CALLED TO SERVE
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Text: from James 1& 2
Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator? This commonly administered personality inventory purports to identify characteristics of personality and how they shape our lives. The test use polarities of personality type developed by Carl Jung to show how we exercise our perceptions and judgments and how we tend to interact socially.
This test has been a very popular measure of personality type. There was a time, though I don’t know how common this is any more, when those in the know would ask, “Are you an INFP or an ESTJ?” with the question making sense. For others, it must have seemed like the insiders were speaking some sort of code, as indeed they were. Jung’s theory organizes personality along a set of polarities. One runs between introversion and extraversion. Do you prefer time alone and keep your own counsel or are you highly social, drawing your energy and direction from others? Another is a measure of how one perceives that runs between sensory perception and intuition. Do you perceive by handling the concrete elements and building the case or do you see the big picture as a whole without seeing all its elements? How do you make your judgments on a scale that runs between feeling and thinking? Do your judgments spring from heartfelt passions or are they calmly considered products of the mind?
The creators and proponents of the Myers Briggs test use it to predict how an individual will function in a particular work or relational setting. For example, when I worked at the Lloyd Center Counseling Services at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, the entire staff took the test under the guidance of an expert consultant. One finding from the exercise was that we were all fairly similar types, none of us given to the detail necessary for smooth administration of the Center. That was no great surprise, given what we had seen of each other as we worked together day by day. But was it helpful information?
One of my major criticisms of the test and how it has been used, is the tendency to get one’s results and then announce something like, “This is who I am. Get used to it.” It’s that liability of any label to become restrictively defining. It says who one is and that’s the end of the story. “I’m an introvert. Don’t expect me to be outgoing or social. I’m an intuitive type. Don’t expect me to worry about the details. I’m a feeling type. My passions make me right.” These, of course, are crass overstatements, but they give an idea of how the system can be abused.
For Jung, the recognition of the elements that go into one’s personality are only the first and the easier step in a life-long process. Jung believed that the individual’s life work was to develop the underdeveloped side of these polarities. Introverts work to be more social, extraverts develop their capacity to be alone. Intuitive types work to be more aware of the details; sensing types need to come more quickly to the big picture. Feeling types need to pay more attention to their thought processes and thinkers to their feelings. For our agency to function well, the Lloyd Center staff had work intentionally to cover the areas that our personality types were not inclined to naturally.
Now I can hear you asking what does all this have to do with today’s theme and text. Well, the third pillar on which we build our church stands in contrast to the first two that we have considered. The worship of God and the exploration of faith and discipleship are primarily inwardly focused. Today’s pillar – to serve those in need - is very much an outward focus. I suppose it has some similarities to the polarity between introversion and extraversion. The writer of James sees this as he presses the recipients of his letter to understand that “faith without works is…dead.”
This writer is very clear that the life of faith and its community is centered in God: “…every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the God of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of God’s own purpose we were given birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of God’s creatures.” All that we are and have comes from God. To engage in worship is a natural response to the recognition of this reality. As for questions of faith and discipleship, the writer asks, “My sisters and brothers, do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” Though this is a question specific to James’s message, it indicates the kind of exploration on which we want to build our church. What difference does our understanding of faith make to our commitment to Jesus as the Christ? Can true disciples show favoritism? How does a disciple respond to Jesus’ command that we “love our neighbors as ourselves”? These and other questions send us in search of what it means for us – you and me – to be Christians? Before I settled on Washington Gladden’s great hymn, “O Master Let Me Walk with Thee” for today’s Song of Reflection, I had penciled in the spiritual, “Lord, I want to be a Christian – in my heart, in my heart. Lord I want to be a Christian in my heart.” In this desire is the depth of what it means to be explorers of faith and discipleship. I want to be a Christian. I may not be there yet, but I do so want to be faithful to my Christ.
Here the writer of James, in this odd little book of early Jewish Christianity that almost did not make it into the canon, makes a major challenge to the journey inward. He insists that worship and faith are meaningless if they do not have practical consequences. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?... Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.” The journey inward must be paired with a journey outward. As Howard Moody observed, in the beginning of the church “‘service’ was there as the outward indication of God’s creation and love – it was the manner in which thanksgiving became concretized” (Howard Moody, A Voice in the Village: A Journey of a Pastor and a People, p. 385.)
Liberation theologians find in James’s teaching a clear articulation of God’s preference for the poor. Here we have it boldly stated, “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” We have seen before that the early church was a mixture of social outcasts, the marginalized, the working poor and those with means. The scenario of how those with resources and those without might be welcomed into the community is not so foreign to what we might experience, though I imagine the ratio of rich to poor would be reversed in our congregation.
It is a significant challenge to us to say that we want to build a church whose mission is to serve those in need when we are quite literally located in the most expensive neighborhood of a highly affluent city. Our billionaire neighbors are hardly neighbors in need. The poor and needy rarely land on our doorstep. Though it is true that for 17 years we opened our doors to the homeless as we hosted Hotel de Zinc, our physical limitations have caused us to let that ministry go. These days our primary method for serving those in need seems to be our mission giving.
Some are critical of a congregation that “purchases” its mission work, but I am not so easily inclined to condemn this practice. Not many of us are physically able to go to Haiti to work, but our response to that disaster has been and continues to be generous. We hear the tale of Greg Mortenson’s remarkable work with schools in Afghanistan and we long to help, but in the end, we are left to raise funds to enable others to go on our behalf. We do collect food, clothing and household items for Ecumenical Hunger Program, the Opportunity Center and Friends Outside. Is it enough? Probably not. Is it something? Yes.
One important thing we do do in our mission giving is hold before us our neighbors in need. We say to ourselves that as children of God, as people of faith, as disciples of Christ, we need to keep conscious of the world around us. It is never enough for us to focus on our worship and faith exploration without being aware of and responsive to the needs of those in our own community, in our local environment, in the larger world, even in creation itself.
Part of our challenge is to invite others to join us, not only in worship and exploration, but also in service. We can’t fulfill our vision alone; we need help. One thing I learned long ago working with children is that they love to help. Our kids quickly and willingly responded by putting together 25 hygiene kits for Haiti. Is it a big deal, in light of the enormous need? Of course not. Is it a big deal in the lives of our kids? Yes. When we join together in the summer to help in a Habitat build, are we resolving the housing crisis? I doubt it, but it makes a difference in the lives of those who will inhabit that house, those who work on it, those who feed the workers, and in the life of our community. When we collect turkeys and food boxes and Christmas gifts for EHP and Friends Outside, are we eliminating poverty? Hardly. But some friends we don’t even know share part of what we experience in our own celebrations of the holidays.
Can we do more? Should we do more? Is there more that can be done to serve those in need? Oh, yes. What more can we do? That is the challenge of being a church whose mission is to serve those in need, especially when that mission is linked to worshiping the God who gifts us with all we have and are and to exploring what it means to be a faith community committed to following Jesus.
Last week we considered Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. The text tells the tale of an extraordinary experience that Jesus, Peter, James and John have on the mountain top when they step aside to pray. Remember how Peter’s immediate response is to stay there on the mountain, build shrines, and spend the rest of their days worshiping God and sharing with Jesus? But in every account of the Transfiguration, the sacred vision vanishes and Jesus leads the disciples down from the mountain, back to flat land and the villages and the crowds and those in need. The course of discipleship seems to be this constant movement between two poles, inward and outward, from the heart of God to the world in need back to the heart of God and around the circle again, over and over again throughout a life of faith.
On this journey, “…someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’” But it doesn’t work that way in the church. We need to work always on the side of this polarity that is most difficult for us at any given moment as individuals and as a congregation. As far as service is concerned, the writer of James has it right, “…I by my works will show you my faith. For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.” As people of faith, children of God, disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to serve. It comes with the territory, even when it is a challenge for us in our limitations. The question remains before us always as to how we can best serve. It is my hope and prayer that we will be ever open to hearing that question and responding as well as with heart, soul, strength and mind. Amen.