Contemplation Corner: “Training for service. . .”

“Training for service is not a training to become rich but to become voluntarily poor; not to fulfill ourselves but to empty ourselves; not to conquer God but to surrender to his saving power. All this is very hard to accept in our contemporary world, which tells us about the importance of power and influence. But it is important that in this world there remain a few voices crying out that if there is anything to boast of, we should boast of our weakness. Our fulfillment is in offering emptiness, our usefulness in becoming useless, our power in becoming powerless.” 
-Henri Nouwen – Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

by Pastor Donnie Brooks
Marcellus United Methodist Church
pastordonnieb@outlook.com

   Doesn’t it seem so very counterintuitive that we should “offer emptiness” to be filled and to fill the lives of others? Or that our “usefulness” is in “becoming useless” our “power in becoming powerless”? That is the paradox of a faith full of paradoxes. “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Matt 19:30, NRSVue). “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (Mark 9:39, NRSVue). To win the race, one must come in last? That doesn’t make much sense. To be strong, you need to be weak? These are the paradoxes of faith.

   It isn’t so much that we give up and let go of things in resignation or especially in despair but that we give them to God. This in God’s paradoxical equations of how the kingdom works: this kingdom that seems to flip everything upside down. What this also teaches us is to be wary of those who ask us to do the opposite. Those who pretend to be strong by exercising brute strength upon others, however “Christian” they pretend to be, are far from its truths. If they are brutal to those they “serve” tyrannously, they are “tyrants” not “servants of all.” If they foster hate, even in the name of Christ, they hate and do not love. In not loving others, they do not love God. Let us listen to the voice of God in this humble and topsy turvy God and in the voice of God in our neighbor to whom we love and hope to serve.

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