Joe Paterno passed away Sunday morning.

Twelve weeks ago, Paterno would have been remembered as a legendary coach who helped to put Penn State on the theoretical map, both athletically and academically. Instead, his legacy is hindered by the unthinkable child abuse scandal involving former coach Jerry Sandusky, which forced Paterno’s termination.

While I have criticized Penn State for a lack of action in reporting the abuse, Paterno should be remembered for his accomplishments and successes, which are numerous. I believe Paterno made a very big mistake in not reporting the abuse, but I believe he recognized this and was remorseful of his inaction and should be forgiven.

Instead, too many are choosing to celebrate his death as “poetic justice.” We live in a world, today, that rejoices in a person’s failures, especially if that person believed in doing things with “honor.” What does it say about us, as a people, if we rejoice in a person’s failures, instead of rejoicing in a life? Or when we cheering a person’s fall from grace instead of seeking their redemption?

In time, the scandal at Penn State will not be the second paragraph in Paterno’s biography. It will always be a part of his biography, but soon his accomplishments will shine and he will be remembered as the great coach and humanitarian that he was.

Yesterday, I was wanting to party like it was 1995. Instead, I grimaced like it was 1991.

Last night, I watched the NFC Championship game in anticipation that my beloved San Francisco 49ers were going back to the Super Bowl. Instead, I’m wondering if cheering for Madonna to be on key at halftime is an acceptable option.

The 49ers looked like they were on their way to their sixth Super Bowl for most of the game. However, two key mistakes, an inability to score in pressure situations, and unfortunate non-calls by the officiating crew led to the Giants winning 20-17 in overtime.

Even though the 49ers lost, I have a hard time as a longtime fan it is hard to be too disappointed. Going from 6-10 to the brink of a Super Bowl appearance was an unexpected surprise. The 49ers have a great future, however some questions will need to be asked in the offseason. Even though he led the team to win against the Saints, is Alex Smith the long term answer? Is Peyton Manning a short-term option? Are there wide receivers available in the draft or free agency that can produce right away?

The 49ers will be back in the Super Bowl again. Yesterday proved that it will sooner rather than later.

As for the Super Bowl itself, I’m not that excited about the game. It has nothing to do with the fact the 49ers are in the game. I’m just not excited about the Patriots (a team I do not like) going against the Giants (a team I only rooted for in 1991 in the Super Bowl because of WVU’s Jeff Hostetler). I’ll watch, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Part of my displeasure with the match-up is that the national media (ESPN) will hype the Super Bowl rematch, Tom Brady, and Eli Manning. It will be hard to watch.

My early predication is that the Giants will win 24-14. I believe they are playing the best right now, and the Patriots have shown several weaknesses this season.

It was a warm day. The sun was shinning. There was a light breeze in the air. The sound of the water hitting the rocks along the shore was soothing to the ear. Fishermen could be seen up and down the shore carrying their catch of fish for the day. Children were laughing and enjoying a simple day by the sea.

But she was not laughing. There she sat on that rock, amid the laughter and the normalcy of a warm day, full of despair and without hope. She was in pain. She was hurting. She was deeply sick.

For 12 years, she had suffered from a deep hemorrhage, an unspeakable kind of hemorrhage. Each day for 12 years, she would wake up feeling gross and dirty. She felt the pain of constantly bleeding. She felt the hurt of being cast aside by her friends and family. Ceremonially, she was considered unclean. She would not have been allowed in the synagogues, which was the central place of worship and community fellowship. Anything she touched would have been considered unclean, so she would not have been able to be with a husband or her family. She was alone.

She was broke as well. In trying to find an answer to her sickness, she went to every doctor she could find. She spent what little she had on her desire to be well. Unfortunately, no one had any answers. The only thing that came out of these visits were more pain, more bleeding, and financial ruin.

On this beautiful day, there she sat on the rock. Completely alone. Completely broke. Fearful that her bleeding might never stop. She was tired and discouraged. Where could she turn for help?

In the distance, there was a sense of excitement in the air. A crowd was forming. Everyone had stopped what they are doing and were moving toward where a small boat has just docked. She looks at the boat and notices that a man gets out. He was not alone. There are several other men with him – about 12, she counts. She can’t really make out who it is and why the people are gathered around him. Her eyes stays focused on him until she can figure out who he is and why everyone was so excited he had arrived.

As the crowd came closer, she noticed this man was in the center of the crowd. He was smiling and talking with the people. Eventually, she begins to recognize him. It was Jesus. She had heard so much about him. Even though she had never laid eyes on him, she knew who he was. His reputation in the community went before him. She had heard the stories of his powerful teaching and the love he shared with those the religious leaders said were unworthy of being loved. She knew the powerful acts he had done and the people he had healed. Even though it happened on the other side of the lake, she had heard people talk about how he cured a man who had been demon-possessed. She remembered the claims people made about Jesus. They said he was the long expected Savior. Even more, that he was the living Son of God who was filled with the power that comes from God, because he is God.

Her despondency begins to turn into hope. She recognizes she is in the presence of the Living Lord. She stands up from her rock and goes to join the crowd. As she takes her first step, she feels the brush of a man running past her. It was Jairus, the leader of the synagogue. She wondered why he was in a hurry. Was he another member of the Pharisees who wanted to challenge Jesus on his teaching? As soon as she thinks this, she notices Jairus do something unusual for a leader of his stature. He falls at Jesus’ feet. He had come to seek mercy from Jesus. Why? Jairus begins to tell Jesus about his daughter. She is sick and dying. The woman sees the compassion and concern of a desperate father. He doesn’t want to lose his daughter. He needs Jesus to bring her back to wholeness. He places his hope, his faith, that Jesus is able and willing to do just that.

Jesus agrees to go with Jairus. The first stages of healing are initiated. There are two main elements we can see simply in the fact that Jesus decides to go with Jairus to see his daughter. First, there is an opening of a relationship between Jairus and Jesus. A relationship is central to any healing. It sets the framework for Jesus and the Holy Spirit to bring healing in an individual, as Brad Long and Cindy Strickler write. Many of the healings Jesus did has this introductory element of establishing a relationship. Often, it is someone coming to Jesus to seek healing, as is the case here, and also the blind men in Matthew 9. The second is that Jesus has compassion for the child and the father. Compassion and love, which flows out of Jesus’ nature as the very Son of God, is prominent in every healing. One of the most powerful verses of Scripture is John 11:35, which we find in the middle of the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. After seeing the tomb, “Jesus wept” in a powerful expression of his love and compassion for all people. It is with that same compassion and desire for all to come into a relationship with Him that Jesus goes to see Jairus’ daughter.

Jesus doesn’t go alone. He is followed by the large crowd that had circled around him. The woman is there in the crowd. She’s seen everything that has taken place. She wants that same healing that she knows the girl will soon receive. She doesn’t want to take away the girl’s healing. She just wants to be whole and healed too. She thinks if she could just get close enough to Jesus to touch his robe, then she would be healed. She knew others had simply touched him and were healed.

So, she pushes her way towards Jesus. She’s not concerned about making others unclean by touching them. She just wants to get close to Jesus. After pushing her way through the crowd, she gets close enough to touch him. With a sense of desperation, hope, and excitement, she quickly reaches out and touches the edge of his robe. Immediately, she is healed. The bleeding stops. Imagine her joy in that moment. See the tears flowing from her eyes. Experience the overwhelming sense of relief in the depths of her soul. For the first time in 12 years, she felt free and pure.

As she is feeling this sense of joy, Jesus stops his journey to Jairus’ daughter. He felt that healing power had gone forth from him and touched someone. Jesus begins to look around to see who might have touched him. The Disciples are looking around at a loss. They knew Jesus had been touched by multiple people. In fact, they were a little frustrated, because they knew the mission was to go to Jairus’ daughter. There was no time to sit around trying to figure out who among the hundreds had touched him.

But, Jesus wanted to talk with the person. He needed to. He had to put the healing in its proper perspective. There was a quasi-magical reason why the woman touched Jesus’ robe. In those days, there was a belief that touching the clothes of a religious leader, who had power from God, would bring healing to the individual. Paul has the same experience in Acts 19, when people were healed of diseases merely by their handkerchiefs touching his skin. Jesus wanted to make sure the woman knew the real reason for her healing. It wasn’t because she touched him. It was because of God’s compassion and desire for her to be healed. It was a free gift of God’s grace given in response to her faith. Healing is an expression of compassion, but it is also an expression of God’s power and the authority given to Jesus as the Son of God. Together with the Holy Spirit, Jesus is able to heal the sick, raise the dead, and give sight to the blind. On this day, the power that is in his nature as the Son of God comes out of him and touches the woman in the area of her greatest need and brings healing to her body. In that moment, she experienced the fullness of the Kingdom of God and felt the promise of a time of no illness, tears, or pain, all of which came to her through the power of God, expressed freely through Jesus’ love.

Hearing that Jesus was looking for her, the woman begins to walk back toward him. The joy she felt just moments ago has been replaced with a sense of fear. She is trembling. She has no idea what Jesus is going to do. Will he be mad at her? Will he put the sickness back on her? Will she never be healed now? She had no idea. Courageously, she walks forward and falls at Jesus’ feet. With a sense a humility and an act of confession in her faith in Christ, she tells Jesus why she touched him. She tells him her story and the pain of 12 years of being sick. She merely wanted to touch him, because she knew that within him was healing, within him was grace, and within him was hope and love.

Jesus then looks at the woman and tells her why she was healed. It was her faith in him that he is the Son of God. God honored her faith by giving her the gift of healing. Healing is an act of compassion, as an expression of the power of God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and it is put in its proper context for a future relationship. In these words, “Daughter your faith has made you well,” Jesus invites the woman into a journey of faith. He calls her a daughter, a child of God. She is no longer abandoned and alone. She is now adopted in God’s family, because of her faith in Christ.

Not only this, Jesus starts her new life with a blessing. She is sent away with a command of peace. Jesus is telling her she is now whole. She will never suffer again. Christ, through her faith in him, has made her whole. We don’t know what happens to her from this moment on, but we know her life is never the same. Her life is a new journey from that day forward.

On this day, in these few moments, this woman felt the depths of Jesus’ compassion to freely give of himself so others might be healed and free from their diseases. We do not worship a God who sits on the sidelines while the world hurts. We worship a God who is right there in the midst of our pain and our hurts to bring forth healing. Sometimes it is instantaneous and other times it happens over the course of a lifetime. No matter when or how healing comes, it expresses God’s compassion, and his power, and points us back into relationship with him so that he will receive the glory and praise.

Today, we have been touched by this powerful story. Maybe you have seen yourself in this story. Maybe there is something in your life that you need Christ to touch and bring healing. Maybe you know something about someone else who needs healing that only comes from Christ. I don’t do this often, but I want to encourage you during our final song to find yourself at the altar. Spend time with God in prayer and seek his face in an act of faith and dependency on Him in our lives.

May today be the day that healing comes to us all, no matter our need and no matter our situation, just like it came to that woman so long ago.

In the last few years, our forms of communication have been dominated by Facebook and Twitter. We are inundated with status updates, tweets, friend requests, and follows. So much so, that our traditional forms of media will report on a tweet or a Facebook status from a celebrity, politician, or athlete as if it is major news. Case in point, was yesterday’s tweet from Rob Lowe suggesting that future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning would retire.

The evolution to a social media world is to be expected. In the last 100 years, we have seen a gradual progression in mass communication that has led to this point. What was once an industry, and a culture, dominated by the written word, we are becoming more and more engaged by the visual and the instant.

Now, this has some advantages. We can get information out quicker to people than in previous generations. We also have more freedom and flexibility in sharing. This comes as a great advantage in marketing and getting the word out to people about events and ideas, especially in the life of the church. The social media platforms gives the church more access to the people it desires to reach. This is a positive that cannot be understated.

However, social media and our technological world comes at a cost. Whether it is blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of communication, we have lost the personal interaction that is important in social relationships. While social media does well in bringing people together, it can also bring people apart. So often, we can see people on the Internet not as an individual but as a blank avatar. This allows for us to say things to someone who we likely would not say in a face to face conversation, especially if we disagree with something they say. Because we cannot see the individual we feel we have more freedom in criticizing or denouncing one’s views. It’s not the person we are writing against, but their representation on the Internet. This type of approach reduces the humanity of the other. It’s not just being done by those outside of faith, but also by those who are leaders in the church as well. We have all fallen victim to seeing profiles on social media as formless representations instead of a human interaction.

Our social media world also interacts with our personal world. We are becoming a people who struggle with face-to-face interaction. Our dinner conversations are more wrapped up in looking at our iPhones than seeing the face of the individual who is sitting next to us. We are all guilty of this, and I put myself in that category as well. Personal relationships must be fostered through things that social media cannot give. Relationships need eye contact, touch, and personal emotion, all of which we ignore if we focus only on technological forms of expression and communication.

This is not a new development. The past few decades have been a slow decline in the amount of personal face-to-face interactions we share with others. Social media only enhances what has been a growing problem of seeing the self as more important than the other.

Each of us must be willing to place boundaries on how we use the Internet. Some of us have not, and it causes severe problems, especially among our teens with cyberbullying. Parents must teach their children how to set proper frameworks for being on the Internet and monitor their children’s use of Social Media. As adults, we must be mindful of what we would say and be willing to stop ourselves from saying things we would not say in a personal and public setting. In the church, we must balance our engagement with the Internet with our promotion of humanity. If our engagement with social media, or other forms of communication, hinders our call to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ then we must question our motives and our actions on these platforms.

Social media is important and will play a role in our communication forms for years to come. We must engage this platform better than we are, today, and teach the proper usages of this important communication tool. If we do not, we run the risk of continuing the downward slope in personal communication. We cannot lose the personal in our quest for technology. If we do, we must just lose ourselves in the process.

Earlier this morning, some friends and I discussed the future of the church. We all have ideas and solutions to what is going on in the church today. It was a great conversation, and it inspired me to think more about the issue facing the church. We live in an ever-changing world, and an increasingly post-Christendom world. Some have accepted this, but some have not. But, all in the church recognize there is something different about the world we live in.

This recognition requires a response. For too long, our response has been like the church in Sardis. In Revelation 3, we see that the church in Sardis has a great “reputation for being alive,” but the opposite is true. It is actually dead. Even though the church does a lot of great things in the community and has the looks of being alive, it is spiritually dead.

We do not have to look hard to see this is the case for the church. There are several concerns we can touch on.

Too often, the church is more interested in being the United Way than the body of Christ. We want to be known by the good deeds we do in a community. The United Way is a great organization and does a lot of good to help strengthen our communities. But, something is missing. The United Way is great, but it is not about sharing the Gospel.

We cannot disconnect good deeds from our faith and proclamation of Jesus Christ. The two go hand in hand. We must serve the poor and less fortunate, but it should flow our of our relationship with Christ. Acts of mercy and justice should not ignore the proclamation of the hope that flows from Jesus Christ. What good is it to give someone a blanket if we are unwilling to share the hope of Christ with that person? The only thing we have to offer is our hope in Jesus Christ, and everything else flows out of that hope, including our acts of mercy and kindness. Our mission and ministry must be a both/and not an either/or.

Another prevalent response is to ignore the true Gospel, which is the message and hope of Jesus Christ. We’ve replaced the Gospel with a personal feel-good message that places the individual in the role of God. Our sermons, our teachings, and our music is directed at a personal focus to faith. When we do so, we are offering a psychological focus that is merely a self-help guide to life. There is no true and everlasting hope in self-help and self-glorification models of faith.

We need the Gospel and we need to share it with our people. The Gospel is the true message and hope of Jesus Christ. To proclaim any other story above this runs counter to our purpose of worship, which is to offer God praise and glory. If we are unwilling to tell the story of Christ to someone, then the question should be asked of us of why not?

Another response the church has, today, is we have a protectionist mode of ministry. We are that because the world is different, we must hide in the church. There it is safe and we can strengthen the people. Because we can’t relate to the world, we are going to focus on ourselves and be content.

The church should be about making disciples and equipping the saints for ministry in the church. It is an important to ground men and women in their faith so they may be rooted in the love of Christ. As a pastor, it is something I take seriously. However, we cannot stay only where it is safe. We must be sent out into the world to serve God. We must be willing to engage the world. This means going to where the people of God are and purposely be the witnesses of Christ to them. They will not come to us, so we must go to them just as Christ went to the people.

This means, most likely, being adaptable in our worship practices (not our beliefs or teachings) to reach people. If holding a contemporary service is the best way to reach the people, then do it if that is where God is calling your church. The same with sports ministries, or adapting the time of corporate worship, or, even, have church in unusual places like a park. The church that is creative will be the church that is reaching people for Christ.

Finally, we have to stop fighting amongst ourselves. Another aspect of the protectionist model is to argue that only people with similar beliefs about Christ are maintaining the true Gospel. Doing this denounces the church’s ecumenical call in favor of holding up one’s own understandings above others. Sadly, in this area we look a lot like the world. We will stomp, kick, and call others names if they do not share the same beliefs about Christ that we do. We will claim heresy on things that are not heresies, because we cannot stand not having the “real truth.” Heresies are not differences of opinion. They are teachings that go against the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We can have differences of opinion in the church, which means different theological perspectives. We cannot have heresies, which proclaim falsehoods about Christ.

If we cannot get along with each other, how do we ever expect people to reach out to us? That is something for all of us to think about.

I believe we are called, as a church, to be the global representation of the body of Christ. The church is the ongoing ministry of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are all one body together. As a Wesleyan, there are areas where I have a difference of opinion with Calvinists. However, this does not prevent me from working together with my Calvinist friends to share the message of Christ. More than ever, we must work together to share the love of Christ.

As a church, both locally and corporately, we must be spiritually alive. What I offer are merely suggestions on how to improve. Ultimately, it will only happen when churches, and its members, are willing to be led by the Holy Spirit, and are grounded and rooted in our faith in Jesus Christ, and being obedient to the Father in all things. That is what makes us alive, both personally and church universal.

I hope and pray for a revival in the church, a revival that spreads across denominations and faith traditions. It is needed. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

There is much we could focus on, but we will limit ourselves to a few topics during these next five weeks. We will look at his role as a teacher. His work as a healer. The counter-cultural nature of his ministry. We will examine the fullness of Christ, who is both fully human and fully divine.

There are multiple purposes for this series. First, it helps us prepare for the season of Lent. As we understand the fullness of Christ, we will better understand and appreciate why Christ died for us, and we’ll better understand the full impact of the resurrection.

As well, when we are grounded in our love and understanding of Christ, it helps us to not be swayed by bad teaching and theology. There is much in the way of bad theology and teaching today when it comes to the Son of God. We have made Jesus be what we want him to be to fit our needs. We place Jesus in a box, so to speak, to make him more comfortable and approachable. We want Jesus to be more Republican or Democratic. We want Jesus to be nicer. We want Jesus to be cool. We want Jesus to be our “boyfriend.” By doing this, we’ve separated Jesus from the Gospel and used him as a tool to promote our own understandings, ideas, and desires.

We must never disconnect Christ from the Gospel, for the Gospel proclaims the truth of Christ’s love – why he came to earth, how he points us to the Father, and how he is present today through the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Today, we begin to wrestle with the fullness of Christ. We do so with one of the most difficult aspects of Jesus’ ministry – the call to be servants. It’s a difficult call. This isn’t because we haven’t heard about Christ’s servant nature. We have, and those stories are central to our faith. It is difficult, because it runs counter to our basic human nature and it is uncomfortable. To be a servant means we must deny our own wishes, ideas, and desires and see others as more important than ourselves. To be a servant means taking on the posture of humility so that we might share the love of Christ with others.

We all want to be servants in our lives, but, to be honest, each of us struggle daily with being servants in the name of the Lord. This is because to be a servant is to run completely counter to the world’s message. The world has unique ideas about service. Its message says we do things so that we can receive the honor and glory. In other words, we do things so that we can receive accolades and respect from others. We give money to causes, because we can receive a tax break or because someone told us it is what “good people” must do. Service and helping the world is not about our neighbor. It is about us.

Our culture has even given us an unique perspective on leadership. Those with true power and influence are those in the highest positions of authority – politicians, teachers, and pastors. Because these people hold an area of influence, we look to them for guidance and direction. We should. Unfortunately, this trust is misused by those who are more authoritarian in their approach. We have a leadership problem. It occurs when leaders, whether it is by their place of authority or by the position given to them by culture, such as celebrities, consider themselves as the helpers of the “little people,” without having true concern for those whom they desire to help.

With the world’s ideas of service and leadership so prevalent in our midst, it is no wonder that we in the church struggle with being leaders who are servants. We have little understanding of true service and true leadership, and we struggle to put these concepts together our life and in our witness of Christ’s love and desire for the world.

Fortunately, we are not alone in struggling with being leaders who are servants. The Disciples struggled with it as well, and they were right next to Jesus, who is the greatest example of a servant leader. The Disciples struggled with placing these concepts of service and leadership together, just as we do in our own lives. Many of the questions between the Disciples and Jesus centered on this idea of how to truly live out our call to be leaders who are servants.

In our passage today, the Disciples are, once again, trying to understand this idea of being leaders who are servants. This time, they do so in the Upper Room during the Last Supper with Jesus. They were attempting to figure out who would be the greatest in the Kingdom of God. It’s a scene that is much similar to Mark 10:34-35 when James and John ask Christ to give one of them the privilege of sitting at his right hand. Here, however, the disciples knew that Jesus was inaugurating the Kingdom God on Earth. They knew someone had to be in charge, so why not one of them? The Disciples wanted the authority of leadership and wanted to be seen as great among their fellow people.

Jesus doesn’t give into their wishes. He desired something different from them, and desires something different from us. Jesus wanted them, and wants us, to be great, but not by the world’s standards. That is what the Disciples, and perhaps we as well, were attempting to do. Jesus explains a contrasting situation that we see in our world today. To follow Jesus’ line of thinking, leadership to the world is about lording our acts of charity and good will to others because they are the “little people” who “can’t help themselves.”

Jesus says the world sees greatness as what we can do for them, because the world needs us to live better lives. It is a self-focused way of living and leadership that says we are the answer to the world’s problem, and without us, others would have nothing. When we say this, we place ourselves above the needs of others and remove any potential for relationship and sharing of life with others. Servant leaders share life in humility with others in order to bring the hope and the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all.

True leadership, and true greatness, Jesus points out, is about something else. To be truly great, to be true leaders, we must be willing to lay down our lives for others. We must see others as more important than ourselves. We must share our faith in acts of love, kindness, and mercy out of our common humanity that comes from God and love for one another. We must be leaders who are servants.

This means we must live our lives as servants in the name of the Lord. It is a style of leadership, and a way of life, that says it is not about us. It is not about our glory or having our name proclaimed. Being leaders who are servants is about humbling ourselves by taking on the lowest position. This is so others might be cared for and see Christ’s love working in us to impact the lives of others. We are servants who give Christ the glory, for he is worthy of our honor and praise.

Please do not think that I believe the call to be a servant is only for those in places of leadership. It is for all of us. Jesus’ call for us to be people who are humble isn’t limited to those in places of authority. Our entire life is to be wrapped up in this idea of serving others out of the basis of our faith in Christ. We are called to be servants in all aspects of our lives, whether it is in our homes, our schools, or our careers. We are all called to be leaders who are servants.

Thankfully, Christ shows us the way to this type of leadership. The entire New Testament is filled with Jesus’ interactions with the people of that time that highlights this servant nature to leadership. Paul writes in Philippians 2 that Christ did not see his divinity as something to be handled as a prized trophy. Instead, he took the position of a servant and came into the world. We are called to imitate Christ by being servants who are obedient to the call of Christ to see others as more important.

Servant leadership, Christ shows us, is about taking on the position of a server in order to care for the needs of others. He does this so beautifully in John 13. Before the Disciples enter the Upper Room, Jesus washes each of their feet. He cares for them in the most humblest of ways, because of his love for them. No one would expect the leaders of this world to get on their hands and needs to do the most menial tasks. They would consider it beneath them. Yet, Christ says it is his honor to humble himself, to care for the needs of others, to show his love by caring for them.

Christ shows that being obedient to God is not about us. It is about taking on the lowliest of positions in order to serve the needs of others and share the message of Christ’s love to all people. Those who have done just this are truly remarkable people who are worthy of our admiration and respect. I can think of Mother Theresa, who took on the position of a servant to help the poor in her native India. Even parents who were less concerned about their own needs in order to provide for their children.

For us, we are called to do those things that no one would expect us to do so that we might share the Gospel of Christ’s love with others. Where are the places we might be called to humble ourselves? Where are the places we might walk in a posture of humility? Who are the people who need to see a dedicated group of believers truly practice and believe that Christ called them to serve instead of to be served?

The call to be servants may seem like a high and lofty goal. It may seem impossible to deny ourselves in order to follow Christ’s path of obedience, even to the point of death on a cross. Yet, when we deny ourselves and take on this posture of humility, some great things can happen. It is not about anything we did, but about God simply working in us and through us to inspire others to the cross.

There are some final points we should make regarding this nature of servant leadership.

We cannot do this alone. Leaders who are servants are not lone creatures. When we are out on our own, we can easily take the message about being humble in life and in service to others and make it a point of separation and bragging. Instead of being concerned about the needs of others, we can become more concerned about having others “look at me” and distancing ourselves from people who “are not doing it like I would do it.”

We must be servants together in community. There is a reason Jesus sent his disciples out in pairs to serve others. We need partners who will help us and guide us. We also need the encouragement of others to help us, especially in discouraging times. Henri Nouwen writes that “We cannot bring good news on our own.” We need each other. This is one of the great strengths of our connectional system in the United Methodist Church. We are not alone in ministry and service to others. As we go out to serve, how can we partner with each other in our church, our charge, and also with the greater witness of believers throughout our community? This is a question for all of us to think about.

This must be an act of mutuality. This is probably the hardest aspect of serving. We must see the other as valuable, because they are created in the image of God. So often, we have the problem of seeing the person we are serving as “less than.” Instead of taking this posture, we must see them as someone of value and as our friend. This means forming relationships with the people we are serving, so that we might learn from them and share life with them. What good is it to serve if we are unwilling to share our lives with one other? The life of Christ is about relationships, and we must follow into that as we serve and interact with others.

As we go forth today, we will each have opportunities to inspire others and to make an impact in someone’s life. How will we do so? My hope is that we will do so as true witnesses of Christ’s character, who are servant leaders. When we do, I promise you true opportunities will be created and true sharing of life will take place.