“Are You Being Served?"
Christmas is the birthday of the One who came to serve
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Text: Mark 10:35-45
As a young boy growing up, I was forbidden to see a certain television program. Every time it came on, I was sent to my bed. No matter what time it came on, I was sent to my bed. As an adult, I have had an opportunity to watch that program many times, and I would still send myself to bed whenever it comes on. You will tell by the title of the sermon, no doubt, what that program is, and I am sure that on this side of the ocean, many, if not all of you, have seen one episode or another. The program is called, “Are You Being Served?” This program, which really is a parody of the British class system in the ”˜60s and ”˜70s, is set in a large department store in London.
As many of you know, the characters in this story work in the men's and women's section of the Grace Brothers department store. I have always thought that one of the great ironies of the whole program, probably even its raison d'être, is the fact that the program is called: “Are You Being Served?” when not one of the characters is even remotely interested in serving the customers at all! Customers seeking service in the women's section will be shown a faux fur outfit and told, “If you were to buy it, M'arm, you will look like the Queen Mother.” The biggest lie of all! Or, a man will buy a suit and find that it doesn't fit, only to have the clerk take it out back and tear the inseams so it suddenly fits perfectly. That is the nature of the service that you get at Grace Brothers. The great irony is that you don't get the service that you think you are going to get.
This remind me of the story of a man who came home on Christmas Eve only to realize that he had had a mind block and had forgotten to buy a gift for his wife. Christmas morning came along and he felt terrible, so he took her to one side and said, “I am sorry, dear, I was just so busy I forgot to buy you anything.” Her response was, “Don't worry! Tomorrow morning I expect to see something in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in 2.9 seconds.”
The man thought about it, realized his chances didn't sound very good, but did his best. He went quickly to the Boxing Day sales, came home, and presented to his wife on the driveway, for her enjoyment, a set of weigh scales! What did the Rolling Stones say, “You can't always get what you want?” Well, I think that is the nature of the program, “Are You Being Served?” The answer is an unequivocal, categorical, absolute, “No!” You don't get what you think you'll get.
Today, in our text from Mark's Gospel, there is a similar moment, a poignant moment, when the disciples don't get what they are looking for. It is a most telling moment, when John and James, the sons of Zebedee, come to Jesus and say to him, “When you come into your glory, can we sit on your right side and on your left side?”
As the great New Testament commentator N. T. Wright suggests, all the disciples, without exception, misunderstood the nature of Jesus' ministry, particularly at this moment. They thought Jesus was going to lead a military campaign that would result in him sitting on the throne in Jerusalem, and that he was going to establish a new kingdom, a new Israel, in which they would be lead participants, and that they would be the beneficiaries of the power to which their leader was going to ascend. They really felt in their hearts that they should jostle for position within the new cabinet that would be established once Jesus began his rule. So, there was a profound misunderstanding on the part of the disciples, particularly James and John. In fact, all of them were jealous of James and John and angry with them for making such a claim. Thus, there was a misunderstanding of the nature of Jesus' kingdom, Jesus' reign, and the power that Jesus was going to exercise.
The second thing we find in this text, and it is the most telling of all, is that it turns our notion of religion on its head. More often than not when we think of religion and the Christian faith, we think that it has more to do with us doing something for Christ, than Christ doing something for us. We think of religion as a series of rules and regulations and obligations that we have to carry out to fulfill our calling. But Jesus turned this whole notion of faith on its head. In order that they might understand the nature of his kingdom, Jesus said to his disciples and says to those of us today that want to be religious: “The Son of Man has not come to be served, but to serve.”
Jesus is outlining, then, not what we do for him, but what he does for us. I find that many people have feelings of guilt as they approach Christmas. They feel that they are not worthy, that they haven't done what they need to do to somehow be worthy of his grace or his love. There are many people who feel guilty, who feel they are outside the range of the Christian faith because they haven't been able to fulfill all their obligations, and so they look at the spiritual side of Christmas and they think that it is a dark and a difficult and a remote thing. But the message of Christmas is and always will be, not what we do for Christ, but what God in Christ has done for us. Christmas is our response - Christmas is our Alleluia. Christmas is answering the question: “Have we been served?” with a categorical and unequivocal “Yes!”
The very nature of Christmas and the very nature of the Christmas message is that God in Christ has served us. Looking at its origins, if you read the Christmas story, one thing is clear: The picture is incomplete. We never know all the events that take place. We have a little insight only from two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, as to precisely what the birth of Jesus was about. Far more was left out than was included. But what we have is a partial vision. What we are given is what is central to all this: the humble nature of that birth. If you look at this story simply and clearly, it is fascinating to think that Joseph and Mary, two Galilean teenagers - that is what they were - have in their hands or, literally, in her womb, the fate of humanity. That these two people from a remote part of the Roman Empire, in a place that was hardly ever referred to, are holding in their hands the fate of humanity, and they are in a most dangerous and difficult and appalling situation.
Many of us do not grasp the full horror of the reign of the Herod family. It is a family: There was Archelaus, there was Antipas, and there were others. It is a dynasty; it is not just one person. The rule and the reign of the Herods particularly Herod the Great at the time of the birth of Jesus, was akin to the rule of Stalin in the 1930s. There were secret police; there were executions nearly daily; there was oppression of the masses; there were spies everywhere. You couldn't move without the king and the king's minions knowing what you were doing. Palestine was a violent and a desperate place, so it is no wonder that when Herod thought that a new monarch was going to usurp him, he had slaughtered all the innocent boy children in Bethlehem. This was not out of character for Herod; it was actually a rational decision based on the situations at hand. When Christ came into the world, he came through two vulnerable Galilean teenagers during the reign of the oppressive King Herod, and eventually they had to flee the country as refugees.
As Karl Barth said, “What we see in the Christmas story is a God who is courageous, a God who is willing to come into the most difficult and dangerous of situations in the most vulnerable form, in one of the poorest outposts of the Roman Empire, and he comes courageously, vulnerably as a refugee for the sake of humanity.”
There can be no question that the origins of Jesus' birth were those of a servant. Being a refugee was a dangerous thing. Just this last week, I went into the coffee shop where I go every morning and was greeted with a rather stern look by one of the owners, a woman I have known for seven years. Over that time, we have developed a friendship. It was about 7:30 in the morning, and she said, “Dr. Stirling, I am so pleased to see you. I have had the most frightening morning imaginable.”
She had come to this country as a refugee from Iran many years ago. She came because her family was being persecuted, and she had no hope as a woman of having a career or a life for her family. She had been frightened. On this particular morning that fear returned. A man had come into the shop, and because she was not able to give him the free prize from the tear-off rim of his paper coffee cup, he reached over the counter and stuck his finger right up to her eye, a millimetre from her cornea. He said, “You know, it is people like you who should be serving us and giving us what we want. You need to change your ways.”
She thought for a moment that she was going to lose her eye. She told me that this man was from the same country she had fled from, and said, “People have no idea, Reverend Stirling, how hard it is to be a refugee, how hard it is to leave behind the fears of a land where there is oppression.”
Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt as Galileans, as Jews. Can you imagine what they must have gone through? Can you imagine the fear they must have felt? To go back to the place from which Moses, their predecessor, had liberated their people to escape the pain and the problems in their own country. The ministry of Jesus was as a servant, a humble, vulnerable ministry right from its very origins.
One of the things I have been trying to do over the years is to change what I believe is an erroneous view of what the Christian faith stands for. In our culture, I believe that the Christian faith is seen as being powerful; it is seen as being prestigious - not as much as it was, but still prestigious. If the cross is a symbol of glory and of power and of glamour, the message of the Christian faith is one of the status quo and of power and of glory. Yet, when you read the Bible, nothing could be further from the truth. The whole message of the Good News, the whole message of God's encounter with humanity, is one of his coming into our midst in Christ as a servant, not to be served, but to serve; as the gift of grace; as an outpouring of love; as a manifestation of God's very inner life of love and fellowship and of peace.
Now, some have understood the humble nature of the Christian faith, and have therefore rejected it as unappealing. Frederick Nietzsche once said, “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous innermost perversion, the one immoral blemish of mankind.” He called it that, not because he found Christianity to be too powerful, but because he found it to be too weak. He found it to be too humble. The Jesus he read of in the Bible was a Jesus he simply could not tolerate, because he valued power and glory and dominion, and the Jesus of Nazareth that he read about had come not to be served, but to serve. I like what Helmut Thieleke once said: “The amazing thing about our God is that he never considered himself too great to come in the form of his Son and wash the feet of the creatures he had made.” That is the Christian faith! That is what is so profoundly radical in its dimensions, and transformative in the way in which we look at the world.
One of the great writers of the 20th century was a man from India named Rabindranath Tagore. He was a friend of Gandhi. Although he was a Hindu and tried to live according to the writings of the Upanishads, he understood the nature of Jesus. He understood the power of the birth of the Christ Child. Here is what Tagore had to say:
Here is thy footstool and there rests thy feet, where the poorest and the lowliest and the lost live. When I try to bow to thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depth where thy feet rest, among the poorest and the loneliest and the lost. Pride can never approach to where thou walkest, in the clothes of the humble amongst the poorest and the lowliest and the lost. My heart can never find its way to where thou keepest company with the companionless, among the poorest and the lowliest and the lost.
Rabindranath Tagore understood the Jesus of the Bible. He understood that Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and from the very origins of his ministry to the very last breath on the cross, the ministry of Jesus was the ministry for us. It is also the great destiny of Jesus to be the servant, but as the servant, to be the Lord. The Apostle Paul in writing to the Philippians said that this Jesus humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, but then he said that at the name of this Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God, the Father. John and James wanted to sit beside a throne on earth; Jesus of Nazareth came to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth and to lift earth to glory.
John Donne says of Mary, “immensity was cloistered in thy dear womb.” The birth of Jesus is the birth of immensity, of glory. It is the ineffable, the magnificent, the immortal, the splendour of the coming of God the Father in the form of the Son. But so often at Christmas, my friends, we forget about this. I don't know about you, but when Boxing Day comes, I always have mixed feelings. I actually prefer Boxing Day to Christmas Day. The turkey is always a little bit better the second time around. The cranberries are a little sweeter. The wine a little better chilled. I like to phone my relatives to thank them for their Christmas gifts, and to find out where they bought them, so I can return them (and to think that they are listening right now)!
But sometimes I think that Boxing Day is a very sad day, for all the humour, the joy of Christmas is gone; the emotion, the high is over. It seems a down day. I love what Charles Swindoll wrote in a little poem. He summed it up so beautifully and cheerily:
T'was the day after Christmas when all through the place,
There were arguments and depression, even Mum had a face.
The stockings hung empty and the house was a mess,
And new clothes didn't fit and Dad was in stress.
The family was irritable and the children no one could please,
Because the instructions for the swing set were written in Chinese.
The bells no longer jingled, and no carollers came around.
The sink was stacked with dishes, and the tree was turning brown.
The stores were full of people returning things that had fizzled and failed.
(Weigh scales! Weigh scales!)
And the shoppers were discouraged,
Because everything they bought was at half-price sale.
T'was the day after Christmas, the spirit of joy had disappeared.
The only hope on the horizon was twelve Bowl games on the first day of the New Year!
It seems that at Christmas we get on a rollercoaster. All is joyful and magical and crisp and bright; and afterwards, it all plunges back down. But for Christians, no! After the birth of Jesus, there is joy. After the birth of Jesus, there is recognition we have been served. After the birth of Jesus, there is a reminder that his life came that our sins might be forgiven. After the birth of Jesus, there is a reminder that death has been swallowed up in victory by the power of his life. After Christmas, there is the reconciling power of the Saviour, where we couldn't reconcile ourselves. After Christmas, there is peace with God and goodwill.
After Christmas, we ask the question: “Have we been served?” The answer is an unequivocal, absolute, categorical, “Yes!” I'll tell you why. Jesus said, “I have not come into the world to be served, but to serve.” Go and do likewise. Amen and Amen!
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.