Service As Meritocracy

21  Pentecost b P.24  October 18, 2015
Job 38:1-7, (34-41) Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45

Lectionary Link 

             I came across this quote from P. J. O’Rourke who once remarked, “Everyone wants to save the planet; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”   It seems that the typical business plan involves creating thousands of vice presidents positions and middle management positions in the company and pay them lots of money to demand more production from the low wage earners who actually do the work.  And better yet if we can find people in other countries who are willing to work for lower wages.

             I suspect that the early church was like every family and organization; value systems and systems of reward and honor sometimes get skewed.  Washing dishes and fixing meals and cleaning and taking out the trash and taking care of the sick and elderly and teaching children do not always bring public honor even while they have irreplaceable value in maintaining the life of the common good.
           The preachers in the early church believed that they could preach and speak in the name of Christ.  They like St. Paul believed because they had the Holy Spirit, they also had the mind of Christ and so they could channel Christ as an oracle in their preaching and teaching.  They molded the oral traditions of Jesus which had been handed on to them to make application within their communities which grappled with the same issues which all human communities grapple with.  And this is how the quilt work teaching narratives of the Gospels were put together.  If one takes the theology and issues found in the writings of St. Paul and then looks at those issues being interwoven with an oral tradition of Jesus, one can catch a sense of how the Gospels functioned within the early Christian communities.  I say this because the writings of Paul came before the writing of the Gospels.

Often too many people want to be chiefs and bosses, and not enough people want to keep the trains running on time.  Too many people want to be seen as being real important and sometimes we define importance by being seen with the really important people.  In employment we hear the cliché:  It is who you know and not what you know that matters.  One cannot get a position without knowing people who have power to appoint people to a position.

James and John and Peter and the twelve went on to become servants and leaders of the early church.  So how do these leaders teach the members of their communities who are spiritual neophytes?   They use the example of their own past spiritual immaturity to help teach lessons within their communities.

St. James and St. John could say, "People, I remember when we did not fully grasp the purpose and the message of Jesus.  We walked with Jesus and we were excited that we were able to follow him.  We saw all of the wonderful things which Jesus did.  He did everything with such authority and grace and we wanted him to become a earthly King who could appoint us to influential positions within his kingly court.  But that is exactly how the rest of the world thought.  Everyone was looking to move up in life to the next position of power and authority.  When we saw the success of Jesus, we misinterpreted how Jesus planned to be successful.  And so we became like everyone else; we thought about self-promotion.  Yes, we thought of something before the rest of the disciples did; we took Jesus aside and asked if we could sit at seats of honor when he attained glory.  And Jesus said it was not his place to assign seats of glory; such things only happen in the fullness of the mystery of God.  In play of freedom in this world, it will happen that sometimes good things will come our way and sometimes, as taught to us by the life of Job, bad things will come our way.  The freedom of what can happen in this world means that we cannot always choose every situation.  But Jesus taught us something about freedom, he taught us about our own freedom.  He said that we should use our freedom to serve one another.  Jesus washed our feet; he modelled the role of service to show us that true freedom means the power to serve."

         We can understand how the early immaturity of the disciples was used by the church to teach the lesson of service.  If this were not the case, it would seem rather inappropriate simply to remind the church about how immature these famous apostles had once been.
         What does this mean for us today?  It means that service is the best expression of human freedom.  Service does not mean that we all have to be dishwashers all of the time, or even some of the time.  The freedom of service means that we use our personal gifts and ability, to help the common good, rather than use them for simply personal promotion.
         Today, we ask what is needed in our parish community to help us to be the very best Christians possible.  All of the ministries of the church are important.  All of us have been gifted by the Holy Spirit in our baptisms and the secret of the church is the secret of Jesus Christ: Find a way to use our gifts to serve one another.
          May Jesus Christ teach us to use our freedom to serve today.  Amen.