If Not Higher
Reverend Amy Zucker
May 4, 2003
Palo Alto, CA

Servanthood has a bad reputation. No one wants to be a servant, the lowest rung in the work ladder. If you want to ensure low status, take a job that is devoted to service to other people: cleaning their homes or their clothes, removing their garbage, or repairing things that they break. The humblest work of all is personal service: actually dressing, washing, and tending another person. The exception, I suppose, is if the person to whom you're humbling yourself has a very high status. The person who helps Queen Elizabeth get dressed in the morning would probably be considered the highest of the low.

And then there are the "helping professions," like teaching, social work, and nursing, that garner respect but alongside it, a kind of condescension. We pay them great tribute on occasion, singing the praises of the "Teacher of the Year" and thanking nurses for their boundless generosity. But judging by how poorly we pay for these acts of service, we don't value them nearly as much as the rhetoric suggests. And, perhaps because they do so much for so little remuneration, those who want to do this work are often regarded with a kind of pitying disbelief, even while they are thanked and praised.

The presence of servants can make people very uncomfortable. Perhaps that's why the homeowner tries to be out of the house when the housecleaner is doing her work. To serve, we have to humble ourselves, and we don't like to do that. We have to put our needs below someone else's, and we have to do tasks that we prefer to think are beneath us. Acting in a role of servanthood is humiliating; it erodes our sense of self-importance . . . which is perhaps part of the point.

The rabbi in the story is a true servant. He humbles himself to serve; an archaic way to say it would be that he humiliates himself. He puts off his immaculate robes, the symbol of his special status in the community, and puts on the rough clothes of a common peasant. He departs from the synagogue, where everything is clean and bright and polished, and heads instead into the dark woods to a shabby hut. He conceals his true name and becomes a nameless wanderer. His hands that usually caress books and the scrolls of the Torah take up an axe. Like a beast of burden, he carries wood on his back; he sets aside his intellectual and spiritual work and takes up the work of the body, groaning and staggering. As he kneels to make the fire, he literally lowers himself before the poor sick woman.

The words humble and humiliation come from the Latin humilis, which means "lowly" or "base," and which goes back to the word humus, meaning "earth." To humble oneself is literally to ground oneself: to be close to the ground, planted in the earth, in the things of this world, in the daily matters that are not glamorous or spectacular. They are not "spiritual" in any sense of "floating above" or "being apart from the earthly." They are as simple and plain as a loaf of peasant bread. Humility is about this simplicity and grounded ness. The other, best-known word from the root humus, earth, is human. We are of this earth; the word human literally means earthling, creature of the ground. Humility means serving humanity. That may require getting right down on your knees to do for the lowly, the base, the creatures of the earth. Servanthood doesn't mean kowtowing to the great and almighty; it means bending our lives to the cause of human need, wherever it may be found, which tends to be not among the powerful but among the bent and broken.

The people of Nemirov say that their rabbi ascends to heaven, and the story implicitly asks, what and where is heaven? Is heaven where angels sing God's praises and people float far above the dirt and dust and sweat and tears of the world? If it is, then it is not the highest place one can go. And so the Lithuanian learns, and he declares his new-found faith. One finds humanist fables in the strangest of places. I. L. Peretz was steeped in the God-centered world of Eastern European Judaism, and his rabbi protagonist is a devout, Orthodox Jew of the Old Country, concerned day in, day out with God and His word. And yet the message of the story seems to be that heaven is all very well, but the higher attainment is to serve, and the lower the people one serves, the higher one ascends. Go to the hovel, the tenement, the hospital, the nursing home, the prison, the shantytown--never mind heaven.

A fitting message for our this-worldly religion. We're not too sure about heaven or the next life. Maybe there's a heaven, maybe we live again after this life ends, but we don't know, and not knowing, we must focus our concern here. The Humanist Manifesto, which was written by many Unitarians and went on to shape our tradition, said, "Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of humans' lives and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social position." It is also the explanation of why the rabbi spends the night before Yom Kippur the way he does.

Many of our congregations share a covenant that appears in our hymnal. Its words vary from place to place, but the beginning is usually the same: "Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer." We Unitarian Universalists can have a lot of trouble with prayer, especially prayers of petition or intercession: prayers that make a request. Many of us can't help wondering, who do we hope will answer this plea? Who is hearing it? I look forward to exploring those questions, and many more about prayer, from this pulpit, but today has time for only one sermon, and it seems to me that this statement of ours cuts through all of the tangled questions. What is our prayer? Service. Who hears our prayers? Those who are served, and those who do the serving. We don't have to wait for God. We hear the longings of our hearts, and we answer them. In the prayer called service, we ask for help, comfort, companionship, justice, relief for the suffering-and we give the answer in the asking.

The rabbi offers two prayers in the dark of that early morning: the prayer of Slichot, and the prayer of service. The one may take him up to heaven; the other takes him higher. Slichot are the prayers of repentance and preparation that precede Yom Kippur; in singing them, the devout prepare their hearts for forgiveness and try to be redeemed from the wrongs they have done. You could see what the rabbi does as a deal with God, a quid pro quo, but I don't think that's what's going on. He does not perform his anonymous act of service in order to gain forgiveness for himself or his congregation. He lights the fire and feeds the sick woman, not as penance, but as a free outpouring of love: no strings attached, no reward sought. An act of love is the only true act of repentance, and the only coin that can buy redemption.

A man named Eric Ashford wrote some words on the prayer that is service: "Be a wordless prayer, then you shall share that intent with all life . . . . .You become a service. Extend this prayer in service to others. When you can help, be helpful. No matter how seemingly insignificant that help may be. It is a service to Holiness. To you. It is your prayer."

Because I am committed to shared ministry and say so in my biography and my packet, and wrote my Master of Divinity thesis on sharing the ministry in a UU congregation, many people this week have asked me to define shared ministry. It is, fundamentally, so simple that I feel a bit like the theologian Karl Barth, who published enormous tomes that systematically dealt with almost all of the major theological issues. When someone asked him to summarize the message of his life's work, he replied, "Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so." Shared ministry is the conviction that all of us carry out the ministry of the church. The needs of our community call every one of us into holy service, and whenever we respond, in whatever setting, we are sharing in the ministry.

I have seen and heard of many examples in this congregation this week. You've spoken of organizing cars full of Peninsula people to go to San Francisco to witness for peace. I've heard of church neighbors taking a church neighbor to physical therapy. I've seen you guide a small child not your own through the steps of a square dance so that every generation could enjoy it. Your voices have been raised in open dialogue, honest self-searching, and compassionate outreach. In meetings, you have asked yourselves how to welcome people of different theologies, political views, ages and abilities, and in your answers I have heard a strong desire to be of service. In a Beltane ritual, you have risked ridicule by exposing your tenderest hopes, and emboldened others to open their hearts as well.

This is the ministry of this congregation: to serve each other, to serve the world, to serve the vision that peace, justice, and truth will blossom. We all take part in it because we all share the vision. And just as none of us would expect another person to speak all of our prayers for us-all of our hopes and promises-neither do we delegate the prayer that is service. Each of us lives that prayer by serving one another and the world in love. That is shared ministry. It's that simple.

We sometimes confuse service and servanthood with servitude. The difference between servanthood and servitude is merely whether one freely chooses to serve or is compelled to-and it is all the difference in the world. While doing something under compulsion fills us with resentment, anger, and even hatred, servanthood of our own choosing is all about love.
John Milton wrote:

Freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall. (Paradise Lost, V, 538)

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