March 3, 2002 - Third Sunday in
Lent
Psalm 95; Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John
4: 5-42
BEING AFRAID OF THE WRONG THINGS
Theme: Fearing
Leaders
ILLUMINATING TEXT AND THEME
In Exodus 17, we find a wandering people, deep in the wilderness. Things
are going from bad to worse. They find themselves in Rephidim, a place with
no water. Because of their thirst, they begin to complain against Moses,
their leader. They believe in him enough to think that he should be able
to find water where there is none.
Moses responds to their moaning directly, asking: "Why is everyone
picking on me?" He is not just defensive. Actually, he is so enamored
with their belief in him he begins to confuse himself with God. When he
asks the people why they chide him, he goes further: "Wherefore do
ye tempt the Lord?" Still, all through this dialogue, there is insufficient
water, and still the people thirst. The tension of the whole passage is
right here: indeed God has brought them out to the wilderness and God, through
Moses, will quench their thirst. In the middle time, the wilderness time,
the thirsty time, they must be patient and not complain, no matter how thirsty
they get.
But their confidence is lost and the people not only complain against Moses;
they go another step. They "murmur" against him. They ask him
the big question of why he brought them out here in the first place. They
begin to question his leadership. Why bring us out of Egypt, where at least
there was water, to this place where our cattle and our children have nothing
to drink?
Moses is not immune to the problem, for he too was thirsty. So Moses carries
the very complaint the people have made against him to the Lord. To God
Moses asks: "What shall I do unto these people? They are almost ready
to stone me." From chiding to murmuring to stones—a typical journey
for a leader.
God comes through. God says to Moses that he should take his rod and go
"before" the people, stones or not; take the elders so they can
see what you do; take your rod, the same one you used to smite the river.
So Moses goes to the rock in Horeb and hits the rock with his walking stick.
The water comes out and the people have water to drink.
We get no indication of how crazy Moses thinks the Lord is at this point.
Or maybe Moses is impressed when he sees water coming from a rock? It's
not impossible from a natural perspective but definitely unlikely. And on
top of that he did it in front of everyone (v. 6).
What follows, after verse 7, only underscores the power of Moses' rod.
There was a little fight, against Massah and Meribah, where Moses had to
chide those who had mistrusted him and God. There was also Amalek who came
to fight with Israel in Rephidim.
The battles that develop all have to do with Moses' rod. When he keeps
it up, they win; when he puts it down, they lose. The two miracles—water
from the rock and battle winning—restore Moses' leadership.
There is a little interesting parable about leadership in the middle of
all of this. During the fight, Moses gets tired ("his hands were heavy").
He can no longer hold up his rod, so he needs to be propped up, first by
a stone and then by Aaron and Hur. They kept his hands steady till the sun
went down.
The ability to get water from the rock restores Moses to leadership of
a weary and fainthearted people. He remains their leader because he manages
the journey from complaint to murmuring to doubting. The message of the
story is that God intervenes to prop Moses up as the leader. It is not Moses
who performs the miracle, but Moses' faith in God. God doesn't want the
people to thirst, but wants them to be out of Egypt, and even wants them
to drink. Moses is God's emissary in the midst of all the trouble in the
wilderness. When things get bad, Moses leans on God, who comes through.
ILLUSTRATING TEXT AND THEME
If you have been a leader, you have been murmured against. Murmuring comes
with the territory. If you have been a follower, you have murmured. No leader
is good enough to get us through the majority of wilderness paths; they
too have to learn as they go on. They too have to learn when to hold up
their rod and when to put it down, when to ask for help when the going gets
tough and when to listen lonely to an equally lonely God.
**************
"Bullets" are normal in the ministry. Most people don't even know
why they shoot them or if they have shot one but gunfire is a faint smell
in many church hallways.
If I were to give one thing to every graduating seminarian, it would be
a lightweight, make-believe bulletproof vest. In three colors: green for
the long season, blue for advent and purple for Lent. There would be optional
decoder rings attached so you could decode what was really going on from
time to time. Most of us live without really knowing! The vest would protect
from "verbal bullets": those occasional (or often) remarks that
discourage us from our ministries.
**************
How can clergy respond to the pecking, nit-picking, the noodling of the
ever-present noodles? Clergy must do what Moses did: carry on. Lead the
people to the fresh water anyway. How did Moses do it? He did it by relying
on God. He waited for God to tell him what to do, and God came through.
When God spoke, he followed God. Many clergy simply run from the bullets
or stones. That is not a direction. Following God is. How do we follow God
in our wilderness and our day?
First, if there is an ounce of truth in the bullet, cherish it. Learn from
it. Work with it. The answer to a complaint is YES: you did experience what
you just said. That may be all that is needed. A complaint is really a request,
as one organizational development guru once told me.
Second, if facts are misplaced and embedded in the feeling, wait till your
yes, followed by silence, is heard. Then quietly suggest a contrasting fact.Third,
practice non-violence in every way. Refuse to hurt back when hurt is shot
out. Non-violence removes the capacity for control from the aggressor and
restores it to the self.
Fourth, get support. Make sure others know of the interaction—and
that they are proud of their pastor's self-protections and love!
Most people don't ever know why they pull the verbal trigger and shoot.
One theory is that the pastor is a source on which parishioners project
their fantasies. What can clergy do? Resist projection. Cover your screen
with a bulletproof vest.
And remember why we went out into this love business in the first place.
The reason was to love. The reason was to lead people to living water. When
those are the goals, it doesn't matter how tired our arms get.
Finally, clergy need to remember that many people in the pews are Moses'
in their own shops. The worst thing I ever heard was a congregation using
a CEO, who had started two successful companies and employed thousands of
people, to fold and staple the newsletters. That was considered a volunteer
job worthy of his gifts! Instead of thinking ours is the only organization
that needs bulletproof vests, we might find out what the people in our pews
know about leadership. About Moses. About leading and following. About raising
the rod and letting it down.
**************
In a
Peanuts comic strip, Snoopy is sitting on top of his doghouse
as Woodstock approaches. Snoopy's little bird friend first flies to the
right in a rather mixed-up, scrambled pattern. In the next panel Woodstock
flies in the opposite direction in the same kind of erratic, twisting, turning
manner. Finally Woodstock lands on the doghouse exhausted, and Snoopy says
to him, "Never fall in love with a butterfly!" In a manner of
speaking, the Israelites complained against Moses for leading them on such
an unpredictable, circuitous route to their destination. To the masses,
it must have seemed that they were following a butterfly. If you examine
a map of the route that the Israelites took from Egypt to the Promised Land,
it very well might appear that they were following a butterfly, because
their travels certainly did not take them on a straight line between those
two points.
**************
Today leaders are often criticized because the consensus is that powerful
people cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Founded in 1929, the Burlington
Liars Club in Burlington, Wisconsin, sponsors a contest each year to find
the biggest lie. A recent winner was a story from a man in Madison. He said
that he heard that farm lots in the northern part of the state sold as cheaply
as $600 per acre, while an acre of soil in the more populated southern part
of the state sold for as much as $35,000. So he said he dug up dirt from
the north and sold it to the fancy city people in the south for a tidy profit.
The only rule in the liars' contest is that politicians are not permitted
to enter.
**************
Moses is in good company. Just as in his day, leaders in our time are not
generally looked upon in a favorable light. In August of 2001, a Harris
Interactive poll was conducted in cooperation with
U. S. News & World
Report. The poll sought to find out who Americans consider to be their
heroes. More than half of those surveyed said that there was no public figure
today they consider to be heroic. About one in six of the people said they
had no hero at all. In the poll, those who were most often identified as
heroes were: Jesus Christ (6%), Martin Luther King, Jr. (4%), Colin Powell
(4%), John F. Kennedy (3%), Mother Teresa (3%), Ronald Reagan (3%), Abraham
Lincoln (2%), John Wayne (2%), Michael Jordan (2%), and Bill Clinton (2%).
Nearly a quarter of the Americans surveyed said they have recently crossed
off someone from their hero list, primarily because of unethical conduct.
Those who were most frequently cited as former heroes were: Bill Clinton,
John F. Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
**************
In dealing with leaders, the public often falls into one of two camps. On
the one hand, there are those who think that leaders should be granted copious
amounts of respect. On the other hand, there are those who want to limit
any special privileges or marks of distinction, for fear that the honors
might go to the leader's head. An example of those two ways of reacting
to leaders is found in the way that the first Congress related to George
Washington. At first, the Senate believed that it was necessary to assign
abundant titles of dignity to Washington in order to build up his national
and international prestige. Thus the Senate initially suggested that Washington
be addressed as "His Highness the President of the United States of
America and Protector of the Rights of the Same." In contrast, the
House of Representatives preferred a more simple form of address—"the
President of the United States." After considerable debate, the Senate
finally consented to the House's suggestion.
**************
In order to control dissension against himself, Moses should have attempted
to do what John Adams did. During his tenure as president, Adams signed
into law the Sedition Act, which was later repealed during Jefferson's presidency.
The Sedition Act made it a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment to
make any false, scandalous, or malicious writing against the government,
Congress, or the President, or to stir up sedition.
**************
Cardinal Bernadin was the Archbishop of Chicago and was one of the main
leaders in the Catholic Church in the United States. Despite his solid reputation
and all the good that he had done over the years, he eventually became the
target of murmuring. A number of years ago, a young man accused Cardinal
Bernadin of molesting him when he was in seminary. A few months later his
accuser admitted that he had made up the allegation, but in the meantime
Cardinal Bernadin's life and reputation had been utterly devastated. Then,
shortly after that trauma, Cardinal Bernadin learned that he had cancer
in his pancreas and that it was inoperable and that he was going to die.
Before he died, though, he wrote a book called
The Gift of Peace.
In that book, Cardinal Bernadin explained how those experiences, as awful
as they were, had served the purpose of causing him to focus himself on
God like he had never done before.
**************
Dag Hammarskjold, the former leader of the United Nations, offered some
reflections that may have very well been similar to what would have been
on the mind of Moses. Hammarskjold commented, "Two themes came to preoccupy
my thoughts. First, the conviction that no man can do properly what he is
called upon to do in this life unless he can learn to forget his ego and
act as an instrument of God. Second, that for him personally the way to
which he was called would lead to the cross, i.e., to suffering, worldly
humiliations, and the physical sacrifice of his life."
**************
"No general in the midst of battle has a great discussion about
what he is going to do if defeated." (British politician David Owen)
**************
In the Movie titled,
A Lesson Before Dying, there is a young man
on death row by the name of Jefferson. He was caught by police officers
at the wrong time, having been with two friends in the wrong place. Within
hours he was arrested as the accessory after-the-fact...blamed with the
murder of two men shot by one of his "friends!" He had been considered
to be one of the young blacks, "who would make it!" Although,
surprisingly, he had completed five years of Elementary School, his reputation
under teacher, Grant Wiggins, did not protect him. The Prosecutor had referred
to Jefferson in his closing wrap-up statement, as "a hog who did not
know how to change." When he was sentenced to death row, his grandmother
enlisted the help of his teacher, Grant, "to visit him everyday in
prison so that he could teach him "how to die like a man."
During each visit, Jefferson paced up and down his cell and asked Grant
Wiggins many questions. Grant admitted that he did not know all of the answers.
At the last day's visit before Jefferson was to be executed, it came time
`to say good-bye,' Jefferson made one of his grandest statements of summing-up
his gratitude for Grant. "Nobody ever make me think I'm somebody before!"
**************
As related to the previous story, it seems that we all stand in-need of
someone who will validate our ticket to being recreated in the image of
God. For John Claypool's Class of
Preaching Genesis, we are asked
to make use of Walter Brueggemann's
Commentary on Genesis. As I spend
time reading Brueggemann's Commentary and Bill Moyers'
Genesis—A
Living Conversation, these words of Brueggemann have repeatedly jumped
off the page: "I
am rooted in relationship—I cannot be
human outside of relationship." Could there be any better statement
that lends unmistakable proof for our needs of confidence and professional
competence?
Brueggemann appears to take great delight in his ability to relate Old
Testament texts to the appropriate New Testament text: "Though our
outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day."
(2 Cor. 4:16) It seems possible that we may discover daily new resources
to strengthen our relationships with Leaders, as well as, with our clients,
co-workers and patients.
**************
During a recent TODAY Morning Show, Matt Lauer was interviewing Vernon Jordan.
From his recently released autobiography, he was discussing his long friendship
with Dr. Martin Luther King. He told of hearing Dr. King's "I've Got
A Dream" speech seven years prior to the actual Televised date. Matt
Lauer asked Jordan how that first hearing had influenced him. His answer
was, "I was inspired with the source of confidence in myself that I
could make it happen!" As Matt and Vernon continued their discussion
they agreed that King's Dream is needed today, more than ever before.
**************
Many people fear failure. They place a thin veneer of respectability over
their fear and hope that no one notices the fear in their eyes (the windows
to the soul) or (God forbid) that they be tested. Styling is a way of life.
"To be or not to be" is no longer the question. It is enough for
one to only "seem to be."
**************
Men fear leaders because they know the leader will call forth courage that
is not visible, faith that is not active, and priorities, which have been
misplaced. A leader will know one as he or she really
exists. The leader's eyes are not distracted by one's attempts to appear
other than one is.
**************
The Bible is full of illustrations concerning the fears of people. They
fear running out of wine at a wedding, having a younger brother return and
be restored, not getting their fair share of inheritance, being embarrassed
by one's limited means, being ignored, and being deemed unable to save oneself.
There should be only one fear in a Christian's heart: To know one's duty
and fail to do it. One should be so afraid of this that he or she dedicates
his or her whole life to discerning God's will and accomplishing it. Moses
knew God wanted him to lead the people out of Egypt.
Everything else was just postlude. The world fears a man who knows where
he is going with God.
2nd
Quarter 2002
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