(Leviticus 16:27-28; Hebrews 13:7-25)

The author of Hebrews has a high view of the importance of church leadership; but he doesn’t argue it in the ways we’re used to seeing. He doesn’t say, obey your leaders because they’re well-trained, or because they’re good motivators, or because they’re successful. Instead, he says, remember the leaders who have gone before, the ones who first taught you the truth about Jesus—the ones who you know ran the race faithfully all the way across the finish line without stopping or turning away; since they proved faithful to the end, they are the example you should imitate. As for your current leaders, he says, obey them because they’re going to have to give an account of the way they’ve served you as your shepherds, and if you give them flak and trouble, you make that hard for them. It’s almost more a matter of taking pity on them than anything.

And in between these two statements, Hebrews comes back once more, inevitably, to Jesus. Remember your leaders, obey your leaders, why? Because they point you to Jesus. Be led by those who are following Jesus well, because he’s ultimately the one whom we’re supposed to be following; good leaders are those who help us do that better. Even the best of leaders are temporary, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday—when he made sacrifice for all our sin—today—when he sits at the right hand of the Father as our great high priest, bringing our prayers to the throne of grace—and forever—whatever may come, to the ultimate end when he will bring us home to sit at his side. Jesus does not change and he does not fail us, and so we should hold fast to his unchanging truth; he will do new things among us, but he is the same God who does them, and what he does and says tomorrow will never contradict what he has done and said all the way along.

Of course, given the enduring human belief in the new and improved, there are always people coming along trying to convince us they have a better idea, as there were back then as well; and those better ideas always seem to take our attention away from Jesus and point us instead to earthly things and earthly behaviors. Sometimes they’re about behavior control, forbidding certain things and demanding we do others in just the right way; other times they purport to be all about freedom, inviting us to seek satisfaction and fulfillment in the things of this world. Either way, they lead us to put too much value and importance on things that are fleeting, instead of the things of God, who is eternal.

This can only be to our detriment, and so the author says, “Don’t fall for that. You can’t nourish your spiritual life with rules about food, but only with the grace of Jesus.” As the British NT scholar F. F. Bruce put it, “rules about food, imposed by external authority, have never helped people to maintain a closer walk with God.” (And if this talk about food seems unrelated to life nowadays, just consider how many diet books and programs there are out there, and what we call the people who create them: gurus. Modern folks may spiritualize food differently than the ancients did, but people very much still do it.) We need Christ at the center, nothing else.

To emphasize this, Hebrews goes back to the language and imagery of the sacrifices one more time. With the regular sin offerings through the year, after the animal was sacrificed and the best part given to God, the priests ate the rest. On the Day of Atonement, however, when the great sacrifices were offered for the sins of the high priest and of the people, those animals were not eaten—they were burned outside the camp, or the city. Such sacrifices had nothing to do with food—and neither does the sacrifice of Christ, the once-for-all sacrifice that was the reality of which those sacrifices were but a shadow. No outward conformity to rules about food—or anything else—can ever save us, can ever make us pure enough to please God; only Jesus can do that, by his grace.

Now, living by grace doesn’t come naturally to us; even more, societies and governments find it problematic because once you stop believing you can find salvation in obedience to law, you become a lot harder to manipulate and control. It’s telling, Hebrews argues, that Jesus was sacrificed outside the city, outside the walls that enclosed civilization with its rules and structures and orders; he was killed out there with the criminals and the rejects and the wild animals, with those whom law and custom declared unfit and unwelcome. If we’re going to follow Jesus, that’s where we have to go—to the place of rejection and reproach, laying down the approval of others to walk with him.

And here we get this marvelous allusion to Abraham. If you remember chapter 11, Hebrews tells us that Abraham followed God without even knowing where he was going, turning his back on his city and everything that went with it for life spent in tents, because “he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” So too, Hebrews says, we need to recognize that here we have no lasting city; we too are called to live in tents, looking forward to the city that God is laying down on foundations that will endure forever. We need to give up our kingdom-building, to give up pursuing the things of this world and measuring our life by how we do; we need to set aside the approval of others and stop letting it guide our decisions; we need to understand that our call is to follow Jesus, and while Jesus may well give us a really nice tent to live in for a while, it’s still just a tent, and it’s not his goal for us. We need to hold all good things lightly except the love of God and the approval of Christ, because everything else passes away, and everything else will fade in time.

Living this way takes grace, and it takes the Holy Spirit; it takes help, which is why the Spirit gives us leaders. Unfortunately, leaders like this aren’t all that common, which is one reason why the church is so prone to go off the rails. Whatever you may think of her politics, the most startling and profound moment I’ve seen in our country in recent years was when Gov. Sarah Palin declared, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die.” That’s not the kind of language we’re used to from our leaders—for most of them, their own political survival and their own continued importance is the center of their existence. To be sure, Gov. Palin was quoting one of her favorite books of the Bible, the words of Queen Esther to Mordecai in chapter 4 of her book, as she prepares to go to the king to plead for the salvation of the Jews; but then, Esther was a pretty uncommon person herself. Leaders who are willing to lead at their own risk, at their own expense, rather than playing it safe by telling people what they want to hear just aren’t all that easy to find.

Of course, whose fault is that? If we only follow people who lead us where we already know we want to go—if we vote out the truth-tellers, fire the prophets for making us uncomfortable, and generally make it clear that we are going to set the parameters within which we will consent to be led, then what kind of leaders are we going to get? We’re going to get the careerists, the trimmers, the spinners—the ones who tell us whatever we want to hear while they feather their own nests behind our backs. That’s why we get the government we deserve; it’s also what keeps so many of our churches earthbound. We won’t get truth that way, which means we won’t be led in the way of Christ.

Our criterion for leaders should be that they are people committed to following Christ wherever he may lead, speaking his truth even when it’s unwanted, showing his love even when it’s uncomfortable. Everything else is gravy; that’s the main thing. It’s not even that they need to look holy—sometimes the people who look holiest are just the best liars; sometimes people who clearly struggle with sin can help us the most as we struggle with ours. We’ll never completely overcome sin in this life, after all—the key is that we keep fighting it and keep seeking to put it to death, even when we don’t want to, even when we aren’t wildly successful. We need to find people who do that and are committed to keep doing it because their deepest passion is to know Christ, to love Christ, to serve Christ, to follow Christ, to be like Christ—and follow them, even when it’s not our way. Indeed, especially when it’s not our way, because it’s not about our way. It’s about Jesus’ way.

A closing word to those whom God has called to lead, and those whom he is calling: be ready for the nails. If the essence of Christian leadership is “Follow me as I follow Christ”—and it is—and if the way of Christ leads to the cross, then we should expect to get nailed to the wall sometimes. Unlike Jesus, none of us are perfect, so sometimes we have it coming; like him, we’re a target, so sometimes we don’t. Either way, if we’re serious about this following Jesus thing, what else should we expect? The key is that when we feel the nails, we need to respond with humility and grace—with repentance and honesty, when we have sinned—and above all, with love. It’s only as we model that that we can ever lead the church to do the same. Leadership in the church is not a privilege or a right, it’s a form of serving the church, which means suffering for the church—and it will hurt at times, mark me well. Hebrews is right, the church making you groan does them no good, but they’ll do it anyway. But as Hebrews says of Jesus, for the joy set before him Jesus endured the cross—and there is deep joy in this; if God has called you to a place of leadership, whatever else may come, the joy is more than worth it.

(Psalm 118:5-7; Hebrews 13:1-6)

The great irony of this passage is that we’ve worked our way through Hebrews, with all its resounding affirmations of the unique supremacy of Christ and its unyielding insistence that we are not and cannot be saved by obedience to law, but only through the atoning sacrifice of our Lord Jesus—and then we get here, and if we’re not careful, old habits kick in and we read it as law. We’re so used to thinking of life in terms of following commands in order to earn rewards that if we don’t stop and catch ourselves, we’ll see this and be right back to law; we’ll read this as things we have to do to earn God’s pleasure, just as if the first twelve chapters of this book had nothing to do with it. Even for my part, I should know better, but if I don’t stop and think, I’ll preach it that way.

Which isn’t good, because there are things here we need to learn that we won’t learn if we do that—and not just about grace, but about law. We were talking about this in our small group last Wednesday, with respect to the Sermon on the Mount, because Christ does come as the lawgiver; it’s something Matthew emphasizes. Jesus firmly dec-lares that he hasn’t come to get rid of the law, but to fulfill it, and Matthew is structured to present Jesus as the new and greater Moses. Hebrews, of course, does something similar, arguing that Jesus is superior to Moses. Our Lord is far from indifferent to what we do or how we do it; those who claim the name and authority of Jesus to throw out biblical commands they don’t like clearly don’t understand him, or the holiness of God.

What we need to understand, though, is that Christ is a lawgiver in a profoundly different sense from any human lawgiver, or even from Moses in the giving of the divine law. Human laws are about compelling outward obedience; they don’t go any further than that. Indeed, they really shouldn’t, given human limitations. In the hands of an all-knowing God who is love, however, it’s a very different matter. He doesn’t simply want us to acquire a certain code of behavior—he’s on about something far better and far greater for us, nothing less than our total redemption and re-creation; and so he comes to us as lawgiver, yes, but rather than giving us behavioral standards which we have to meet in order to earn rewards, he gives us the perfect law—the law of love, the law of liberty.

Now, these phrases are biblical—James uses the latter a couple times, and he and Paul both say that love is the fulfilling of the law—but they fit strangely with how we think of law, and we aren’t quite sure what to make of them. The problem is, we’ve missed the first lesson: what we think is freedom isn’t. We learn, in this world, to define freedom as doing whatever we want; we understand law as defining the limits of our freedom, restricting our freedom in this area and protecting it in that one by restricting the freedom of others. We see it as a balancing act, and something of a zero-sum game, that all really boils down to one question: how much are we going to be allowed to do?

The Bible comes along and says no, this is all wrong. Doing whatever we want isn’t freedom at all, it’s slavery—slavery to our desires, to our whims, to the sin that has rooted itself so deeply and so insidiously in our hearts. It is the ability to give in to our desires, to let them rule our lives and dictate our actions; it is the corresponding inability to rise above them, to go beyond them, and thus to become more than just the sum of our appetites. It is the soft slavery of the patient tyrant—and as the Bible shows us, there is a tyrant here indeed, for the desires that rule us are not truly our own, nor are they truly oriented toward our own good; we are being manipulated by our ancient enemy, the Father of Lies, who is perfectly willing that people should never realize that they are in fact puppets on his strings so long as they continue to be puppets. Such do our desires make of us, as long as our main concern is whether or not we can do what we want to do.

Which it usually is, most of the time; not that we’re all completely selfish or trying to get our own way at any cost, but this way of thinking is just how we naturally frame our decisions and our opportunities. Out of this comes our basic understanding of law as something which restrains us, something which compels us to act against what we want to do. Even when we think that restraint is a good thing, whether for us individually or for our society, we still understand it in those essentially negative terms; we see laws as existing to prevent us from satisfying our desires, and thus forcing us to act against our nature. They are external objects which serve as instruments of coercion.

If we stop and think, though, we realize that this isn’t the only kind of law we know about. We also acknowledge and respect physical laws, such as the law of gravity, which are very different. The law of gravity isn’t something externally imposed on us, or on other objects—it’s simply the way things work; it’s not a law created to control the behavior of people or things, it’s a law we recognize that describes our behavior. If I hold this pencil in mid-air and let go, it drops, and that was every bit as true before anyone ever came up with the word “gravity” as it is now. It’s just what naturally happens; it’s a law of internal reality. The law of love is much the same, though in a different way: if we are full of true love, which is the love of God our creator, how will we naturally behave? If our lives are governed by love for God and for other people, what will they look like? Put another way, if the love of God sets us free from slavery to our desires, what will we seek instead, and how will we act? This is the perfect law, the law of liberty.

And it’s what this passage is about, because it’s all about love—specifically, keeping our love rightly ordered. It’s about love for those who belong to us—our family, our friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ—which calls us to seek their good, even (or perhaps especially) when it costs us something. More, it’s about love that goes beyond that circle to those in need, especially those who are strangers among us and have no one on whom they can depend; whether we know them or not, God does, and he loves them, and he calls us to share his love with them and meet their needs. It’s about not pretending sexual desire is love, or using that pretense to justify immoral behavior. Our society loves to do that, and many marriages have been defiled and destroyed as a result; we need to understand that love must sometimes oppose desire, and put it to death, if love is to be true and stay true. We won’t necessarily make friends by saying that, but it’s the truth, and sometimes love requires us to say it.

And finally, it’s about loving God rather than money. This might seem disconnected, but it really isn’t; it’s another area in which we can easily let love for God come in second, and it’s one which helps us to see that part of the problem here is trust. “Keep your life free from love of money,” why? Because God has promised to take care of us. So much of what drives us to the pursuit of pleasure, to the accumulation of wealth—or to hoarding wealth in an effort to make sure we always have enough—is the fear that if we don’t, we’ll lose out. We don’t trust God to provide what we need or give us what’s best for us if we aren’t striving to make that happen; this fear and mistrust chokes out joy and pushes us to seek things instead of God, the gifts ahead of the giver. But the author knows that God’s perfect love casts out fear, as 1 John 4 says, and so he reminds us that we have every reason to trust God.