GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
MARK 1:7
Unworthy
The first church I served was a small congregation. The first Sunday as the new pastor, the inaugural Sunday, a powerful storm moved through Southern Illinois. The street in front of the church was filled with water. Street parking near the church was impossible, so congregants had to park about a block away from the church and walk through the rain. Twenty-one lovely, wonderful people trudged through the storm to the sanctuary that day. The church budget did not allow for the employment of a full-time custodian, so I, or volunteers, cleaned the building each week. I, the pastor, often ran a vacuum cleaner, emptied waste cans, and, yes, cleaned toilets to prepare the building for use. During the next eleven years, the budget grew, and it was possible to hire custodial help, but I never considered custodial work demeaning.
St. Mark described the introduction of Jesus by John; he wrote, “And he was preaching, saying, ‘One mightier than I is coming after me; of whom I am not worthy to stoop down to loosen the strap of his sandals.” (1:7) At that time, washing the feet was a duty performed by a servant. John proclaimed that he was even unworthy to do a servant’s work, to remove the sandal and wash the feet, for the one coming after him. For John’s audience, it would have been difficult to imagine anything lower than a servant bowing to wash someone’s feet.
Almost five decades after that first pastorate, I look back at the amazing people who put up with a newbie pastor for eleven years, and sometimes I think that I was not even worthy to clean the building’s toilets for them. In those moments, I can identify with John’s view of his own unworthiness. There are a lot of “toilet-cleaning experiences” that mitigate arrogance; do you have any?
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