Servanthood, Part 2: The Linchpins of the World

I once worked in the corporate offices of a major company. My job: Making certain that copy machines were maintained and office supply cabinets stocked. It was a part-time job. But it gave me a bird's eye view of how a big organization functions.

I noticed the execs could be gone for weeks at a time, attending meetings with other decision-makers or making pitches in other parts of the world, and back at corporate offices, things would keep running smoothly. Product was created. New lines were introduced. Items were shipped. Suppliers were paid. Vendors sent their money. The bottom line was padded.

In part, this productivity in their absence could be attributed to the fine work done by the globe-trotting leaders. They had overseen the training of an efficent organization. Leaders, as the gurus remind us, should always be working themselves out of jobs, so infusing their organizations with abilities, vision, and a sense of duty, that their organizations can function without them.

But I noticed something else.

These were basically pre-computer days, the only computers around being those huge room-filling monsters requiring elevated floors and lots of air conditioning which could only really churn out inventory reports. Apart from face-to-face meetings, all communications were by phone, snail mail, or courier. There were no beepers, cell phones, or PDAs.

A guy named Ben, working by himself, was in charge of taking in all the postal mail and freighted items delivered to the corporate offices and distributing them throughout the complex. He also was charged with seeing to it that the huge volume of inner-office correspondence got to the appropriate people and with picking up and sending all outgoing mail and parcels.

One guy did all of this! Today, I wonder what sort of mileage a pedometer would have shown Ben racking up each day. He was like a busy doctor making hospital rounds. As soon as he finished one round of the building, distributing and picking up items, he would be back to the loading area, preparing for the next round.

Truth be known, most of the execs had no idea that a person named Ben existed. If you'd asked them who was the MVP of the company, they might have nominated themselves or someone on a higher rung of the corporate ladder. But if you asked their secretaries or the lower functionaries who resided in the endless rows of metal and cork cubicles that filled the building, there would have been one name consistently on their lips: Ben.

Ben was the guy who facilitated the decisions that those self-important executives made. Ben was the one who got the memoes for revision to and from the secretaries. Ben was the one who got the marching orders to those functionaries.

I found out how valuable Ben was one day when he had to be out of town. I was recruited to put in an eight-hour day in order to do his job.

Have you ever seen the episode of the old I Love Lucy sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel get a job in a candy-making factory? All these candies went by them, rapid fire, on a conveyor belt. The two of them simply couldn't keep up. That's how I felt on the day I filled in for Ben. I wondered how he was able do all that he did.

By two o'clock in the afternoon, people with whom I'd once had friendly relations, who had been so supportive of me as I began the day, were using my name as a less-than-complimentary term. I was peppered with questions and telephone messages when I returned to the loading area. "Have you got that memo from A for me yet?" "Where's the package from UPS?" "How long before you're back on six?" "When did you say Ben was coming back?" My answer to most questions was, "I don't know." But my response to the last one was, "Not soon enough."

This is what I learned: Ben was the linchpin of that corporation's existence. Before the changes brought on by technology, if Ben had quit without a properly-trained successor, it would have taken the company a long time to recover.

What Ben did could be described as "grunt work," I suppose. It's the very workaday stuff most of us do every day, not just on our jobs, but with our families and at home. Someone has to take out the trash, dust the furniture, do the dishes, clean the toilets, see that the gutters are cleared, get the oil changed, run to the grocery, pack the lunches, paint the house, treat the deck, run the errands, and pick up the kids from ballet or baseball or MENSA meetings.

There is no apparent glory to this sort of work. No Nobels or Pullitzers or MacArthur prizes are awarded to those who faithfully see to it that recyclables are put out on the curb every Tuesday night.

Nor is it likely to be noticed by the world when we make a call to a lonely person, send a card to someone who's ill, drop off food at the home of a grieving family, contribute clothing or toys to a homeless shelter, rake the lawn of an elderly widow, take lemonade to the guys re-doing our roof, interrupt our schedules to listen to a child, volunteer to help kids with their assignments at the local elementary school, or thank a teacher.

But I'm convinced that it's the amalgamation of all these collective acts of service that help this world, to the extent that it does so, move in the right direction. It's true of the service we render as part of our duty on the job. It's even truer of those acts of service we take on voluntarily.

I don't think I'm alone in this conviction.

It was the night when Jesus was to be arrested. It was a night that the twelve men who had been following Him most closely would remember for the rest of their lives. You can be sure that, as God-in-the-flesh, Jesus knew how important this night was. It was therefore critical for Him to give these men, His disciples (disciple being the English translation of the word from the original Greek of the New Testament, mathetes, meaning student), an important lesson.

What follows is a somewhat lengthy quote from the New Testament account of John of what happened next. I hope that you'll patiently read it. It's important. John writes:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him.

And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’ Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!’ Jesus said to him, ‘One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.’ For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, ‘Not all of you are clean.’

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.

For many of us, it may be difficult to understand what an act of servanthood Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet was. If that's true for you, imagine someone who has spent an entire hot day trudging through a desert in sandals. These were what the twelve sets of feet Jesus washed at that moment were like.

Imagine still further that washing the feet of travelers who had come to dine with you was the task assigned to lowly servants.

On top of that, consider that even to this day, Semitic cultures like that of Jesus and His disciples in first-century Judea, believed the foot to be the dirtiest part of the body. A westerner who allows the bottom of his foot to be seen by an Arab friend is guilty of a great insult. (That, by the way, is omething that CBS correspondent Dan Rather learned, when he carelessly showed the bottom of his foot to Saddam Hussein a few years back.)

Yet, Jesus, Who never demurred at the titles of Lord and Teacher, Who claimed for Himself the designation, I AM, the very Name God claimed as His own to Moses, and Who let people worship Him as God, nonetheless willingly took on the role of servant, cleaning the disciples' filthy feet.

By this seemingly simple act, Jesus was signaling the significance of what He was about to accomplish through His death and resurrection. Jesus didn't have to do any of these things. He didn't have to go through scourging, beating, derision, or death. He didn't have to reclaim life on this earth through His resurrection. But He did them all, becoming our servant, in order to win us back from death and hell. The "wages of sin is death," Romans 6:23 tells us. But Jesus tears up the check stubs of all sinners who turn to Him and willingly become the undeserving beneficiaries of His sacrifice of self for us. With Paul in the New Testament, those who have surrendered to Jesus have reason to marvel:

...while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person...But God proves His love for us in that we still were sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

For our purposes here, Jesus service to us tells us several important things:

(1) No matter how high we may rise in esteem or status in the world, we never outgrow the call to be servants, just like God-in-the-flesh.

(2) Servants are the linchpins of the world. (Indeed, no one is worthy of the title of leader who isn't, above all, a servant. Leaders who aren't servants will, eventually, find themselves without followers.)

(3) There is nothing more jarring to our sense of self-sufficiency, our sense of entitlement, or our penchant for "looking out for number one" than encountering a genuine act of service.

A few years ago, I joined my buddy, Steve Sjogren, in going into local businesses and asking for the "opportunity" to clean their toilets. Later, some of the people from our church and I did the same thing.

The reactions of business managers and customers were mixed. Most people could hardly believe that we wanted to do this most distasteful of tasks. Some giggled at our stupidity. But, when they asked us why we were cleaning toilets and we explained, as Steve had taught me, "We're just trying to share the love of God in a practical way" or, "We're Christians trying to serve our community," the giggling and derision usually stopped. When we serve others with no thought of selfish gain, especially when we do it to honor the God we know through Jesus Christ, we help people realize that we human beings were built to live in relationship with God and with our neighbors. I think that's part of what Jesus demonstrated to us all when He washed the feet of His disciples.

In my next installment, I hope to address the question of just what servants look like.