Anna

 October 23, 2020

“If you are willing to dedicate themselves to full time service to the Lord, come forward.” I can’t be absolutely certain these were the exact words; after all, it was nearly sixty years ago. Our church held week long missionary conferences twice a year, and at this particular one, I felt an inner nudge from the Holy Spirit, and walked down the aisle to the front of the church, where Pastor Ellis and the missionary Ken Johnson were standing. Mr. Johnson had shown pictures of his work in Venezuela, but even more significantly, the week before he had handed me the controls of the little Cessna seaplane he used to ferry supplies to missionaries in remote jungle areas. For a fourteen year old boy, that was quite an adventure, and until I met Linda in college and we began talking of marriage, the foreign mission field was my goal.

Tonight I’m thinking about that phrase “full time service.” For forty years, I was in what people called full time service, as a pastor, and I’m not so sure it’s much different than any other kind of work. Sure, it’s religious, and involves different skills and tasks than say, an auto mechanic or a farmer, but “full time Christian work” often conjures up images of someone who never takes a day off and is at it twenty-four hours a day. And the “service” part—pastoral ministry can be sacrificial, or just as self-serving as any other sort of work.

This morning’s Scripture caught my attention. In the second chapter of Luke, we go from Jesus’ birth, the angels’ song, and the shepherds’ visit, to Jesus’ dedication at the temple after his circumcision and Mary’s ceremonial cleansing.As Mary and Joseph brought Jesus in, the aged Simeon happened to be in the temple and prophesied over him, followed by Anna, eighty-four years old. The Scripture says of her, she “did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” 

When I think of serving God, my mind naturally gravitates to mission work, preaching, feeding the hungry and clothing the needy...DOING something—anything. I suspect we miss the whole point of service when we think this way. As Christians, we are called not primarily to serve people, but to serve God. Often, we do so by serving people, but not always. Some are scholars who study so they can provide God’s people with tools for better understanding Scripture. Some are administrators, secretaries, janitors. Brother Andrew in Practicing the Presence of God wrote that he could be just as much in the presence of God washing pots and pans in the monastary scullery as when before the Host during the Mass. 

Serving God is not so much what we do, but who we are while we do it. God doesn’t need anything I have to offer; he graciously uses it, but he doesn’t need it. And if I offer super spiritual stuff from a cold heart, it hardly qualifies as service. I suspect some of God’s best servants labor away in dark corners and unseen hovels, fasting and praying though no one notices. Except God. He sees and nods in pleasure at what many would consider foolish and a waste of time. Anna “served God with fastings and prayers, night and day.” Had she not been doing so, she would have missed being one of the first to see and give thanks for the Savior of the world. I wonder how many times I have missed him by being too busy with “serving” to really serve, and I am thankful tonight for Anna who brings me up short and tells me to pay attention and follow her example.