Serving God in Small Things

Staff Devotional—November 6, 1997

Samford University; Birmingham, Alabama

Luke 10:7 ("the laborer is worthy of his hire")

When Jesus sends out the Seventy, in Luke's gospel, he warns them that they will be like lambs among wolves, yet that they are to stay wherever they are welcomed, to eat and drink whatever they are offered, but not to move about from house to house. Then comes the sentence that is the focus of my little talk: "for the laborer deserves to be paid." Most of us will re-member this saying as it is recorded in the King Jimmy: "the laborer is worthy of his hire." The immediate meaning of Jesus' odd words is perhaps something like this: Those who bear the Good Tidings that the Kingdom of God has drawn near in Jesus Christ—indeed, that He is al-ready at work in our midst—are doing the world's most important work. They are completely worthy of their wages. They deserve our most generous support. We must not take them for granted. We must give them our best, not leaving them merely the leftovers. While this is all true, I want to put a rather different reading on this saying of our Lord. Since most of you are secretaries and office workers, I want to insist that you are lambs threatened by a new kind of wolf. But I also want to declare that you are no less worthy of your hire for doing what may of-ten be boring, repetitive, even mind-deadening work.

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It is the wolf of celebrity that threatens to devour the lambs of our culture. We live in a world that is obsessed with publicity and notoriety. We want to do only the grand tasks and to get only the attention-grabbing jobs. We feel terribly unworthy and unimportant unless we can associate ourselves with something big and important. Hence our obsession with movie and sports stars, with the rich and famous, with Princess Diana and her sort. The pop artist Andy Warhol once described America as the country where everybody is guaranteed fifteen-minutes of fame. We thus feel cheated if we are not famous. We think our lives worthless if we are con-signed to the doing of small things: working at a computer screen, standing at a copying ma-chine, sweeping floors or cleaning toilets, sorting books or setting up lab experiments, running errands or making repairs. Hence the wry sign I once saw: "No one has ever complained, at the end of life, that she spent too little time at a copier."

I believe that our Lord offers a radical alternative to these assumptions. He would have us learn to serve God precisely in these small things, as laborers worthy of our hire. Few matters are more important, for example, than fixing things that are broken. The novelist Walker Percy liked to say that this country will collapse, not from the influence of Marx and Nietzsche and the other great atheists who would undermine our faith in God. "America is dying for lack of repairmen," Percy wittily declares in Love in the Ruins. This is a nation, he says, where you can acquire nearly anything but get virtually nothing fixed. No one wants any longer to do something so lowly and seemingly unimportant as repairing a radiator or fixing a printer or copy-editing a text. Thus has the wolf of celebrity devoured the lambs who spend their days doing small things. So effective is the wolf's work, says Percy, that we no longer believe ourselves truly real unless we can prove our existence by collecting multiple credit cards or by seeing our-selves on television. Our identity is so insecure that, after attending a public event, we rush home to watch it on television—to authenticate that it really happened and that we are now celebrities.

The drastic counter-view is that we are laborers worthy of our wages to the extent that we do good work for the sake of the Kingdom. I believe that we do first-rate work precisely to the degree that we believe God is the audience before Whom we labor. And I believe that we do sloppy and shabby work exactly because we no longer live and move and have our being before God. The result is not far to find: Our world is suffering from a worldendish loss of excellence.

We cut corners. We cover up errors. We slack off when real effort is demanded. We do often just as little as necessary—all in order to get by. Not believing that our work is truly worthy, that God is the ultimate arbiter of our lives and work, we hurry through our daily tasks in order on to get to something else, usually our own pathetic little amusements.

The people I admire most are those who are not taken in by this false gospel of celebrity. They are willing to serve God in small things. There are countless orderlies, usually black women, who change the diapers of the elderly incontinent in nursing homes. Often their patients don't know that they are lying in their own waste—perhaps they don’t even know who or where they are. Yet these orderlies treat such infirm souls with utter tenderness and care. The world offers little monetary reward—and no glory at all—for such service. Yet these women and men may be the very noblest souls among us. I also have the highest regard for a plumber-friend who has no ambition to be anything grander than one who properly joins pipes to sinks and showers. He is very much akin to another friend who was asked by a high school principal to specify his main qualification for a teaching job. My friend did not reply that he encourages self-esteem in his students by always maintaining a positive attitude. With admirable honesty, he replied instead: "I know my subject." Both plumber and teacher can keep from pummeling their pillows at night because they do their work ably, because they have mastered their craft, because they do small things well. My admiration also goes out to a carpenter who tells me that his real test comes when he makes a mistake. Given his considerable mechanical skill, he could easily cover up his error. He proves his integrity by taking the time-intensive and money-losing trouble to tear out the wrongly nailed boards and to start over again. Though this carpenter is not an especially religious man, he knows that he is summoned to excellence even in small things—violating neither the people who have hired him, nor the dignity of his own craftsmanship, nor the God who is the ultimate evaluator and beneficiary of his work.

A Florida pastor-friend has invented a witty name for people like you who are administrative assistants and lab workers and custodians. He calls you ministers of things: an apt title and a worthy office indeed! Your faithfulness in small projects—doing them carefully and patiently and well, rather than hurriedly and sloppily and ill—is ever so important. You enable the rest of us to do the work that the world regards (perhaps wrongly) as far more important. I know a college administrator who describes her work as consisting largely in making a list and checking it twice, thus insuring that little deeds are done right. Many of us fail to recognize that the secretary or receptionist is the one person whom most visitors first encounter when they come to a church or a business, to a school or a department. The visitor's lasting impression is largely shaped by this initial encounter—whether it was gracious and helpful, or whether it was curt and off-putting. Far from being nobodies, therefore, you serve both God and man by doing small things well.

The test comes, for me, when I am grading papers. There is no more thankless and mind-numbing task. When I used to ask my late and dear mother what, in her retirement years, she missed least about teaching school, she would instantly answer: Grading papers! I understand her plaint. There are few things I dread more than a stack of freshman essays. Someone has likened it to the reading of War and Peace as if it had been written by 18-year olds. A friend of mine from Calvin College once caught me up short when I emitted this stan-dard professorial whine. My Michigan colleague reminded me that, far from being dullness incarnate and compounded, grading papers is one of my most important tasks as a teacher. "Do you recognize," he asked, "that a carefully-marked essay—praising a student's insights, flagging the errors of logic and grammar, offering suggestions for improvement—may be the very first time that this young person has ever been taken seriously?" My friend was right as rain. Our world flatters and rewards and grants young people nearly everything they ask for, while demanding nearly nothing of them. Thus do we insult and dismiss and refuse to take them seriously. Far from being unworthy work, I confess, this is what I am called to do right alongside you—to serve God in small things.

Ralph Wood