece of paper that says I am probationary member of the Annual Conference and therefore have authority to do all the pastor things I do, is another piece of paper saying that I was baptized on January 16th 2000. On the day that I got that piece of paper, I man in my church, Steve, came up to me and said, “So, are you ready to get to work?” To which I replied something like, “um, uh, well…” He said “Great, you can start next week.”
Steve then told me (he would claim he asked me) that I was going to be a Sunday School Superintendent. All I had to do was collect attendance sheets and offerings and make sure all the children’s classes had graham crackers and ice water. I was terrified! I thought for sure I would somehow mess it up. In my full-time job, I was producing live radio shows in eight different cities every day. I was on the air in Lufkin, Amarillo, Lubbock, Waco Corpus Christi and Tyler, Texas; Pensacola, Florida; Modesto, California; Greenville, South Carolina, Yuma, Arizona; able to keep track of play lists of top-40 songs, oldies, country and rock, making sure Pensacola didn’t get Greenville’s weather forecast and making sure the folks in Modesto weren’t hearing about Sea Sculptures in Corpus Christi. That was no problem. The thought of being responsible for graham crackers made me lose sleep at night.
But God provided, I took on the challenge, and I got it down to a science, counting the offering, tallying the attendance, getting the ice water in the right room. Then, one day, a teacher caught me in the hall and said, “Will, I have a misbehaving kid, will you help me out.” To which I smiled and said, “I don’t do that.” To which the teacher said, “Yes you do, you are the Sunday School Superintendent.”
Now, in case you don’t know, I am not a parent. At that point in my life, I had one niece who I saw about once a year. I knew nothing about children. Suddenly I was responsible for making one behave.
I got through that, I have gotten through a number of unexpected challenges in trying be a faithful servant. Do not think that you can’t follow your heart into ministry because you are not qualified. God calls people who are not qualified all the time. Just read the gospels. The disciples are nearly comical in their lack of qualifications, yet, obviously they did something right or we probably wouldn’t be here.
Sometimes we feel we are not equipped, sometimes it is a more personal issue where we, consciously or unconsciously feel that we are not good enough or worthy enough or righteous enough to serve.
The prophet Isaiah certainly felt this way when, in a vision, he came face to face with God.
Isaiah 6:5
5And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
I remember the first time I was asked to preach. It was actually before I went to seminary, but I had already decided I felt called to be a pastor. I remember being asked because for some reason, part of my brain decided to make me act all confident and I said, “yeah, I would love to.” Meanwhile the other side of my brain was saying, “What? Why are you saying that? Who said you could speak?”
For me, getting up in front of the congregation to preach the Gospel was not a practical issue. I had the technical ability to do it. I had been a disc jockey for ten year. I knew how to talk, both on the radio and at public events. I wasn’t even that worried about writing the sermon. They say everybody has at least one good sermon in them.
For me, it was an issue of worthiness. How is it that I am good enough to stand in front of a bunch of people who have been Christians their whole life and pretend to proclaim the news of God?
9As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him.
When you are considering your own worthiness to be God’s servant, you have to consider Matthew. Surrounded by the religious elite, those who spent their whole lives trying to be righteous and perfect in God’s eyes, Jesus calls one who would be considered anything but righteous. We are tempted to compare Matthew to a modern tax collector. That doesn’t quite work. We don’t like tax collectors today because we don’t like paying taxes, but they are mostly honest, not especially wealthy people. In Jesus day, a tax collector was a thief, collecting tax for Rome and collecting enough extra to build his own wealth at the expense of the poor. By anyone’s worldly standards Matthew was not righteous, but Jesus will choose who Jesus will choose. God will choose who God will choose.
I told you there were two main categories of reasons not to serve, “I am not good enough” and “I am already good enough.” Let’s look at that second one.
“I am already good enough” sounds a little self-righteous, but it is not always that extreme. A whole lot of us have said, either out loud or to ourselves, “I am already doing enough.” There are, indeed, times when that is true. Sometimes, in our zeal to serve, we take on too many things. We may get into “can’t say no” syndrome. This can be a real problem in any church, where a small number of people are responsible for most of the ministry because they keep taking on more and more. But sometimes doing more doesn’t mean adding on.
I remember when I first felt a call to full-time ministry. My general response was, “Aren’t I already doing enough?” I was Sunday School Superintendent, I was a lay-leader, I was active in the United Methodist Men, I sang in the choir. But, you see, God wasn’t calling me to tack on more things, but to do something different.
Wherever you are in ministry, it is possible that God is calling you to do more, additional things. It is also possible that God is calling you to do more, other things, even possibly giving up the things you are doing now.
But let me honest with you, wherever you are in ministry, it is very unlikely that the challenge of the Gospel is going to say, “Good enough.:
At the risk of tossing out one of the most challenging pieces of scripture in the New Testament right at the end of my sermon,
Luke 18:
18 A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ 19Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 20You know the commandments: “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honour your father and mother.” ’ 21He replied, ‘I have kept all these since my youth.’ 22When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ 23But when he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich.
People get hung up on this because they think it is about money. But it is about more than money. It is making the point, no matter how good a job you think you are doing, there is more to do and God is going to call you to do it.
Which brings me to the last excuse I am going to cover today: “I am too busy.” You know what, you are right. You probably are too busy. I know I am. But, you know what, our busyness is our choice. There are things beyond our control. Perhaps we can’t work less, perhaps we have young children or aging parents that need our attention. But there are things we can control. We decide how much television to watch. We decide how much time we will spend on the internet. We decide what activities we or our children will participate in. We decide how much to buy and maintain and store. We decide how many hours we will spend worrying, fretting, planning procrastinating, blaming, hating, regretting, mistrusting, complaining…
Jesus was once asked:
36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
It may seem like too much, but as Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians:
Philippians 4
12I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. 13I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
Today is a big day at Grace. Today we will decide if we will let the excuses determine our ministry or if we will be a church on fire with ministry. Today we have a chance to commit ourselves to reaching in to serve and nurture each other, to reach out to spread God’s love to our neighbors here and around the world and to reach up and personally take that next step in ministry leadership that will take this church to a whole new level of ministry.
I have been very clear what the excuses are. I hope I have been clear that the Gospel will not let those excuses fly. Today, I invite you to embrace the possibilities, to step up and step out. Today, I invite us all to be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.
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