Sermon Illustrations on Serving God

John is explicit that during supper the devil had already put it into Judas's heart to betray him, and it is right after that note that Jesus gets up, takes a towel, and starts washing feet. Judas is at the table. Nothing in the account suggests he was skipped. So the hands that were about to be handed over washed the feet of the man who was going to do it.

The usual reading pits activity against devotion, with Martha as the cautionary tale. Read the words: Jesus says she is anxious and troubled about many things. The problem named is not the meal. It is the anxiety, and the resentment that made her ask him to send her sister to help. Somebody had to cook. He does not say otherwise.

Nicolas Herman was a soldier and a footman who joined a Carmelite community in Paris in the seventeenth century as a lay brother and was put to work in the kitchen, a job he disliked. What he became known for was a practice rather than a doctrine: attending to God in the middle of ordinary work, so that the time of activity and the time of prayer stopped being different times. He said he possessed God as tranquilly among the pots and pans as on his knees. He held no office and wrote no book.

Sourcing: Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, c. 1614–1691, Discalced Carmelite lay brother in Paris. The book known as "The Practice of the Presence of God" is a posthumous compilation of conversations and letters assembled by Joseph de Beaufort, so the famous lines are reported speech rather than his own published writing.

Andrew brings a boy with five barley loaves and two fish to Jesus and then says the sensible thing out loud: but what are these among so many? He is right. It is a child's packed lunch in front of a crowd of thousands, and barley was the cheap grain. It gets handed over anyway, and it is what the meal is made from.

Jesus tells a host that when he gives a dinner he should not invite friends, family, or rich neighbours, because they will invite him back and he will have been repaid. Instead: invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. And then the reason, because they cannot repay you. The inability to reciprocate is not an obstacle to the invitation. It is the qualification for it.

Straight after the greatest public victory of his ministry, Elijah runs for a day into the wilderness, sits under a broom tree, and asks to die. What happens next is not a rebuke and not a recommissioning. An angel wakes him and gives him food. He eats and sleeps. The angel comes back and feeds him again, because the journey is too much for him. The conversation about what he is doing there comes much later, after two meals and two sleeps.

In every church there is someone who arrives before anyone else, turns the heating on, sets out chairs, checks that the toilets have paper, and leaves after the last person. Nobody thanks them, because nobody notices. Their work is only visible when it fails, a cold room, a missing chair, and then everyone notices at once. The visible ministries in that building run on top of an invisible one.

What is a good illustration about serving god?

Brother Lawrence in a monastery kitchen, because it locates service in the least visible possible work, and Jesus washing Judas's feet, because it removes the condition that the person served must deserve it.

Where do preachers find illustrations?

For service, look inside your own building first. The person who sets out the chairs is a better illustration than anyone in a book, and using them, with permission, teaches the congregation to see the same thing on Tuesday.

How many illustrations should a sermon have?

Two or three. If one of them is a real person in the room, that one is worth two of the others and should carry the main point.

Do I need to cite an illustration's source?

Yes, and for stories about living people the citation is really consent. Ask before you use a member's story, agree what will be said, and remember that they cannot object from the third row.

How do I ask for volunteers without guilting the congregation?

Ask for something specific, time-limited, and small, and say who to speak to. Guilt recruits people who resent it by March; a clear and bounded ask recruits people who finish the year.

What do I say to people who are already serving too much?

Preach 1 Kings 19 and mean it. Then follow it up privately, because the people who most need to stop are the ones least likely to conclude that a sermon about rest was addressed to them.