Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Servants in the Wilderness

[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening. It was given as part of our 40-Days to Servanthood emphasis.]

Mark 1:9-15
I was fired from a job once. It happened about a year before I started seminary.

But before that happened, I went to another job where things went well. My supervisor liked the job I was doing and there would be opportunities for advancement. Besides all that, I worked at a place I had always wanted to work: the State House in Columbus.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like my job. It didn’t feel like the right fit for me.

At about the same time, this one-time atheist came to faith in Christ and our home church decided to put me on church council.

So, there I was, twenty-six years old, a new Christian, an elder, and chairperson of the evangelism committee. I took on the one task nobody else in the congregation seemed to want to do—calling on the inactives and going door-to-door to invite the unchurched to worship with us.
I loved every minute of it!

At the same time I was going to work and feeling that what God really wanted to do was become a pastor.

But that concerned me. One night, after a council meeting, I spoke with our home congregation’s pastor. I told him that I thought that maybe I was being called to pastoral ministry.

“Uh-huh,” he said, betraying a total lack of surprise on his part. (You see, he’d figured out that I should become a pastor long before I’d even thought of it.) “But...” I went on. “But, what?” he asked me, with slight impatience. “But I got fired from my last job and, although my boss really likes me at my new job, I’m not really excited about it."

I thought that my pastor would be shocked or something. But instead, he just said one word with a question mark: “Yeah?” I took that to mean, “So what?”

“Well,” I told him, “I don’t want to be going to seminary if there’s even the slightest chance that I’d be doing it just to run away from jobs I don’t like.”

My pastor sighed, fixed me with a stare, and then asked me this: “Have you ever thought that your getting fired from one job and landing in another one that you do capably but don’t like is God’s way of telling you, ‘Quit messing around and start doing what I want you to do?’”

Now, I can’t begin to express the impact of those words on me, folks. Years of confusion, self-doubt, and even self-recrimination were suddenly dissipated and destroyed by my pastor’s words. The wilderness of confusion about what God wanted me to do—at least for the next twenty-nine years of my life—were ended.

I’m convinced that my pastor was sent to me at that moment in my wilderness wandering and ministered to me—I mean, he served me by being a faithful servant of God in that moment, speaking a truth of God that set me free from my uncertainty.

Our Bible lesson ends the account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness with these words: “The angels waited on Him.” The word translated as waited literally means served. The angels served Jesus, the One Who said that He came not to be served but to serve all of us; the One Who washed the feet of His disciples on the night of His arrest; the One Who died on a cross for all of us.

Here’s the point: Whenever we go through the wilderness times of our lives, God sends servants to help us through.

And He sends all of us who follow Christ to be those servants who help others in their wilderness times.

True story: Joe had just learned he had cancer. Joe’s wife called the pastor and after chatting for a time called the husband to the phone to talk. They spoke briefly, but the pastor knew his empathy could only accomplish so much. Joe needed to talk with someone who had gone through cancer, knew what it was like, and could be a living example of how to go through thw wilderness of that disease.

So, after putting down the phone, the pastor called Bill, a cancer survivor in the congregation. The Pastor knew that Joe would still need his listening ear and the prayers of the congregation to help him face whatever loomed ahead. But he was also wise enough to know the limits of his own competence. He asked Bill to reach out to Joe. Bill was the servant who helped Joe make it through the wilderness.

We respond to the amazing and undeserved love of Jesus Christ, a love that gives new life to all who dare to turn from sin and turn in trust to Him, by offering up lives of servanthood to God and others.

We become God’s ministers in the wilderness times that people experience. And there are lots of people experiencing the wilderness right now. There are neighbors who have lost or may soon lose their homes through foreclosure. People without jobs. People who are hungry. People who are simply dealing with uncertainty. Throughout Lent, being God’s ministers to a hurting world will be our emphasis, our call, and, I pray, our passion.

In the wilderness: Our call is to rely on God. When we do, we’ll also be called to resist the temptation to walk away from God and called as well to pass the tests of character God uses to shape us for our missions in life. And, just as God serves us and cares for us as we make our ways through life, we’re called to be servants of God who bring God’s care and comfort to others.

Let’s be absolutely committed to pursuing the journey of servanthood throughout these forty days of Lent and all our lives!

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