Full Service?

Full Service?

Epiphany 4 (NL3) John B. Valentine
Luke 6:1-16 February 2, 2025

“FULL SERVICE”

So ... we’ve been at this for like a month now ... walking through stories about the earliest days of Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Gospel according to Saint Luke ...

• Pastor Pam started us off with a look at Luke’s account of the Baptism of Jesus ... and invited us to consider what it means to “walk wet” as baptized children of God .....

• Then the following week ... I got to play with that story about when Jesus disappointed his homies ... and pondered why it is that we like the eight-pound, six-ounce newborn Jesus more than the grown-up one .....

• And this past week ... Vicar Meagan chimed in ... and invited us to follow Jesus into the deep waters of our world ... even if we don’t like fishing.

But ... taken altogether ... I hear in those stories something of a bigger question.

A question that really is at the heart of Luke’s Gospel and a question that is at the heart of our lives as people of God ...

A question that has kind of been bugging me all week ...

“What does a God-shaped life really look like?”

And ... rather than dancing around that question ... I want to name that question and own that question and invite you to consider that question with me:

“WHAT DOES A GOD-SHAPED LIFE REALLY LOOK LIKE .....”

And ... in order to get our mental machinery moving in the right direction ... I want you to join me in thinking about ..... a bank .....

Yes ... you heard me right ... A BANK.

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Now I’m not talking about banks in general ...

I’m talking about A bank in particular ....

And I’m not talking about banks as big institutions ...

I’m talking about the particular branch of a particular bank over in Moraga at which Bethany and I banked for the past twenty years.

You see .... though I won’t go and defame certain financial institutions by name per se .... I’ve got to tell you ...

When we engaged the services of said bank twenty years ago ... back when we first moved here ... they billed themselves as a “full service” bank.

When we arrived ... they were proud to note that they had:

• Weekday and weekend office hours ... and
• Reasonably-priced safe deposit boxes ... and
• Both a walk-up and a drive-thru ATM ... and
• Access to their coin sorting machine ... and
• Medallion signature guarantees ... and
• A banker on site who could help you with a loan application ... and
• Tellers who actually knew you by name.

But then the access to the coin-sorting machine and the medallion signature guarantee service thing went away ...

And the tellers who knew you by name went away ...

And then ... in no short order after COVID hit ...

• The weekend office hours went away ... and
• The weekday office hours went away ... and
• The access to safe deposit boxes thing went away ... and
• Then they took out the ATMs ....
• And ... finally ... they just locked their doors.

But ... to this day ... this financial institution still bills themselves ... on their website .... as being a “full service” bank.

FULL SERVICE? REALLY???

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You see ... at least in part ... what the bank did ... what they’ve done ... is REDEFINE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE “FULL SERVICE”!

I mean ... to ME ... a “full service” bank is one that has

• Weekday and weekend office hours ... and
• Reasonably-priced safe deposit boxes ... and
• Both a walk-up and a drive-thru ATM ...

And all that other stuff I noted previously.

For THEM ... and I quote from their website ... “full service” means:

“Serving individuals, small- and middle-market businesses, large corporations, and governments with a full range of banking, investment management and other financial and risk management products and services.”

They didn’t like the old definition ... so they traded it in for a new one!

After all ... the OLD definition called them to be something that they really didn’t want to try to deal with anymore ...

So they just ditched the old definition and came up with a new one that better suited their purposes!

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Now keep that image in mind and let’s look at this morning’s Gospel lesson.

Jesus and some of his closest friends and followers are walking through the grainfields on a Saturday afternoon ...

And a couple of them get a bit of a ‘snack-attack’ ... and pluck a couple of heads of grain ... and rub them together in their hands to knock off the chaff ... and have a quick bite.

And ... immediately ... some Pharisees call for a party-foul!

Then ... again on a Saturday ... Jesus encounters a man who’s hand isn’t working so well.

And he calls the man over ... and invites him to stretch out his arm ... and he heals him.

And ... again ... some Pharisees call for a party-foul!

And Luke makes it clear that some of the people who are following Jesus are there just to watch if and when he messes up ... and breaks some rule or other.

But ... in response to both of those accusations ... Jesus points back to the original definition of those so-called Sabbath laws.

• You see ... back at the beginnings of time ... back in Genesis 1 ... after the work of Creation was over ... “on the seventh day” ... even God rested ... just to pause and admire the goodness of it all ... and to just rest.

• And ... in Exodus 20 ... when the Ten Commandments get handed down ... the third of them is all about the Sabbath being a day of rest.

• And ... in Exodus 23 ... when the Ten Commandments get explained in a bit more detail ... that Sabbath spirit is applied in the broadest possible sense ... so that even slaves and illegal aliens and donkeys and oxen get to participate in rest.

The Sabbath ... by its original definition ... was all about RESTORATION and RENOVATION and REST.

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But the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the other power players in Jewish society back in the day didn’t like that definition of Sabbath ...

They didn’t like it any more than the folks at the bank in Moraga liked the definition of “full-service bank” with which they’d been saddled ...

So they did exactly the same thing that the bankers did ... they concocted a new definition!

One that was all about RESTRICTION and more RULES.

By the new definition ... the Sabbath was no longer about

• People being refreshed and restored ... and

• People having time to refresh and restore their relationships with God and with their neighbors ... and

• The folks at the bottom of the social ladder getting to be refreshed and restored ... and

• Even slaves and beasts of burden getting a moment to be refreshed and restored ...

No ... the Sabbath went from being the pause that refreshes to being the pause that restricts.

And so they developed this extensive series of rules about all the things you CAN’T do on the Sabbath ... like:

• Carrying or burning ... or
• Writing or erasing ... or
• Cooking or washing ... or
• Knotting or untying ... or
• Plowing or planting ... or
• Building or demolishing ... or
• Harvesting or threshing ...

And the list goes on and on.

But ... in both his words and his deeds ... Jesus seems to be saying that the new definition of Sabbath that those folks had cooked up was just plain bad.

That they needed to remember that the Sabbath ... as originally defined ... was a gift ... not a guilt trip ....

That the Sabbath was made for people ... not the other way around.

And it seems to be that maybe what is at the core ... not just of this lesson ... but at the core of all of what Luke is trying to get after in the early chapters of his Gospel ...

Is that Jesus is peeling back bad re-definitions that people had ... over time ... used to misconstrue and misinterpret God’s Word ... and get back to the original definitions ... as God had first intended.

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Speaking of bad definitions ... do you perchance remember the question that I told you has been bugging me all week???

“WHAT DOES A GOD-SHAPED LIFE REALLY LOOK LIKE?”

I can’t help but wonder if ... maybe ... the problem that we face in answering that question is that we have done EXACTLY what that bank over there in Moraga did before the shut down ... and what the Pharisees had done in their redefinition of the concept of Sabbath.

Maybe we too have redefined the term “full service”.

I mean ... “service” ... being in service to God ... is at the heart of the first three of the Ten Commandments ...

And “service” ... being in service to our families ... is at the heart of the Fourth Commandment ...

And “service” ... being in service to those whom God would call our neighbors ... is at the heart of the last six of the Ten Commandments ...

And ... for that matter ... being in “service” to the created order is at the heart of the whole creation narrative.

If we take that all together ... it seems pretty clear than a God-shaped life is a life lived in service to God and our families ...

• and the community in which we live ...
• and the society in which we live ...
• and the world in which we live.

But in how many ways have we stood that original definition of “full service” on it head and made “full service” mean “all about us”???

You see ... in these lessons that we been looking at for the past three weeks or so ... and in the lessons that we’re going to read from Luke Gospel over the next two and a half months ...

Jesus is going to make it pretty clear that the Kingdom of God is not a full-service restaurant or a full-service bank or a full-service gas station ... for that matter.

The Kingdom of God doesn’t come into this world when and where our needs are bing met ... but rather the Kingdom comes when and where we are meeting the needs of others.

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So what DOES a God-shaped life look like?

Maybe we should take our lead from the One who said “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve ... and to give his life as a ransom for all.”

“Full Service?” was a sermon preached by Pastor John Valentine on the weekend of February 2, 2025 — the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany.  The text upon which it was/is based is Luke 6:1-16.  To access a copy of this week’s worship  bulletin, click here: Worship Order 20250202