BY ROY ADAMS
ANY READERS WILL REMEMBER THE New York Stock Exchange controversy last September. At the height of the storm, Dick Grasso resigned as chairman and CEO of the Exchange. The conflict had centered on a compensation package that included a lump-sum payment of nearly $140 million. Facing the press before he knew he would resign, Grasso said: "I'm very proud to say that I've been very well compensated."
Indeed!
In the spring of 2002, during a bidding war between CBS and ABC for late night talk show host David Letterman, CBS offered Letterman $31 million to stay--31 million dollars a year for bantering, joshing, and good-naturedly sparring with other celebrities five nights a week. Wouldn't you like a job like that?
I'm not saying it's easy. But is what you're doing easy?
Somebody sent in a question to Parade magazine last November. "How many homes does Oprah Winfrey own?" Parade answered: "The last time we looked, Oprah . . . had a luxurious apartment on Chicago's Michigan Avenue; a house in Elwood Park, Ill.; a $50 million, 40-acre estate in Montecito, Calif., with a 20,000-square-foot mansion as well as a 3,000-square-foot guest house; a house in Franklin, Tenn., for her father; a house in Merrillville, Ind.; a condo in Milwaukee; a 160-acre farm in LaPorte County, Ind., that's now up for sale for a mere 8.5 million; a condo in Pewaukee, Wis., that is also for sale; plus property in Hawaii" (Parade magazine, Nov. 9, 2003, p. 2).
Wow!
Someone estimated that Bill Gates, with something like $48 billion to his name, is richer than the bottom third of the United States population, richer than some 98 million people put together.
In these examples, I've stayed with what I consider the safest area: celebrity compensation, and the obscene income disparity in modern society. But I could also have touched on contemporary morals, couldn't I? Or on violence, including the stupid, gratuitous violence that permeates the entertainment media today. Or on politics--mentioning the double-talk, the manipulation of information, the rampant corruption, the deception of the public. Sometimes as you watch contemporary developments, you want to cry out in the words of England's great playwright: "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason."
But it's precisely into this mad world that we've been called to serve as Christians.
In Matthew 20:25-28, Jesus says: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (NIV).
Against the background of this passage, I want to reflect on service under three categories: the Motive; the Model; and the Mystery.
1. The Motive
I read a sad story out of Paris back in March of 2003--about a three-star French chef named Bernard Loiseau. For the French, as perhaps the whole world knows, the preparation of food is a work of art. And top-rated French chefs are said to enjoy a prestige within the country equal to that of movie stars. Chefs!
According to the story, Loiseau, who'd begun his work as a lowly cook down in the back of the kitchen, had worked his way up over the years, demonstrating, the story said, "an obsessive dedication" to the intricacies of his vocation. With that kind of focus, he eventually grew "into one of the most celebrated masters of fine cuisine in the world."
The French people went gaga over him. And year after year, as far back as 1991, his flagship restaurant southeast of Paris was given the highest rating, three stars, from the most prestigious restaurant-evaluating agency in France. For Loiseau, it was "the fulfillment of [a] lifetime quest for recognition," the report said. He became "the only chef [in the country] whose business traded on the French Stock Exchange." He published books; he made regular television appearances; he produced a frozen food line; etc.; etc. In short, Loiseau had become a high-profile celebrity in France (Keith B. Richburg, "Did Ratings Slide Kill a Great Chef of Europe?" Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2003, p. C-1).
But in late February of 2003 tragedy struck. It happened after the second most prestigious rating agency in France dropped his standing (in their system) from 19 to 17, on a scale of 20. Loiseau was crushed, devastated. Alone at home one day, he took his own life.
The incident is instructive for us as Christians, whose very reason for existence is service. For here in Loiseau's case, the sheer joy of service had become twisted, warped by a penchant for recognition, popularity, and power. I found the incident doubly significant when I read the comment made by Loiseau's wife on French television in the wake of her husband's suicide: "All these people," she said, "all these exceptional beings who give you the impression of so much assurance, they are all very fragile. They all have such strong moments of doubt." (Ibid.)
That, precisely, is the predicament of all too many of us today, operating as we do in the dog-eat-dog environment that characterizes contemporary society--especially in the West. We seem to be on a vicious, get-it-all-for-myself binge. We see this in the spate of reality TV that has swept the United States (among other Western countries) over the past two and a half years or so, based on a philosophy that turns the concept of selfless service completely upside down. We see it in the Enron phenomenon, a culture of naked egoism and greed. And we see it in the outrageous earnings and compensation packages some enjoy today.
My point here is that the church and its mission are not immune to all this madness. We're all affected, particularly the coming generation. What place will service take in their value system? What signals are they picking up from the older generation? What impressions do they form when they see, in some places, adult Christians scrambling like crabs in a barrel, shamelessly (and sometimes viciously) climbing over the backs of others to the top?
I'm talking here about motive, the internal force that drives us and determines the quality of our service in the eyes of God. If we're to be true servants in a world gone mad with egotism, selfishness, and greed, then it's critical that we take stock of our own motives: Why am I doing this? Why do I want to become a pastor, an evangelist, a physician, a social worker, an attorney, a nurse, a teacher, a missionary, or whatever? Am I doing it because that's where the money is? Because that's where the power is? Because that's where the cameras are?
"The noblest service," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "comes from nameless hands. And the best servant does his work unseen."
Sometimes we can feel unimportant and useless when we see others doing great things, and nothing seems to happen where we are. But here's this encouraging word from Ellen G. White: "Not the great things which every eye sees and every tongue praises does God account most precious. The little duties cheerfully done, the little gifts which make no show, and which to human eyes may appear worthless, often stand highest in His sight" (The Desire of Ages, p. 615).
It's motive that counts with God!
2. The Model
It's quite possible for us to misunderstand what Jesus said in the passage before us. The wording of His statement can be twisted. Let's look at it again: ". . . whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave . . ." (Matt. 20:26, 27, NIV).
I can almost hear someone saying: "So that's the Christ-sanctioned way to the top! I humble myself; play the role of servant; people take notice; then, voilà, I'm catapulted to the top. If that's the price I must pay to reach the pinnacle, then I will do it--yes, I will do it."
As if Jesus foresaw this egotistical distortion of His words, He placed Himself at the very heart of the passage as the Model: "And whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, AND TO GIVE HIS LIFE . . ."! (verses 27, 28, NIV).
In his immortal classic, Paradise Lost, John Milton insightfully captures the attitude of the fallen angel, the same attitude that bedevils us still today. Says Lucifer as he's cast, unrepentant, from the heavenly portals: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." (See Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 250-264.)
But it was different for Jesus. The ruling principle of His life was service. As Matthew reports it, "Jesus went throughout Galilee, . . . healing every disease and sickness among the people." Word about all this spread like wildfire across the region, says Matthew, "and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them" (Matt. 4:23, 24, NIV).
As I drove to an appointment in Montreal years ago, the discussion on my car radio turned to the results of a sting operation focusing on television evangelists and their betrayal of the public trust. After making emotional appeals to listeners to send in their personal prayer requests to the broadcast, the report said, these preachers--almost as an aside--would call on supporters to "enclose a gift also, to keep the program on the air."
But what the undercover investigators discovered shocked them. Staffers for these televangelists would go to the post office, pick up the mail, open it up on the spot, fish out the donations, then dump the prayer requests right there in the post office garbage bins.
In the passage cited above, we read of vast crowds flocking to Jesus from all over Palestine. Without any thought of material reward, He ministers to them. And when Matthew returns to the same theme in chapter 9, he adds a critical dimension that forever distinguishes Jesus from those televangelist charlatans just mentioned: When He saw the vast crowds, says Matthew, "he was moved with compassion on them" (Matt. 9:36).
The word "compassion" comes from a Greek word referring to "the inward parts," "the bowels," considered the seat of the emotions in the ancient world. Compassion goes beyond sympathy (which can be merely cerebral and intellectual). Compassion comes from the inside; from the heart; from the gut, if you please.
That's what Jesus had. For Him, pocketing people's money and dumping their heartrending prayer requests in post office garbage bins would have been utterly foul and ghastly. If you can imagine someone doing all we've just read about with never a thought of personal gain, never a thought of aggrandizement, never a thought that what he's doing will be "picked up by the press," or at least "look good on my résumé"--if you can think of someone doing all this with absolutely no thought of personal gain whatsoever, then you're thinking about Jesus. The single force that moved Him was love--love from the belly, love from the gut. The Gospels call it compassion. And over the centuries, thousands of women and men have looked to Him as their Model for service.
Among them, Fernando and Ana Stahl.
It had been raining the day they took me to visit one of the islands on Lake Titicaca. As I stood there, at one point, surveying the scene of poverty, my mind went back to the Stahls, as they would have arrived in the area some 95 years earlier. They'd have been on their own, without any local church support or infrastructure, such as I had. Where did they stay? I wondered. Who took them in? What did they eat? How did they get started? What privations did they face? What kept them going? What made them stick with it?
I believe it was their motive: sheer love for the people. I believe it was their thickness with Jesus, their shining Model. And I believe it was because they kept ever before them the vision of a transcendent future.
And this brings us to our final point.
3. The Mystery
You won't find the Stahls' name in the halls of fame of the nations. In fact, even among Adventists, few remember them anymore--which is also the fate of the vast majority of those intrepid men and women who've given their lives for this cause (pardon the cliché). People aren't falling all over themselves to do what they did, nor what we do as Christians today. When the advertisement went out for auditions to fill 16 slots on the reality show The Apprentice, a whopping 215,000 people applied--for 16 slots! For them, clearly, that's where the action is. And no wonder: "The ultimate prize is a position as president of a [Donald] Trump [company] division, which includes a starting salary of $250,000" (TV Week, Jan. 4-10, 2004, p. 6).
It takes a sense of mystery to understand that the ultimate prize that awaits the Stahls is better. It takes a sense of mystery to look beyond the temporal to the eternal.
According to that tragic story we related near the top of this article, Loiseau had made the following remark to friends in the business at a time when he was riding high in the esteem of the judges: "If I [ever] lose a [single] star, I'll kill myself."
Those are the words of someone whose motive for service is twisted, because it's not anchored in Jesus, the Model; whose motive for service is warped, because it cannot pierce the gloom and madness of this present world of greed and rivalry and poverty and destitution and disappointment--to something beyond. It's critical that we keep ever before us the sense of mystery.
While visiting the Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, a while back, I came across a favorite quotation of the former president, from the ancient Greek dramatist, Sophocles: "One must wait until the evening to know how splendid the day has been."
I thought about that when I came to one particularly poignant paragraph in a book I was reading over the Christmas holidays. The reference was to William Manchester, prolific American writer, and author of the well-respected Winston Churchill biography.
Manchester, who has suffered two strokes since the death of his wife in 1998, suddenly finds himself unable to finish the last of the three-part Churchill biography. The author I was reading (and I can't locate the reference for the life of me) visited the famous writer in his home, and heard from his own lips the verdict on his present predicament: I cannot write anymore, Manchester said. All I do now is enjoy my grandchildren the best I can, and wait for the end.
One must wait until the evening to know how splendid the day had been? Tell that, Sophocles, to former U.S. president Ronald Reagan as he vegetates under the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. Tell that to those crumpled souls staring blankly out of windows in senior citizens' homes today, confused shells of their former selves. Tell that to William Manchester as, with no brighter horizon before him, he simply bides his time until the end.
No, Sophocles, you had it wrong. Correction: "One must wait until the morning to know how splendid the day had been." That's mystery. There's something beyond! Something better to look forward to--in the MORNING!
"For three things I thank God every day of my life," said the blind Helen Keller: "Thanks that He has vouchsafed me knowledge of His works; deep thanks that He has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to-a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song."
In a world gone mad with consumerism, selfishness, and greed, that's the spirit we need. And that's the hope that will sustain us.
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Roy Adams is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.
