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The early church's generosity wasn't born out of easy, simple times, it happened in the "Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love." Which small, unglamorous task in your own life might actually be more meaningful than you've given it credit for?
The early hospitality team could have treated serving meals as just another item on a to-do list, or as an act of love. When you think about your own daily responsibilities, which ones tend to slip into the "checklist" category, and what would it look like to do them differently?
Mother Teresa said she saw Jesus in every person she served, "this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him." Is there someone in your life right now you find hard to see that way? What might change if you did?
Brendan talked about shifting his focus from just "going through the motions" to putting people, not tasks, at the center of his volunteering. Where in your own life might you be going through the motions rather than staying focused on the people involved?
If wholehearted service is less about what you do and more about how you do it, is there something you're already doing that you could approach with more intention or love this week?
Transcript:
"Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love." This was the well-known motto of the next saint in our stewardship series we're calling Wholehearted: Mother Teresa. For Teresa, this was the root of what it means to live out a life of faith with our whole hearts.
For most of her life, though, she would not have been described as one of the greats. She was small, frail, about four foot eleven, with a hunched-over back from years of hard work and service. In Kathryn Spink's biography of Mother Teresa, she recorded that one of the first impressions of her was, and I quote, "not particularly remarkable in any respect." And yet this small, unremarkable woman would begin a Christian community dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. At the time of her death in 1997, there were more than 4,000 people who were serving through the Missionaries of Charity, and 610 foundations spanning 123 countries. Talk about wholehearted service.
To see how Mother Teresa's life can be an invitation for our own wholeheartedness, we actually need to go back further in time to the earliest of the Christian communities. We read about this story in the beginning of Acts. The people who were part of the earliest church were committed to doing life together. They were immersed in the rhythms of community that required them to be sharing space and resources and meals with one another. The original apostles were out fulfilling Christ's call to go and make disciples of all nations, and they were doing so well that the community was rapidly growing. And we can imagine that with rapid growth comes a bit of friction, as elements of the common life together started slipping through unintentional cracks.
An early recording of one of these tension points comes to us in the first few verses of Acts chapter six. We're going to take a look at that passage together now. Acts chapter six, verse one:
Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, it is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables. Therefore, brothers and sisters, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word. What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. They had these men stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. The word of God continued to spread. The number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
Friends, this is the Word of God for the people of God. And we say together, thanks be to God.
Will you pray with me in these moments? Oh God, we give you thanks that your presence has met us here by the power of the Holy Spirit. By that Spirit, oh God, open our hearts and our minds to hear how you are inviting us to live wholeheartedly this day. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Behold, the first hospitality team of the early church. Serving meals might not have seemed like much. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't flashy, and it wasn't overtly making disciples of Jesus Christ like the original apostles were doing, bringing more people into the fold. But serving meals was indeed important to the growing church, and in this simple act of making sure all of the members of that community were being fed, Christ's love was being communicated. Those meals mattered to the widows, who, outside of that community of care, might not have had easy access to the resources or the means to even provide food for themselves without the care and the support of a man in the household.
So the men who were appointed to this task did have a choice to make. Their choice was to serve these women as simply another task to check off the to-do list of the community for that day. Or they could serve these women with their whole hearts. Do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa, from a very early age in her hometown of Skopje, Albania, would watch her own mother drawn to care for the poor with gentleness and great care. She watched as her mother took to sewing and embroidery, and selling those cloths to make money, not only for her own family, but for the poor in her community.
Fast forward several years, Mother Teresa has entered the religious life as a nun, fulfilling a call within her to belong completely to God. Following that call led her to the Loreto Sisters in Calcutta, India, where she taught school-aged children, but without a formal education herself. As she was walking through the streets of Calcutta and serving the community there, she was met face to face with the realities of poverty and the lack of care for the people who found themselves living on the streets in the slums of Calcutta.
Mother Teresa then felt a very clear call, one that she would describe as a call within her original call. This call was to be poor with the poor, to serve the poorest of the poor, not as someone who would remain far off in the comforts of her own home, in the community where she was, but someone who would live right there with them, to immerse herself wholeheartedly in the experience of serving the people who were living on the streets.
So she went about the work of leaving the Loreto Sisters to begin a new order of service in the slums of Calcutta. But in doing so, she risked losing the comfort and the security of the religious life that she had up until now. But she trusted, she was following that clear call from Christ. For Mother Teresa, this was the very best way that she could communicate God's love, to be fully present, to be fully one with those whom she was called to serve, in the same way that Christ made himself one with humanity in the incarnation.
For Mother Teresa, her call to be poor with the poor was modeling the way that Christ showed up in the world for us. He brought himself low in a way that was unglamorous. He disregarded the flashiness of divinity and took on the posture of a humble servant. And so would she. Because for Mother Teresa, it's not so much about what you do, but how you do it.
This is a lesson that one of my former students is learning firsthand these days. You know, before I was ordained, or before I was even in seminary, I was a youth director at a church in Fernandina Beach called Memorial United Methodist Church. And if you're wondering why that sounds familiar, it's because Pastor Charlie just came to us from there.
While I was serving there, I met the Twiggs family. Brendan was in my youth program at the time. His mother, Diana, was a local doctor in the Fernandina Beach area, and his father, Chris, was a running coach. In 2024, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Diana felt deeply called to offer her medical skills to the people who were impacted by the escalation of violence in Ukraine. At that time, though, Brendan was living in Michigan, living his best life. He had a great job with a medical technology company, but his life suddenly felt like it imploded, and so he moved home and decided to join his parents on their next trip to Ukraine. While he was there, he absolutely fell in love with the people and the culture, and he experienced a deep call to volunteer his time and his energy to the work of helping Ukrainians in any way possible.
Now, in a very Mother Teresa-like way, he lives there full time, fully immersed in the life and the culture. He spends all of his free time engaged in multiple volunteer opportunities to help Ukrainians impacted by the ongoing war. I actually had a chance to catch up with Brendan this week over a Zoom call and asked him what exactly he was up to. I would love for you to hear it from his own words. I'm going to play a quick clip for you, so take a listen.
Marisa: "Describe for me what you are doing, volunteering, your life for the people here."
Brendan: "Oh yeah, so I kind of float around between a lot of different volunteer opportunities here. The main one is called La Vie Volunteer Kitchen. They started in 2017 when the war started. There were two older women who realized that they had the ability to organize and put together a kitchen where they make essentially MREs, but it's like good, home-cooked Ukrainian food. So, just like dehydrated borscht and other things. And so that's most of what I spend my time doing, is going to the kitchen. And it's really cool, you don't have to sign up for shifts or anything, it's just however much time you have that day, you go in there. It's pumpkin season right now, so right now it's a lot of chopping pumpkins. It could be peeling potatoes, beets, just preparing food. And then they put it in the packs that end up getting sent to the front line for the soldiers. But I'll also go into, here's another location where I'll do camo netting pretty often, which is nice, it's pretty close to the hotel, so I'll just hop in for a few hours in the middle of the day and do some camo netting. Saturday mornings I go and do dog walking, there's a lot of animals that have been rescued from really dangerous parts of Ukraine, and so they'll walk the dogs on Saturday mornings. And there's another place that I absolutely love where we actually recycle the batteries from like disposable vapes, or those electric scooters, but just recycle rechargeable batteries and turn them into battery packs that the soldiers can use on the front line to charge their various devices."
Marisa: "What have you learned about your faith, about your journey, or yourself, in following your own call to jump in full scale?"
Brendan: "Yeah, I'll say honestly, a lot of the first year here, it's a lot of just doing the day-to-day things, and it's a lot of focus on just the work you're doing that day, and not the war on a larger scale of things. And then this past summer, I got the opportunity to follow my grandparents to their mission down in Guatemala, and to see the example that they set, of kind of setting the people first. And that kind of changed my perspective on things, and I realized, I was thinking, you know, there were very good motions, but just someone going through the motions of volunteering. And that really struck me, being like, okay, this is, there's a reason that I'm doing this, and trying to put the people in the work, not the work, you know, the people as the end goal of things first."
It was so cool to get to hear from Brendan what he's doing, and to be able to see how God is at work in his life right now. And through that conversation, it was clear to me that Brendan learned the key to what it means to serve wholeheartedly. You know, it's not about what you do exactly, it's not about where you go to do the work, it's about how you do it. It's not just about the tasks that are at hand. While those might be important, serving wholeheartedly is about the people, the people you are connecting with.
Mother Teresa said it this way: "I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus, this one has leprosy or gangrene, I must watch him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus." Teresa didn't just mirror Christ's humility in service, she truly believed that she was meeting Christ in every person she served. Service for Mother Teresa was an act of devotion to Christ. It was the way that she wholeheartedly lived out her life of faith and her love for God.
I believe that it was the very same for that first hospitality team of the early church, how they might have seen their service to the widows that they were serving. As they were passing a meal to them, they saw Christ. Serving others is an act of serving Christ. It is offering yourself to others in a way that communicates the love of Christ with your entire being, your heart, soul, mind, and strength, maybe in ways that your words could never fully communicate.
This is what it means to be immersed in the life of a community, to wholeheartedly say yes to the tasks that seem small and inconsequential. But when they are done with great love, they make all the difference in the world.
I'm not saying anything you don't already know, Trinity. You know this to be true, because you are already doing it. Our church family is filled with people who live out this Mother Teresa-like wholeheartedness. People like Jan LeDuc, who, up until recently, at the age of 92, friends, 92, she was getting down into the dirt in the plants and yanking up weeds on our northwest campus and driving around on that gator thing that is loud and goes fast. Giving wholeheartedly to the simple task of pulling up weeds, the important work of keeping our northwest campus beautiful, because she knew that someone could experience God's love through the nature that surrounds us in this place.
Then there are people like the older guys who, my very first week here, actually, before I was introduced to any of you all back in '22, I saw them trying to hoist up this roof to that thing, and they were doing a great job. And I went over to help, and they were like, "We don't really need your help, but you are welcome to join us." They do some of the odd jobs that no one would ever see or know about, but make sure that our campus and this church run smoothly.
There are people like our ushers and our greeters, who greet everyone with a warm smile, and in doing so, they communicate a couple of really important things. First, that they are welcomed in this place, and second, that they are deeply loved by God. There are those who serve at our mobile food pantry, who offer so much more than simply a bag of fresh groceries to our neighbors who are struggling to put food on their tables. They offer hope and love in a way that could not be communicated just with words.
There are so many more ways that we are living a wholehearted service here at Trinity. This is what it means to be a part of a community. It's saying yes to offering your time in what might seem like small and insignificant ways. But when they are done with great love, they make all the difference in the world.
In just a few moments, we will have the opportunity to welcome new members into the life of our church family. It's an opportunity for them, and for all of us, to say yes again, to recommit ourselves to offering our prayers and our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness. And as they say yes, I invite you to hear those words anew, and to hear the invitation that Christ might be extending to you, of ways that you can jump in again, wholeheartedly.
Do small things with great love, because that is what makes all the difference.
Amen.