If God is a servant, then "serving God" isn't what we think - Vince Brackett
SPEAKER NOTES
Intro
In the couple decades since I’ve become a churchgoer, I’ve encountered something that I think is a pretty common notion in faith. And it’s something that I have increasingly grown wary of. It’s how the Biblical Tradition’s encouragement to “serve God” is often talked about in America — as having to entail “doing hard labor for Jesus”. Like “serving God” is something akin to ::God being the Crawley family from Downton Abbey, and we are the servants downstairs.:: If we want connection with God, we must do hard work for the sake of pleasing him. Shine his shoes! Bring him breakfast!
God is going to ask us to do some hard stuff, some unpleasant stuff, but, hey, that’s what we gotta do to stay in the master’s good graces.
The heart of this I think is born out of an American truism about life that in most cases I actually don’t dislike — that nothing good in life comes easy. Part of that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” American “hard work ethic” ideal. I totally believe “nothing good comes easy” in a lot of ways.
But, in the case of faith, it can have negative consequences, and make us believe: if connection with God is a good thing, it’s got to feel hard. It’s got to feel like hard labor. And so people learn to talk of God as though he is an aloof master, with a long list of demands that we must follow because we are his servants and he has Lordly, Downton-Abbey things to attend to. And we learn to live for those few-and-far-between times when God suddenly, inexplicably becomes present to our lowly servant needs — those episodes of Downton Abbey when the master comes downstairs to the servants’ quarters and everyone, including the master, is like, “oh! the master’s down here?! that’s so wonderful of you God! you don’t have to be here! we’re supposed to be waiting on you God! how incredible of you to take a moment to wait on us! You’re the best God ever!” And we content ourselves to believe that those few-and-far-between moments will keep us going, but otherwise serving God is hard labor.
I have my own experience with this. I didn’t grow up in an intensely religious environment being taught I had to “serve God”, BUT I did grow up in an environment that taught me to be a people pleaser — which can have the same result when applied to a spiritual life.
My childhood was marked by downplaying my deepest needs and desires down so that my siblings’ needs and desires could be served, and my parents’ needs and desires could be served, and later on so my peers’ and friends’ needs and desires could be served… So when I became a praying person, I fit right in to the American “serve God” ideal — my needs and desires don’t matter, God — don’t worry! I’m ready for hard labor! You just tell me what to do! I promise I won’t grow passive-aggressive or entitled about it!
A lot of my earliest fumblings into relationship with God were, I think, colored by this notion that I’m just here to bring Jesus his breakfast and shine his shoes — not literally, but, you know, that was the gist behind any of the ways I was meant to live out faith.
(PAUSE)
So I actually do think there’s a different (and, maybe surprisingly, joyful) take on “serving God” woven into the Jesus Tradition and the Bible that can be extremely helpful to anyone’s spiritual life, and that’s what I want to talk about today…
But it is not the popular American sense of “serving God”. And I want to make that clear right from the start, because religious and non-religious Americans alike all take for granted this misconceived notion — that “hard labor for Jesus” is what anyone must be talking about when “serving God” comes up, or what the Bible must be talking about when “serving God” comes up.
This is how half of the people I meet in life respond when they ask what I do and I say “I’m a pastor” — whether they’re religious or not themselves, their responses have behind them a sort self-deprecating awe: “oh wow! you’re really doing so much for God! I’ve really been meaning to bring God breakfast more… but you, you must be like breakfast in bed every morning… good for you!” It’s meant to be complimentary, and that is so kind, but, despite how my faith began, “serving God” for me today is really not at all about hard labor for Jesus.
The trouble is, this notion of “serving God” sounds right to our American sensibilities of service — again, even if we’re rejecting the idea — this still sounds like “what those religious people, what Vince the pastor, must be about”. Hard labor for Jesus looks and sounds the part to us on the surface.
But it is, if we peel back the layers, soooo “American hard work ethic” it’s hilarious… And it would be more hilarious, if some of the consequences of this weren’t so sad.
I’ve just been talking about how this affects personal relationships with God. But far more consequential is the way this affects the ways societies at large conceive of pursuing God, or pursuing what is right. The “hard labor for Jesus” notion of “serving God” is also the foundation on which every theology in history that defended slavery or institutional racism was built — scriptures ripped out of context and delivered by the voices of the powerful, skewing them to say “Be subservient to me. That’s God’s command to you.”
So this is real stuff that needs to be investigated: what actually is the Jesus and Biblical tradition getting at when it encourages us to “serve God”?
Context
To address that, we’re going to dive further into ::the Gospel of Luke::, one of the four biographies of Jesus that kick off the New Testament of the Bible. A couple weeks ago I mentioned that my next several talks here on Sundays will be drawing from Luke.
And the central question we’ve started working with to help us through Luke is:
::What kind of world do we want to live in?::
Luke’s unique contribution to the picture we have of Jesus is that “big questions like this” were a guiding force for him. In his teaching and in his actions, Jesus seemed to be pointing people again and again toward expanding their moral imaginations: beyond themselves as individuals, beyond their tribes of people just like them, to as broad a sense as they could imagine:
What is a good life? A righteous life? Well… what kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your children to inherit from you? That’s a good start for answering “what is the right way to live?”
And Luke’s Jesus has lots to say about how “serving God” is involved in this expanding of our moral imaginations, ::so let’s take a look at some passages.::
Content
::In Luke 4::, during Jesus’ “temptation in the wilderness”, Jesus draws strength for himself by appealing to the Ten Commandments’
“Worship the Lord, your God, and serve him only.”
So obviously, there’s some high regard there for “serving God” from Jesus.
Likewise, ::in Luke 17::, Jesus says to his disciples:
7“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? 9Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”
Hmmm… Sounds pretty Downton Abbey… or at least Downton Abbey-adjacent, right? But there’s more to the puzzle Jesus is giving us.
::In Luke 22::, Jesus says to his disciples:
The greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. 27For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? ~But~ I am among you as one who serves.
Do you catch his flipping of the expected? He asks “Is it not the person at the table being served who is greater?” I imagine him pausing for some dramatic effect — and the disciples are like “yeah, of course it is”… and then he finishes his point “BUT, I am among you as one who serves.”
The second piece of the puzzle from Luke is: The God Jesus is here to show the world is, himself, a servant. This is a theme throughout Luke; and it’s most explicitly said here.
So… we should serve God. But God is a servant.
God’s master-ness is defined as servitude - that’s the unique and subversive thing here - this is not American conceptions of service, which teach us to expect that faith is hard labor for an aloof master and which reinforce our prejudice power structures at a societal level… this is something different.
::Luke 12:: is best at capturing the subversive tension of serving the God who is a servant. Jesus teaches:
35“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, 36like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. 37It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on ~them~.
The master will wait on the servants!
Interpretation
So how does one serve the God who is himself a servant?
Here’s an analogy some theologians have used that has helped me and many at our church — it’s one of our favorite analogies here — so perhaps you’ve heard us mention it before.
It’s ::the difference between serving God as a Good Doctor vs as a Bad Boss:: — let’s take the bad one first.
We serve a bad boss because they need the benefit of our hard work for their purposes, and so we can get a paycheck in return. But we work hard for them reluctantly, because they are a bad boss. We say the right things to their face, but inwardly we are racked with frustration toward them, because what they need from us clearly seems to be more important to them than us as people, and perhaps we are constantly asking ourselves, “is my paycheck worth all this?”
Sounds like so many Americans trying to serve God, right?
On the other hand, we serve a good doctor (we follow a doctor’s orders) not because she needs the benefit of our working hard to do so, but because we need the benefit of our working hard to do so — the frustrations of serving a doctor might have to do with the inconvenience of recovering from a procedure or the lifestyle change of a new exercise plan or diet they prescribe for us to stay healthy, but it’s not frustration at the doctor for putting her self-interest over ours - a good doctor is, by definition, there for our self-interest, our health!
Now approaching God as a doctor can feel scandalously selfish to many who have spent a great deal of time in church being taught to “serve God” because he is worthy, or because he deserves or demands it. But, I don’t think the doctor approach is selfish so much as it is humble — this approach acknowledges “we are the ones with needs, not God!”
It’s sort of a ridiculous cosmic role reversal to not approach God this way. I think of this sort of funny line from Psalm 50, where the Psalmist writes from God’s perspective: “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine, if I was hungry I wouldn’t tell you.” God isn’t the one with needs, I am!
Actually, Jesus himself used the analogy of doctor to refer to the God he was showing the world. Luke captures this in chapter 5: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” — There’s that humility piece — Jesus seems to say, if you want connection with God or spiritual growth, you have to go to him as “sick and in need of a doctor.”
So that helps me makes sense of this: Luke’s Jesus shows us a God who longs to be served as we might serve a Good Doctor — this God is the great meeter of needs, his essence is servant-hearted-ness toward us — to serve God is to let God serve us.
And the reason, I think, is that that turns us into willing, joyful servants ourselves.
::Remember the great question at the center of Luke’s Gospel: “What kind of world do we want to live in?”:: Luke’s Jesus seems to ask us: don’t you want to live in a world where it is joyful service that makes everything go round? That’s what I’m doing — joyful service — and that’s what I can birth in you.
Personal Story
I mentioned that my childhood developed in me a people-pleasing problem, and that I took that to my relationship with God early on, because that was all I knew.
Now I definitely experienced some personal growth and maturity during my first years of fumbling into a relationship with God, I don’t want to say it was worthless by any means, but it was not making me much of a servant. All of my growth during that time was internal self-esteem and hope and purpose stuff. Outwardly, I was still a pretty hurt, entitled kid, waiting for everyone in my life to pay me back for all that I’d done for them. I was focused on what felt scarce, so I was stingy with my resources, only willing to serve others if I had to, or if I was going to get something in return, which isn’t actually service, it’s a transaction.
Well, honestly, it was learning this doctor analogy for the first time when my relationship with God really started to grow the way I interacted with others and make me more of a servant. I’m a cerebral person, so new ideas that connect with me excite me, that might be part of why it was so life-changing for me particularly.
The shift from trying to “hard labor for God” to “serving God by letting him serve me” made anything good in life I experienced feel like a gift from God. And with so many things now feeling like a gift, the “I’m just waiting on everyone and no one is waiting on me” feelings started to dissipate. I didn’t feel the need to be stingy anymore, and I started to feel generous in a new way.
I remember when a family member, with whom I previously felt dread being around because of my history of people-pleasing with them — I remember they ended up in crisis, and I found myself totally ready to be there for them, full of care and compassion and a heart to serve.
Letting God serve me turned me into a more generous and willing and joyful servant myself.
Practical application
::So, if I can leave us with something practical here, two maybe obvious suggestions:::
::1) Don’t serve God as a bad boss:: -
If you notice you are (like look for the Downton Abbey “servant speaking to the Lord of the household” tone in your prayers) — if you notice that, just decide to stop, and gently re-direct yourself. Don’t shame yourself. Just say, self, that’s not who God is. God looks like Jesus, the good doctor.
::2) Do serve God as a good doctor:: -
For me, this was as simple as teaching myself to see anything good in my life as a gift from the God that wants to serve me.
Or, to get practical a different way, let me throw one last Luke passage at you. In Luke 16, Jesus famously sums up a story he’s just told by saying “you cannot serve both God and money”. And I once heard someone explain that it can shine light on how practically we might “serve God” by considering the thing we’re not recommended to do there: “serve money”.
Obviously it doesn’t make sense to bring breakfast in bed to money, it doesn’t make sense to say we’re serving money so money can put its feet up and rest. No, what “serve money” means, of course, is “bank your hope for a happy future on money.” And we would be unwise to do that.
On the flip side, then, we can understand “serve God” as “bank your hope for a happy future on God.”
Perhaps that feels practical enough to use in your prayer life?
- God, this season of life is so hard for X reason. But I’m banking my hope on you, not changed circumstances. Help me feel your encouragement and love and peace in the midst of this.
- God, I’m exhausted and angry about our country, I’m banking on you for fresh inspiration or perspective or opportunity. What do you have for me?
To serve God is to let God serve us. And what happens when we do this is, eventually, we become so full of joy and gratitude that we overflow to others. We, just like the God Jesus shows us, become generous and willing and joyful servants of others.
Like I experienced, this can take time; this is not the fastest way to get someone to serve others, which is maybe why it’s not popular in America. But if a lifelong commitment to serving others is our hope, commitments that can truly change the world we live in and not just last a year and then disappear because people burn out on their people pleasing or will power, then THIS I think is the only game in town. We have to start from an internal place of God is joyfully generous toward me. Only then can the same thing be birthed in me.
So I would love to pray for us. Would you stand with me?