Servant Leaders - Servant Love

Easter 5B; 1 John 3:14-24 & John 15:1-8; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC 5/3/2015

Jim Melnyk, “Servant Leaders/Servant Love”

There’s an old country song that starts out, “My heroes have been cowboys.”  Well, with apologies to Willie Nelson, it seems that all of my heroes while I was growing up were ball players of some sort.  As a youngster, I remember checking the box scores every day, following the exploits of Mickey Mantle.  And I was in High School when Willis Reed, the center for the New York Knicks, limped onto the court at the start of game seven of the championship series against the L.A. Lakers – struggling down the court and hitting the first two jump shots of the game when he shouldn’t have even been in uniform – totally psyching out the Lakers – with the Knicks never looking back!  Now that was hero time! 

           

But today, although some would say I still wear my sports allegiances like a second skin, my heroes have changed.  Today my heroes are folks like Desmond Tutu, who is perhaps for me one of the greatest witnesses to the love of God in this world today.  People of God like Tutu have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ, taken it deep within their hearts and souls, and have found ways to be imitators – and initiators – of the Spirit of Christ.  They have become what many choose to call “Servant Leaders.”  Servant Leaders – people called by God to lead others into the heart of God.  As people called to imitate the holy paradox of Jesus of Nazareth – the God who serves, they lead others into the heart of God by standing alongside their sisters and brothers – by seeking wholeness and holiness for others and glory only for God.

The author of First John proclaims: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love…. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4).  And so, both Jesus and the author of First John in today’s lessons connect loving and being loved by God with abiding in God – sort of setting up house in God and living in God – and thus keeping God’s commandment that we love one another. 

We might ask, what does all this look like – this abiding – this loving – for followers of Jesus?   Only moments before today’s lesson from John’s Gospel Jesus offers three commandments for his disciples to take to heart. 

           

First, during their last meal together, Jesus takes ordinary bread and a cup of wine.  “This is my body – offered for you.  This is my blood – poured out for all.  Whenever you share this meal,” he tells them, “I will be present with you.”  And in the sharing of the bread and the cup we come to know Jesus, and recall his revolutionary message of justice-love for all people – especially those whom the world chooses to ignore or hate.  In sharing Christ’s body and blood we abide with God in a tangible way – remembering Christ’s sacrificial love, and pledging to carry that love with us into the world.

And then, while they are still at the table together, Jesus gets up and gently washes his disciples’ feet.  The Word of God made human flesh – the Very Promise of God from the foundation of time – washes the grime of Jerusalem’s dusty streets from the feet of his disciples.  “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet,” he tells his disciples, “you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”  Jesus comes among us as one who serves, and this act of foot washing is a defining sacrament of servant leadership.

Finally, as the meal comes to a close Jesus says to his friends, “[Now I am giving] you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Jesus offers us two sentences that encompass a whole world – two sentences so easy to say – and so difficult to live.

And so the stage is set for today’s gospel lesson.  “Abide in me as I abide in you.”  The whole show boils down to our abiding in God through Christ, and as a result, loving one another as God has loved us.  The center of God’s universe is love.  The central act of God’s universe – the central action of God’s universe – is love.  Yesterday at the Festival I came across a guy handing out religious tracts.  In huge, bold, letters the tract proclaimed: God’s Judgment of the world is underway!  Yet, when I read John’s Gospel – when I read First John – what I hear is a Gospel of love and forgiveness.  Now that doesn’t mean there is no judgment – but what it does mean is that judgment is always anchored in love and forgiveness.  To be centered in God’s universe is to be centered in God’s love – to find ourselves centered in and abiding in God’s love, and to be in love is to act in love and act out of love. 

And that is why folks like Desmond Tutu have become heroes of my faith.  They speak to me of what it means to be centered in God’s universe – to be centered in God’s love – and they remind me of God’s call to invite others to share with me in the promise of God’s love.

“God has a dream,” Tutu has said so often.  “God has a dream that we will [someday] realize that we are [all] members of one family.  That’s the one lesson God is [still] hoping we will learn, and if it takes millennia for us to learn, God will give us those millennia.  But that’s the one lesson God wants us to learn….  Not as a figure of speech, but as the most real thing about us.  That we are members one with another.  In this family,” Tutu reminds us, “there are no outsiders.  All are insiders.”

And Tutu is willing to further define what he means by this.  “There are no aliens.  All, all, all belong: black, white, yellow, gray, rich, poor, educated, not educated, beautiful, not-so-beautiful, gay, straight.  ‘HEY,’ God says, ‘all, all.’  Even those we call extremists,” says Tutu – and you recall that Tutu spent so much of his ministry in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid! “Even those we call extremists, “he says, “they belong, they belong.  That’s why it’s so radical,” Tutu says, “That’s why if we’re able to accept this truth, then we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – spend those amounts on budgets of death and destruction, when we know just a small, small fraction of that would enable God’s children everywhere to have clean water, enough to eat, adequate education, accessible health care, and a safe home environment.”  These are powerful words, and for some – perhaps for many – disturbing words from a servant leader whose words echo the greatest servant leader of all time – Jesus of Nazareth.

The Servant Leader heeds the commandments of Jesus offered as he prepares to give his life for the life of the world: Jesus, the one who comes among us not to be served, but to be a servant of all.  We are all branches of the One Vine that is Jesus – and as branches, not one of us is more important or more beloved of the vine; each of us called to abide in the vine, and each are called to bear fruit on behalf of the vine.

Once again across our nation we have witnessed the violence of riots – this time we watched as neighborhoods in Baltimore burned – and all sorts of emotions have boiled forth: Anger at the violence, anger at injustices still experienced by minorities, dismay – with some folks disparaging the violence and others asking for understanding over what led to the eruption of violence.  Eugene Taylor Sutton, Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Maryland pleads, “Weep and pray for Baltimore.  Violence never works.  Ever.” (http://episcopalmaryland.org/weeping-for-baltimore-statement-by-bishop-eugene-taylor-sutton/)  And as followers of Jesus we seek an end to violence – we declare there must be a more constructive way.

But we also must remember what has been said many times, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” (Gandhi).  We must remember that modern day realities such as homelessness, discrimination of any kind, isolation, and our turning deaf ears toward suffering and the root causes of suffering, are also forms of violence.  And abiding in Christ – in the love of God – invites us into relationship with those who suffer from any form of human-caused violence in places like Baltimore

The Servant Leader hears the words of First John – words written for the faithful throughout the generations, but also written during a time when the Church was being persecuted by Rome: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars” – tough language to be sure – “for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  And so we are called to seek the end of violence in all its incarnations.

These are indeed the marks of a Servant Leader: To hear the commandment of God in Christ and to follow; to draw the circle of faith ever wider and to work for the healing of our lives and the life of this world – what our Jewish brothers and sisters call tikkun olam – as we seek to find our place in the center of God’ universe – as we seek to find our home in the center of God’s love.  And we know ourselves called, like Desmond Tutu, to risk saying and doing the very things the world doesn’t want us to say or do – as followers of Jesus saying and doing the very things that will turn our world inside out and upside down for the love of God.   Amen.