A visitor to Lambarene found the great medical missionary, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, pushing a wheelbarrow as he helped build a new road. The visitor was shocked to find the famous doctor performing such a menial task. “Doctor Schweitzer,” he asked, “Why are you doing that? How is it that you push a wheelbarrow?” With a twinkle in his eye, Schweitzer replied, “Oh, that’s very simple. You just pick up a shovel, fill up the wheelbarrow with dirt, then take hold of the handle, and push.” That is the way the Lord’s work gets done!
There really isn’t very much glamour in our day-to-day tasks and in the day-to-day decisions we make for Christ and his Kingdom. We need to learn that most of the triumphs of the Christian faith are won in the daily round of loving service. We must never get the notion that being a Christian relieves us of work and responsibility and struggle. We must never mistake the Kingdom for utopia, because there will always be “wheelbarrows to fill!”
Just as God needed Peter and Paul, and James and John, so too he needs you! Just as, in times past, he gave each of them a specific, distinct, unique task to perform for the enrichment of the Kingdom, so too he has fashioned a specific, distinct task that is uniquely yours. Hopefully, we all share the same goals. From the first disciple to the last, the Christian mission is to be “the salt of the earth and the light of the world,” as Jesus tells us in the Gospel. Each of us has been called to bring the light and the flavor and the scent and the wonder and the healing power and the joy of God’s love into the lives of others; but each in his or her own individual way.
God has made you uniquely what you are. He gives you the grace to envision your individual potential - what you can become. God gives you that challenge, but if you fail to say “YES!” to it, his Kingdom is the poorer, because there is no substitute for you! No one else can do the specific, distinct, unique task God has appointed you to do!
From the Gospels we know that when people came to Jesus to be his disciples, he immediately began to shape them to be his ministers. The people came for any number of reasons. He would feed them. He would heal them, spiritually and physically. But they soon discovered that he would also send them out! First he sent the twelve; then the seventy-two; then others. Anyone who came to be a part of what Jesus was doing had to understand that he or she had to become the Lord’s minister!
So often, in our time, we come to Christ to get what we can out of him. We come to Church to have our needs met. But we soon discover that he will not let it end there. We discover that there is more involved in following Jesus than simply coming to Church to be passive receivers of the gifts that are being dispensed. And if we are at all conscious of what is going on in the worship experience, we discover that an active ministry is beginning to define itself in us! Make no mistake about it - you are ministers to one another here at St. Mary’s! And you are ministers at large to the world! Whatever your secular vocation may be, whatever neighborhood you may live in, whatever your family situation is, while you are there you are a full time minister of Jesus Christ!
It is time for us Christians to take on our true identity and give true witness to the world, of a loving God who cares about us all and keeps his promises! If God compared your acts of the past week to power for a light bulb, would you be operating at 25 watts, 50 watts, or 100?