This week in our series on spiritual disciplines we move on to what we decided to call missional disciplines: loving, giving, and serving. Discipline means giving in, surrendering ourselves, letting ourselves be controlled by the will and commandments of something greater than ourselves. That is true even when we practice these disciplines under the guidance of a human intermediary, such as spiritual director or fellow-traveller.
Scripture and experience teach us that this discipline is not just a matter of subjugating our own inner impulses, not just a matter of self-sacrifice: there are benefits as well as costs. Scripture is full of paradoxes relating to this kind of discipline: to be bound is to be free, to be exalted is to be abased, to be master is to serve, to be poor is to be rich, to give is to receive.
Loving, giving and serving: we refer to these three things as missional disciplines because they are visible to the world outside, when we perform them for people beyond the congregation. They are proclamations of who and what we are as Christians. Loving other Christians, serving one another, and giving to the church itself for the sake of paying its bills: these are things we take almost for granted, things we assume members will do. Loving, giving and serving for the sake of the community beyond the building are disciplines that make the gospel real to people who never worship with us. Our faith is other people’s evidence, and actions speak much louder than words in explaining to them what that faith is.
Let’s begin with serving. There is no discernible difference between servants and slaves in the Hebrew Scriptures. The main distinction there is between people with land, and those without. After the conquest, as time passed, social distinctions grew. More and more people were forced by the burdens of failed harvests and taxation to sell their land to the wealthy, whose holdings grew bigger and bigger. This movement is condemned by the prophets, who see it as a violation of God’s covenant: “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field” (Isa 5.8). Landless labourers, dependent on a tiny daily wage, were only a short step from slavery.
Slavery was an unquestioned institution in the Roman Empire and all other societies in the Ancient Near East. Slavery was the status of the majority (probably 60%) of people living in the Empire. That is why Paul does not argue against the evils of slavery; slavery is simply a fact, in his world. People were either born into slavery (the most common situation in the Empire), sold into slavery to pay debts (the situation most often referred to in the Hebrew Bible, as we have seen), or seized in battle or conquest as the spoils of war (seen as God’s punishment for the nation’s faithlessness).
A widow cries out to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves” (2Ki 4:1). Hezekiah, denouncing priestly abuses, says, “Our fathers have fallen by the sword, and our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this” (2Ch 29.9).
Slaves in the Empire aimed to accumulate enough money (through presents or tips) to buy themselves out of slavery before they were too old. Some slaves were freed as a reward for faithful service; others were freed as a punishment, turned out of the household to starve.
The point is, slavery was a fact. Slaves were the lowest stratum of society. They were a commodity: faceless and almost nameless, disposable. Some slaves did jobs we would think of as high status, for example as civic treasurer; but they were still slaves, nonetheless.
Theologically, slavery in the Bible is often treated as divine retribution, a punishment for sin. Adam and Eve refuse to serve, they choose to rebel, and the result is unrewarding toil for all their descendants: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3.19). Ham, the son of Noah, dishonours his father and as punishment is condemned to slave for his brothers: “Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers” (Gen 9.25). Israel rebels against God, and the punishment is conquest, exile – and slavery. Daniel, the honoured adviser to the King of Babylon is still in fact a slave.
But what about those who choose to serve? Great individuals in the Bible, appointed to high position, self-identify to others as their servants. Abraham, beneath the oaks of Mamre, entertains three strangers who turn out to be angels, or even God himself: there is a sense of mystery here, a reminder that there is more going on than meets the eye, and this is true of every act of genuine Christian service. According to the conventions of hospitality, Abraham repeatedly calls himself their servant, in an elaborate and exaggerated show of humbleness: “O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant” (Gen 18.3-5). Simultaneously, of course, behind his hand, he is giving instructions to his wife and presumably his servants to do the real work, of bringing water and preparing the food.
David, the great King of Israel, is chosen by the Lord to be his servant: “He chose David his servant and took him from the sheepfolds” (Psa 78.70). God’s decision to choose David to serve him is intimately connected to his election of Israel to be the covenant people: “I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn to David my servant” (Psa 89.3). David recognises his vocation as one of service, to God, through his chosen people.
David, and those few later kings who tried to rule in his image, prefigure Jesus, who turns the imagery of slavery on its head. This inversion is modelled on a biblical pattern, that of the Suffering Servant (Isa 53-54). Jesus is the Son of the King who offers himself as a servant to all, whose voluntary poverty is riches for us all. His reward is to be misunderstood, questioned, tortured, and shunned. He insists on washing his disciples’ feet (as Abraham offered to do for the angels in Gen 18), entailing on them an obligation to do likewise – to show by this type of humble act that they are masters of themselves, free of false pride and all claims to worldly status. Paul is the self-conscious prototype of how this works out in practice, subjecting himself to the most arduous tasks and the greatest hardships in order to serve the gospel, by serving those who are waiting to be called to faith in Christ.
To be a slave is to be robbed of oneself. In contrast, to be a servant to someone else is voluntary. Every act of unforced service is an act of self-surrender, an act of giving. All giving that is not self-giving tends to be self-serving, an act with a hidden agenda, the promotion of our own interests rather than their abnegation. All loving that is not self-giving tends to be self-seeking, the love in other people only of what reminds us of ourselves. We serve God not in the hope that he will love us back, but in the certain knowledge that he loved us first. When we realise this great spiritual truth, and when we act on it, loving, giving and serving come together.
To return to what I said earlier, the practice of the spiritual disciplines unravels for us in practical ways some central paradoxes we find in Scripture. To be bound is to be free, to be exalted is to be abased, to be master is to serve, to be poor is to be rich, to give is to receive. Particularly in the Hebrew Scriptures, we see that some of these reversals occur in time, and come to pass through God’s judgements: tyrants fall, earthly treasures are lost, the prosperous go out from the ruined city in chains, leaving only the poor and the landless behind. In the time we are living though now, the time of the gospel, these reversals are eschatological; they will be fully accomplished in the age to come. But we don’t have to wait so long: spiritually, these things come to pass now, in the lives and experiences of people who have come to faith, who now live in Christ through baptism and communal belonging.
Spiritual discipline is joy, not suffering, as Paul recognised. We discover it in the self-knowledge that comes through the experience of giving, loving and serving, welcoming any and every challenge and difficulty for the sake of the gospel, experiences which are a revelation of the presence of the living Christ at the heart of our lives.
heatonsaints 