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February 10, 2008
Self-Serve, or Full Service?
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11
Rev. Richard Allen
Zion United Methodist Church had been closed for some time
before I first saw it. The congregation had long ago died, or moved away, or drifted to one of
several Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches nearby. But the building was falling apart at
a little crossroads near my first pastoral appointment in South Carolina. Something had to be
done.
It was true. The roof leaked, and pigeons nested in the
eaves. Persons unknown and unseen had come at night and taken all of the pews, and everything
else but part of the altar rail. In the little church-school rooms out back, these same folk or
their neighbors had stolen the flooring and even some ceiling joists. The place was dangerous.
We worried that some night an unknown scavenger might well get himself hurt. So the trustees of
the charge – my first appointment in South Carolina – decided to sell the building. When even
the Baptists didn’t want the building to use as a church, we invited sealed bids and sold it to
the highest bidder.
Only two sealed envelopes actually arrived, and it turned out
that two thousand dollars was the high bid. For that investment, plus the costs of renovations,
the new owner converted the shell of that old church into a gas station and country store. He
had a sense of history, though. He Christened his new enterprise “Zion Grocery.”
It was nice to see the old building rehabilitated and the lot
around it cleaned up. It was good to see some life at the place. Still, driving by one
afternoon, it stung me to see hanging on the walls of that former site of weddings, funerals,
revival meetings and Sunday worship the signs advertising cigarettes and beer. More unsettling
was the notice on the newly installed gas pumps near the road. It said simply: “Self-Service.”
The image of that one sign haunted me for a long time. Not
just that the building had changed owners and therefore changed purposes. I understood that.
But I couldn’t help but wonder how many church buildings should have had their own invisible
sign announcing: “Self-Service.”
You see, when you go to buy gasoline, you expect to serve
yourself. It’s quick, easy, and with pay-at-the pump self-service is fast and convenient. I
can’t remember when I’ve walked inside a gas station to pay a clerk for my fuel. But I wonder
how often people expect their church families to be self-serving in the other sense: taking
care of the members first – or the circle of those who make it somehow into the ‘family’ of
faith. Sometimes I wonder if the church of Jesus has lost its way in taking care of its own
needs first of all.
Jesus said somewhere that he came not to be served, but to
serve. And just before he died, according to the gospels, he gave the assignment of serving
others to his followers. When I drove by the Zion Grocery, that sign calling patrons to serve
themselves triggered my musings about the death of the Zion Church community. For I knew this:
the church as a community had fallen apart before the building that housed the worship had
fallen into disuse and begun to decay. Had they died as a congregation, I wondered, because
they had lost their way theologically? Were they gone because they had lost their bearings as a
people of faith, serving themselves first?
The lessons for today remind me of the danger – the
temptation, to use a theological word – of loving ourselves first and ignoring the needs of our
neighbors. And here at the beginning of Lent we’re invited to take an inventory of the deepest
recesses of our hearts and lives. Indeed, Lent is a time when we’re called to reflect on both
the sins and the successes of our own individual lives, our lives as a congregation, and maybe
even our life as a nation before God. If that focus is appropriate, then one helpful question
just might be: Are we here to love ourselves first and most, or are we called to love God and
others first, as we would love ourselves?
In the first lesson, the first human couple eats the fruit
that God has forbidden that they even touch. They do so because they want something for
themselves: they want to know as God knows. The act is selfish in this sense: they depend on
themselves, not on God. Their disobeying God breaks their communion – the community – with God.
Why? Because they have started to focus first on themselves. Not God. Not God’s good garden.
Not even each other. But themselves. They see themselves, as if for the first time, and, for
the first time, they see that they are naked. And they are afraid.
In the gospel lesson, Jesus is faced with a similar question.
Having been claimed by God in his baptism, “You are my son, the beloved,” Jesus next goes into
the wilderness carrying little more than the God’s blessing and its holy, haunting implication.
Having been blessed by God, he must decide: how will he use this blessing, this calling, this
power?
The three temptations make it clear that even Jesus wrestles
with the notion of serving himself and his needs first. He is hungry; no surprise after a
forty-day fast. “If you are hungry,” Satan whispers, “take care of yourself. Serve yourself
first. Turn a stone into bread.” Failing that, perhaps you feel a bit lonely, ignored. “Go
for the dramatic, Satan suggests. “Bring some attention to yourself first. Jump down from the
temple and show the world who you are.” Finally, Satan suggests taking the power that the
gospels will later tell us has belonged to Christ all along: “Serve yourself. Let me make you
the ruler of all the world.”
Musing on this story in his book simply called “Sermons,”
Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes suggests that Matthew’s point in here is not to warn us about
temptation, and therefore warn us away from something during Lent. The purpose of the season is
more compelling than our ageless human struggle with attractions of the flesh. Rather, the
story is about the deeper spiritual task of confronting ourselves. In these 40 days of Lent we,
too, look at ourselves to discover clarity about our purposes. Claiming the faith and claimed
by it as well, we are called to do precisely what Jesus does in his forty days in the
wilderness: we confront ourselves rather than serve ourselves first. With Jesus, we delve more
deeply into our hearts; we face our temptations. Jesus, says Gomes, “confronts his vulnerable
points and his spiritual conflicts.” With Jesus, like Jesus, we confront our very selves.
Confronting ourselves, Gomes then continues, “means looking at ourselves behind the elaborate
social cosmetic we create in order to protect ourselves from our own vanities. [This]
confrontation with our ego and ambition and fear – is the ultimate confrontation with the devil
and the evil he incarnates.” (Gomes,
Sermons, page 52.)
So today we stand together at the table of the one who calls
us to follow him, even to the cross. We come to face ourselves in our deepest fears and true
needs, hinted at in our temptations.
As you receive the sacrament this day, hear the words that
accompany them: “The body and the blood of Christ. Given for you.” Hear. And remember the
Christ gives himself for you, even before you could be grateful for the gift. We follow a
savior who loves us first, and who therefore calls us to follow him in serving others first.
Not ourselves.
Thanks be to God for such a remarkable gift.
Amen.
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