Sermon for September 7th, 2014
Romans 12:1-8
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Spiritual Gifts, Spiritual Ministries: Ministry
The summer between my Junior and Senior year in high school, I worked at a Sonic Drive-In fast food restaurant. For those of you familiar with the Upper Valley, it was the Sonic that's on Doniphan near Redd Road. I did not flip burgers at Sonic--I wasn't that lucky, or skilled. I had a lowlier (and less paying) job at Sonic...I was a car-hop. I carried people's burgers out from the kitchen to their cars, asked them if they needed more ketchup, smiled politely at their verbal abuse when someone in the kitchen had messed up their order, picked up their trash when they left, and at the end of the day, scraped their chewing gum off of the parking lot pavement with a metal spatula.
It was while performing this last duty one night that I had an epiphany: It occurred to me for the first time that a college education might be a good idea, so I didn't have to spend the rest of my life scraping up other people's chewing gum, picking up other people's trash, putting up with other people's bad manners, waiting on other people and, in short, serving other people.
After I got that college degree I became a high school teacher, and I remember one day scraping chewing gum off of the bottom of my classroom desks, thinking to myself...so much for that idea!
Eventually, I became a pastor--a job where I am daily haunted by the words of Jesus (in Mark 10:43-44): "Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all."
These days I am a much better paid servant...but I am still no less a servant than I was in high school, back in the parking lot of Sonic. And unfortunately, I have *still* had to scrape chewing gum off the pews on one or two occasions (let's maybe try to avoid that in the future, though, ok?).
The word that Jesus uses in Mark, translated "servant" is the Greek word διάκονος. It's actually the same root word Paul uses for the second spiritual gift in our list from Romans, the one we'll be discussing today, although for whatever reason, in Romans it's translated as "ministry" and "ministering." I prefer the translation in Mark--service, or servanthood--so that's how I'll be referring to this gift for the rest of the sermon.
For anyone just joining us this week, we are in the middle of a study on Spiritual Gifts and Spiritual Ministries, based on Paul's list in Romans chapter 12. We have learned that, contrary to popular belief, these "gifts" are not special talents or abilities that God gives to us, but rather they are what we give to God through the work and (especially in today's case) the service that we do for others, for God's people.
-All "gifts" can be given by all people at any time...however practically speaking, this would be overwhelming. Division of labor.
-Acts 6
dia + konis = through the dust
