God Helps Those That Help Themselves (?)
I spent the last week at camp with 42 high school students and 10 adults. This camp is known as “Camp Awesome.” It is a camp that kids who begin their camp experiences in elementary or middle school look up to and strive toward because of a high level of adventure, amazing bonding among campers, and a second worship service that helps older kids really dive deep in developing their own relationship with God – not their parents’ or their youth pastors’.
Camp Awesome includes all of the normal fun of camp – paddling, swimming, a challenge course, a climbing wall, dining hall meals and camp songs, puns, and knock-knock jokes.
It includes all the normal fun of older kids leaning into their independence. A little sass. Some eye-rolling. Some power struggles and negotiations about what is the “right way” to act, talk to one another, dress… All of that. And more.
Over the course of their high school years, campers come back again and again and develop deep relationships with one another, with the camp staff, and with the volunteers. Even over the course of the week, you can see their walls come down as they get more and more comfortable with one another - and that is where life changing conversations take place.
And it is a deep tradition in Camp Awesome for cabin groups to “prank” one another at some point during the week. Under the cover of darkness, with the permission and knowledge of all the adult staff and volunteers, crazy pranks are carried out. The commitment is that no one gets hurt and that the pranking cabin will clean up after their prank. Over the years, pranks have included taking all the furniture (you know those big heavy dorm lounge couches from “This End Up”?) out of common rooms under the cover of darkness and sleep, moving canoes into indoor meeting spaces or cabins, wrapping everything on the porch in plastic wrap, silly string and shaving cream everywhere, beds turned upside down – you get the picture, right?
But this year, something really different happened with pranks.
On Wednesday night, sometime around 1 a.m., 21 people stealthily entered the common room of the cabin I was assigned to and set up a round dining hall table with 8 chairs, set up 8 formal place settings, and laid a spread that included fruit, croissants, muffins, cookies, cupcakes and a beautiful bunch of flowers.
The accompanying note said…
Knock Knock
(Who’s There)
Canoe.
(Canoe who?)
Canoe do the dishes?
As the pranked cabin woke up and sleepily trickled out to the common room the next morning they were dazed and confused. Because typically, a prank has a little bit of an edge to it, right? Some degree of interruption or inconvenience…some hijinks for the sake of hijinks.
But this…this was an act of radical hospitality and service.
It was sweet and yummy, thoughtful and good.
This was love in action.
And it presented a new challenge for the pranked – how to respond in kind.
After some planning, on Thursday evening, 29 people assembled tea lights and bubbles, face masks, nail polish, colored hair spray, hand lotion, body spray, shower poufs and shower steamers, pillows and towels and set up a spa in the middle of the other cabin’s common room. Earlier in the week we had found a children’s book on a camp shelf entitled “Five Minutes of Peace”… about a mama elephant needing a break from her three kiddo elephants…and that book took center stage in the set up.
The campers were expected to return from their late worship experience to apply bug spray and continue to a campfire. Instead, they arrived in cabin to a note that read:
Knock knock.
(Who’s there?)
Dishes.
(Dishes who?)
Dishes your prank.
Instead of a campfire, campers gathered in that common room and enjoyed side-splitting laughter, facials and some pampering.
It really was priceless. And it shifted the energy.
In the last 18 hours of camp, hot, sweaty, tired kids were praising one another’s generosity and thoughtfulness and privately brainstorming ways to out-serve one another next year.
Turns out, serving others is fun, funny and contagious.
Turns out, serving others changes things…the servants included.
I left camp thinking about our series – and about the bumper sticker we are tackling this week.
God helps those that help themselves.
The quote is often attributed to Ben Franklin, but in Poor Richard’s Almanac, he actually quoted the original author, Algernon Sydney, from an article entitled “Discourses Concerning Government” sometime around 1790. Our work is not so much to unpack the context in which it was originally penned…which is a college lecture in itself, but to think about whether this is something we can say is “true” about God.
Our American culture is deeply formed by the revolutionary and pioneering spirit that came with colonization. We are historically steeped in the idea that rugged individualism – which was a departure from feudalism where ruling monarchs held land and peasants lived to serve - yields strength, success, and power.
Historically, we pointed to statements like “God helps those that help themselves” to build and justify the spirit of rugged individualism.
But what would Jesus do?
I want to reread a portion of our scripture today from a different translation – from Eugene Peterson’s The Message:
When the other ten heard of this conversation, they lost their tempers with James and John. Jesus got them together to settle things down. “You’ve observed how godless rulers throw their weight around,” he said, “and when people get a little power how quickly it goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not to be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for many who are held hostage.”
As a reminder, the purpose of this series on bumper sticker theology is not to create shame around saying these things as much as it is to build our awareness so that when we say something, have something said to us, or see it on the car in front of us or on a coffee mug or wall plaque, we’ll pause and think about how we understand God and God’s Word in order to understand what that “sound bite” could really mean to us.
It seems pretty clear in today’s text that we are called not so much to help ourselves but instead to serve others. Time and again in the gospels, we have Jesus describing just how upside down God’s kingdom and God’s actions and God’s value are when placed alongside the world we humans continue to create and generate and live into.
The good news is that God has been patient through time, waiting for US to get it…and to begin to turn the tide. God has waited on us, worked on us, worked in us.
And maybe, going forward when you see that well know phrase, God helps those that help themselves, you might pause and say – is that how it works? Is that the best way?
This week, I feel like I got just a glimpse of a next generation trying to do something different.
Trying to love differently.
Maybe it will catch on.
I pray that it will.
God who waits patiently for us to understand how to love and serve, may it be so.
Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment