Readings for the Day:
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Near the end of my service year as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, I had one day where it became really difficult to get my kids to come for their pullout groups for literacy. The classroom had recently been given computers, and they wanted to play the games on it. One of these games, the favorite of my pullout students, had to do with Greek mythology, so I told my students, “oh, do you want to really know about these stories? I can tell you all about them.” So we had our pullout group and talked about Greek mythology the whole time.
It went so well that one of my students said, “you should put on a school event for this.” I took him seriously and started the work to put on a school wide mythological event that would cover the myths of various ancient cultures from throughout the world.
This was both near the end of the year and shortly after our team had put on another school wide project. Everyone at this point was really tired and a little burned out. I originally had conceived this project as something our whole team would work together to make. Because I wanted to make things easier on everyone else, I ended up taking on most of the planning and work.
The result was I ended up sick for a month at the end of my service year. In trying to keep everyone else from getting too burned out, I ended up burning myself out, and my body forced me to rest.
I wish I could say I learned my lesson, but I haven’t. I still have a tendency to take on too much and try to do things all on my own. It is something I still am working on because it is important to me that the work we do for God is work we do together.
You see, God calls all of us to serve our Lord in this world. We witness that in our reading from Numbers this morning. There, we see the Spirit of the Lord descending upon the elders of Israel, appointed to help Moses lead the people. Now two of the elders were not at the ceremony installing them into this office. They were at the camp with the rest of the people. Yet the Spirit descends on them too, and they start prophesying. Moses’ own assistant, and later successor, Joshua, is terrified on seeing this. He asks Moses to make them stop.
Moses, instead, tells him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them!”
Moses’ words are still our hope today. If all of us served as leaders of one ministry or another, think of how much more we could do as a church and for the world.
My hope in my time with you at St. Luke’s, for however long God deigns that to be, is that we can all be built up to be prophets and leaders in this church. My hope is that the work of St. Luke’s won’t be the work of just one or a few, but the work of all of us together serving God with our different skills and ministries. I cannot do the ministry of the church alone, nor do I want to. That’s true of all of us. My hope is to help all of you be great as leaders in this church. Help me to do that. Help me to help you be Spirit-filled servants of Christ Jesus for St. Luke’s and the world.