As our Lenten journey nears its end, we see that gentiles seek to see Jesus. The word about him as reached the Greeks, has spread outside the circle of faithful Jewish followers and into the culture of Palestine, where Jesus has been preaching, teaching and healing. Everyone begins to know about him, even gentiles.
The seeking of Jesus is our main duty as Christians. To know Jesus better through prayer, worship, contemplation of his acts of healing, his words pulls ever closer to God’s will for us. Not to worship him alone, although he is divine, but to also see where he points to the God that has created and sustains us, who nurtures and loves us, in good times and in troubling times. Today Jesus’ words tell us about the sacrifice of life for eternal life, how, to be close to God, we must be far from the parts of ourselves that only see our little world and nothing outside.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus,” the Greeks say, but do they know what they really are asking? Jesus says that seeking him is to seek to be a servant. Whoever serves Christ will serve God.
So on this last Sunday before the passion, Jesus asks us to give up our life in service to him and to God. What is your service? What do you give of yourself?
Service calls us to use what God has given us, our talents as parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Our gifts of vocation, whether around the house or outside in the workaday world. Our money and time in service to the world, to reduce suffering and build up God’s peace and justice. Our very self is asked in service to God.
Our Lenten study has taken us into the rule of the Benedictines, to see how the life of monks can inform our own life as servants who live in the world. We have seen that both work and rest need to be balanced. While the monks pray and work together in a more intense way, our own balance of prayer and work can be nurtured. We have looked at the word obedience, how it is connected to the word hearing. Obedience then first leads us to listen to God around us in order to follow where God leads us. All this leads to conversion of life—a turning around where we are shown how we fail ourselves and God.
Benedictine spirituality has many things to teach us who live in the world, many life-giving words of wisdom for living faithfully as servants of God.
The public television series Downton Abby had as its theme the life of servants in a different sense—these servants of a British nobleman worked not for God but for another person, giving up their homes and family life for the life of the baron’s family. In return they were cared for, but the series clearly showed that the life of household servants was secondary to the life of the family they served. This is not how service for God works.
When we are God’s servants, we are loved for who we are, our talents are nurtured, our gifts multiply and we enter into the full understanding of all that we are and all that we have been given. We put God as central to our lives, and begin to see that God has made us central to his work for the world. Instead of second-class citizens working for a self-consumed boss, we work together with God to make the world a place of love for all.
Instead of working for the glory of the boss, we glorify God in our service, and thus work for the dignity of every human being. God’s service doesn’t require that we ignore our needs, but that we put them in balance with the needs of the world, as the Benedictines have taught us to do.
Our life of service calls us out of our self-centered pettiness, into a life of living for the peace and justice of all God’s creation. Instead of being cast out of creation, we become co-creators with God, listening for the word of God and heeding its call.
Where God will call us to serve we do not know. I got called to this parish in Boone County Illinois. God called some of you to be parents, some to be teachers, some to be caretakers of the environment. Your service means that God’s work can be done, perhaps not in our time, but in the scheme of eternity. Jesus tells us that our service bears much fruit. Without dying to self, our fruit will fall to the ground and wither, but with our service, our self will die and we will bear the fruit that gives life.
May you hear where God calls you into service that feeds you and builds up the peace and justice of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment