“Put On Your Apron”

“So, you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants. We have only done our duty.'” Luke 17.10

My uncle wore an apron every Sunday morning. Whenever I think of him, my first memory goes to the long white apron that he looped over his neck and then tied behind his back. The apron belonged to my grandmother, but each Sunday it became the property of my uncle as he prepared breakfast for her and for me. He worked in the fields during the week, driving a tractor and doing all the hundred other jobs of a farmer. But on Sunday morning, he would put on a starched white shirt along with pressed black pants, go to Sunday Mass, and then come to his mom’s house and make breakfast for her.

Since I spent a lot of time with her, I also was at at the kitchen snack bar on those Sunday mornings and I watched as my uncle pulled the apron over his Sunday-go-to-church clothes and put a big skillet on the stove and began to fry the bacon. I can still hear the sizzle and splatter of the bacon in the pan. This was his Sunday ritual as sacred as that Sunday Mass he attended and he did it with the same attentiveness as the priest at the altar. Unlike the priest, his actions around the table always were accompanied with a hearty laughter and a big smile.

I don’t remember how many years my uncle Larry made breakfast for his mom on Sunday morning. I know it was long enough to include in time three or four of his oldest children as they reached church age. We’d pull up another chair to the table as another of his children joined us the next year. The apron was always the same long white one, although my grandma had others on the rack behind the door to her utility room. He was a tall man and the long apron seemed a perfect fit for him.

I never asked him why he did it–I was too young to question the ordinary stuff of my day. But with the years, I have come to see the many reasons behind that kind gesture: love for his mom, devotion to her in her old age, generosity on his part, an opportunity to give her part of his week, a chance to sit down at a table to share a meal with her as he had done for so many years at the old farmhouse where they grew up. Whatever the reason, that apron showed love just as clearly as it showed any stains from the splatter of bacon grease.

You don’t see many people wearing aprons anymore. Aprons, it would seem, belong to a bygone age, much like the typewriter or the Volkswagen Beetle. We can speculate as to its demise, offering explanations such as less time spent in the kitchen or less mess in preparing meals–thanks to the microwave–or less concern about a spot or two on our regular clothes. You might see an apron on a server in some restaurants, but their aprons are more an accessory than a necessity. That point is proven by the lack of any smudges on the apron. It is as clean when it is taken off at the end of the shift as it was when the server first put it on at the start of the work day.

Yet, an apron is the centerpiece of the Galilean Teacher’s message that he preached in those many villages he visited on his way to Jerusalem. In fact, the apron may have summarized his teaching long before the cross usurped that place of prominence. We should not be surprised, in fact, if his early followers were recognized–not so much by their low-life character–as by the aprons they all wore.

The reason for the clear association between an apron and a follower of the Rabbi is simple–he taught the importance of service. If we listen carefully–or even casually–to the teaching of Rabbi Jesus, we will hear him speak often of servants and of the work of servants. Factually, his last oral lesson was about foot washing, which was the job of a servant. Clearly, he identified his way of life with that of a servant. “I have come to serve, not to be served,” he said.

That fact alone may explain the reluctance to follow his way. We don’t easily or readily identify ourselves with servants. We associate the word, not with his teaching, but with people who work for high-highfalutin folk, subjected to the whims and nonsense of people with too much money. We’ve had that notion of servant reinforced by such popular TV shows as Downton Abbey, with that inimitable cast of servants huddled around the simple kitchen table as their rich betters eat in a sumptuous dining room a door or two down the corridor.

People these days do not aspire to the job of being a servant. At least not in our culture. To be obligated to the (seemingly) menial tasks of cooking and cleaning regularly for somebody else for low or little pay is not something we want for ourselves. We prize our independence and our status too much for the job of being somebody else’s servant. Our first instinct, honestly, is to see it as a job beneath us.

And right there is where we run headfirst into the Rabbi’s teaching with a crash that results in a knot or two on our foreheads. We find ourselves in the awkward position of hearing the Rabbi tell us to be a servant while our own desire is to be anything but a servant. As one notable spiritual commentator pointed out years ago, we prefer to wear a bib instead of an apron. As he explained it, we like to be served, not to serve.

Yet, the cold fact is being a bona fide follower of the Galilean Teacher means the first requirement on the job description reads “servant.” If we sign up to be his follower, then we better look good in an apron because we’re expected to do a lot of stuff that requires serving others. If we want to understand clearly the nature of the work that he wants us to do, we only need to remember that the word that is used in Greek (doulos) to connote a servant is the same word that is used to refer to a slave. The Rabbi calls us to be slaves to one another.

According to Biblical scholars, that word “servant” or “slave” is used about 120 times in the Christian Scriptures, a frequency that lets us know that service is more than an occasional good act or a summer mission trip of a few days to Central America. As the Rabbi makes clear by his own life, service is supposed to be a way of life for his followers. It is how we start our day and it is how we end our day–serving others as would any good servant or slave.

That reality is brought home to us again in the gospel today when the Rabbi instructs his followers that they are to see themselves as servants. He uses the example of someone who comes in from the fields at the end of the work day and who then must prepare a meal for his master who says to him, “Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished.”

If we still fail to grasp the centrality of service for our lives as followers, then the Teacher makes it clearer for us when he concludes his teaching today with these words, “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants. We have done what we were obliged to do.'” So, not only are we to do what servants do, which is to put the needs of others before our own needs, but we also are to self-identify as servants–unworthy, to boot.

I hear people still talk about Mrs. Kegley’s peach cobbler. Mind you, it’s been fifty years since I had a bite of her cobbler, but I remember it well and I remember her equally well. Mrs. Kegley was the head cook for the high school cafeteria. She, along with two other women, cooked and served all the meals that we high-schoolers ate. As we waited in line to be served by these kindhearted women, the first thing a person saw was the white apron that Mrs. Kegley’s wore every single day. It rarely was clean because a person who cooks lunch for 200 high school students isn’t going to have a clean apron.

The second thing a student saw was the big smile on Mrs. Kegley’s face. She never ever served a meal without a smile–great and generous and genuine. That woman, I tell you, was happy to see us and happy to serve us some of her home-cooking. We were–all of us–her kids. And while she didn’t know how to cook a single bad thing, her peach cobbler was everybody’s favorite. When somebody still tries to duplicate it these many years since–and she was only too happy to share her recipe–it brings back lots of good memories. But I’d still say the duplicated cobbler doesn’t taste quite the same as Mrs. Kegley’s did. I know it has all the same ingredients, but one thing might be missing. And that is love. Mrs. Kegley baked her cobbler with love in her heart and in her hands, and genuine love is not something easily duplicated.

When we hear the Jewish Rabbi ask us to put on an apron and to serve one another, he’s asking us not only to feed others and to give drink to others and to help the needy, he’s also asking us to love others. And so, as we loop that apron around our necks and grab a serving spoon, he expects a smile to be on our faces and a good heapin’ of love in our hearts. Then, only then, have we become the servants he wants us to be.

— Jeremy Myers