Matt served with WMF in Romania and Nepal from 2000 to 2005. His article appeared in The Cry, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 2002).
How do we breathe life into the mundane? I muddle through this question every day as I work as a server in a restaurant. Five days a week, I take food from one place to another. Most of the time I feel like a glorified robot with hurt feelings. The majority of my waking hours are spent running around taking requests and trying to keep people patient. I am an errand boy who garners little more than a glance between various marching orders: “Sir, this chicken is too tough.” “Could you bring me another lemon for my water?” “We need separate checks, and we need them now.”
I am a server, so by definition I serve people, right? Honestly, the word “service” has become a pejorative term, its meaning stolen and trampled on by industry. So, when I glance over the Word Made Flesh Lifestyle Celebrations and read that “we celebrate service, which fulfills our fellowship,” I struggle to understand how I am to celebrate that which has become drudgery for me. When did service fulfill fellowship in my life?
It was easy to celebrate service when I lived in Romania with a widow, Elena, and her five children, and working among orphans who lived on the street. Why has service now become so banal? Why was serving the poor dinner more worthy of my sweat than serving the rich lunch? Maybe it is because Christianity at large and the Scriptures validated me in my service to the poor as it is “pure and undefiled religion to visit the orphan and widow in their distress” (Jas. 1:27). My friends and family admire the perceived sacrifice I made in going to Romania, but none of them think serving people their lunch in Lexington is anything of note. But it is something different than validation that keeps me from celebrating service. Perhaps it is my understanding of what service is and my very definition of service that need to be addressed, rather than who or even where I am serving.
My understanding of service involves little more than what the dictionary describes as “work done by someone for someone else as a job, a duty, a punishment or a favor.” Service has become punishment because of my conception of it. Service involves the served and the servant–one who will passively receive and one who will actively give. Through this understanding of service, I have become the means to an end for the folks I serve.
However, it is not those I serve who cause me to be dehumanized; it is my perception of myself as I serve them. My dignity is stolen by my paradigm of service. When my dignity or my perception of myself is fractured, I prohibit the full reception of Christ’s expression of love for me. Because I understand myself to be less than adequate to receive that which is rightfully mine, I misunderstand and I become incapable of loving others. Service needs to be redeemed from the categories of cumbersome punishment and dehumanizing process so that I can fully participate in loving and being loved.
Perhaps, then, we can better understand service as sacrament. St. Augustine said that a sacrament was the visible sign of an invisible reality. A sacrament is a rite established by Jesus to bring grace to those participating in or receiving it. It is the sacred among us.
One of the most common sacraments is communion. We celebrate the Eucharist so that we can remember Christ’s sacrifice. By taking something tangible that has been assigned symbolic meaning we are able to remember and participate in something that is otherwise intangible. The bread and the wine are the visible components of the sacrament. The acknowledgment, remembrance and resulting thankfulness are the invisible components that complete the mystery of the sacrament. The sacrament is a necessary vehicle for our deeper understanding of Christ’s sacrifice.
Service can become sacramental and it probably should be. Christ came to serve. However, it is difficult for us to comprehend our Creator as our servant.
My marriage has helped me to grasp God as servant. As I search for the most meaningful and selfless way to love my wife, I discover that it is found through serving her. I love my wife more than she will ever know, but love is only a feeling until I give it form and substance through my actions toward her. Christ came to serve, tangibly expressing the intangible expression, “God is love.” Likewise, our service to one another becomes sacramental and thus manifests our love for one another while testifying to Christ’s love for all.
The proper posture of our hearts joined with the ubiquitous presence of Christ transforms service into sacrament. This is where the mundane meets the mysterious and where the grace of God is uniquely active. Service is redeemed from the realm of toil and slavery. It is free to become prayer, worship and even love. As service becomes sacrament, it doesn’t matter if I am serving lunch to the lady with a diamond ring or dinner to Mihai (a friend who makes his home on the streets of Galati, Romania). Whenever Christ is invited to the table, our fellowship and service is fulfilled.