“’His Master said, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little,  I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.’”

(Matthew 25:21)

Do you sometimes feel that this business of being religious, of attending church, and being a church member — is just not for you; that you have little talent for it; that you just don’t have the spiritual apprehension that other folks do?

Once, when we were holding a series of religious services at a country chapel among sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta cotton country, we went to call on a fisherman’s family living in a tent on the banks of the Mississippi River. When we invited them to come to the church the fisherman shook his head and shrugged his shoulders: “What chance is there for an ignorant fellow like me that can’t even read or write his own name?” Religion — the religious life — this man believed was just beyond his comprehension. He had no aptitude for it. He told us to count him out.

How many of us who aren’t literally illiterate feel at times as if we were spiritually so? Once I heard a successful businessman remark with a sigh of resignation: “There’s so much in the Bible that I can’t understand.” This man, having mastered the techniques of manufacturing, production, and high finance, had become baffled and discouraged in his religious life and had about reached the conclusion that religion was just not in his line.

And what one of us is there who has not been plunged into deepest despair by our weakness in temptation, our moral and spiritual failures? We have known the right. We have promised ourselves and our God, by all that is high and holy, to be true and fair and pure, but we have failed and fallen and made a sorry mess of our lives and hurt others. And in our hopeless despondency we have wondered if, after all, we possess what it takes of moral and spiritual stamina to live a religious life.

In such seasons of despair, brought on by the overwhelming sense of my mediocrity of talent, my spiritual dryness, my moral failures, it has been heartening for me to turn again to the gospels and read of Jesus’ interest in and affection for the average man, the ordinary person.

There was Lazarus, for instance, “so unimpressive and colorless a man that no human being could remember a single word he ever said, or anything he ever did. And yet, Jesus ‘loved Lazarus’ though blank non-entity some would have judged him. For Christ had always time for awkward or for commonplace or for impossible people whom others did not notice, time that was apt to keep itself up into hours.” (Arthur John Gossip — God and the Ordinary Man)

You remember the surprise of that woman in Samaria by Jacob’s well when Jesus spoke to her: “How is it,” she asked, “that you a Jew will speak to me, a Samaritan?” And how her wonder increased all the more that Jesus would take up any time with her when He let her know that He knew also of her moral uncleanness!

Then there was Zachaeus, that man of small stature and small reputation, peering through the leaves and branches of the sycamore tree, and yet Jesus saw in that plain man’s face something which made Him wish to spend, not just a few minutes, but a whole long evening in talk with Zachaeus.

Then there were those disciples of His whom Jesus chose to be with Him. Who were they? We are accustomed to think of them as St. Peter and St. James and St. John — with a halo of holiness always about them. But really there were in that group none of those whom the world had acclaimed great. Not one of the disciples has any place in history apart from his association with Jesus. The disciples, to the man, were very average, ordinary folk when Jesus found them, and yet He loved them and called them to follow Him.

It is heartening for me to trace in the gospel record Jesus’ interest in and affection for average, ordinary people. Perhaps at times you feel you are not a spiritual person, that you have no talent for the religious life. “You live in the rush and press of things, sordid material things, and must live there. And though you look toward Christ with admiration, you feel that with a plain, prosaic soul like you He can have no real friendship.

“Well, you are wrong. It is a mistake to talk about apostles and disciples as Saint this and Saint that. Because that fosters the idea that, while Christ could make something of such august souls, even He cannot be expected to do anything with our drab ordinariness. And yet (the record shows) the twelve were very ordinary men — not in the least like what they look in stained glass windows, but very human — John with his temper, and Peter scared into hot oaths, and Thomas lagging so far behind that he could hardly keep our Lord in sight, wait for him how Christ might. And yet these men were very dear to Christ, and He owed very much to them, as He, Himself, told God, looking at them the while with eyes shining with gratitude.” (Gossip — Ibid.)

Yes, it’s been a great comfort to me to turn to the gospels and read there of how much interest Jesus had in the average man. The gospels say the common people heard Him gladly — because, no doubt, He took such a glad, uncommon interest in them.

It’s also been a source of comfort to me to find in Jesus’ clear teaching that God accounts us winners or failures, not by comparing us with the rest of the field, buy by judging our faithfulness in making use for Him of what we have and what we are. Browning said: “My business is not to remake myself; but to make the absolute best of what God made.” That is just what Jesus taught.

You remember that when the rich men, out of their vast wealth, were putting large contributions into the Temple treasury and the poor widow came up timidly with her two small coins in the presence of all that folding money — Jesus said the widow had really made the greatest contribution of all. For the rich men out of their luxury and wealth had given only a small portion of what they had, what they could spare and would never miss, but the widow in her poverty had given all she had. With God it is not the amount we give that counts, but rather the proportion of what we have that we give.

As with our giving, so also with our living. The Lord of our lives who has endowed us with whatever talents we have knows full well what we have to offer to His service. He doesn’t judge our efforts with our one little talent against the remarkable record of that capable five talent person. In the parable when the man with two talents turned in to his Lord two other talents, he received the same reward and accolade of praise as did the five talent man who earned five other talents. To each servant the Lord gives highest praise in the same words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

“Faithful” — that is the key word with Christ, not only in the gospels, but also in the Book of Revelation where the living Christ says over and over again that this is the law of life: God judges us each one not in competition with what others may or may not do, but rather by the standard of our faithfulness in using for Him whatever He, in His infinite wisdom and providence, has given us.

It has also comforted me in life’s struggles, heartened me in the discouragements of church work, made me more courageous as I have seen the marshalling of formidable forces against the Kingdom of Righteousness, to note how Jesus, not only in Bible times, but ever since, has been taking ordinary folks with average endowments and working wonders by His grace with them. Yes, I’ve seen Him take people who have really little to offer but their faithfulness of devotion — that’s all — and make them blazing lights in the glorious galaxy of God’s saints.

Of course, you’ve read about Brother Lawrence in France in the 17^th century. Lowly and unlearned, he was a great awkward man who, as a footman in the employ of M. Fieubert, broke up everything he put his hands on. Later, as a soldier he showed no promise and won no recognition. But Christ found Brother Lawrence. He became a lay brother among the barefoot Carmelites. His daily work was scrubbing the kitchen pots and pans for the brotherhood — it seems that was all he was fit for — but such was the faithfulness of his devotion to Christ that this simple man made new discoveries in the science of “practicing the presence of God” and lead thousands of people into a new richness of experience of God in their daily work.

And Father Damien was no illustrious person. He was just a Belgian peasant lad who stepped up and took his brother’s place when illness prevented the brother’s going as a missionary to Hawaii. Later, when the leper island of Molokai became a hell-hole of lawlessness, strife and cruelty, Father Damien again volunteered to step into the breech — to go live with those poor doomed people. The lepers had no houses, no gardens, no government, no hospital, no church; and Damien had no special skill but the love of Christ which constrained him, so he became their doctor, judge, carpenter, gardener, dietitian, gravedigger, confidant, and finally — living among lepers — he became a leper himself.

Yes, the world knows of these men and others like them, meagerly endowed, but magnificent in loyal devotion to Christ, like Mother Teresa in India today, and of their tremendous impact for good upon the world.

But it is not these well-known average folks whose devotion to Christ has now made them famous that most greatly comforts and encourages me, but rather the plain ordinary folks I’ve known personally, seen in my own experience the living Christ take and work wonders with.

I keep remembering that banker who was more interested in making men than he was in making money. Yes, he’d gamble a loan on some unlikely fellow who’d never had a chance — whose only collateral was ambition and a willingness to work. And so he made men — that was this banker’s business. I was at his home when he died — just before dawn one cold December day. Only the members of the family and the physician were with us. The front door bell rang and, when I went to answer it, I found a man standing on the steps in a leather jacket and overalls. “Isn’t this Mr. Frank Harbison’s house?” he asked. “Yes, it is,” I said. “Well,” the man replied, “I was just going to work and I saw all these cars out here and the lights on in the house and, it being so early, I thought there might be some trouble here.” “You’re right,” I said, “Mr. Frank just died.” He bowed his head and turning back into the darkness said, “Well, I’ve just lost the best friend I ever had.”

And then I keep remembering a courageous woman who through the years had been the backbone of her family — really the man of the house. All week long she worked in a grocery store and nursed and kept house for her invalid mother at night. And yet she found time to remember every little child’s  birthday in the neighborhood and what they liked, believing evidently with Masefield that:

“ — he who gives a child a treat

Makes joy bells ring in heaven’s street.”

Every Sunday she was in her place at church, bright, smiling, hopeful. One of the elders in the church remarked to me when we saw her at church the Sunday after her little Mother died: “Every time I see her I think of the title to that book, Valiant Was the Name for Carrie.”

Neither can I remember without a jacking up of my laggard spirits that dear old deaf saint who couldn’t hear a word that was spoken or a note that was sung, but came every Sunday to church saying that at least she could come and pray and see her friends and show the world where her love and loyalty belonged.

No one could put it better than William Alexander Percy did in his verse:

I have seen Mary at the cross

And Mary at the tomb

And Mary weeping as she spread her hair

In a leper’s room.

But it was not in Bethany

Or groping up Calvary Hill

I learned how women break their hearts to ease

Another’s ill.

Compassionate and wise in pain,

Most faithful in defeat,

The holy Marys I have watched and loved

Live on our street.

Arthur John Gossip said that Scotland “owed its freedom to the fact that at the crisis of a battle the camp followers came rushing down the hill to fling themselves into the thick of it, whereupon the enemy, thinking this is a new army broke and fled. Just what those unarmed menials meant to do against the mailed knights and the terrible archery of England, even they, perhaps, had not a notion. Only they couldn’t keep out of it, could die at least, and so encumber the hostile advance by their dead bodies, piled in heaps. And doing what they could, poor futility though it looked, they left a tremendous mark on history and saved a nation’s soul. And if we did for Jesus what we could, we plain, unspiritual, ordinary folk, what would there not result?”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Almighty God, we thank Thee: for Thy manifold mercies to us and to all mankind. For the gift of life in body and in spirit, we thank Thee; for health and strength, for our senses and a sound mind, we thank Thee; for house and home, for food and clothing, for love and friendship, we thank Thee; for a place in our country, and in the human brotherhood, and in the great kingdom of Christ, we thank Thee. Lord, help us to value all Thy mercies more and more; and so to use them that we may enter fully into the joy of Jesus our Lord.

Hear us, O Lord, as we make supplication for our daily needs. Guard us and our dear ones amid the perils and dangers of this troubled world. Give us strength in our labors, wisdom in our perplexities, courage in our trials, patience in our sorrows, and a pure heart in all our joys. Grant us the serenity to accept things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

We pray for all who are in trouble and distress of body and soul, for all poor and sick and lone folk, for those whose hearts are broken because death has suddenly robbed them and turned their joy into aching emptiness, their light into darkest gloom.

Our days are in Thy hands, O God. Thou hast said to us: “See that thou livest well, and I will attend to how long thou shalt live.” Set behind and before, O Lord, by the mysteries of life and the mysteries of death, teach us to live more and more for the eternal things in the midst of the temporal, to be faithful unto Thee with the talents Thou hast given us that when for us the end cometh we may hear Thee say: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Savior. Amen.

• Scripture Reference: Matthew 25:14-30 • Secondary Scripture References: Matthew 19:1-10 • Subject : Our responsibility to make the most of our endowments and to use them to the noblest ends; 631 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: Begin Church Loyalty Campaign • First Preached: 9/26/1948 • Last Preached: 6/16/1991 • Rating: 3 • Book/Author References: God and the Ordinary Man, Arthur John Gossip; , Robert Browning; , William Alexander Percy