Today's Scripture Reading (May 27, 2024): Philippians 2
The Butler Did It. The cliché's
origin is often attributed to Mary Roberts Rinehart, who wrote her novel, "The
Door" in 1930. The butler is revealed as the villain in the story, but
Rinehart never uses the phrase "The Butler Did It." Part of the
attraction to the idea of a servant being a criminal is that servants during
the Victorian Era were often overworked and underpaid. As a result, it wasn't
hard to imagine a servant murdering their self-centered and unconcerned superiors.
Butlers had been criminals in numerous earlier works, but Mary Rinehart grabbed
our attention for whatever reason.
As we read
this verse, what leaps off the page for me is this: The butler did it. Jesus
made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant. We have
expectations in life, but we don't expect much from a servant. Servanthood might
have been one of the most misunderstood aspects of Jesus. In fact, it is the
reason why some don't believe in the Jesus of Christianity. Islam holds that
Jesus was a great prophet but that he isn't God because God would never take on
the nature of the servant. We serve God; he doesn't serve us. The Pharisees
didn't believe that Jesus could be the Messiah because the Messiah would never associate
with the people with whom Jesus hung out. The people that Jesus chose to associate
with were the ones a servant would hang out with; they were the lower strata of
society.
Have you ever
watched a movie about eighteenth-century European society? If it depicts the
classes, you often know the character's class in an instant in how they carry
themselves, laugh, or smile (which for the poor was frequently through missing
or blackened teeth.) And the humor isn't quite what it should be in a refined
society. The lower classes often seem to laugh a little too loudly, and when I
am watching them, I am almost repulsed by their behavior. I seem to want to
identify with the kings and the higher classes. But Jesus took on the nature of
the servant, and he hung out with those people. And the Pharisees just couldn't
figure out why.
Churches can be
funny things. A few years back, a friend of mine was the pastor of a church
called Zion Baptist. The church has a bit of a problem with its name,
especially in a neighborhood that is becoming increasingly more Islamic because
Zion is the name of the enemy. But I am convinced that the churches with a more
significant problem might be the ones saddled with the name of First Church
because there is an air of expectation in them. I have been told that First
Churches need to be refined and solemn. At one First Church, a lady even
described why the traditional service needed to be at 11 and the contemporary
service needed to be earlier because extraordinary expectations were placed on
a First Church. If we were Northside Church, we could do anything we wanted,
but the sign outside read "First Church." First Churches have a special
kind of reserve. As I was listening, not just to this lady but to others in
other churches as well, there was this overwhelming feeling that what they were
telling me was that servants were not welcome in their churches, and that was a
problem because, according to the Bible, the butler did it. God took on the
very nature of the servant. He came and stepped into our world. Maybe one of
the questions we should be asking is this: would this kind of Jesus, with his
friends who were tax collectors and prostitutes and people who worked with
their hands and maybe had terrible teeth and laughed too loudly, would they be
welcome in our churches? Would Jesus, the butler of the world, feel comfortable
in our highly refined and solemn congregations? If the answer is no, we have a
big problem.
Tomorrow's
Scripture Reading: Philippians 3
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