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One of the most gentile and humble human I have ever met is Kervin Jones, pastor at 3rd Street Church of God in Greensboro, AL. I first encountered Kervin as a high school student serving at Sawyerville, a project of the Diocese of Alabama that takes youth and college students and has them led what is basically a Vacation Bible School for impoverished kids in the area around Greensboro. Each summer we served, we’d go over to 3rd Street Church of God to hear Kervin preach at their Wednesday service. He was never showy or extravagant. He simply went through whatever Scripture the church was covering that evening. I found I always learned a lot.
Years later, I ended up as one of Kervin’s colleagues in the area. Every encounter I had always amazed me more about Kervin. He never stole the spotlight from anyone, though he is very tall and could do so easily. He always supported what he believed to be good work in the area.
Because of the respect I have for Kervin, I asked him my first year at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greensboro to be one of our Lenten Lunch speakers. In fact, he was the first speaker after me that year. The story he shared showed even more the humility that I had come to see in him.
He talked about his experience of 2011. For those who don’t know, that was when a terrifying tornado came through the region, notably barreling through Tuscaloosa and my hometown of Birmingham. Kervin obviously survived, and held onto some family Bibles, but his house was completely destroyed.
After a while, Leslie Manning, the director of Sawyerville at the time reached out to Kervin. Knowing the damage the tornado had done to the area, she asked if there was anything Kervin needed.
When telling this story, Kervin said this is where his pride could have gotten in the way. He almost said ‘I’m good’ and walked on. Instead he swallowed his pride and said, “Well, I need a house.”
Sawyerville and the Diocese of Alabama got together to raise funds and built Kervin a new home. As he describes it, there was no expectation that he would join The Episcopal Church. There was no expectation that he would give anything in return. It was simply a free gift, just like Grace. Kervin, in all his humility, said that as a result, he tries to make sure he smiles at whoever walks by him and do anything else he can to share the same love and joy he got from this free gift.
The thing is, Kervin was always beloved by the Diocese of Alabama, Episcopalian or no. It’s this very humility, this sense of ‘why me?’ that makes us love him so. It’s this very humility that makes him such a good vessel for preaching the Word of God.
We don’t have to hold ourselves up to be good servants of God. In fact, we are called to do the opposite. We are called to be like Kervin, not propping ourselves up, but holding up Christ Jesus in our work and in our lives.
This is what our lessons in James and Mark are teaching us today. In both, we see conflicts arising. In Mark specifically, we see the Disciples arguing about who is the greatest among them.
What Jesus and the author of James are trying to point out is how much the Disciples are missing the point. In God’s Kingdom, it is not about greatness. It is not about who beats out the other.
Instead, it is about serving God. It is about possessing wisdom, the very theme of our readings last week that we see continued in our Gospel and Epistle today. It is about living into the Truth of our Lord Jesus Christ, that God, loving us so much, came down in the from of Jesus to die for our sins and rise again so that we could rise with Him too.
It is this humility that leads us to away from the path of evil into the path of life. It is what draws us to the Lord, as James tells us. It is the path that leads us to draw others to God, the very thing Jesus is urging the Disciples to do by calling them to welcome the children in their arms.
It is the path that leads us to ask in the right way, as James urges us to do and as Kervin demonstrates for us.
If you are here to try and make yourself great in the eyes of others, you are not here for the right reasons. James shows us what will happen if we continue down that path. Instead, we are called to be humble, to focus the attention not on ourselves but on Jesus Christ. If we do that, we can be wise. If we do that, we can have life. If we do that, then we can see the face of God and bring others to know the Lord like we know our Lord.