Will you pray with me? Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.

Earlier this week, members and friends of Old South Church received an email from Maggie Mode, chair of the Old South’s Christian Service and Outreach Committee, and me. In that email, we asked, on behalf of the committee, for you to share with us stories of the service you perform. We wanted to hear from you about some of the ways you were serving out there in the world, and about what that service meant to you.

We already knew, of course, about the many ways you serve within and through the church with the support of the Christian Service and Outreach Committee. We knew that, once a month, you serve a meal at Sunday’s Bread, and that you’ve donated hundreds of pounds of clothing at our clothing drives, food at our food drives. We knew that you’ve given thousands of dollars to our blanket drives, and our holiday alternative giving programs. We knew that you’d taken up our matching grant challenges and donated over $10,000 last year for humanitarian aid and disaster relief throughout the world. We knew that you’ve shown up time and again when the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization has called upon us to struggle with synagogues and other churches for worker rights, or immigrant rights, or for health care for all Massachusetts’ citizens.

The committee also acts as a grantmaking organization, supporting agencies and institutions in Boston and beyond, and we knew you’d been there, too, for while much of the money for our grants comes from income earned on the church’s endowments, much indeed comes from congregational giving, and that means from you. Last year, your money went out in grants totaling about $93,000 to 32 different agencies and institutions, at many of which Old South members also volunteer.

And all of that is to say nothing of the ways we knew you serve the church itself, through hospitality or worship leadership or teaching or gardening or committee work or in other ways too many to count.

So, we knew all that. What we didn’t know was what you all were doing in the world beyond our walls and our programs. We wanted to know what you were up to, Old South, as Christians out there working by the grace of God to transform a broken world. So, we asked—and you answered.

Your responses were, in a word, a marvel. You showed that the God of Jesus Christ is alive and at work and dancing in the world.

One family in the church has collected over 10,000 used books for a local reading program

Some of you volunteer in hospitals as chaplains and escorts. One tri-lingual member frequently misses church because she’s acting as a medical interpreter for refugees and others.

A high school student with hair that was—ahem!—longish challenged his classmates to raise money for the Jimmy Fund by promising to cut his hair if they donated enough. It worked, and the Jimmy Fund is now better funded by over $700.

You care for young friends that need help and old friends who need support as they age.

Financially, you support organizations and institutions that span the globe.

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One couple roams around surreptitiously planting flowers along roadsides and walkways that don’t belong to them, which they refer to as a “dubious but loving practice”.

You work with organizations like Cradles to Crayons, Community Servings, the Red Cross, World Vision, Doctors Without Borders, your children’s schools, Habitat for Humanity, Save the Children, the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, the Dudley Literacy Center, as caretakers for Horizons for Homeless Children, and you do walks for hunger, AIDS, leukemia, breast cancer, and Alzheimers

One of you visits nursing homes dressed as a clown to entertain the patients.

A family has supported five young Guatemalan women through high school; one of those women is now on her way to becoming a doctor.

And many of you—so many of you!—said that your career is your service. There is a therapist who works to stabilize families in crisis. A healthcare professional who left the business world to find a way to serve others. An insurance professional who focuses on making workplaces safer, and a labor union officer who feels called by her faith to struggle for fairness and equity. A social worker, an acupuncturist. A community development officer building affordable housing, and a geriatrician whose practice is making house calls on those too frail to leave home. A senior-level psychologist at a local medical school who works with a sliding scale, has never terminated a therapy for lack of ability to pay, and who therefore sometimes winds up with a caseload that is 25% pro bono. A high school teacher that got into teaching as a way to pass on values she learned in church growing up.

And that’s just some of what we heard. Your responses showed us, thank God, just what we suspected they would: that members and friends of Old South are committed, brave, inventive, strong, and so full of Christ’s love that you cannot help but spill it over into the world.

In your bulletin, you’ll find a form that you can use to tell us about your service if you haven’t already. We hope you’ll fill it out and return it to the committee’s table outside after church, so that we can continue to find ways to celebrate, and support, and extend your service.

But before you do that, I’d like to invite you to take a moment and tell part of your story of service now. I want to invite you to turn to someone sitting near you; if you’re sitting with someone you know, that’s fine, but if there’s someone sitting nearby that you don’t know, you might be brave and turn to him or her and introduce yourself. Turn to someone near you, and tell a brief story of a time you served, or a time you were served by someone else. What was it like? What did you get out of it? And where was God in that moment? And what do you carry with you from the experience? So, friends, take a few moments now, and tell your stories.

(Congregants spend time talking with one another)

Thank you. I heard a good buzz out there, and I think that’s a good sign. And if you spent that time making brunch plans instead of talking about service, that’s OK…

In the emails we received, and in the email conversations that followed, and, I’m willing to bet, in the conversations you just had, you gave different reasons for the work you do. But most of them boiled down to this: that in serving, you were served. The love, or time, or money, or energy you put out came back to you in some way. You were changed by the service, increased, improved. It felt good. Karla thought she was going to Panama to help some of “the least of these”, and she did help, but she ended up being changed by the people she stayed with. Judie and Ely thought they were caring for a stranger, and they were, but through it, they gained a model for aging with grace, and a new appreciation for life, and a friend.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the committee chose today’s Scripture as our theme because of its message that in serving others, we serve Christ. But there’s another message in there, too: Jesus paints a picture in which those who serve inherit the kingdom of heaven and those who do not serve inherit hell. I think that’s a hard thing for many of us to hear, and while many of us may be tempted to disregard it, or at least to disregard that second half of it, I want to suggest to you that it is true.

I don’t think he’s talking about some future moment at the end of time. Instead, I think that the heaven and hell he’s talking about are what’s happening here and now. I think he means, more or less, what I heard from you: that in serving, you are shaken out of yourself, out of old ways and assumptions, out of preoccupation with the small things we worry about out of proportion, out of the lonely hell of being trapped in your own head. And in the shaking, you find your eyes opening to the face of Christ before you and the kingdom of heaven all around you, and you realize that you are its heir.

Of course we serve because it’s the right thing to do, and because some have more than others and should share. But Jesus says, and you said, that the real reason to serve is that when we do it right, we get the chance—the rare chance—to step out from under our egos and out from our little worlds long enough to truly meet another person and, for a while, to see one another as Christ, which is to say, to be transformed.

So, bless you for the stories you told in your emails, and the stories you told today. Bless you for your service. Bless God that the stories you told are only the first of many stories about you coming into your own as heirs of Heaven. Bless God that the stories you’ve told are only the beginning. Amen.