Twenty-fourth Sunday After Pentecost Year A 2008

24 Pentecost A 08 (Heritage Sunday)
October 26, 2008
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 (NRSV)

1 You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, 2 but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. 3 For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, 4 but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. 5 As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; 6 nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, 7 though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. 8 So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

Obedient Leaders

Thirty years ago, on November 18th, a Disciples congregation gathered for a worship service at which almost all the 1,000 members committed suicide, and at which a few were murdered.

Some may be too young to remember Jim Jones, a minister of an independent congregation who transferred into the Disciples in the sixties. If we are to evaluate a ministry based on its success in attracting many racially and ethnically diverse people and involving them in real working ministries, Jim Jones was wildly successful. Obviously, the tragedy that ensued raises some issues with this method of evaluating success.

This month’s Disciples World has an excellent series of articles on this tragedy. One of the biggest questions raised by it is of course accountability. In a denomination that so richly values freedom, how does one develop real community without holding one another accountable?

Disciples run into this question at every level of the church’s existence. If every member of the church has a different idea of what constitutes faithfulness, how does a pastor or staff or board set standards of excellence? How are programs evaluated? How are members disciplined? How are troublesome members understood? Are they prophetic voices providing new insights, or are demonic voices undermining the church’s health?

On the regional level, how does a regional minister or board address the problem of a renegade pastor or congregation? What if a congregation is doing real damage to members and to the church at large? One of the learnings gleaned from this whole tragedy was that Jones was attracted to the Disciples and affiliated with them precisely because they so valued the freedom of congregations to shape their own lives. But when is a pastor being innovative and when is he or she being destructive?

On a general level, if all the units of the general church are independent, how does the church operate in a strategic and economical manner?

Even more confusing, when is the opposition from authority a matter of persecution and when is it a helpful discipline? Jones and his followers fled to Guyana believing that hostile newspaper articles and the growing concern of the denomination was a persecution similar to the opposition Paul mentions in his letter this morning.

Our country is now selecting a leader, and I sense a lot of fear and anxiety about this decision. And it came to me this week as I reflected on this tension, that the good news is that we are in essence bringing about a revolution, but one that is free of violence and bloodshed. This is the greatness of the American system of democracy. We have a limit on how long a leader can lead us, and then we have the opportunity to go through all the debate and mudslinging and fierce argument typical of any revolutionary process, but we have ordered it so as to exclude actual violence. Whether you are arguing for McCain or for Obama, whether you are passionate or only mildly interested, the one thing you can be sure of is that your town will not be bombed, your homes burned, and your children murdered, which in the past was the only way to replace one leader with another.

At the same time, as great as our process is, we who are Christian think of leadership in a fundamentally different way than human governments and institutions. To put the finest possible point on it, we already have a king, and that king can never be replaced. He is risen from the dead and he reigns forever and ever, amen.

There’s a wonderful book out right now called Jesus for President. I encourage you to read it. One of the things it says is that the values of the kingdom are miles away from the values of any human idea of statehood. Nations encourage economic competition, but in the kingdom there is forgiveness of debts. Nations encourage killing the enemy, in the kingdom we are taught to love them. Nations encourage private ownership, but in the kingdom everyone shares all they have. Nations need leaders that are warriors, but the kingdom has a leader who will not bend a reed to break it, will not blow out a dimly burning wick, and will suffer and die rather than lift a hand to defend himself. Can we really pledge allegiance to both ways? Can we really have two such different masters?

The law of the world is the powerful rule the powerless, usually to benefit of the powerful, and usually through the threat of violence. In the kingdom of God, the powerless are lifted up and the powerful are thrown down, and vengeance is God’s alone.

And the only criterion for leadership, the only qualifications for heroism, is faith and obedience to the one God, who was made flesh in Jesus the Messiah. On October 20th, a British woman named Gayle Williams was on her way to work in Afghanistan, where she was serving the church as an aid worker. She was shot down in the street, and the people who shot her later said it was because she was a Christian. She wasn’t carrying a gun, she wasn’t wearing armor, she wasn’t trying to convert anyone or hurt anyone, and she wasn’t serving the British government. She was serving Christ and she gave her life for him. Remember her name. She’s the Christian idea of a hero.

Also, what she did was not suicide.

And what about leadership among Christians? We’re currently wrestling with that question as we approach our annual meeting with its nominations and elections. If Christ our king is so different from all human rulers and governments, what is it that distinguishes those who lead the congregation?

What about success? Many early American churches were run by those in the community who had made a success in business and gave liberally to the support of the church. Many of these leaders drew members who hoped to link themselves to the successful leaders. Today, to hear it told on the news and in Christian media, the success of a Christian leader is based on how many people he or she can get together for worship, how big their church building and parking lot is, how many books they sell on the open market. Those leaders are richly rewarded with million-dollar homes and sixty thousand-dollar cars. Some of those criterion applied to Jim Jones, and even earned him the approbation of the denomination early on.

In Deuteronomy 34, Moses is named the greatest prophet who ever lived. The reward for his faithfulness was to die just before the fulfillment of God’s promise to the wilderness-wandering Jews. He got a glimpse of the promised land and was then told he wasn’t going to go there. He had spent his entire career in ministry living in what most of us would call poverty, eating bread and drinking water and living in dusty tents in the desert, being more or less constantly challenged by the ingratitude and discontentedness of his followers. Their numbers, by the way, decreased exponentially from the time he took over until the time he left, and he divided most of his time between yelling at his followers in disgust and begging God not to wipe them off the face of the earth.

None of these things were why he was the greatest prophet who ever lived. He was the greatest prophet because the Lord knew him face to face, and sent him to perform signs and wonders in the sight of the people Israel. He was a great leader because God knew him, and God sent him.

And what happened as a result? Moses was changed from a stuttering, angry, frightened and anonymous shepherd living in exile into the wisest and most powerful religious leader in Israel’s history. And through him, God transformed a huge band of frightened slaves into a much smaller nation of priests to the living God.

Jesus is our king and Messiah not because of the great success of his ministry. He managed to get only twelve people to really commit to his path. He was able to get some crowds to rally, but they turned on him as soon as the going got a little tough, including even one of the twelve closest to him. He had not place to lay his head, much less a million-dollar home, and he never wrote a word or sold a single book. Most of the leading religious thinkers of his day, that period’s version of today’s televangelists and mega-church bishops, thought he was a blasphemer and a heretic. He was rewarded with a cross and a tomb.

But God sent him. God transformed him. God worked through him. God raised him from the dead. And when he rose he became a Lord who transforms bumbling fools into great preachers, hateful persecutors into loving apostles and diverse populations of lost sheep into unified communities of love and grace.

So when we choose our leaders here in our Christian community, we’re not looking for material success, charisma, popularity, sense of humor, good looks, organizational skills or the ability to eloquently speak, although these abilities are sometimes bestowed by God in service of God’s mission. We’re not looking for people who are good at flattery or manipulation. We’re looking for people who are sent by God, transformed by God, and through whom God works to transform others.

But we’re also looking for someone who takes seriously the authority of Holy Scripture, even if they don’t fully grasp it yet; who takes seriously the great tradition of the church; who takes seriously the authority of the whole body of Christ.

Of course we need leaders who are courageous enough to speak a word that isn’t already popular or mainstream; but we’re also looking for someone who prays with fear and trembling for God’s guidance in all things; we’re looking for someone who struggles to serve rather than to dominate and through whom God can gather a bunch of diverse individuals and transform them into a communion of love.

Amen.