A Song of Servanthood

Psalm 123

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
Juvenal Cervantes, Pastor
May 22, 2022

Theologian and author Richard Foster tells about a time in his life when he was franticly finishing his dissertation. He had a day set aside and things spread across this desk. He was working intently, concentrating, making some progress and his phone rang.

He picked up the phone and it was a friend of his and he said, “Richard, my wife’s gone in her car today and I have some really important errands to run and I can’t get out. I was wondering, could you possibly come and pick me up? I need to go to the hardware, the pharmacy and the supermarket and it is really important that I do these things and I really need some help. Could you help me out?”

Richard felt trapped by that and wished he had not answered the phone, but he reluctantly and sort of resentfully, agreed to come and help his friend out so, he left his work. As he was leaving the house he picked up a little book that he had been reading it devotionally.

It was a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a book about Christian community and how we are supposed to live with each other. And he said, “Maybe I’ll get a few minutes to read while I’m gone.” So they set out. He took his friend to the hardware store and to the pharmacy and then they went to the supermarket. He said, “Richard I’ll be back.” So the guy left and Richard is still getting angry with himself with all of this and wishing he had all of his work done. He opened up the book and began to read in the last place he’d been reading, the first paragraph where he left off.

The second service that one should perform for another in Christian community is that of active helpfulness. This means, initially, simple assistance in trifling external matters. There is a multitude of these things, wherever people live together.

Nobody is too good for the lowest service. One who worries about the loss of time that such petty outward acts of helpfulness entail is usually taking the importance of his own career too solemnly.

Now, sometimes the Lord has a way of pricking you right where you need to be pricked at the right time, doesn’t He? The Lord has a way of doing that. And what Richard Foster said he’d been learning in that moment is that service is inherently a part of what it means to live together. We serve one another.

And it is inherently a part of what it means to be a pilgrim on this path of following after Jesus Christ. The last few weeks we’ve been looking at this pilgrim songs, the psalms of accent, Psalm 120-134 and each one has something to tell us about what we need to successfully make our way along this road following after Jesus Christ. Being transformed into the image of Christ, becoming more like Christ.  Psalm 121 reminded us that God never sleeps, his eye is always upon us, his providential care oversees our lives and we can trust our life into the maker of heaven and earth. We never escape his sight. Psalm 131 last week reminded us that when our souls are noisy, they can be quieted by resting in God as a child resting on the breast of her mother. Resting in God like a weaned child.

This morning I want us to turn to Psalm 123 because it tells us that one of the things that is necessary as we travel along this pilgrim road together, is that we learn to serve one another humbly and faithfully. That is part of the image to be shaped like Christ. It’s not just that we serve, but actually that we become servants, and there is a real distinction to be made there.

Let’s read this Psalm together, it is only four verses long and we can read it together.

To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!

As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us.

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt, Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.

One practice that we can refine as we learn the life of pilgrims as the disciples followed Jesus is what it means to legitimately, authentically be servants of God.

There is an inauthentic kind of service that we can offer one another or offer God and it is inauthentic because it is not really a surrender at all. We give service. We decided who we serve or whom we serve. We decide when we serve, we decide where we serve. How often we serve, how long we serve. What in we serve. In others words no matter how we’re serving, to what end we serve, we still remain in control, don’t we? That’s different than begin a servant.

A servant is someone who has surrendered control and is on the beckon call of his master. That’s a different kind of thing. When we become a servant of God in relation to him, we give up the right to decide whom we serve, where we serve, where we serve, how often, how long, to what end. We remain at God’s disposal. It is a different kind of relationship.

Psalm 123 is not a rule book about how we serve, but it is more like a portrait of what a servant looks like and what a servant’s posture is and what a servant’s motivation is. It helps us understand what authentic service looks like as we make our way up this road following after Christ, being formed into his image.

The Psalms says that authentic service begins with a particular posture or relationship to God, an upward look to God.

Verse one and two says, “To you, I lift up my eyes, Oh you who are enthroned in the heavens. As the eyes of the servants look to the hands of the master. As the eyes of the maid to the hand of the mistress, our eyes look to the Lord our God.”

Picture, imagine someone bowing before God, the maker of heaven, the Lord of all creation, enthroned in heaven and earth, who is truly God. Bowing before God in worship and adoration in submission and saying, “God, whatever you ask of me, I’m willing to give to you.”

You think that it would be obvious that God is God and we’re not, that God is Lord and we are servant. That should be an obvious thing, but I’m afraid it’s not sometimes to us. It’s kind of easy, especially in popular Christianity, to get the idea that God is somehow our servant. We may read prayer promises, like Jesus’ word to his disciples, “Ask whatever you will in my name and I will give it to you.” “Ask and you will receive that your joy may be full.” Ask and seek and your will find. Knock on the door and it shall be open to you.”

It could be easy to think that God is some sort of genie in a bottle that we summoned to our aid whenever we want some help. God is there to help us along when the burden gets too heavy, God is there to be our help, our servant and we just call him when we need him and when we don’t need him, we ignore him.

It’s sort of easy to think that Christianity is sort of a magical king of thing and that is not, we totally misunderstand what this is all about. At its heart, our faith is about our relationship to God and when God is God and we are God’s servants, we submit to God because God is a God of mercy and love and we’ll talk about this in a little bit. He cares about our needs and responds to our needs, but we are there to serve God and not the other way around.

“To you, I lift up my eyes, oh you who are enthroned in the heavens.”

We are to remember that the God we worship and serve is the God of creation and providence, the God of the Exodus and the God of the empty tomb, the God of Sinai and Calvary, the God who is in charge of all things in the universe and we have been called into relationship with him, as sons and daughters, but also as servants.

And so, it is appropriate for us to lift up our eyes as the psalmist says like a servant lift his eyes to the master, like a maiden lift her eyes to her mistress, so we lift eyes to the one who is enthroned in heaven. We become God’s servants.

Sometimes it is easy to think that God is the creator of a great big heavenly bureaucracy taking care of things and we have needs in our lives so we come to one of the local franchises like the local United Church of Christ church trying to get the help from one of God’s agents like a pastor, elder or somebody and to get our needs met and that’s not what this is about. We hope that by doing the right rituals, the right form somewhere around the line, Gods going to meet our needs, but that’s not the way it works.

The way it works and the way we want it to work, if we’re honest, is that God is God and if God is God of all, then we are by definition God’s servants.

We’re called to submission. The correct posture is to lift our eyes to the Lord as the slave to a master, as a maid to her mistress. An authentic service to God gets that right initially. “I lift up my eyes to the one enthroned in the heavens.” Once we have that relationship right, once we have that posture as the way we live with God, we’re in the position to offer authentic service to God and we do this by serving one another.

It is we who are God’s beck and call, because it is he who is Lord and not the other way around. The posture is where it starts.

And the psalmist says that authentic service is motivated by the experience of mercy. We can’t put God in a box and control him because God is God and we are not.

But we can expect God to respond to us according to this nature that he has revealed to us, when we lift our eyes to him, we can expect his mercy and his grace.

The psalmist says, “We lift our eyes unto the Lord until he has mercy upon us.” He knows what to expect from the Lord. He is merciful, loving, a God who cares about the tiny degrees of our lives and then he prays, “Have mercy on us Lord, have mercy on us.”

Three times in the psalm, the psalmist comes back to this experience of God’s mercy and grace. He knows what to expect from the hand of God, that is God’s love and God’s mercy.

Our assumptions about God, our theology, if you will, has an impact about what we think about God, how we pray to God, how we worship God, how we approach God, what we expect of God and I wonder, what do you assume about God when God looks intently upon you and your life in particular? He focuses his attention upon you, which he does all the time. What do you think is God’s response? What do you think when he looks at you?

Suppose he says, “Ugh! If you just clean up your life, if you get your act together, maybe we can get along!” Is that what God think of us?

What if God’s response to us, every single time his attention focuses on us, which he never ceases to do, what if God’s attitude toward us, his response to us is what Psalm 103 says, “As a father has compassion or loves his children, so the Lord has compassion, he loves those who fear him.”

What if God looked at your life and his very first initial response without anything in-between, which is pure love? What if we assumed for that to be the case? I think the psalmist assumes that.

Some years ago, Roberta Bondi wrote a book called In Ordinary Time. She had an interesting perspective on this question about how does God look on us and when God’s attention is focused on us, what is God’s response?

She said…

My first theological assumption—an assumption about prayer—is this: Before anything else and above all else and beyond everything else, God loves us.

God loves us extravagantly, ridiculously, without limit or condition. God is in love with us. God is besotted with us.

God yearns for us. God does not love us in spite of who we are or for whom He knows we can become. God loves us hopelessly, as mothers love their babies.

God loves us--  the very people we are. Not only that, but even against what we ourselves sometimes find plausible, God LIKE us!”

Think of that. We were created by God’s hand, we were created by God’s heart, I was, and his very essence, was an expression of his love. He created you and me in his image, by his hand. We are not despicable to him!

Can you imagine a parent holding an infant child for a moment, thinking anything else, except, this child is beloved, not in spite of what it is right now, not because of who he can become sometime, but who it is right now. This child created out of my body, my love, this child, is nothing short of precious and that’s the way we must assume God thinks of us when God focuses attention on us. God loves us, greatly, deeply, for who we are right now.

What if God responded to us that way and I think He does. The message of scripture is that first and foremost, and beyond everything else, is that God loves us.

The psalms say, “I lift my eyes up to the one enthroned in heaven, like a slave lifts his eyes to his master or the maid to her mistress, until I know your mercy.” He expects God’s mercy to fall, God’s love to be present in that moment and that is the motivation to becoming God’s servant. We don’t serve God out of fear. We don’t serve God hoping to build up a credit account with God so that someday when we need to cash in, God owes us something, that’s not why we serve. We serve because we’ve been loved, we serve because we received mercy. That is what we ought to expect from God and it is the appropriate motivation for authentic service.

In Romans chapter 12, verse one in the good old King James Version, it says, “I beseech you, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies living sacrifices, wholly, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service.”

Our reasonable service flows from the mercies of God have been poured out in our lives. Because his mercy is so great, our service is called to be great, sacrificial. We don’t just serve, we become God’s servants.

That’s the motivation: He loves us and he’s God and if he’s God at all, he’s certainly worthy of the service that we bring to him.

How does God look upon us when we fail, when we sin, when there’s wrong doing in our lives, when we wander astray? The Scripture gives us a little bit of insight to that, in one place, in Jeremiah 18 where Jeremiah is sent to the potter’s house. Israel, the nation has sinned and failed and is under judgment and Jeremiah is instructed to watch the potter at work and the potter forms the vessel and if the potter discerns there is a flaw in it, he crushes it and brings it back to life again until it looks the way he wants it to look. He doesn’t abandon the project, and it is the same sort of way, although there is always failure and sin, wrong thinking and wrong doing in our lives, God doesn’t abandon us or look upon us as something despicable, he stays with the project and shapes us and forms us till we bear his life.

Those two things come together: his posture that looks to God as Lord and master and waits for his mercy and the experience of mercy that motivates us to service, that’s what makes us into authentic servant of God and we express that service by serving one another.

In verses three and four, the psalmist expresses, “We are tired of serving earthly masters, we’re tired of being treated with contempt and being stepped on by those who overpower us. We’re ready to change our loyalty and give our service to someone else. Our eyes look to you oh Lord who is enthroned in heaven and acknowledge that you are our master,” that’s what he’s saying.

Human beings know a lot about servitude and slavery. It’s been built into the fabric of human existence since there was a handful of people on the face of the earth and those who exercised power over others. It is built into the ways human being treat one another.

And in times in our history, it has been built into society, into the fabric as an institution. We may have gotten away from the institution of slavery in our society, but we still know what it means to be on the receiving end of somebody else’s expression of power and sometimes their contempt for us. They’re using us in one way or another. Even if we don’t know that first hand we do know when we find ourselves trapped, enslaved in service, to some addition or habit or practice in our lives that we just can seem to get rid of.

There are so many ways that our liberties and our freedom are taken away in our world and the psalmist, says “Lord, I don’t want to serve those thinks or people anymore. I lift my eyes to you. You are my Lord. You are my master and freedom is found in serving you.

Some of you are old enough to remember Bob Dylan, he is still around. Some years ago, he released an album that was reflective of his new found Christian faith. He had a song that said, “You got to serve somebody; it may be the devil or it may be the lord, but you got to serve somebody.”

The fact is that we were made to be servants. We can give our lives in service to God and find freedom or we will find ourselves serving someone else, something, that will ultimately destroy us.

Paul says in Romans chapter six that we are either servants of sin or servants of God, one or the other, but we do not escape begin servants. The psalmist says, “I’m choosing to serve the Lord, acknowledging that God is God and his mercy is the motivation of our service.”

Authentic service is different from the kind of self-righteous service that we sometimes offer to God. Inauthentic service is always interested in rewards, in applause, in recognition, the limelight, but authentic service is often hidden without any attention being drawn whatsoever.

Jesus told the parable of the unworthy servant. He said which servant, having worked on the field all day long, comes home at night and, expects dinner on table? No, the servant comes in and keeps serving the master and says, “We are only unworthy servants. We are unworthy, but our God poured mercy upon us.”

Self-righteous service is discriminating, it asks, “What is best for me?” Authentic service responds to God. Inauthentic service has moods.

How do we serve authentically? We serve one other, we go to hardware. Jesus said, “In as much as you serve others, you serve me.” It is about taking someone to get groceries, serving others as we have opportunity.

May we continuously adopt the posture and attitude of the psalmist: Lifting our eyes to One enthroned in heaven and serving Him because He is merciful toward us.