The Grace of Low Expectations

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 20 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 6 October 2013 Dallas, Texas Luke 17:5-10 I was always looking for an edge. And who doesn t? It s the American way, right? During my college football days at the University of Miami, I was the student president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It s a fine group, but it s at its best when it reminds Christian athletes that sports are not the most important thing in life, that sportsmanship is a greater testimony of faith than championships, and that how we deal with losing might be a better measure of faith than winning. I know that today better than when I was in college. I remember passing out little booklets produced by some group called Total Release Performance, or something like that. Its idea was that Christians should be the most successful athletes because we have an advantage others don t have we have God on our side. Of course it never occurred to me that God might be on the other side, too. You can t think too deeply about these things, don t you know?! One verse the group used to make its case was Philippians 4:13 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. You ve seen that reference on Tim Tebow s eye black. And then there s this verse from our text today: If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you. Can you see how seductive that would be for a college athlete? Or what about for a husband who s afraid he is losing his wife s affections? Or for a woman who wants to break the glass ceiling and make partner in her firm? Or for a politician who wants to impose his will on Congress? If you just have enough faith. Increase our faith, the apostles say to Jesus. And we are right there with them. We want the faith that moves mountains, the faith that gives us an edge, the faith that boosts us out of mediocrity and raises our expectations.

2 The importance of high expectations is something we hardly ever question. We have all kinds of slogans designed to help. Michelangelo supposedly said: The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we hit it. Or this one from that clever wordsmith, Anonymous: If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. Or this one from Sam Walton of Walmart and Sam s Club fame: High expectations are the key to everything. Well, maybe not if your aim is to live the way Jesus taught. Now, Jesus didn t have anything against expectations as such; he just wanted the disciples focused rightly. And the right focus is not on personal achievement, on becoming an All-Star Super- Christian that wows others with our success, or someone who seeks rewards for what he or she does for Christ. The focus is on humbly doing our duty with no expectation of reward or of being special. Jesus tells a parable of a master and slave that I would never have found appealing when I was trying to be a great college quarterback and a high-profile Christian with lots of influence. But the right focus, he says, is doing our duty the way a slave does who serves his master. Now we probably need a short outtake here on Jesus using an analogy of slavery in a positive way. You can imagine how during the period of slavery in the United States, preachers and plantation owners cited this text to show how Jesus expects slaves to be obedient and gives no indication of being against the institution of slavery. It s also no use trying to name all the ways that slavery back then was not the same as slavery today. I grant you that it wasn t laden with the subjugation of a whole race of people like the antebellum American version. We can stipulate that slaves back then were held in higher esteem, were able to assemble in public, were often educated better than their masters, blah blah blah. It was slavery nonetheless, and it offends us to think that Jesus didn t take it on as part of his mission of liberation. I would say only this: he has since. The living Christ, through the power of his Spirit, has worked to rid the world of that evil and is working at it still, since there is more slavery today than at any time in the history of 2

3 the world. But the first step was to undermine it from within. And that happened in part in our text by Jesus elevating a slave to the status of a model disciple. In other words, he wants everyone to serve God like a good slave serves his master. Words like these appealed to slaves in the early church. Christianity flourished in wealthy households, first to the household slaves and then to their masters. The Bible often leaves bread crumbs for us to follow; it doesn t always lead us directly there right away. So now back to the main point. Jesus wants us to understand that following him is not a competition about who can be the greatest; it s about the simple humility of doing what is put in front of you to do in the way a slave was and is required to do. A slave s preoccupation is with serving others, not with being served or with being rewarded. This ought to be a great relief to every one of us. I mean, how many of you have wondered whether you were underachieving in your lives because you didn t have enough faith? If you listen to those prophets for profits on TV who promise you wealth if you just have enough faith, you probably feel like a spiritual failure. Or maybe you prayed for your child to get well or for your grandmother not to die or whatever, and you feel like a spiritual failure. Didn t Jesus say that if you have enough faith, you could uproot a huge mulberry tree and transplant it in the Gulf of Mexico? Well, no, he really didn t mean that if you had more faith, you could do things that would make you seem impressive to others. He told his disciples that all they needed was what little faith they already had to do seemingly impossible things. See, it s not the amount of faith you have that counts; it s the purposes to which you put whatever faith you have. And if you read the verses right before these, the seemingly impossible things the apostles want more faith to be able to do are the very unglamorous yet very hard things that make us all better. Jesus says that we ought to do all we can do not to contribute to someone else sinning. And if we see someone getting caught in the web of sin, we ought to care enough to intervene in love. You think those are easy things to 3

4 do? Yeah, me neither. And harder still is this one: forgive those who hurt you or sin against you. And do it as often as it happens without withholding mercy or holding a grudge. Notice how the things the disciples think they need extra faith for are things to be done that don t add one bit of glory to them or us. They are all for the sake of others. That s what faith is for not that we have the power to do great things that make us seem great in the eyes of others, but that we have the power to do the everyday hard things that make life better for others. The world s most famous evangelist in the late 1800s was Dwight L. Moody. He once was hosting a Bible conference in Massachusetts at which many of the participants were from Europe. Following European custom, they left their shoes outside their rooms to be cleaned by the hall servants overnight. They didn t know that there were no hall servants in America. Walking down the dormitory halls that night, Moody noticed the shoes and determined not to embarrass his guests. He gathered up the shoes, went to his room and began to clean and polish the shoes himself. Only the unexpected arrival of a friend in the midst of the work revealed the secret. The following morning, the foreign visitors opened their doors and found their shoes shined. They didn t know by whom. Moody told no one, but his friend told a few people, and during the rest of the conference, a different person volunteered to shine the shoes in secret each night. 1 This is what it means to be a big shot for God: it s the willingness to shine the shoes of others without them knowing what you have done so that you can get the credit for it. You just do the right thing and know you have done your duty. That s the reward of the slave of Christ. I went to chapel at Duke Divinity School this week. Dr. Willie Jennings took as his text the verse in Psalm 103 which says that God knows how we are made and therefore has compassion on us. God remembers that we are dust and so does not hold our sin against us but has mercy upon us. 1 Brett Blair, Three Small Steps in Our Journey of Faith in Collected Sermons (Christian Globe Network, 2004). 4

5 Dr. Jennings remarked about how hard it is for us to remember the same thing about ourselves. We think we are special. We make all kinds of distinctions between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the rest of creation. We like to think we are different, that we aren t weak and vulnerable. We like to think we are more than dust, because then we can justify our lust for greatness and recognition. Even today, one reason we can t stand this parable is that we don t want low-income, socially down-andout people being our models for anything. We want high achievers to identify with because that way we can separate ourselves from others who are also nothing but dust. But if we listen to the psalmist and Jesus, we earthlings are only what God has made us, and at the end of the day we should be content to say this about ourselves: We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done! And when you think like that, instead of giving yourself a weak selfimage thereby, you give yourself a break. Look how liberating it is to realize that we can all succeed in following Jesus by being like dutiful slaves. We are all dust after all. And God knows us and loves us as we are. By adopting the low expectations of Jesus, you will find the grace to live your lives without feeling like perpetual failures. So you didn t become a real estate tycoon. So you didn t become governor of Texas. So you didn t write the great American novel. Maybe what you did is to forgive someone who was released to live again because you did. Maybe you stopped someone from hurting herself or someone else before it was too late. Maybe you did the little things well that made all the difference in ways you will never fully know. And when you think about it, how great is that? 5