Loading...I hate cleaning house. I hate the time it takes. I hate the fact that it doesn’t stay done and you have to keep doing it over and over. Even though it is easier now that our two homes are smaller than the three-story house I used to clean, I still put it off for as long as I can and sometimes longer than I should.
For a while, I hired someone to clean my house. But I hated that even more. Oh, I loved coming home to a clean house that I didn’t have to clean, but I hated asking someone to clean up after me. It didn’t feel right to ask someone to clean up my mess, to clean up my dirt. I know I was providing them with income but I still felt guilty asking someone to do my work.
So when I read Jesus’ question to his disciples "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, "Come here at once and take your place at the table’?” He obviously expected no one to say that they would invite their servant to the table. But I wanted to raise my hand and say “I would.”
I would love to have the opportunity to let the person, who had worked hard for me, doing my work, know that I felt they were my equal and that I valued them. The way Jesus asked this question sounds strange to us because we no longer have servants or slaves.
Jesus is answering his disciples’ question about how to increase their faith. He has just told them the parable of the mustard seed and how the tiniest amount of faith is enough to accomplish great things for God. He is now telling them that to increase their faith they just need to do what is expected of them, do what they have been called to do, serve God.
Jesus is focusing on the servant, not the harshness of the master. He is saying that this is what the servant should expect to do! Jesus is, after all, a servant himself and tells this parable to help us understand our role as servants of God. He says that being a servant is a high calling and expectations are high. Nothing that we do as a servant of God can be considered to be above and beyond the call of duty. Jesus wants us to understand that we cannot earn God’s approval, nor does God need to repay us for our good work. That's not because God is unkind or ungrateful. It is because God already loves us fully and unconditionally.
We, in turn, are not to serve others for the thanks we get. We are to serve others, because that is the life God calls us to — knowing that we receive more by serving others than we give. We will benefit in increased faith.
As we know, being a servant and living the Gospel full-time is not as simple as it may sound. As much as we may want to serve God as Jesus did, we fall short.
But, we do have an example of one Christian who actually did live the Gospel — Francis of Assisi — who we commemorate today. Francis is well known not just because of his words and actions but because his words and actions mirrored the servanthood of Jesus.
I love Francis for a lot of reasons, one of which is that Francis was an ordained Deacon and remained a Deacon until his death. The word “deacon” comes from the Greek word "diakonia" which means servant. Francis removed himself from the wealthy lifestyle of his youth and adopted a radically simple life. His approach to a life of Christian service fits with Jesus’ words to us in today’s Gospel reading — that we are to serve with no thought of reward.
Francis demonstrated his servanthood and his love for God, by living in extreme poverty and dedicating his life to loving service of the poor. He is also known for his love for animals. He understood that our call to love and serve God is a call to love and serve all of God’s creation. He believed that all creatures on Earth — human and animal — were to be treated as beloved creatures of God.
In the first creation story in Genesis, God created animals first and then created us, humans, and gave us dominion over the animals. Dominion means we are to delight in other creatures, as God does, we are to respect and care for them.
We have taken our responsibility of dominion seriously when it comes to our pets. We do love our pets. They have become part of our families; we call them our children, our fur babies. We serve them the best foods, and spend lots of money to provide health care for them. We buy them toys for their play and exercise and plush beds for them to rest in. It breaks our hearts when we learn of animals that have been neglected or abused and we take action against the offenders.
But we have not always exercised the responsibility of dominion wisely when it comes to other animals. Dominion has too often become domination. We act as if creation is ours alone. We do with it as we please without taking the time to understand the effects our decisions and actions will have on the animals.
And animals often suffer because our decisions and actions. In our quest for more comfortable and easy life styles, we have mistreated, depleted, destroyed, crowded out, and neglected animals. We have not seen all animals as God’s beloved creatures. We have not shown respect nor have we set limits on ourselves so that all animals can live and thrive.
Creation is not just a collection of a wide variety of plants, animals and people. God created a wonderfully complex, interrelated and interactive system. Animals, plants and humans depend on each other for survival and protection. Our responsibility, to exercise dominion, requires us to understand and respect these interrelationships. It is important to understand how species interact within their ecosystems and how all creatures are affected by environmental and human influences. The plants and animal and humans within that system maintain the health of an ecosystem.
Let me give you a recent example. Just two weeks ago a study was released that focused on a drop in the number of wild birds in the US and Canada. The bird population, which was about 10.1 billion in 1970, had fallen to about 7.2 billion today. Nearly one third of the birds in our part of the world are gone. We now have 3 billion fewer birds in our neighborhoods, fields and farmlands. That means we have three billion fewer birds to eat bugs which we now have more bugs around that destroy our plants and more bugs, especially mosquitoes, that carry diseases. So we have few plants and more infected animals and humans. Everything in creation serves a purpose to help keep the system in balance and healthy. When creation is out of balance, plants and animals become sick, die, and even extinct.
The number of birds has decreased because they are losing their natural habitat due to our actions and they are finding it hard to survive as our neighbors. We haven’t done this on purpose, it isn’t because we don’t care. We have acted in carelessness without thinking about the effects of our actions on our animal neighbors. As servants of creation, it is our responsibility to have dominion, to serve the needs and care for all of creation not just our human needs.
We have the responsibility to behave in ways that will enable all of life to thrive together. We need to be aware of the effects of our actions on other creatures. We can work to establish and restore safe homes and habitats for all animals.
We are all called to be servants of God. It is the Christian way, to love our neighbors, Our feathered neighbors, our furred neighbors, our neighbors with scale and fins, and yes even our neighbors with eight legs or no legs all. Let us be good servants like Francis and exercise our dominion — not domination.
