The Ministry of the Towel

This sermon is focused on John 13:1-14, Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. I preached a first version of this sermon at Calvin Presbyterian Church on 3/19/06 at the contemporary worship service, and was asked to preach it again for the regular worship services on 3/26/06. I changed it a little bit and added some text to fit in with the day's theme, "Jesus as Servant."

I feel privileged to be among you this morning as we continue our Lenten journey together, considering and celebrating the person and the identity of Jesus and all the different yet intimately interrelated roles he plays in the scriptures and in our own lives. So far in this series we’ve talked about Jesus as Teacher, Healer, and Shepherd. This morning we’re going to talk about Jesus as Servant, and his call to us to embrace the spiritual discipline of Service.

The theme of servanthood and service is not an unusual one in the New Testament. Our gospel reading this morning, in which Jesus assumes the role of a servant to wash the feet of his disciples and then tells them that they should follow his example, is just one of many scriptures which calls Jesus’ followers—us included--to take up lives of service to others.

In Mark 9, Jesus says, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.” In Matthew 20 we read that “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

I have a soft spot in my heart for the work of serving others. As some of you know, I work as a volunteer recruiter at a local hospice. Each day, every day, my job is to find people who might enjoy serving and helping others, to encourage them to consider volunteer service at our agency, and then to keep them connected with the meaning and the mission of what our work is really all about. My job is all about encouraging people to take up service—and truly, I have worked in the field of what you might call “community service” or “social service” since my days in seminary.

I worked at a soup kitchen and shelter for homeless women in Boston. I helped do refugee resettlement here in Portland. I worked with college students who were doing community service in agencies all over the city. And I’ve worked with volunteers in hospice for the past 7 years.

I believe that Jesus the servant calls us to service as a way of life, and as a way of ministry—and I know that you do, too. Calvin Presbyterian Church is filled with people who volunteer here at the church and out in the community and who support all kinds of compassionate community organizations and ministries with their donations, their gifts of time, and their prayers.

Yesterday, in fact, our Calvin adult mission team left for the Gulf coast to work with people in Alabama who are trying to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. And every year we send our youth out on a mission trip to serve people in another part of the country or the world, building in them a sense of the importance of service as they grow into maturity as Christians and citizens.

We know all about Christ’s call to service, and volunteering, and serving others—it’s something we all do, and it’s something we all know we’re supposed to do from the moment we take our baptismal vows and our first hesitant steps as Christians.

This morning, as we continue our journey through Lent, I’d like to talk about embracing service not just as a given of the Christian life—but about embracing service intentionally and mindfully as a spiritual discipline.

Richard Foster, in his book “Celebration of Discipline,” talks about various kinds of spiritual disciplines practiced by Christians through the ages, and how they can be meaningful practices for our spiritual lives in our own time.

Foster classifies the various spiritual disciplines into three groups--the “inward disciplines”, which would include meditation and prayer; the corporate disciplines, which include worship and celebration—and “outward disciplines” such as simplicity and solitude. And as you might imagine, Foster classifies service as an “outward discipline.”

Foster begins his chapter on the discipline of service with a wonderful quote from mystic Bernard of Clairvaux: “Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a scepter but a hoe.”

Foster continues by describing the disciples gathered around Jesus at the Last Supper from the passage we read from John’s gospel just a few minutes ago. No one of the disciples wanted to do the dirty, menial task of washing everyone’s feet. No one of them wanted to be considered the least among them. Then, Foster says, “Jesus took a towel and a basin and redefined greatness. The spiritual authority of which Jesus speaks is an authority not found in a person or a title but in a towel.”

Foster says, “As the cross is the sign of submission, the towel is the sign of service.”

I really like that image—my mind immediately jumped to the thought of being, in addition to people of the cross, people of the towel! And perhaps even, if we adapt Jesus’ famous words a little bit, we might think of him saying, “take up your towel and follow me.”

In my work as a volunteer recruiter and coordinator I hear a lot about the reasons why some people undertake volunteer service. Some will say, “I’m interested in medicine or nursing and want to get experience for my future career.” Some will say, “I lost my dad last year and I want to help deal with my grief by helping others.” Some will say, “I’m interested in death and dying issues.” Still others will say things like, “My therapist told me to start volunteering somewhere because it’ll be good for me.”

Now all of these are certainly legitimate reasons to embark on volunteer service. But you might notice that all of the reasons I listed above have more to do with serving the self than with serving others.

Service is a true spiritual discipline when it is more concerned with the other person than with ourselves. Service to others is a true spiritual discipline when it comes out of a relationship with God and God’s urging deep inside. The person who practices the discipline of service is not interested in reaping rewards or recognition; and is not particularly interested in results which will reflect well on him or herself. True service delights in the service of others for the sake of the service itself.

Service to others is a true spiritual discipline when it does not choose whom to serve based on future advantages, or earnings, or to convey some sort of image to the outside world—or to exert control over others. True service is not affected by moods or whims—the person who practices the discipline of service doesn’t serve just when they feel like it—and they don’t just serve for a while and then go home and forget it.

True service is a mindfulness, a lifestyle, that springs from your deepest convictions and unpretentiously goes about caring for the needs of others, rejecting the temptation of self-glorification and embracing the care and the knitting together of the fabric of community.

You know, when I first went to seminary I didn’t have a lot of experience with diverse ways of worship. I was raised in a Presbyterian church that valued and enshrined the traditional ways of doing things, including, for the Lord’s Supper, the traditional grape juice in little cups passed on trays down the pew—as we do it here most often. In seminary I began to meet people of different traditions and go to worship with them in their different churches.

On one occasion, after worshipping in an Episcopal church where I had to go up front for Eucharist and sip from a common cup, I remarked to a fellow student how different that seemed to me—and he replied by describing how, for him, that movement from the pew, and walking down the aisle, and receiving communion there at the front was an essential part of his spirituality of worship. “What moves the body moves the mind,” he told me.

Service is a spiritual discipline because it requires movement. It requires us to draw close to others who are different from us. It requires us to move our feet and our hands—sometimes, to do simple and menial things.

Whenever we sit on the floor to wash someone’s feet, stretch up to hammer a nail, bend to clean a toilet, kneel to talk to a child, get on a plane to travel to the Gulf Coast or the Philippines—or do any kind of service—we change our perspective, we look at the world from a different direction. By moving our bodies in service, we move our minds, and hearts, and souls to a new and greater understanding of God and God’s love for us.

Do any of you remember that quote--is it from Shakespeare?--that goes, “pretend a virtue if thou hast it not”? The discipline of service works just the same way. By doing service, we make ourselves into servants. Like any habit, our service to others sets us into rhythms of work and action, thought and feeling and spiritual commitment, that become so deeply ingrained into our beings that it beats with our heart and breathes with our respiration—that our spirituality and our connection to God becomes part of us, body and soul.

I believe that the discipline of service brings us to a truly embodied spirituality.

The great Catholic writer and social activist Dorothy Day puts it this way: “It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight.”

Perhaps this sounds like an overwhelming task, this spiritual discipline of service. It need not be. Richard Foster, in his book, gives some wonderfully concrete examples of ways each and every one of us can embody this discipline in a daily or hourly basis. He calls us to “Embrace the service of small things, for in the realm of the spirit we soon discover that the real issues are found in the tiny insignificant corners of life.”

What does he mean by “small things” in the “insignificant corners of life”?

Well, one thing he talks about is the service of listening.

You know, this is one of the most important things we teach our hospice volunteers—to listen—and it’s hard sometimes to convince folks who just want to be helpful and do something that listening is doing something.

Foster puts it this way:

“We need so desperately the help that can come through listening to one another. We do not need to be trained psychoanalysts to be trained listeners. The most important requirements are compassion and patience.

“We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening for we become more anxious to give an answer than to hear. An impatient half-listener is an affront to the person sharing.

“To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God. It creates an inward working upon the heart that transforms the affections, even the priorities, of the life. When we have grown dull in listening to God we would do well to listen to others in silence and see if we do not hear God.”

And among the other small things Foster mentions are these: courtesy towards one another, hospitality,allowing oneself to be served (and how difficult that sometimes is), and bearing each other’s burdens.

As I was writing this sermon, and thinking about that image of being the People of the Towel, there was another book that leaped to my mind. It’s a little book by Douglas Adams called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—and for those of you who don’t know it, it’s a science fiction adventure story—and social commentary--with a lunatic, British, Monty Pythonesque flavor.

This book leapt to my mind because one of the most important elements in the story happens to be a towel. In fact, so central and memorable is the towel that sometimes when the author would hold autograph sessions his fans would bring towels to him for his signature instead of paper.

Adams explains that the towel is the one, crucial, indispensable necessity that the intergalactic traveler must bring along on any journey.

Adams says, “A towel, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth; you can lie on it on brilliant marble-sanded beaches ; you can sleep under it beneath the stars; use it to sail a mini raft down the river; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes; you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

“Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

The towel of service is the one, crucial, indispensable necessity that the Christian traveler must bring along on his or her journey through life.

If we are the people of the towel, and we always know where our towel is—then think of all the ways we can serve others: we can wash their feet; we can wrap them in warmth; we can provide a comfortable place to sleep; we can help them on a journey; we can protect them; we can signal in emergencies; we can clothe the naked, swaddle a baby; comfort the sick. I’m sure you can come up with many more uses, small and large, for our towels, our hearts, and our willing hands.

In conclusion, I hope you will remember during this season of Lent that service to others can be, and should be, one of your spiritual disciplines. The spiritual discipline of service need not be grand and dramatic, but is often focused on small acts of love and humility.

The spiritual discipline of service is mindful and intentional; it is truly focused on the other, not the self; it is given freely, for its own sake, without expectation of result or return or even gratitude; and it moves our minds and hearts and souls and bodies more closely into the love and presence of God.

Here’s a practical suggestion to get us on our way, moving down the path of the discipline of service: Start each day by praying, “Lord Jesus, I would so appreciate it if You would bring me someone today whom I can serve.” Then be alert for God’s answer to your prayer—and above all, know where your towel is.

As we move together through Lent, I hope you will choose to be part of the ministry of the towel.

Amen.