Embracing True Servanthood Through Openness and Humility

We're starting a session now on servanthood, and what does it mean to be servant? It's not a word that is very popular because everybody wants to be leader, lord, higher up. Servant is not attractive to most of us. And I've written about this, and so I just want to have you note the books that I've written. In fact, the one on servanthood at the top has now reached over 40 ,000 copies in distribution, and it's become a bestseller for the publishing company. And what I'm going to give you now will be just a small sampling of what's in that book. But if you want more, the servanthood book is available to you. It's also available in Russian, Russian and Chinese and Portuguese and Korean. [00:00:16]

So right now we're talking about servanthood. What does it mean to serve? Well, when I was involved in teaching, I was teaching about 500 missionaries a year and also some expatriates from multinational corporations in how to adjust cross -culturally. So in any given year, maybe at least 700 people going through my teaching, some others, faculty with me, part of the teaching program. And especially in our missionary community, we found that the frequent word was serve or servant. We want to serve the people. We want to serve the church. We want to serve the culture or the society. We want to serve God, so that was the theme very often throughout the entire program. [00:02:11]

Eventually, over the years, I got to travel more, and as I traveled in a variety of countries, I would ask the question of certain people, usually church leaders, sometimes people who were on the streets who knew Americans that were there. sometimes it would be leaders of denominations, and I would ask them this question. what could missionaries do to more effectively minister the gospel of Christ in your country? And so they would often say that they were very grateful for the missionaries who had come because much of the time their salvation came through the message of missionaries. And so they were very grateful for this and were thankful to God for the people who had come, oftentimes from North America, but also from Western Europe and other countries as well. [00:03:10]

So then as they finished their very kind remarks, they then said, missionaries could be more effective if they didn't think they were so superior to us. And that came so many times, slightly different ways, but essentially the same message. That I realized that there had to be some substance behind it, some general reason for it. So I thought to myself, well, I don't think missionaries generally think of themselves as higher. They don't consciously do that. I mean, none of us do, maybe a few, but most of us don't. So that doesn't seem to be the problem. So what can be the problem? [00:04:06]

Well, I think one of the problems is that we, and this would be true of all of us, if we were to go into another culture, we would tend to assume that they're much like us, and so I can be myself and they will be themselves. And sure, there's clothing differences and food differences, but pretty much we're the same. And of course, we already know that there's some very deep differences in how... we handle conflict how we think of shame or face or embarrassment the cultural differences the use of time all of these kinds of things so just by being who they were more assertive task -oriented get the job done they tended to come across as being superior our way is better my way is better your way is not as good but the other thing that I think happened in with missionaries and actually anybody who goes cross -cultural because now there are Brazilians going to South Korea and there are South Koreans going to to Congo and yeah I mean this is happening all over the place but what we're finding is everybody makes the same human mistakes so what I'm saying about Americans is probably going to be true of Koreans or Brazilians or Russians the other thing that happened is I think that when at least in America when we call ourselves servant and we hear ourselves thinking that and saying that frequently a little switch goes off in our head and we say ah now I am a servant see if I think I am it doesn't take much to say I am now if you're if you think you're being servant then everything you do is assumed to be serving the people serving the culture serving the church etc I'm serving God however unless you're aware of the cultural differences and make those adjustments you're not going to come across as servant but you're going to come across consistently as foreigner wants to do things in the foreign way. [00:04:56]

And people perceive that as arrogance, pride, high status, or even neocolonialism sometimes, paternalism, like the father or whatever, or maternalism, the mother. And so these people were telling me that the missionaries, yes, they call themselves servant, but that's not how we see it. So that was a little bit hard to handle, but it's good information, and they did it graciously. Now the question is, what does servant look like in your culture? So now over the next, I think it was over a dozen years, as I traveled in dozens of countries, I asked this question, what does servant look like in your culture? [00:07:10]

When you see somebody who appears to be serving you, you feel served when they have been around you or done something. What is it that's happening? What does a servant look like in Russian culture? What do you think? And you can refer to your own experiences. When somebody has done something, you say, wow, that person was really good. Maybe you can say that person really served me well. What's happening? [00:08:02]

All right. Yeah, good. Yeah, so it's the person who does things or makes sacrifices sincerely for your benefit, not for their own benefit. And so otherwise there would be mixed motives, exactly. Anyone else want to... What are people doing or saying when you're feeling served by them? Any other thoughts? Well, let me introduce my discoveries, and yours certainly fit in there. And as I gathered, I don't know, hundreds of responses, I suppose, they seem to fit into some categories. And so I'm going to show those categories to you. And first of all, I want to talk just about the title, Pilgrimage to Servanthood. [00:11:14]

When I heard so many people say that arrogance seemed to be the characteristic that was interfering with people doing their job well, doing it in a sensitive way, in a sincere way, that really caused me some frustration. I thought, oh, come on, folks, let's get it right, okay? Let's try to get this better. And so when I came back from some of these trips, I would be speaking to a group, and I'd call for a moratorium, a cessation, a stopping of the use. of the word servant, because we're not being servants if people see us as being arrogant or superior or higher than, better than. [00:12:15]

And so that came forth with a little bit of resentment and anger, and so I'm calling for this stopping of it completely. And then I realized that probably servanthood is a pilgrimage. It takes time to be servant in a new culture. We don't exactly know how to do it, but I then issued a call for people not to call themselves servant until the local people begin to use the word or the concepts of servanthood about them. Then maybe you can say, I think maybe I am being a servant of Christ in this culture, in this community, in this church. [00:13:03]

So it is a pilgrimage, and it takes time, and it takes a lot of learning. It takes adjustment along the things that we've been talking about so far in these sessions, and it takes daily discipline, daily reflection. How did I do today? Did I do something wrong? Did I offend somebody? Not intentionally, but how do I make it right? What should I have done differently? And so we're constantly making those adjustments. So servanthood is a pilgrimage. It's not a switch that goes off. It's not easily done. [00:13:45]

Openness is the ability to welcome people into your presence and to make them feel safe. This issue of safety and security is not so much a physical one but an emotional one where you relax physically and emotionally because there's something about these people that they signal that they're happy that you're with them. They're actually delighted that you're there, they're pleased, they're they counted a privilege to have you there. So this openness is the ability to embrace people and to make them feel safe and to feel secure and it's in that kind of context that people begin to communicate openly and and to to share their lives with each other and to begin the bonding process. [00:14:38]

The differences of food or the differences of how people communicate or differences with time or how things are managed and differences can threaten us and when they happen to us we often tighten up inside and we withdraw a little bit or we make negative attributions as I said before. Openness is difficult because of some research that I gave you earlier. How long does it take us to determine whether there's a possibility for friendship when we meet somebody? The research says less than five seconds. So within five seconds, either we remain open or we close down. And most of the time, we don't know the person. We think nothing of it, and so we just unconsciously close down. [00:15:42]

When Jesus met the woman at the well, this was a perfect opportunity for rejection. This woman had been rejected by her own Samaritan community. She had been rejected rather fiercely and intentionally and harshly by virtually all other Jewish men and women. She was accustomed to rejection. And so when Jesus came to the well, she was expecting that he would reject her just like all the other Jewish men had done. Furthermore, Jesus being a Jew and she being a Samaritan, the Jews hated the Samaritan. So not only would he reject her because he was a Jew, but because she was a Samaritan. He would reject her because she was a Samaritan woman. [00:16:34]

By the way, the Jews believed that the Samaritans were made to fuel the fires of hell. Fairly low view of people, wouldn't you say? Their kindling, their wood for the fires of hell. So that was their view of the Samaritan. Jesus knew she was a Samaritan. He knew she was a woman, obviously. He also knew, and by the way, women were low caste people. There was a group of Jews called the bruised and bleeding Jews. They thought that women were the source of all evil and all that is bad in the world. [00:17:26]

whatever our problems are it's because we have women we have to put up with them in our society so what happened is that whenever they would see a woman they put their hands over their eyes and they'd go off the path quickly and try to get past them but they trip over the rocks and fall into the thorns and thus the bruised and bleeding Jews and of course they became extinct which isn't hard to understand but there were people who had that even extreme view of women and if you read the much of the early literature you'll see that women were held in pretty low esteem except when Jesus came women were important well now she's a woman and she's an adulteress she said all of these husbands and she's living with another man yet and so she's in the eyes of the Jewish people a very gross very severe very extreme sinner how does Jesus show openness to her do you remember the story John 14 I think how does he show openness [00:18:08]

first of all he talked to her in a gentle voice and asked something of her kindly but now if she's going to give him water she has to touch something right okay if a good Jew touched a Samaritan he would have to go to the temple for cleansing because he had been contaminated by this person and that Now not only is it the Samaritan that's doing it, but the woman who's this terrible sinner. And he says, are you willing to help me? Can you give me some water? And so he treats her not as a Samaritan, not like the other Jews, but as a human. There's the embrace. And she begins to relax. [00:19:28]

And she begins to feel comfortable in the presence of this person who is very opposite of who she is. Of course, she doesn't know it's Jesus, but she knows he's a Jew, probably a religious Jew. She knows he's a man. And all of these things now are clouding her mind. And Jesus opens the embrace, the capacity to welcome her into his presence, to make her feel safe. And now she listens and trusts him as the Messiah. Openness. Welcoming others into your presence and helping them to feel safe. The ability to withhold judgment and to wait and give this person the chance. But to accept them as human beings, to make them feel comfortable, welcome, be gracious, value them. [00:20:21]

You already heard the problem about the Maasai spitting, so you know the answer to that. But you see what happens is when you know that the spit is a blessing, then you say, oh, now I understand. But at first the tendency is to reject. Now I can accept. You heard the story about Eunice. and my suspicion and premature judgments about Eunice. And now, knowing what the passive voice and the active voice mean, and how Eunice was really the very innocent, well -behaved person in the whole thing, she did everything right, now, rather than rejection, I can embrace. I can say, oh, I understand. We're so quick to reject. So here's two stories. [00:21:51]

It was wintertime, and a fair amount of snow had fallen. I called ahead. I don't like to drive over fresh snow in my driveway because it packs down, it gets icy and slippery, and you can slip as you're coming and going from the car. So I called ahead and said to Muriel, tell the boys that when they come home from school today, they must clean off the driveway before I get home, so then we'll have that finished. And sometimes they would have to do the driveway, and sometimes I would clean the snow off myself. But this time, it was, I called. So she says, I'll do that. When I got home, it was plenty of time for them to have shoveled off the driveway. But the shovels weren't even out. The driveway was covered with about that much snow, and nothing had been done. [00:22:46]

And maybe you're going to have to hear some harsh words from me, too, as part of, you know, so I'm already arranging everything that I'm going to say and everything that I'm going to do. And yet I don't understand why the driveway isn't shoveled. But I've made my decision. I've made my judgment. I know they're lazy. Okay. The other story has to do with a Russian flight on Aeroflot in 1990. And I was sitting in the back of the plane and reading, and all of a sudden a flight attendant was there, and she had a tray of apples. And they were quite small apples, and they looked like they were not very good, maybe even wormy. I don't know. They just didn't. So the apples were quite small and didn't look good. [00:23:48]

So I smiled, and I said, no, thank you. But I'm thinking, how did she know I was American? And I don't know if she did, but she, you know, I assume she did. And why did she offer me the worst apples on the plane? She had apparently served everybody else, and she now serves me the worst apples. And I'm saying, oh, sheesh, you know, I don't want to travel here anymore, you know, those kinds of thoughts. In both situations. In both situations. I do not remain open. I've made up my mind. I know that somebody has a problem here. But it's not my problem, it's their problem. So you think about that for a while. [00:24:41]

Of course it's going to turn out like the Eunice story, the Zulu lady in South Africa, but how does it come about? It turns out like the spittle from the Maasai warrior, but how is it going to come out? So this issue of openness, the ability to welcome people into our presence and to make them feel comfortable, to relax them, so that there can be honest conversation, a sense that we're safe with each other, a sense that I'm not going to be judged, I'm not going to be rejected, somebody's not going to speak harshly to me, somebody's not going to be mean to me, that I'm safe with you, you're safe with me. We can build on that foundation. [00:25:45]

With each of the characteristics of servanthood, in this case, openness, I'm going to talk about biblical concepts which support this idea of openness, and then also the necessary skill that will help us to be open people, or whatever the characteristic is. So the biblical concept of hospitality is quite an important one. In the very early days, when people came, were traveling, and then they came to the end of the day, someone would see them, and they would be invited into the home. And they would be welcomed there as people who were on a journey, they would be treated as family, they would be given... a nice place to sleep, a nice place, nice food to eat, and that was hospitality. [00:26:30]

So, and when they left, if the people were very hospitable, they would say that we feel so good having been here. It was like a healing place. It was like a place where we were now better off, where we feel better going than we were when we came. Thank you for helping us to get better, to feel better. Well, eventually then, the word hospitality became the word hospital, the place where healing takes place. But it wasn't just kind of a social kind of healing, but also now physical healing. Now, in America, we call hospitality when we invite somebody in for an evening, and we maybe have food, or we have some drinks, or some snacks, or something like that, but that's called hospitality. But hospitality in the biblical sense really goes much farther. It's the embrace of people, the warmth, the welcome, the caring. [00:27:15]

These are more important than the drinks, or the food, or the snacks, or things like that. Most of us are not really good at the biblical concept of hospitality. I'm not very good at it, okay? My wife is very good. People relax in her presence. People tell her their life story, their deep secrets, in five minutes of talking. So I have to follow her example in these things. And then, of course, the biblical concept of shalom. The beginning of each relationship starts with the offering of peace. Peace be to you. The end of the relationship, peace go with you. You see, the shalom of God. But then also the shalom of God that we offer each other. This sin. that we are people who embrace, who care, who love, who want peace to be beginning, end, and everything in between. [00:28:20]

So the biblical concepts of hospitality and shalom tell us about this openness, the way in which we welcome people into our presence, into our homes, into our lives. The primary skill of openness is to suspend judgment. So if I see someone that doesn't look like me, maybe he doesn't dress like me, my tendency is to say that's fine, leave them alone, they do their thing, I do my thing, fine, good. Because I think that there's not much chance that we'll be friends. They're too different from I. Rather than making an attempt, being open at least. If they don't want to be friends, then that can be their choice, but it shouldn't be my choice. So we suspend judgment and that keeps us open to understanding, open to new relationships, open to build bridges with people who are not the same as we are. [00:29:23]