BACK TO BASICS: SERVICE

      I once had a parishioner who operated a service station, and he loaned me a video that Sunoco sent to all of its franchises. It was called “A Pleasant Buying Experience.”

      The message to the owner was this: there will always be someone around who can undersell you. You won’t always have the cheapest gas. People don’t even like to take time to buy gas. It’s an inconvenience and there is nothing you can do about it. All you can do to take your own future in your hands is offer a pleasant buying experience.

      So don’t depend on your mechanic to pump gas. He wants to tinker with motors and resents the intrusion. Get some people who will hop to and say hello to the customers as if they were really glad to see them. Say something funny and remember their faces and compliment them on something. You may think you’re just pumping gas, but what you are there for is to serve.

      We live in an age where personalized service is a vanishing art. When you pick up the phone to talk to a business, you don’t get a live person: you get an automated system. No surprise that some businesses advertise: call us and speak to a live person. Home Depot has decided that checking out customers is a nuisance: to do business with them, you have to wait in a long line for the one teller, or do self check out in a machine that is slow and cumbersome.

      And then you go into a store where the salesperson is busy with another customer but calls over to you “I’ll be with you in just a minute” and you realize that you’ve got a live one. Somebody cares that you are here.

      In an age when the bonds of community and civility had broken down, Jesus was a live one. He could tell when someone touched him in a crowd. No one was invisible to him. He spent time with those to whom no one else would speak. He washed the feet of his disciples, and made them take responsibility for getting the wilderness crowd home on a full stomach. They had been ready to say: not my job.

      Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnation of the creator of the universe, moved through his little patch of the world as a servant. A servant of the lowest of the low. He carried nothing with him inside that kept him from addressing the very core of the person in front of him. When people asked him about matters of faith, he spoke as the servant of the tradition that was their reference. He cared more about them as persons than about their status or their agenda or their negotiations or their goods.

      He said blessed are those whom the world ignores or despises, and the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and the Son of Man came to be a servant. And those who reported his life in the Gospels shaped their testimony around the Isaiah prophecy of the Suffering Servant.

      Whenever the church has had a real moment of renewal, it has been when it rediscovers the scriptures and rediscovers its role as a servant. I’m not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but I know that in real rebirth both take place. The Methodists had it for a while. When they began to lose it, the Salvation Army and the Church of the Nazarene rediscovered it. Bishop Romero found it for the Latino Catholics, and his martyrdom spread it all over the world again. Mother Theresa found it.

      I’ve told you the story of Barry Spelling of Greenwich, Ct., but I’ll tell it again. (You get hear my really good stuff several times.)

      Barry Spelling worked for Procter and Gamble as a kind of traveling fixer. He was in the air over the Atlantic more than he was on the ground. Somewhere in his British Methodist background he had discovered a devotion to the work of the church that just couldn’t be worn down. So once a month on Saturday when our church served lunch at a nearby soup kitchen, Barry Spelling, red eyes and all, was there, sometimes stopping off in his pin striped suit before going home after an all night flight from Brussels.

      The guests were seated and the food was brought to the tables, family style. Barry passed the bread tray: whole wheat, rye, white. One Saturday a picky guest demanded in a loud voice: “Where’s the pumpernickel?” Barry graciously apologized for the lack of selection.

      Next month, somewhere between Brussels and the soup kitchen, Barry bought a loaf of pumpernickel and proudly included it on the tray. When he reached his friend with the loud voice, what he heard was: “Where’s the rye?”

      And Barry, being (1) in the Spirit of Christ, (2) brilliant, and (3) familiar with the games people play because he worked for a corporation, recognized that this was not at all about pieces of bread but about the Bread of Life, i.e., relationships of respect and forbearance that are a gift from God. And the man at the table had no religious reference to know that he was in fact testing to see if he was really at the table of the Lord. So Barry once again apologized for the lack of selection, and the man ate the pumpernickel and was nourished in body and in soul. Because Barry was not too smart, too busy, too important, or too tired to be a servant.

      It’s not easy being a servant. It’s easier to pay someone else to be a servant for you.

      I hope that the next time you look at the church budget, you take a look at our bottom line. The bottom line on our budget is where we find the percentage of what we send to the folks in need in ratio to what we take in.

      Most church budgets are not formatted like that. Most just end with what you took in and what you paid out. We may be the only mainline church in America that shows the real bottom line.

      I’m proud of that. They say that pride is a sin, so maybe I should just say I’m happy about that. But I’ve always tried to tell the truth from this pulpit, so I’ve got to say: God help me, I’m proud of that. That percentage is about 8.5 and I hope it grows significantly and intentionally every year. It should.

      But sending money so that someone else can be a servant is not the same spiritually for us as being a servant ourselves. Jesus didn’t pay someone else to wash feet.

      I know that some of us go face to face regularly with folks as a servant representing our church and its Christ. The Lawrence Oliver School in particular is a place where that happens. Among other things, twice a year our church and another combine to offer an appreciation breakfast to the teachers and staff. In a profession and a location where the demands are high and the rewards are few, so many of the teachers stop by to thank us on the way to class. If they feel like somebody else cares, it makes it easier for them to care.

      I’m hoping that, in a few weeks, when we explore a relationship with the Samaritans, that a number of you will become involved.

      Because here is the deal about what Jesus was saying to us and showing to us by his life and his death: If think you get it here (in your mind) but you don’t get it here (in your hands), you don’t got it. It you think you get it here (on your lips) but you don’t get it here (in your hands), you don’t got it. If you think you get it here (in your heart) but you don’t get it here (in your hands), you don’t got it.

      Down deep in my bones, I believe that God is performing a holy experiment in this place, to see if these people can offer a new model to the mainline church. And a significant part of that is how we arrange ourselves to welcome a wonderful diversity of ages and races and orientations. But an even more significant part may be how we arrange ourselves to reach out personally and serve a wonderful diversity of ages and races and orientations. If we hope to grow spiritually, it may have to start with our hands.