Sermons
July 28, 2024 (Proper 12)
“I’m not here to do dishes.”
John 13:1-17
My first boss at the Council of Churches in Portland was an old-school kind of boss. He sat in the corner office and summoned me when he wanted something. He’d call me to come and go through paperwork with him at his convenience, without regard to what I was doing at the time. He would even call from time to time to have me make him a cup of tea and bring it to him.
He and the Deputy Director were actually on their way out when I started there. She was going to be the Chief of Staff at the National Council of Churches, and he had been called to lead Church World Service, and they were both going to be moving to New York.
I worked in the front office with two other young women, and it was our job to do things like set up for meetings and keep our break room and the downstairs kitchen area tidy. Once they left, there was a change of leadership, as you’d expect. We had an interim Executive Director, who divided his time between us and his church, First Christian Church in downtown Portland. Two other core staff people became co-Deputy Directors.
Our new Executive Director was roughly the same age as his predecessor, but had a very different way of doing things. I didn’t, for instance, have to get up and make him a cup of tea; he was more than capable of walking the three steps from his office to the breakroom to get himself tea, or coffee, or whatever he wanted to drink.
And we set up a rotation wherein all the people who worked in our office—except the Executive Director, who, as I mentioned, was only with us part-time—took a turn at kitchen duty. We had people who worked downstairs, and they mostly used the downstairs kitchen; and the folks in the upstairs offices used the break room in our area. The downstairs folks were to look after the downstairs kitchen, and the upstairs folks took their turn tidying the break room.
By that point I was supervising the front office staff, and another of my co-workers was responsible for setting up and cleaning up whenever we had a meeting (and we had a lot of meetings). It was her job to make sure dishes and food from those meetings were dealt with properly.
It wasn’t too long before the other organizations who had offices in our building and used the downstairs meeting rooms began to complain about the condition of the downstairs kitchen. Dishes weren’t getting washed but were being left in the sink, and the kitchen was generally a mess.
Knowing that one of the women I supervised was in charge of meetings, my boss, one of the two co-Deputy Directors, wrote me a memo to try to sort out what was going on. I asked, and my co-worker assured me that she was doing what she was supposed to do before and after meetings, but that there were lots of other dishes being left and lots of other food and stuff not being cleaned up.
So my boss went to the downstairs folks. The personnel director responded to her query by saying, “I’m not here to do dishes.”
That might have worked with the previous top brass, but not with the new Executive and Deputy Directors. I’m pretty sure the personnel director got the law laid down to her, because almost immediately the downstairs kitchen was being properly tidied up.
There’s not a whole lot that annoys me more than having somebody say, when asked to do something, “That’s not my job.” It seems like it’s almost inevitably said when someone is asked to do a task they consider beneath them, like the personnel director being asked to wash her and her colleagues’ coffee cups.
In our Scripture for today, Jesus makes it clear that’s not how his followers are supposed to act.
Jesus, God in the flesh, got down on the floor and washed his disciples’ feet—in that time and place a job usually done by the lowliest of servants. We who generally have well-fitting shoes and access to facilities for regular bathing may not understand just how nasty a job that would have been.
I’m not sure how much it’s true these days, but when I was a kid I spent most of my summer running around barefooted, wading in the creek behind our house—which, as we learned in science class, when our teacher had us bring in samples of the water to look at through a microscope, wasn’t exactly pristine, clean water—and stepping on who knows what. Have you ever stepped in really squishy mud and had it come up between your toes? That’s not even the grossest thing a person could step in!
I remember opening the back door and having my mom say, “You get back outside and wash your feet off before you come in this house!” After a day in the backyard, the creek, the street, all sorts of places, my feet were really, really nasty.
In Jesus’ day that would have been the case for just about everybody. If a person had shoes, they were generally sandals that didn’t exactly keep the dirt of the road off their feet. So when a person would come into a house, the first thing their host would do is either have a servant wash their feet or, if they didn’t have any servants, offer them a basin of water so they could wash their own feet.
It was a gross job—but Jesus did it.
It’s hard to imagine Jesus ever saying, “I’m not here to do dishes,” or “wash feet,” or whatever. And after he washed their feet, Jesus told the disciples that was how they were to act in the world, with one another, with anyone. Don’t ever place yourself above a task that needs to be done. Don’t ever pass up a chance to be of service to another person.
Early in the tenure of our current Pope, he did something that many people found unusual.
It’s customary on Maundy Thursday for the Pope, in keeping with what Jesus commanded in our reading for today, to wash people’s feet. But in the past, those have generally been twelve high-ranking church officials, cardinals, bishops, and such, with well-kept, generally clean feet. Pope Francis decided to do something different. He went to a women’s prison and washed the feet of some of the inmates—at least one of whom was a Muslim.
It might have been different in the Vatican, but when he was an archbishop in Argentina, this was his regular practice; there are pictures of him from that time kneeling at the feet of poor women, oftentimes with babies in their laps, to wash their feet.
When we aspire to a high position of power and authority, it’s easy to give in to the allure of having others serve us. It’s easy to fall into the habit of getting others to clean up after us, fetch us coffee, be at our beck and call at every moment.
But that is not how Jesus acted and it’s not how he wants us to act. When a follower of Jesus finds themselves in a position of authority, they are to use that authority not to get others to do things for us, but to be of service to those others.
If we have power and access to others in power, our service could be to speak on behalf of those who aren’t normally heard—folks who are poor, who are struggling, who live with chronic illnesses or disabilities, the folks who are doing the dishes and washing the feet. If we’re managers with people working for us, occasionally we might need to get in there and do the work alongside them—sometimes even in place of them.
I don’t know if my dad remembers this, but I recall a Sunday when we got to the cafeteria after church and found that the dishwasher at the pot sink had gone home sick. Normally on Sundays—lunch on Sunday was the busiest service of the whole week—my dad was out front greeting people, and now and then carrying a tray from the line to somebody’s table. But on this Sunday, when that dishwasher had had to leave, my dad went into the kitchen, took off his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and washed pots and pans—the absolutely nastiest job in the whole place.
There is a reason why people who worked at the cafeteria have told me, years and years later, that it was the best job and my dad the best boss they ever had.
Service is a spiritual discipline because it makes us more like Jesus. Last week I mentioned Philippians 2, where Paul, trying to help the folks in the church in Philippi sort out a disagreement that was threatening to split the church, quoted a hymn that was familiar to them. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” he says as he launches into the words of that hymn:
“who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness…”[1]
He was the embodiment of God’s very nature, the Fourth Gospel tells us: “…the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”[2]—which is the New Testament way of saying what God said about himself back in Exodus 34: “…abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”[3]
If Jesus was willing to set aside his claims to greatness we can’t even imagine, then how could we who follow him say, “I’m not here to do dishes”?
I would be tempted to argue that, perhaps behind only prayer and maybe worship, service is the most important of the spiritual disciplines. For it is in serving others that we are most like Christ.
[1] Philippians 2:5-7a
[2] John 1:14
[3] Exodus 34:6