Sunday of St Mary of Egypt

Orthodox Christian Church of the Holy Spirit

Orthodox Church in America - Archdiocese of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania

145 N. Kern St Beavertown PA, 17813

“You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them, yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all.”

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Servant.” “Slave.” Yuck! Have we not evolved beyond these concepts in our modern age? Did we not, as a nation, abolish such a concept one hundred sixty years ago? How are we to opt into servitude, to slavery? Is this just another instance of the Scriptures’ language needing to be contemporized; even, a whole ethical construct—that of willing servitude, willing slavery—needing to be overhauled? Slavery is primitive. Servitude is immoral. What may have “made sense” in one historical context no longer does. After all, the Scriptures also speak of freedom, right?

“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).

So, if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Rulers

Freedom! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! This sounds like a much better Christian slogan. “Whoever desires to become great among you… [let him live virtuously and freely!]” It has a strong appeal. It would feature nicely on a “visitor’s pamphlet,” situated prominently in our narthex. However, brethren, … it would not be the gospel. For the gospel is this: we were created for freedom, yes, but we were also created to serve. In fact, we were created to freely serve. St. Paul makes this exact point elsewhere, in his Letter to the Galatians:

“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge in your sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love” (Gal 5:13-14; italics mine).

Man was created to serve. We forget that sometimes, … a lot actually! Man was created to enjoy God, to enjoy the creation, to enjoy the beauty of the earth, to wonder, to explore, to build, … but also to serve.

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it” (Gen 2:15).

Eden, brethren: who’s garden is this? Is it man’s garden? No, it is God’s garden. So, man was created to work for God, to serve God? Hmm… this is starting to sound like too many other ancient Near Eastern creation mythologies… . Man is made to toil and to serve; to work the earth so that the gods don’t have to! To bring the gods their wine, and mead, and meats! To sweat, to bleed, to suffer for their gods, and finally, to attain to the rest of death! Well, that is how some of the stories do go. But this is not the story of Genesis. The Judeo-Christian creation mythos is entirely unique. Man is made as the crown jewel of the cosmos. Man is given a place and a vocation that is beneficial to him; he is given a home, and a purpose, the familiarity of creatures, and the intimacy of a helpmate. God does not watch over man as a taskmaster but walks beside him—in love and in communion—in the “cool of the day” (Gen 3:8). This is all true, and importantly, man’s vocation as “keeper and cultivator of the creation” is part and parcel of this equation. Man, indeed, was made in love, was made for communion, AND was made to work and to serve.

“Service,” biblically-speaking, is not a dirty word. It is a noble word, referring to man’s most ancient vocation. Contemporaneously, service is a hassle. We equate service with work, and work with our jobs, our jobs as obligations, and obligations as inherently minimizing our freedom. The goal, in the modern, American dream, is to minimize obligations; therefore, maximizing freedom. The goal in life is not to work; it is to retire! We work, we serve, we slave away, 8:00 AM-5:00 PM, Monday-Friday, for forty-five and some odd years so that we can eventually NOT work, so that we can someday wake up late, eat Belgian waffles at 9 AM, go for a walk in the park, play a round on the back-nine, hit the lake for a bit, and sit down to a nice steak entree, made by someone else at the local diner. Ah, this is the good life! A day full of fun, freedom, and pleasure, and the best part of it all: I ne’er had to lift a finger. Doesn’t this sound wonderful?

This may be the dream of some; this may be a dream, a fantasy, that resides deep down inside some of our hearts. I am not asking you to raise your hand if this is your fantasy. But surely, this is what so many of our vocational and financial machinations anticipate and strive towards. “Make your 401K work for you!” we read plastered on a billboard. “Work for me,” we think, “yeah… I like that!” For many of us, work is despicable. And much work is despicable. There is unethical, immoral work. There are whole industries predicated upon toil, injustice, financial stratification, “unrighteous mammon.” We must flee from these works.

Scripture, even as early as Genesis, makes just this distinction too: work is not toil; toil is not work. Toil assumes a species of “fruitlessness,” vanity, a “striving after the wind” (Eccl 2:11), a “whole lot of work… but nothing to show for it.” Work, however, service, is our human vocation. Man was created to serve. Man was created to be a steward of the creation in every faculty, in every facility: a steward of the material world, a steward of relationships, a steward of resources, all to the glory of God.

Today, brethren, in our Gospel Reading from St. Mark, Christ’s words hearken back to our long-forgotten vocation. It would seem that it was forgotten well before the advent of the modern age, the advent of the American dream. We can only suppose that “being served” was also the Jewish dream, the Greek dream, too!

“You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them…” (Mark 10:42).

“I’m the boss! You do what I say…! You get the food; you make the food. I eat the food! You make the goods; you sell the goods. I reap the profits!” “It is good to be in charge. It is good to be at the top of the totem pole, because that is where the work isn’t,” so sayeth the world.

But the Christian ideal—indeed, the entire biblical ideal—inverts this paradigm.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… and he saw that [it] was good. … And God created man in his own image, … and God blessed them, and said to them, “… I give you [everything]…” (Gen 1:1, 4, 27-29).

Yahweh God, the great “I AM,” who sits at the tippy-tippy-top of the highest totem, he himself works, creates for the sake of another. He brings into existence a world which he was not in need of. He works to share himself with us. The creation is predicated on the willingness of God to work and to serve. Service is an inalienable component of the ontology of creation. Creation is for God’s glory, and part of that glory is: creation’s existence for the benefit of man.

Of course, all of this is taken to its practical extremes as a consequence of the Fall. That is to say, not only was God willing to create as a service to man in love, but also, God was willing to become a man, to suffer with men, to fully recapitulate man—to embody his vocation, his merit, his dignity. He serves and redeems man as a true man. It cannot be stated strongly enough: the Son of Man realizes the human vocation in his service to man.

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

When you are thinking, brethren, “I am tired. Is it worth it? Does anybody see my work, my service…”, when you think, “What is the point of doing this task, of giving my time and my energy to this cause…,” remember: it is what you were created for. Toil? No. Service? Yes. We are called to work in and to serve the world—most especially, the family of God—in the everyday. And this vocation will continue in the world to come, in the Kingdom of God. There, we will serve and will work perfectly, joyfully, with maximum freedom and maximum fulfillment. And we will say, “How great it is ‘to serve the living God’” (cf. 1 Thess 1:9; Heb 9:14).

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, O Lord, Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.