Every year in February, the
Episcopal Diocese of Northern California puts on a Congregational Leadership
Conference for clergy and lay leaders in our region. Last February St. John’s was invited to be
one of two congregations to make an hour-long presentation in plenary session
about our experience of congregational renewal, and what we have learned in the
process about leadership. So the
outgoing Senior Warden, Nancy Bosch, and the incoming Senior Warden, Marti
Shortridge, and I, met on a couple of occasions and planned our presentation
and drove over on a Saturday morning to St. Paul’s in Benicia and gave it. People seemed to appreciate it and even to be
inspired by the story of St. John’s. And
when it was over Canon Britt Olson, who is the second-in-command, so to speak,
of the Diocese, and the principal organizer of the conference, came up to me
and said, “Great presentation—you know what I liked best about it? It wasn’t all about you.”
I was surprised by that
comment, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. We in the church just as susceptible as other
people to thinking that leadership is about putting our own egos in charge. We are just as prone to careerism, and
ambition, and the desire for power and prestige, as leaders in other areas of
society. Maybe more so, because we have
the added seduction of imagining that our noble purpose puts us above such
things. We can become so accustomed to
being seen as loving and wise, that we overlook the subtle ways we take
advantage of other people, or make them dependent on us. We can become so dazzled by our lofty personas
that we become blind to our baser instincts and selfish motivations. And that blindness can be deadly to the
people around us and to ourselves.
When Nathan rebukes King David
for the evil he has done in having a man killed so he can take his wife for his
own, it is like he is shaking him awake from an enchanted sleep. But it is not the beauty of Bathsheba alone
that has entranced David—it is the seduction of his own power. God has favored David over other men. He has given him good looks, artistic talent,
courage and cunning in battle and in politics.
He has taken him from following his father’s sheep, and made him a
leader of armies. He has supplanted King
Saul, and conquered David’s enemies, united the tribes of Israel under his rule,
and given the citadel of Jerusalem into his hand. And he has promised to make from his offspring
a dynasty of kings, a royal house that will be established forever.
But God did not do all this
for the glory of David. David has a
purpose--to unify Israel, to give her peace from her enemies, to make her
secure in her own land. And just as the
power that God has given to David is not an end in itself, neither is the power
of Israel. The gift of the covenant, the
deliverance from Egypt, the conquest of the land, David’s victories; all the
great acts by which God created Israel as a nation were done for God’s
purposes. And the purpose of God is not
simply to gain power. If all God wanted
was that his anointed king be absolute, if all God cared for was that his armies
conquer other lands, if all God sought was to be served by the maximum number
of worshippers, he wouldn’t have chosen a little strip of marginal land between
the desert and the sea as his dwelling place.
He wouldn’t have chosen a wandering tribe of runaway slaves as his
people.
God’s true purpose for
Israel is woven like a golden thread through all the strange and sometimes
repellent texts of the Hebrew Bible—to be a blessing to all nations, to be holy
as God himself is holy, to keep the ordinances of righteousness, and to love
God with her whole heart, and soul, and strength. In treating Bathsheba like spoils of war, in plying
his deceitful trickery against her husband, and betraying him to his death, David
has also betrayed the God who anointed him for his holy purpose. “You have despised me,” says Nathan, speaking
for God, and David acknowledges the bitter truth of it—“I have sinned against
the LORD.”
All that follows in the
biblical story of Israel is a deeper and deeper exploration into the mystery of
what it really means to be the chosen people of God. Where once it seemed enough for them to
occupy their land and to keep their religious laws and cultic sacrifices, it
became clearer and clearer over the centuries that something far more demanding
and far-reaching was at stake. With
their scathing critique of the abuses of the powerless by the powerful, the
great prophets of Israel gradually brought into human consciousness that the
purpose of God in history has everything to do with justice. With the power of their laments, the prophets
awakened the human heart to the presence of a God who is with his people not
only in victory, but also and even especially in exile and suffering. With the beauty of their songs of consolation,
the Hebrew prophets called all humankind toward a vision of God’s shalom, of universal peace and the
world’s restoration.
All this came before Jesus,
and he continues this tradition. And yet
the gospels ascribe to him a sovereignty that even David never had. Jesus says to the crowd in Capernaum, "This
is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent," as if his
own mission is the fulfillment of God’s whole purpose for Israel. But if this is a claim to power is it is
power of a new and different kind. “I
am the bread of life,” says Jesus, and what is the power of bread? In itself it is nothing. It is power that can only be realized in and
through others, in their nourishment, in their satisfaction, in the health of
their bodies and the work of their hands.
The ancient bishop and
theologian Gregory of Nyssa wrote a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in which he
said that the petition “give us this day our daily bread” is intimately linked
with the one before it— “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven. ” The bread of which the
prayer speaks is ordinary bread, the stuff we eat every day to keep body and
soul together, but Gregory says that we are not just praying for our bellies to
be filled, as a dog or a donkey might, but praying to have bread to eat that is
earned justly, that comes to us without exploiting the farmer who grew it, or
the soil in which it was grown. When we
pray the prayer of Jesus, we are asking to have our bread in a world where
every child and refugee and prisoner is also getting enough to eat today. We are praying to eat our daily bread in a world
where people aren’t anxiously wondering if they will have bread to eat
tomorrow, or when they get sick or become disabled, or grow old.
When Jesus tells the crowd
not to work for the food which perishes, but for the food that endures for
eternal life, he is talking about this kind of food, the food that nourishes
justice. No king or president can give
us this food. It cannot be taken by
force, or contrived by cunning. It can
only be gently and carefully sown in the earth, and nurtured by human toil and
cosmic generosity. This dance of
partnership, this joint project of human art and the powers of nature,
continues through all the miraculous transformations from the field to the mill
to the oven to the table. And when it
comes to the table the bread is transformed again. Taken by itself it is next to nothing. But taken and blessed, and broken and shared,
it is family. It is community. It is conversation and culture, and equality
and empathy and justice and peace. It is
sacrament. It is the life of the world.
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