Serve: Psalm 31:14-24
All Saints Sunday
But I trust in you, O Lord;
I say, “You
are my God.”
15 My times are in your hand;
deliver me
from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.
16 Let your face shine upon your servant;
save me in
your steadfast love.
17 Do not let me be put to shame, O Lord,
for I call
on you;
let the wicked be put to shame;
let them go
dumbfounded to Sheol.
18 Let the lying lips be stilled
that speak
insolently against the righteous
with pride
and contempt.
19 O how abundant is your goodness
that you
have laid up for those who fear you
and accomplished for those who take refuge in you,
in the sight
of everyone!
20 In the shelter of your presence you hide
them
from human
plots;
you hold them safe under your shelter
from
contentious tongues.
21 Blessed be the Lord,
for he has
wondrously shown his steadfast love to me
when I was
beset as a city under siege.
22 I had said in my alarm,
“I am driven
far from your sight.”
But you heard my supplications
when I cried
out to you for help.
23 Love the Lord, all you his saints.
The Lord
preserves the faithful
but
abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.
24 Be strong, and let your heart take
courage,
all you who wait for the Lord. (NRSVue)
This
past week I had the opportunity to be a mock interviewer for some of the people
who are doing ordination interviews for real soon. Ordination, in The United Methodist Church,
is roughly like writing a pair of dissertations and having to defend them both
three years apart, except it’s not about your research but you as a person of
faith, as a leader, as a potential pastor.
It’s a lot, and it was humbling to remember being in that hot seat from
this side of it.
One
of the questions that is part of the writing and answering one has to do is how
you understand “Jesus as Lord.” It’s a
question that gets increasingly weirder as we move further and further away
from any secular notion as lordship.
When it was my turn, I—being a nerd—went to the etymological history of
it. The English term “lord” comes from
the Old English term “hlaford,” which literally translates into “bread
guardian” or “bread protector.” A hlaford
was someone who held the homespace, the safe domain where you could rest and
find food and shelter.[1] Given that this was usually the leader of the
group or the clan, the one who owned the hearth and invited people to stay in
it and offered protection, it eventually morphed into an understanding of the
modern English “lord” that has to do with someone who has power over another.
What
the modern evolution often misses, however, is that the bread guardian was bound
to the people with whom he shared that bread.
Anglo-Saxon culture revolved around the idea that hearth and home were
safe because the warriors brought home wealth and weapons from raiding, that the
lord and his clan—in Old English, often thanes—were in mutual connection. Being a hlaford meant being in
relationship, meant being responsible for the people who were, in a different
way, responsible for you. This sense of
connection ran so deep that any disloyalty was linguistically tied to it; the
Old English word for “treachery” is “hlaford-swice,” the betrayal of the bread
guardian.[2]
Over and
over in the surviving literature, the concept of “lord” was about caring for
the warriors who were part of the clan, and no self-respecting warrior would
serve a hlaford—or hlafdige, the female equivalent—who treated
them poorly, cruelly, dismissively. Service
was a gift; to serve was not something to be taken lightly, to be expected
without any action on the part of the one mostly in charge. A lord may lord, but only because the warriors
and others chose service rather than overthrowing someone who didn’t
care about them.
To
be fair, there are complications and realities and social strata and all manner
of humanity that shift how much choice people had and I can’t fit multiple
degrees’ worth of understanding into this sermon—much to my chagrin—but the
point of it is that someone who serves and the one they serve were always meant
to be connected. One cannot serve in a
vacuum—which matters tremendously as we come to the third week in our series about
the practices that help us sustain our faith and find it is about service.
Often,
the first thought of “service” in the context of “Christian faith” is that of
service to others, usually in a justice sense: serving meals, gathering
resources, volunteering. Indeed, Adam
Hamilton points out in his book The Walk that, “It is impossible to be
the kind of Christ-follower Jesus longs for without concern for justice and
mercy for the vulnerable, the weak, the marginalized, the poor.”[3] He writes, “I’ve known Christians who seemed
to believe that all that God wanted from them was to go to church, to pray, to
read their Bibles, and to refrain from doing evil. But throughout Scripture we find that God
calls us to do good, to practice justice, kindness, and love. When we fail to do these things, our worship
and other acts of devotion are worthless to God.”[4] Over and over again Jesus speaks of the need
to serve, showing that the mightiest must be willing to serve just as Jesus
washed feet, cared for the hungry, and listened to the poor.[5]
But
our English use of “serve” covers so much ground. We serve in justice ministry, sure, but we
also serve on committees; we serve communion to each other; we serve coffee,
that beloved church gathering drink.
These, too, are acts of service; these, too, are connection points in
relationship. There may be no lord
involved in most of these, but how empty is our service if it is only one
direction? Our justice service is flat
if we don’t care about the people whom we serve and allow them to be real to us
and us to them; our committee service is boring at best if we don’t trust the
chair or our fellow members to see the gifts and struggles we bring to the
meetings; our communion is no longer communion if it is an individual
endeavor. Even our coffee is all the
more bitter if it is given or received without recognition of the humanity
involved.
And
where do we learn service that is anchored in relationship? From the God Who calls us, always and
forever, to connection. The psalm today
is one that actually appears in the lectionary—the three-year-long cycle of
readings that covers most of the Bible—on Palm Sunday. Jesus speaks some of the first verses (which
we didn’t read today) while on the cross.
Professor J. Clinton McCann, Jr. writes that, “Psalm 31, along with
Psalms 22 and 69, is among the longest and most impressive of the genre known
variously as lament, complaint, protest, and/or prayer for help.”[6]
The
psalmist over and over again speaks of his trust in God. “Let your face shine upon your servant; / save
me in your steadfast love. / Do not let me be put to shame, O Lord, / for I
call on you”. The whole of this song,
this poem is that the psalmist who has served his Lord and knows that his Lord
will not forget him. The titles
undergird this; where in the NRSVue we have “Do not let me be put to shame, O
Lord,” the Hebrew actually uses YHWH, the unspeakable name of God given to
Moses from the burning bush.[7] The English actually tones down how
intimate it is that the psalmist calls God by name to say I have served
You, I am frightened, be here with me.
Rev. Dr. Howard Wallace writes, “The theology of this psalm implies that
God is responsive to those who call upon God, and that it is in God’s nature to
deliver and save God’s people when they are afflicted by illness or enemies,
and to hear them when they cry. There is a quiet confidence in God’s love and
willingness to help that is at the heart of faith.”[8]
To
willingly serve God answers God’s willing protection of, care for, love of us;
God’s protection, care, and love willingly answers our freely given
service. The cycle continues over and
over, binding us together and strengthening us in the promise that we face
nothing—not enemies, not fears, not joys, not hopes, not disasters, not
triumphs—alone. “O,” cries the psalmist,
“O how abundant is your goodness / that you have laid up for those who fear you
/ and accomplished for those who take refuge in you, / in the sight of
everyone!”
From
this abundance, we learn the courage to reach out to others. We learn how to sit down with a stranger and
remember their name; we learn how to write to a senator and ask for compassion
and mercy; we learn how to fight for and walk with those whose voices may not
have the same reach as ours; we learn how to share the resources we have and
gracefully accept the ones we don’t. We
serve, and whether we ever use the language of “lord” and “servant” or not, we
create connection and trust within and among us. We grow together, we change together, we hope
and love and learn and build the Kingdom of God together because God is Who
taught us how.
“What
if every person in your congregation were intentional about pursuing just one
act of kindness meant to bless someone else each day, or even five acts of
kindness each week?” asks Hamilton.[9] Take it further—what if every person served
in such a way that we built a little bit more relationship? What if we learned the name of one person who
worked alongside us or picked up a bag of food for Love Thy Neighbor? Or said hello to any of the unhoused people
who hang out downtown, just to acknowledge that they are here and human,
too? Or wrote a letter to our
representatives on behalf of the SNAP funding crisis to say that Christians
demand that we feed the hungry, no matter our political leaning? What if we each
offered a few hours a month to one of the 12 ministries connected here at First
UMC, or any of the more than 500 nonprofits in Washtenaw County?
What if we decided to connect with one person in the congregation we
don’t already know? What if asked one
more question on a committee so that we truly engaged and understood? What if we built relationship, over and over;
what if we served like we could trust, like we were changed by the service
itself?
It
is All Saints weekend in the timing of the Church, in which we celebrate those
who have gone before to their rest, those who have taught us the faith we are
so constantly learning to walk. Think of
your own saints in your life; who taught you what service looked like? How?
In what ways did you trust them?
In what ways did they redirect you to the God Who taught them how? As we welcome new members, how will the Body
that is the Church make space for their service, their gifts that they give of
that connection and hope?
“Be
strong, and let your heart take courage,” writes the psalmist. So go out and serve; go, be the people of
faith who build relationships; go, for God goes before you, beside you, behind
you, always and forever holding you safely as Lord, the One Who loves and gives
freely. Thanks be to God for it. Amen.
[1]
Bosworth, Joseph. “hláford.” In An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online,
edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy. Prague:
Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2014. https://bosworthtoller.com/19179. See also Hláfweard,
Guardian of the Loaf | Basement Notes and “Bright’s Old English Grammar
& Reader” ed. F. J. Cassidy and Richard Ringler (Holt, Rineheart, and
Winston, Inc., 1971) p. 437.
[2]
Cassidy and Ringler, 437.
[3]
Hamilton, The Walk (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2022), 70.
[4]
Hamilton, 68.
[5]
The washing of the feet episode is one of the strongest examples of direct
service in John 13.
[9]
Hamilton, 82.
Comments
Post a Comment