My first visit to the little pizzeria was exciting. Its presentation was spot-on, with a buffet to die for. It was clearly going somewhere, and was ripe for franchise. The prices were low, the employee morale was high, the food was great—creative like good pizza ought to be. Lots of cheese, greasy meat, and rich red sauce.
But in their cramped, poorly lit bathroom, I found a universe apart from what was being showcased out in the eating area. It had gone for days without being cleaned as though it were a land that time had forgotten. A forlorn little toilet sat broken, clogged with dark waste. Scraps of tissue were stuck to the floor, and the trash basket was overflowing. The paper towel dispenser was empty. The place stunk.
I don’t know if you can develop PTSD from a visit to a restroom, but upon stepping back out to the bright world of uniformed employees, and happy patrons, I had a hard time forgetting what I had just seen.
Call me weak-stomached, but I could only manage to chew a few slices of pepperoni-mushroom-pineapple-bacon before going home.
On my way out the door, I saw a suggestion box that said, “Tell us how we did!” I took them up on it, penning a two-sentence warning about paying so much attention to public spaces while allowing the private ones to go to hell.
For a year or so afterward, that happy little place continued making pizzas.
And then it was gone. My next trip to that town found the storefront dark and empty. I don’t know exactly what happened. I can’t help but wonder if that bathroom had been a harbinger of sorts—a tale of the inevitable creeping neglect that finally catches up with and cripples segments of the service industry.
This is also where it all starts to end for a ministry.
Think about priestly ministerial service from the Old Testament. Priests were born, not made. They weren’t merit-based volunteers. It was simple. If you could trace your lineage back to Aaron, you were a priest. In a similar respect, it works that way in the New Testament. We’re born again as priests: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (Rev. 1:5b-6).
According to the Old Testament pattern, although we can’t lose our position as priests, we can damage, if not severely curtail, our service. The Apostle Paul mentioned his concern over being disapproved after having preached to others (1 Cor. 9:27), of bringing shame upon himself (Phil. 1:20), and of avoiding any fault being found with his ministry (2 Cor. 6:3). If these possibilities caused some disquiet for the great apostle, how much more it ought to warn us.
Leviticus chapter 21 portrays the danger not so much coming through a single sudden indiscretion, like a bear attack, but through a mounting roach infestation.
These disqualify a person from active priesthood: “None of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God” (v. 17). The chapter goes on to describe a spate of physical deficiencies (vv. 18-20), which, although not the fault of the bearer of them in the Old Testament, illustrates our spiritual faults in the New.
There we find prohibitions based on stunted growth (dwarfism), damaged glory (a mutilated face), extremes and unbalance (limbs too long or short), difficulties with one’s walk (injured feet) or work (injured hands), spiritual blindness, warped vision, constant distractions (itching), inabilities to spiritually reproduce (crushed gonads), and wounds of the soul only partially healed (scabbing).
In the spiritual sense of it, these are often not the result of sudden gross lapses in godliness but of sustained carelessness. To misquote Eugene Peterson, they represent “a long disobedience in the same direction.” Blemishes such as these develop through a process of neglect and indifference–a multitude of small things that finally succeed in shutting down service.
In the meantime, Scripture promises the deeply flawed priest that he “may eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy and of the holy things” (v. 22), and this is where a lot of believers land. At least I still get something out of my Bible studies and Sunday morning sermon! But a priest of God will never find this attitude sufficient, for it stops at priestly position, short of priestly function. Real servants not only want to eat the blessed bread of Christ but to serve it. We’ll never be happy with a halfway experience.
That’s why we bring the cross of Jesus into the places shut away, the unpleasant, uninspiring challenges of our lives that stink. True, it is more fun out in the limelight, where there are lots of high-fives.
But sometimes, most times, trouble starts in the bathroom.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Fernando González from Pixabay
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