This sermon was offered as guest preacher at Pembina Lutheran Church for their Confirmation service.
Last year it was a privilege to have several of your youth
in our Confirmation classes, including the three who will be confirmed today.
And though Confirmation classes can sometimes feel like herding cats I can
assure you that none of them were quite as brazen as James and John. None of
them came out and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of
you.” I mean, that’s pretty presumptuous, and not just
Midwestern-Scandinavian-Lutheran presumptuous either. It takes a whole other level
of gumption to order Jesus around like that. We all pretty much know that if
somebody comes up to us and says, “I want you to promise to do something”
before explaining what that something is, then that something is probably not
something we’re going to want to do.
Jesus,
being the pretty smart guy (not to mention Son of God) that he is, realizes
this and redirects them to what they actually want, and what they actually want
is a promise that they will one day sit on his right and left hand in the
kingdom of God. In other words, if Jesus is king, then they will be the next in
line, the highest among the rest.
OK, let’s
pause there, because even though we might bristle at the way James and John go
about asking, we nevertheless tend to think about Confirmation as something
like the process of earning our seats at the right and left hand of Jesus.
Maybe that’s not exactly the image we have of it, but in one way or another we
understand Confirmation to be the moment where we bask in the reflected glory
of Jesus, having done our homework, checked a few boxes, and earned the right
to become members of the church. So we parade you up here before the
congregation (all robed in white, no less!) as if we are graduating you from
the church (which for too many of you is exactly what you think it is), and we
give the impression that this is what the life of faith is all about. We give
the impression that the important things are A) that you’ve done your homework,
and B) that from now on you’ll be able to say that you are members of Pembina
Lutheran Church, no matter how often, or how rarely, you come back.
But I want
to suggest that this is not at all what Confirmation is about. More than that, it’s
not what following Jesus is about. When James and John come to him with this
ridiculous request, Jesus says, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must
be your servant.” That’s not exactly what they had in mind. To be a
Christ-follower is not to be set above earthly concerns; instead to follow
Jesus is to get your hands and your feet dirty for the sake of sharing the good
news. Today is celebrating not the completion of your classes but the beginning
of a life of servitude to Jesus. Now, having heard that, some of you might feel
like leaving right now. After all, it seemed the last couple years were the
part where you were expected to be somewhere, to do something, to learn about
this or that, and to do more sermon notes than you’d probably like, and having
done that it feels like you should be able to relax and coast for awhile. But it’s
exactly the opposite. You might not be old enough to go off to college or a get
a full-time job, you might not be old enough to care for a family on your own
or make financial decisions for those you love, but today you are nevertheless
being called to an even-more challenging vocation. You are called to stick up
for the lowly and the downtrodden, to live your faith out-loud not just by
saying, “Yes, I believe in Jesus” but by living your life as if that matters.
Confirmation was not the test; life is. Confirmation is just the launching pad.
When Jesus
says, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” he reminds us
that he is the one who demonstrates what it means to be Christians. If Jesus
knelt and washed feet, then we wash feet. If Jesus went to the abused and the
hurting and the rejected and the poor and the criminals, then those are the
people we go to. If Jesus rejected violence and hatred, then so do we. If Jesus
walked the road of the cross, then that’s the path we walk—dying daily to sin
and rising as a new creation. We are called as Christians to be servants of the
needy, to go to the littlest, the lost, the lowly, the losers, and the dead,
and to give them back the humanity that’s been taken from them. We are called
to be servants who bring the gift of Jesus—both in words and actions—to be the
hands and feet of Jesus to a world that needs it.
Big job,
eh?
I can say
that up here, because I’m in one of the few places in America even closer to
Canada than where I live. Eh?
It is a big
job. In fact, it’s an overwhelming job, an impossible job. But, as one ancient
Jewish maxim says, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to walk away from it” (Pirkei
Avot 2:21). Jesus will complete your work. Your job is to simply stick with
it. You are to be servants, and the difference between a servant and a
free-person is that a servant cannot walk away. You are servants to the good
news that Jesus Christ came, died, and rose again so that you would have
eternal life; it’s the best kind of servitude there is. But it is a kind of slavery,
because you cannot get away from that promise. You may drift away from the
church. You may rarely, if ever, talk about your faith. It does not matter. You
are still a servant of the gospel, and the harder you run away from it the
tighter God will hold you. And you will be reminded of it, perhaps even hate
it, in the moments where you are more desperate and most in need of a Savior.
So, you
might as well embrace the life you have been called to. This God knit you
together before you were born, and most of you were baptized before you had any
control over your bowels—let alone the capacity to understand what it was that
was happening there—and now you are confirmed into this faith by virtue of being
here today. But Confirmation is really the littlest of things compared to what
God has in store for you now. If we imagine that what matters is our ability to
confess our faith in front of the congregation—if we think that it’s our convictions
and our good hearts that make us good, Christian people—then we misunderstand
what it means to be a servant. We are God’s property, and so our little
confessions to that effect are only the difference between a slave that knows she’s
a slave and a slave that doesn’t.
OK, that’s
probably enough on slavery, because today is a good day, after all. The best of
days. Because today you are free. No, I’m not contradicting myself—hold on a
second. You are still captive to the word of God, but today you are free to go
out into the world and use that word to free other people who are captive, you
are free to go and show people a better life, and how will you do that? By
being servants. Free servants. Bound servants. Martin Luther, who should
probably be quoted at every Confirmation, said that “A Christian is a perfectly
free lord of all, subject to none,” and “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful
servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.”
So, in my
best impression of Luther’s Small Catechism, let me ask you that all-too-familiar
question: “What does this mean?”
It means
you have a ton of responsibility. You are not just the future of the church but
also its present. You are the living hands and feet of Jesus in the world.
Big-time pressure. But you are also free through the love of Jesus and today
you confess that even though you are not perfect people nonetheless we have a
God who satisfies you, calls you his own, and redeems you as the perfect
creatures you were made to be. This is what it is to be a follower of Jesus. It
seems backwards. It’s not graduation. It’s servitude. Today you are servants.
But, here’s the important thing to remember: I, a pastor called by the gospel, am
just as much a servant as you. So, today, I will serve you communion. Tomorrow,
you serve the world. That’s how this works. And it’s the same thing every week.
Today, you and I and everybody else here are reminded that we are in this
together. All servants. All called to do some good for a world that needs it.
All reminded that we too are in need of some good in our lives. Yes, today is a
good day.
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