Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

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?