Sermon
of July 3, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Genesis 24 (selections)
“The Measure of True Success”
When I began looking at that passage in preparation for this sermon today, I came to that word in the middle of the passage, “success,” and I stopped. I stopped reading right there because it’s not a word I think that I encounter too often in the Bible and it’s a word that has always bothered me; I’ve always had trouble with the word “success.” There are some other words that have bothered me over the years: “evangelism” bothered me because I thought at one point it was a word that was seemed to be being possessed by a small segment of Christianity and everybody else wanted to stay away from it, but it’s a word that we all own and it’s all part of our heritage. You may have words or phrases that bother you as well. Some people have difficulty with the phrase “born again” and there are words and phrases that each of us come across and for one reason or another make us a little uncomfortable. “Success” has been one of those words for me, and I’ve managed to avoid it for a long time. But this week when I saw that, it stopped me and I said “I’m not going to avoid it, I’m going to take a good look at where success fits in in our lives as God’s people.”
I think I had trouble with the word because I imagine that success is often measured by worldly terms. It may not be correct, but that’s how I imagine it – that most of us, when we hear the word “success”, it means that someone is successful according to standards of worldly things. In the early church a great division was made between worldly things and Godly things. Worldly things were not good and Godly things were good, and that helped to shape the progress of Christianity and the development of Christianity. We try to be not of the world but of God as God’s people. And so when I began to think that success seems like it’s one of those things that is measured by worldly standards, I guess I had trouble moving it into the world of faith.
Here’s an example. When we hear someone at an event or a meeting and they’re the guest speaker, often they are introduced according to their worldly accomplishments: here is someone who is senior vice president of something, or a member of Phi Beta Kappa, or on the board of directors of this group or that group, or president of this organization, and those things are meant to indicate that the speaker is a very successful person. And there’s nothing wrong with that; those are all good measures of success in the business world and in other worlds where people like that speak.
Another area, I think, is obituaries. Now when we read obituaries, very often the person’s life is presented as a successful life in terms of things that they’ve done, the college they went to, things they did in the community, awards they received, and so forth. Aside from family, those are the other things that seem to say, “This was a successful person.” So I think that’s what’s always been the problem for me – my own thinking that success is something that’s really measured according to those kinds of terms – when in fact…
Our success in life really should be measured by how faithful we are following God’s will and being followers of Christ. That’s the real measure of success: faithfulness to God. The servant in this story today is a great example of that, of one who is not successful by worldly standards but is certainly successful by Godly standards. Consider this servant in Abraham’s household. He is given a task: go find a wife for Isaac. Not among the Canaanites – they didn’t want a wife from the Canaanites – but go back to the old country and find one of our people. Sounds familiar in some circles, doesn’t it? And so the servant goes off and is in the process of fulfilling that mission in the story or the lesson that we have from today.
The servant is not motivated by reward. Abraham promises the servant nothing. He says, “This is the mission that I’m sending you on.” He doesn’t promise him gold; he doesn’t promise him that he’s going to come back and become “Senior Executive Servant” and have a new big title to impress the other servants. He says, “To be faithful to me and to be faithful to God I send you on this mission to find one to marry my son Isaac.” And the servant understands that this is not just a mission from Abraham, this is a mission from God – because as Abraham reminds him, Abraham has been called by God to become the father of a great nation through many descendants: through his son Isaac, and then through Jacob and Esau and Joseph and others. So the servant understands that this is not just a mission from Abraham, his master; this is a mission from God given him by Abraham. This is a mission to go find the right person to be Isaac’s mate so that they may have children and that this may be the beginning of the expansion of God’s people. He goes on that mission with the sole purpose of fulfilling God’s will and the will of his master Abraham.
So he wouldn’t be a success by worldly standards: didn’t get a promotion, didn’t get a lot of money, was a servant in the household of Abraham. And yet by Godly standards he was a success, and that’s what he had prayed for. He prayed, “God, Lord God of my master Abraham, grant me success today. Help me to find the right person,” and he worked out with God and with Abraham all the details of what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work and what happened if this happened and what happened if that happened. He prayed for that kind of success, not worldly success, but Godly success, and he received it.
And you know Jesus was the same way. Jesus came as the model for our living and Jesus was the same way. Jesus was by no means a success by worldly standards. By worldly measures, Jesus probably would have been thought by many to be a failure. He was a devout Jew and yet those in power and authority who had the high positions in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the others, rejected him. He didn’t get to be a chief priest or a scribe. He didn’t seem to own much, if any, material goods or property. When he had the last supper with his disciples in the upper room, it was in a room he borrowed for that purpose. He borrowed a donkey for the Palm Sunday event. He borrowed a coin to illustrate the lesson about what is to be given to Caesar and what is to be given to God. He had to borrow -- he didn’t own and possess.
By worldly standards Jesus might have been judged by some to be anything but a success, but he was the greatest success of all. By Godly standards he fulfilled God’s mission. He equipped others to carry out that mission after he had left and he brought in people who had been excluded from God’s family before and reached out beyond who the chief priests and scribes had reached and let everyone know that God’s love is for them. The greatest success of all is Jesus.
It’s a very easy pattern to follow for us in our lives. To seek in our lives not to be successful by worldly standards, although if we are there’s nothing wrong with that–that’s good in it’s place but ultimately to be successful as people of God.
I’ll have a good illustration for you next weekend: the fair. I was trying to figure out how to work the fair into this. The big Yankee Street Fair. Often on the next Sunday morning the announcement is made: “Yesterday at the fair we made $6,200. It was a great success.” Or, “Yesterday at the fair it rained a lot and not many people showed and we made $4,000.” Not a great success. And we tend to think of it that way. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that – but what if we judged the success of the fair not by whether it was $4,200 or $5,200 or $6,200 or $10,000, but whether the success of the fair was, did we bring the people in from the community to participate in something that our church was offering? Did we offer people a place to come and have fun on God’s property? Did we convey to others who are not part of our congregation, friendship and acceptance? Do we have an inviting spirit? Were we friendly? Did we greet people with kindness and love? Did people say, “Boy, that was a nice group of people who put that fair on. I’d like to know more about them”? Did we help others to catch a glimpse of God somehow through the things that happen during our fair? Yes, people can catch a glimpse of God as they are buying raffle tickets for the quilt, as they’re eating chicken at the barbeque, as they are eating strawberry shortcake, playing games, bidding at the auction. They catch a glimpse of God through those things through the way we convey God’s presence and love to others.
So, next Sunday morning, I’m not going to object if anybody says, “We made $6,000." I really won’t object if they say, “We made $10,000." But it would be nice to have along with that, yes the fair was a big success in other ways. Somehow in that big event that we think of as a fundraiser, even more importantly, others who might not know God or might have felt alienated from God felt closer again a little bit because of us, because of how we related and how we conveyed an inviting spirit.
The good news today is that the world can literally become a different place if we see our life’s goal and the measure of our life’s success as simply being faithful to what God calls us to do each and every day. Can we look back at the end of each day and say, “I was faithful to the things God called me to do this day.” That’s the most important thing each day. May we look back upon our lives when our own obituaries are about to be written and look upon the things and say, “This is what made me a successful person.” I can look and say, “Well it might say in my obituary I was moderator of the Tolland Association for a while or I was a delegate to General Synod many years ago or I went to Trinity College...but if it says in there that from time to time when God sent someone to me in need and I helped them through that time of need, that’s a measure of my success. This is what we have to be focused on, and get us back doing God’s work. It’s the same for all of us. Those other things are all good, but ultimately are we faithful to being God’s people? Are we faithful to fulfilling the missions that God send us on in our lives? Then we will be true successes.