Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 and Ephesians 6:10-20
and John 6:56-69
“...but
as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15
This
morning, I want us to think about households
and about serving.
In
our first reading, we heard Joshua, who led God’s people into the Promised
Land, setting before them the choice, who
will you serve?
In
our Gospel reading, we heard Jesus (incidentally, the name ‘Jesus’ is the Greek
version of the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’) set before his twelve closest disciples
the choice, who will you follow? who will
you serve?
And
in his call to stand against the devil and take upon ourselves the armour of
God, Paul, writing under house arrest, asks the same question, who will you serve?
You
will always serve something, or – more accurately, beneath the outward
appearances – someone. Why? Because you were created to serve.
We are created to serve,
not because we were created to be God’s Minions, but because we are created in the likeness of God, who comes ‘not to be
served, but to serve’ (as hymn-writer Graham Kendrick put it).
We
are not masters of our own destiny. We can ignore, but not change, this reality.
So you will always end up serving someone, and the question is, who will it be?
Joshua
is clear that he, and his household, will serve the Lord.
Peter
is clear that, having come to know Jesus, they could not imagine serving anyone
else. By the way, like Joshua, Peter is speaking on behalf of a household: his
household was the first household to serve Jesus (in the Gospels we see both
Peter and his mother-in-law leading by example), and the house at the centre of
that household remains to this day, preserved beneath a twentieth-century
church with a glass floor enabling you to look into the world of the Gospels.
Paul
is held under house-arrest, but even there he is serving God, and not only
through his writing. In one of his other letters written while under house
arrest, he informs us that his circumstances have allowed him to make the gospel
known throughout the whole imperial guard (Philippians
1:12, 13) and that some of them (some of ‘Caesar’s household’) have come to
faith in Jesus (Philippians 4:22).
There is a beautiful irony there, though also a very real tension for those
involved. Their outward, external identity was located in a household serving
the self-proclaimed divine-man Caesar; but their true identity was as a
household who had chosen to serve Jesus as Lord.
We
are created to serve, and unless we are able to serve, we will experience
frustration. However appealing the idea of being waited on hand and foot might
sound, it could never satisfy us. So why is serving God so hard? Why is putting
others before ourselves so challenging?
We must be freed to serve.
Joshua helped the people to remember that God had brought them up ‘out of the
house of slavery’. Remember, we serve because we are created in the likeness of
a God who first serves us; but there are
things that enslave us so that we are unable to serve. Things like pride,
or fear, or listening to the voice in our head that says we don’t have anything
to offer and while God can use others he couldn’t use me. Things like
resentment, or loss of hope, or...
Just as we were all created to
serve, so we have all ended up in the house of slavery.
God had come and set his people free, in the hope that they would use their
freedom to bring freedom to others; in the hope that they would have compassion
on those who lived as slaves to harsh masters. Freed not only from something, but also freed for something. Our experience of freedom
is meant to have the same impact in our day; but the fact remains that we
cannot free ourselves: we need to be set free.
The
good news is that in Jesus, God has come and set us free to serve. That Christ
has set us free to be as we are made to be. Either we experience this, or we
are yet to discover it, or we have somehow forgotten and have reimagined our
chains; but in Christ that freedom is available to us every day.
You
were created to serve, and you have been freed to serve. But even that is not
the whole story. And it comes back to being made by God and for God, not to be
his Minions but to be his family, his household, sharing life together. We do
not serve on our own, but alongside God, and in the power of the Holy Spirit
living in us.
We must be empowered to serve.
This is what the Holy Spirit does. The Spirit enables Peter to see that Jesus
brings fullness of life, though not everyone could accept it. According to
Paul, the Spirit strengthens us; speaks to us through even the hardest and most
immobilising circumstances; enables us to pray at all times, regardless of what
we are going through; and helps us make known the mystery of the gospel.
To
serve in our own strength would be overwhelming. It might win us admirers in
the short-term, but it would be utterly exhausting, and ultimately futile. The
good news is that we are empowered to serve, wherever we are and whatever we
are facing. Either we experience this, or we are yet to discover it, or we have
somehow forgotten and have exhausted ourselves; but we can be re-filled with
the breath of the Spirit every moment of every day.
Over
the summer I have been greatly encouraged by so many examples of so many
members of our Minster household serving God and the people of Sunderland – and
one another – through being part of the Sunderland Summer Specials, through the
Recovery event that took place on Friday (where we celebrated lives being set
free from some of the more visible and less socially-acceptable addictions),
and in many other ways. You are a living
sermon illustrating what it looks like to be created, freed, and empowered to
serve. And if you are here today because you are intrigued by what is going
on, but you have yet to discover these truths, or you have known them to be
true but somehow or other you have forgotten and want to discover them afresh,
then please don’t go away today without speaking with me or Fiona or someone
else who will be happy to pray with you.
Next
Sunday morning we shall have a service of celebration giving thanks for all
that God has done through the Summer Specials in particular. There will be
opportunity for some to give short testimonies of your experience of serving
the Lord over these past weeks. But why wait a week, when you can go out and
tell someone today, or tomorrow?
