So, discipleship is dispossession? So Emily argued last Sunday; and I say yes, but take it further. Yes, but not just in material terms. There’s more going on, as we see in Mark 10. We have an advantage over the disciples, of course: we know Jesus is not building a one-generation movement. The story is not “Jesus gathers support, Jesus and his supporters win, God’s plan is accomplished, the end.” He’s starting something designed to keep growing long after he has left the planet, and so he’s making disciples not just to follow him but to lead others to follow him. His disciples will be called to make disciples themselves—but not disciples of themselves, disciples of Jesus. Problem is, we naturally think of whom we’re following as the person right in front of us, and many gifted people are working to capitalize on that. There are many who want to build their own kingdoms and are happy to use building Christ’s kingdom as a pretext. There always have been. We see Paul, for instance, exasperated by this over and over again, perhaps most memorably (if not most directly) in 1 Corinthians 1.
This is worldly thinking, in which the point of following Jesus is to satisfy and stoke my own ego, and we see it clearly in James and John: Jesus is great, and if I can become one of his closest, most trusted lieutenants, I can be great too. He uses the encounter as an opportunity to teach them, and all his disciples, the hard but critically important lesson that discipleship is not only material dispossession, it is ego dispossession. Which in this case, I would argue, is disempowerment—but disempowerment of the ego, not of us. Just as we are called to let go the idea of “my stuff”—or perhaps we might better say, to detach from it, to learn to hold material things with open hands—so too the idea of “my leadership, “my ministry,” “my position,” “my authority.” After all, even Jesus did this, as Paul points out in Philippians 2. Jesus was God and had every right to be acknowledged as such, but he didn’t see that as something to hold tightly in his grip; instead, he opened his hands and became one of the lowly of the earth.
To the world, to the sinful nature, this feels like death. This is another instance of a problem which has been mentioned many times in this congregation’s history, our false views of death and false views of life. The way of the ego is one of those Proverbs 14:12 ways which seem to us to be the way of life but lead only to death in the end. If we allow the disempowerment and displacement of our egos, if we set aside the idea of “my ministry” along with “my money,” then as Emily said last week, it opens us up to entrust ourselves to God’s goodness—even our sense of our own value and significance.
A few years ago, for Josh and Emily’s first Christmas here, the elders were kind enough to go in with me to give them a present. —Well, I suppose it was more directly a present for Emily, but I believed it would bless them both in God’s time. You may remember if you were here, it was a gift of five little books on pastoral ministry which I cherish deeply. One of them was The Crucifixion of Ministry by Andrew Purves, a Scottish Presbyterian who teaches pastoral theology at Pittsburgh Seminary. His wife pastored a small urban church in Pittsburgh, and much of the fourth chapter is an extended quotation from a sermon she preached on Philippians 3:12-14. In that sermon, Catherine Purves said this:
In this race he is running, Paul is running behind Christ, the one he so longs to know. . . . It was not his decision for Jesus that was all-important and got him running. It was God’s choice of him which put him in the race. He is running behind Jesus in the slipstream of the Holy Spirit. Paul is bonded to Christ by the Holy Spirit. He is being drawn forward toward the goal by Christ himself, who has chosen to run the race for us because we cannot run this race for ourselves in our own power.
I need to give up the idea of “my” whatever—ministry, leadership role, job—as something I own, which I do out of my own internal fund of gifts and skills and experiences, for which I get to take the credit (if it works), and accept my displacement from the center, the dispossession of my ego. It’s still mine, but the arrow of possession points the other way: it’s “my ministry” the same way this is my church or my country, not because it belongs to me but because I belong to it. This is the particular place and time and way in which Jesus has drawn me into union with himself through his Holy Spirit and invited me to follow in his slipstream, to get in on his ministry in this world. The more we live and operate in this reality, the more we begin to learn—for I think we only ever truly make a beginning at this—what it is to lead not in our own power and goodness but in the power and goodness of God.
This is not, of course, how this world teaches us to operate. It’s easy to slag on Jesus’ disciples, but would any of us have done better? They have a lot to learn, but to learn they need to be taught, and a lot of those lessons need the right sort of teachable moment. We see one in Mark 10 as the sons of Zebedee make their bid for greatness. They have no idea what they’re asking, of course, because they don’t understand what greatness in the kingdom of God actually is. Jesus tells them so, asking if they really believe they can pay the price he’s going to pay, but they don’t get it; they’re blithely confident they can pay whatever price might be required.
If you joined the sessions the other weekend with Matt Warner’s spiritual director Steve Petermeyer, you might have heard Steve’s friend Dustin talk about surfing. In particular, you might have heard him tell of the time a big wave wiped him out, leaving him lost in the deep with no idea which way was up. The thing that saved him was his leash to the board; when he felt the tug of the leash on his ankle, that oriented him, and he was able to climb the leash back to the surface. That’s where James and John are: in way over their heads and needing a sharp tug.
The challenge of following Jesus is it means actually following Jesus—and his road leads to the cross, and through it. That’s hard to wrap our minds around, and Jesus’ first disciples don’t even know they need to (yet). One lesson I’ve learned from my long Lent is that however much you talk about following Jesus, however much you prepare yourself to walk his road, it always looks different when you’re on it. I’ve quoted the jibe before that adventure is hard and unpleasant things happening to other people far away, but it continues to resonate for me because it continues to be true. As Charlie Peacock put it, “We can only possess what we experience; truth to be understood must be lived.”
Of course, the fact that James and John are utterly clueless doesn’t stop Jesus from accepting their offer; the greatest danger of prayer is always that God might just say yes. Note, though, he doesn’t grant their actual request. Rather, Jesus says, “You have no idea what you’re committing to, but you will. Even so, I can’t promise you the places of honor, because those have already been reserved.”
That might have been the end of it, but the other disciples get wind of the request, and they’re honked off—not, be it noted, because James and John are presumptuous and their priorities are out of whack, but because they thought of it first. What was intended as a sneaky bid for most-favored-disciple status is now a general conversation, and Jesus seizes the moment to teach some home truths. He begins where they are, with the world’s understanding of greatness and leadership: being a leader means you get to lord it over people and flaunt your authority. You get to be the one telling other people what to do instead of vice versa. That’s how things work in the world, he acknowledges, then continues, “but not for you. Among you, it will be different.”
Jesus’ standard is that you can be a leader to the extent you are willing to be a servant. Greatness in the kingdom of God begins with releasing—with detaching from—the desire to be seen and treated as great. In God’s economy, the root of leadership, power, and authority is fundamentally different from that of the world. Purely human power always rests ultimately on force, but the power of God rests on the nature and character of God. God’s power is far greater than any human power, but this is not always obvious because the working of God’s power is so often accompanied by pain and suffering. Like the rich young ruler, whom Mark doesn’t label as such because he doesn’t care, of course we start off assuming God is on the side of the victorious, and thus logically the failures and those who suffer are being punished; but Jesus makes it excruciatingly clear God doesn’t work this way.
Now, let me clarify two things I’m not arguing here. One, this doesn’t mean wealth and success are signs God is not with you. Yes, Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle—and don’t soften that, he meant big cranky beastie and hole too small to get the thread through—than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God; he didn’t actually say it’s any easier for the poor. What he said is, God can do the impossible. Two, I’m not saying every human relationship, or even most human relationships, are purely power-based. I’m a Reformed theologian, and as such I’m a big believer in common grace. The common grace of God, that which is available to everyone, lightens and moderates every human relationship. Were it not so, every society would be completely savage; but by his mercy, it is so.
The point I want to make is there’s a profound difference between gospel leadership, leadership in the slipstream of Christ, and the mere exercise of authority. I’m revisiting here something I said a few months ago in preaching on 2 Samuel 6, that true leadership is intrinsically a form of service. In one sense, a good leader is the most important person in any successful organization because they have the greatest ability to contribute to that success, but in another, that leader is the least important person. In the exercise of leadership, those who lead are not doing any of the work the organization exists to do. Follow a piece of medical hardware from the first idea to implantation in a patient; if my experience means anything, you will find the hands of the CEO or the plant manager on exactly none of them. That’s the work of the company, but it’s not what they are responsible to do. Their responsibility, whether they remember this or not, is to serve those who are doing the work: by giving them the tools and training they need to do it well; by putting them in positions where they can do it well; and by giving them financial, emotional, and structural support in and for the doing.
Leadership is also service to the work itself. True leadership requires subordinating personal agendas to the good of the work and the organization. This can be taken too far, of course, and so it must be said that leaders need to set appropriate boundaries, find those who will support them as they support others, and attend to their own self-care; neglecting these matters makes worse leaders, not better ones.
If true leadership is intrinsically a form of service, it is intrinsically relational in character. One of many reasons this matters is that the scriptural standard for relationships is righteousness. This family of Hebrew words (tsedeq, tsedeqah, and so on) are relational words. They ask us, in this relationship, are you keeping the commitments you have made and living toward the other person in the love and grace of God? Righteousness is the full inversion of power-based relationship. We will never fully escape those in this lost and broken world so loved by God, but that’s the goal in every part of life.
Our example and model in this, as in everything, is Jesus, who is God and laid down everything for us; there was no limit to how far he would go or what price he would pay. Now, does that contradict leaders needing self-care? No—just go through the gospels and see how many times Jesus went off away from the crowds, and sometimes even from his disciples. He didn’t crucify himself, even once; he went to the cross at the proper time, for the only time, because it was what had to be done to carry out God’s plan. To say there was no limit to how far Jesus would go for us means there’s no limit to what God might ask of us except his own nature and character. We can safely say God will never ask us to do that which is not pleasing to him. But could he be asking us to go that far to serve his people? Maybe.
As we consider that, though, remember Jesus’ service was freely given. It was not compelled. It was not bartered. He offered his life in exchange for something, yes—as a ransom for us—but he didn’t offer it to us on a transactional basis. He wasn’t bargaining with us to get what he wanted. Rather, he offered his life for us when we did not ask for it. His life was not taken from him; even at the very last he had the ability to escape death, and he chose to willingly surrender his life anyway. Nothing compelled him to do so but his own integrity, within himself as the Son of God, within himselves as the Trinity.
So, then, where do we go with this? Discipleship is followership; it’s also leadership—for all of us, in our own ways. We follow the leader and lead as we follow. This is one of the forms of service to which we have all been called—and maybe the hardest of all, given that it is the dispossession of the ego, and ultimately ego death. Thing is, what makes it hard is also what makes it a blessing in the end, for as we surrender our egos, we find our true selves. Our egos orient us to this world, but we were made for more; we have to shrink ourselves to fit. Disempowering the ego allows our souls to expand, to grow in capacity in every sense of the word.
And the funny thing is, we don’t get less of the world in the bargain; the opposite is true. On worldly terms, Jesus could easily have been the greatest person of his age, and he threw that away. I’m sure some considered his life a waste of great potential, but had he become one of the great world leaders of his time, his legacy would be as dead as theirs. Of everyone alive on the planet at the moment he was sentenced to death, he is the only one whose legacy still lives. Others are remembered, but their kingdoms are all long, long gone. Only his kingdom remains.
Now, I began working on this message focused on what Scripture calls us to in the areas in which the Spirit leads us to lead; but there’s a flip side here of particular relevance as we stare down the barrel of another presidential election. What Jesus taught his disciples about leadership is not only relevant for us as we are called to lead, it’s also relevant as we’re called to choose leaders, both in the church and in the world. On the whole, do American Christians evaluate and choose leaders on Jesus’ terms, or on worldly terms? I’m not talking politics in the sense of positions and platforms. Personally, at this point, I find both parties appalling, and I’ll be voting third-party again, at least at the presidential level; but, you know, we’re all misguided in some parts of our lives, and even where I think a party’s positions are misguided, even if I’m right, that party’s candidates may hold them for honorable reasons.
The question—whether pastoral or presidential candidate doesn’t really matter—isn’t “Does this candidate say the things I want to hear?” The question is, are we following leaders who are drawing us into Jesus’ slipstream? This is where I find, to pick one example I happen to have seen again this week, Franklin Graham’s defense of Donald Trump on the grounds that “I’m not voting for him to be my pastor, I’m voting for him to be president” wrongheaded. Granted that we can’t expect to find gospel leadership in our politicians, that doesn’t make dismissing the issue as unimportant a wise idea. That sort of move is one reasos American political discourse is, on the whole, worse off for the church’s involvement in it—on both sides of the political aisle. The American church has a woeful lack of good political theology. Instead, we have a lot of language putting Jesus, the Bible, and Christian faith in the service of one candidate or another—which is to say, instead of political theology we have theologized politics.
Are we any better when it comes to church leadership? I’d like to think so, but the continuing list of megachurch scandals in this country would seem to say otherwise. I believe VSF has been faithful in this; of course, one pastoral search in thirty-plus years is a small sample, but in my book it was an outstanding result, and the track record here when it comes to calling godly elders is also strong and not a small sample. Thing is, if VSF has been faithful so far, that doesn’t guarantee future faithfulness—we must stay humble for this to remain true. The question is, do we have anything to offer others out of our own experience? Are there ways in which, in all humility, we can call the American church to Jesus-shaped leadership?
I hope that question will stick in your mind like a burr and bother you; it’s been a burr in my mind for a while now. But may it be a gracious and fruitful botherment—to change metaphors, may it be like the piece of grit in the oyster’s shell that prompts the formation of the pearl—because we don’t have to invent the answer out of our own resources. As we celebrate the sacrament of communion, let us hear the good news proclaimed by this table: we have been united with Christ; we are being united with Christ; we will be forever united with Christ; and what he requires of us, he will bring about in us. We don’t need to figure everything out, and we don’t need to do the work of the kingdom of God. We just need to run the race behind Jesus, in his slipstream, and participate in him as he carries out his purpose.
“Leadership” © Nick Youngson on Pix4free; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported