Trustworthy Servants of a Compassionate God

Matthew 6:24-34; I Corinthians 4:1-5; Isaiah 49:13-15

Isaiah 49:13-15

¹³ Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. ¹⁴ But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” ¹⁵ Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

Matthew 6:24-34 [Jesus said to the disciples,]

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸ And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹ yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³² For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

³⁴ “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

¹ Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. ² Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. ³ But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. ⁴ I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. ⁵ Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.

The Sermon

It was the midnight shift at the hospital and, although I was just a student, I had been called in to be a pastoral presence for a very young and fragile mother, and the baby who was undergoing critical surgery. While she and I stood behind a window and watched, doctors did their work gathered around a plastic bubble, using gloves that reached inside through the surface, to operate on the delicate little life in their hands and God’s.

From where the mother and I stood, two layers of sterile protection removed from the little baby that she had brought into the world, she kept saying through her tears, “Come on, baby, come on, come on; come on, baby…”

Sometimes the world is unfair, and sometimes life is unfair, and every story doesn’t turn out the way it’s supposed to. To be honest, I have no idea how this one turned out, but I know the baby made it through surgery that night. And I know that in that most precarious hour, there was a young mother watching over her tiny infant, willing him to survive.

In seminary one day, a minute or two before one of our three-hour theology classes began, for some reason now lost in the mists of time, I looked at my acquaintance sitting next to me, and I said, “Have you ever had one of those days where you just wanted to grab a pillow and cry out for mama?" Behind her was sitting another good friend, who said, “Oh, yeah. She has.”

I gathered that I had wandered into a little bit of a mine field, but that’s kind of what you do in seminary. I didn’t need to know any other details. My friend had been to the depths in one way or another, and we spoke and recognized the common language of remembering that infantile call, maybe the first prayer most humans offer, not to God, but to someone who is, as far as we’re concerned, in a very similar position.

A guy in the church where I grew up used to tell a story of a young boy who as a baby had been trapped in a burning house, and his mother had run into the house to make sure he got out all right, and in doing so, she herself caught on fire. Her beautiful face was disfigured.

And years later, that boy, now a teenager, in a teenage argument with his parents, got so frustrated with something that his mother said that he burst out, “You’re ugly!”

And his father put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Son, you will never know what you just did.”

We are always offended, disgusted and angered when anything happens to a kid, especially at the hands of a parent. But it seems like it’s treated as an offense of a different order altogether when a story makes the news that a mother has somehow horribly failed her children. Something within us just cannot process that; it’s not supposed to be possible.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? “Even these may forget,” says God, “yet I will not forget you.”

Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ But strive first for the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

So think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.

Because God’s love for us is more compassionate than anything we can imagine, the children of God can feel completely secure in embracing their call to servanthood.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

You don’t have to worry about whether you will be taken care of. If you want to worry about something, worry about whether you are being a trustworthy servant—but even then, if you consider that God loves you with a love deeper than the greatest love that most human beings could ever know, then there is a comfort for all your worries.

The invitation to servanthood sometimes comes so gently that it can be grossly misinterpreted. That has something to do with the fact that church is supposed to be “nice,” which is true if “nice” means things like loving, accepting, caring, helping, supporting.

But church is not supposed to be so “nice” that discipleship comes off as some minimally demanding pastime.

Which is exactly what it is, when you compare it to work, family needs, even kids’ sports. There’s a penalty if you miss any of those. Church used to have a penalty for sitting it out—it was called damnation. But we in the mainline churches have kind of moved on from that era when, as Garrison Keillor said, the sermon was not meant to inspire you; it was meant to terrify you.

But now, church is so nice, we don’t really have a penalty if your discipleship is less than fully devoted, fully trusting in God the way children in even remotely healthy family situations have absolute trust in their parents to provide what they need.

If God is the most important thing in the world to you, it will show. We who belong to the Church belong to Christ. And to belong to Christ is to be invited, to be compelled, to trust God enough that you can be a trustworthy servant of God.

To be a trustworthy servant means you cannot serve two masters.

To be a trustworthy servant means you cannot be a slave to both God and money—or anything else that you use to give you worldly security, earthly comfort, personal gratification.

Even whole church bodies are susceptible to the temptation to not fully trust God, and so to hold themselves back from being trustworthy servants. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a church being celebrated—by its community, or its denomination, or just by its own members as they observe a significant milestone or anniversary—celebrated for its pioneering and compassionate ministry to the poor; or the preacher being honored for outstanding service to the community;

and then you find out what’s really being celebrated: “and that little church has grown from 157 people to an average Sunday attendance of over 2,000.”

It always makes me wonder: is the celebration really for the compassionate ministry to the poor, the pioneering program for the good of the community? Or are we trusting more in the corporate, business world model of greater numbers as the major, if not the only, indicator of whether or not our ministry is a “success.” I always wonder, at those occasions: if that church had stayed at 157 people in worship when it had adopted that marvelous ministry, would we be seeing the same kind of celebration, the same kinds of laudatory things being said about the success of their mission?

There is a movement today popularly called “prospering,” as in, “God wants to prosper you.” There’s another guy I keep seeing on TV who emphasizes that the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular are, more than anything, interested in your financial freedom. Seriously.

Let me be perfectly clear: I see no indication whatsoever that God is interested in “prospering you”--or any other trustworthy servant, or any church full of trustworthy servants.

DO YOUR WORK. Follow the call God is giving you. Give the best ten percent of what God has given you back to God—be it money or time or energy or love.

Prospering you? We’re already prospering! We have life and we have God. Do your work as a trustworthy servant of God.

“Go, labor on:” goes an old hymn that we never use: “spend, and be spent,
Thy joy to do the Father’s will:
It is the way the Master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?”

If you prosper, or if your church grows, fantastic. Good for you. Now show us what you can do with it.

And if you are worried, as many are in these days of spiraling expenses, about what you will eat or drink or wear, know that our compassionate God will take care of you.

The way that usually works is that the family of Christ—that’s us—will not abandon our saints, our workers, our ministers—that’s you. God will not allow us to abandon you to hopelessness, even if we wanted to.

Like the seagull that goes down with another who is injured in flight—they never let one go down alone…

Like Pee Wee Reese going out to put his arm around Jackie Robinson, when the boos and the catcalls and the shameful words were raining down on that great player and great, great man, whose crime was to be a black man playing baseball on a white team. Pee Wee was a white guy from the part of Kentucky that in Indiana we used to pronounce KAIN-tuck, and Pee Wee wasn’t all that thrilled with the idea to begin with.

But when he saw that Jackie Robinson was doing what he did with dignity and grace and absolute determination, and he saw what they were doing to him because of it, Pee Wee went out and put his white, Kaintuck arm around Jackie Robinson’s black shoulders and didn’t have to say a word for every moron in that stadium to get the message loud and clear: open your eyes and wake up, because I just did: this is my brother.

Trustworthy servants of a compassionate God will tend to do that kind of thing.

I had the honor of being in the company of the great preacher Barbara Brown Taylor at the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis last week, and at the beginning of her remarks in worship, she said, “if the Holy Spirit is here, then nothing else matters; and if the Holy Spirit is not here, then nothing else matters.”

We are servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. To be a trustworthy servant of our most compassionate God is not hard. But it is demanding.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

But strive first for the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord will have compassion.

“And I will never forget you.”

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

May 25, 2008