October 27, 2005
Servanthood
He who is greatest among you shall be your servant (Mt 23.12).
Christian faith is not always the same, if anywhere near or ever the same, as the Christian Faith. To confuse the two is one of the more profound blunders of Christian churches. The one is deeply subjective and freighted with risk and humility. It has no place nor need for crippling circumscriptions like “orthodoxy.” The other is often so uncongenially certain and too often filled with pride. It is often in blind obsession to orthodoxy, an obsession that has always compromised the church as, indeed, it does so in these very times.
Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space in which day by day we are all involved, stumbling, trying to appear as if we have good sense. The truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it is to be found at all, not in the Bible or the Church or Theology — the best they can do is point to the Truth — but is to be found in our own stories.
It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to stay in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives, for to say that faith is not some institutional doctrine is not to say that it is not corporate or communal. If God is present anywhere, it is in our stories. If God is not present there, then we might as well forget the whole thing.
Our Baptismal Covenant literally turns on our answer to that same question that stands at its center and is phrased like this. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” That is where we find the stories, that is where we find faith.
And that is where we find what Jesus means by true greatness when he says, He who is greatest among you shall be your servant. I hope it is not lost on us in today’s gospel accounting that Jesus chose the religious establishment and its frequent fixation with puffery with which to contrast his words about servanthood.
From the religious standpoint, servanthood tends to mean a lofty ideal all right for the Scout movement and isolated from the so- called real world of win/lose. From the secular perspective, it is often seen only as “servitude,” a condition imposed on women and racially different groups by male-dominant cultures or self-imposed by both men and women out of fear of their own power.
The kind of servanthood Jesus seems to imply is neither of these. Rather is it the way of fulfilling the human longing for peace and the planet’s need of preservation as the theater of all life. It is the kind of leadership that is needed to make the world safe. It is always a two-way exchange, never as subjugating dominance and never as a unilateral and preemptive arrogance. It not only influences, but is also open to influence. It acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance that other’s capacity to make a difference. It is a paradox — for it gains by giving.
Just as God could say of Jesus as his son in whom he is well pleased and for us to listen to him, thus showing us what he means by being human. So might we hope Jesus can say of the church as what he means by a community of servanthood, leading others into creativity, productivity, and, best of all, bonding people into communities of caring. We can have no greater ministry to the society and to the world in which we are called.
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Note: To Frederick Buechner on faith and story and to Bennett Sims on servanthood — thanks for the better parts of this preachment.
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