Several things prompt this message. First and foremost, I bring this message because I know that it is crucial to teach and re-teach our church’s vision. Everyone needs to understand what we are trying to do as a church. Just saying it once or twice does not get the story told. I want to proclaim again today the challenge to refocus. It is important that we understand to what God has called us.
But there is a special reason to bring this message from this text at this time. As I worked my way through the Letter to the Hebrews, I realized that this last chapter, with its emphasis on the relationship between pastor and people, would come very close to the anniversary of my service at Takoma. Last Sunday, as some of you may know, marked the completion of thirteen years as pastor here. Even though we are not a church that celebrates anniversaries, I cannot help but reflect a little on our relationship and on where it is going. The last chapter of Hebrews and this milestone have come together in my thinking, and demand to be preached.
Paul says in one place that he was determined to know nothing among his people except Christ crucified, and that is my intention as well. The theme we are using is “We See Jesus”. Our worship, our identity, our very life together is totally dependent on who Jesus is and what He has done. My prayer is that, even while we think together about some very human things like Christian leadership, nevertheless at the center will be Christ. In all things, Christ. We see Jesus. I cannot improve on a phrase which comes, in fact, from today’s text, “Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” My message is not so much about who I am or who you are as it is about who we are in Christ, to whom be honor and glory, now and forever, amen.
I suspect that most of us, when we were kids, played the game, “Follow the Leader.” You remember how it works. Very simple. One kid assumes leadership and begins to go places and do things, and all the others are expected to follow right along. The leader can make things boring and easy, or he can make them exciting and challenging. The kids who follow have to decide whether they are up to the challenge as the leader takes them through more and more places they might not ordinarily go. When I was a kid, I too played “Follow the leader.” I learned a few things. Our cues come from this source:
Hebrews 13:7-19; “Remember your leaders.”
I
As a child, I wanted to exercise leadership. I wanted to do something that would involve others and get them doing what I wanted them to do. I had some examples to follow.
Larry told me about stamp collecting, and I decided to try it. Larry told me that the way you build your collection is to trade duplicates with other collectors. If he had two of the 12 cent Zachary Taylor presidential stamps, he’d be glad to let me have one of them if I had something he wanted, like maybe a copy of the 13 cent Millard Fillmore in the same series. That seemed fair, and so Larry and I plunged happily into sorting out our duplicates and trading, stamp for stamp. After a while, Larry proposed another rule. When he had an air mail stamp I wanted, Larry said, “Look, this air mail stamp is twice the size of the regular stamps. So you have to give me two of yours if you want one of these.” That didn’t seem just right; but Larry said it was right. Larry was older than I, Larry was really smart, and so that’s what we did for the rest of the afternoon. I got one, he got two; I got two, he got four; I got four, he got eight. Until my little pile of stamps looked rather puny next to his, and we quit.
Well, I don’t need to tell you what I found out later, that the value of postage stamps has nothing to do with their size. I followed a leader and got caught, because this leader was not honest. This leader was deceptive. This leader did not base his leadership on truth.
But deceptive leadership breeds deceptive leadership. So I tried a deception of my own. Desperate to get somebody to follow me in something, one day at school I turned to the kid on my right and the kid on my left and whispered, “When Mrs. Ferree’s back is turned, let’s holler out real loud.” They gave me a look, but both of them smiled, as if to say, “Good idea.” Two minutes later Mrs. Ferree turned to write something on the chalkboard. I looked to my right, I looked to my left, and went, “Hooahh”. Mrs. Ferree jumped, most of the other kids jumped, the kids to my right and my left sat silently and snickered softly as our teacher snarled, “Who did that?” And without waiting for even a decent interval, she towered over me and asked, “Was that you?!”.
I’m not George Washington. I lied. “No, who, me?” But of course my supposed accomplices knew everything, and told it, and by the end of a day spent shedding tears in the principal’s office, I knew the first lesson of leadership. People will not follow you very long if you lead out of falsehood and deception. People will not go with you far if you do not offer them truth. If you want to play follow the leader, you had better give something authentic, something genuine and real.
Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings.
In this church we shall remain unashamedly devoted to preaching and teaching God’s word. In this church this pulpit will be dedicated to interpreting as dynamically and as creatively as possible this eternal word, rooted in the living word, Jesus Christ. I have devoted a significant portion of my time to studying, teaching, interpreting, and preaching. So also I expect you to become capable and eager students of God’s word. There really is no excuse for anyone attached to Takoma Park Baptist Church to say, “I don’t know much about the Bible.” There is no excuse, for we will deepen and broaden opportunities to know it. Sunday School, midweek worship, discipleship classes, whatever it may be. I sense in many of you a desire for intentional ways to grow spiritually. We will provide those ways. We will insist on them. Leadership depends on leading from truth. “Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you.” I intend to lead you into deepened discipleship, into a serious knowledge of the word of our Christ, the same, true, yesterday, today, and forever. Leadership depends on truth.
II
Now if leadership depends on truth and not deception, how do you get that truth into people? How do we get people not only to know the truth, but also to do it? How do we get obedience to the truth? I cannot be a leader if no one will follow, so how do we get followers?
Patrick was the major bully at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School. Tall, muscular, with a shock of red hair and a jutting jaw, Patrick ruled the roost wherever he went. He always had two or three other boys around, too, saying whatever he said, doing whatever he did. It seemed as though Patrick really knew something about leadership. It seemed as though the secret of leadership was in muscles, loud voices, and a bullying attitude. Most of the time I kept my distance from Patrick; but I have to admit I envied him.
You see, I couldn’t be the kind of leader Patrick was. I didn’t have the physique for it, nor did I have the gigantic personality. I was the uncoordinated kid, the one nobody picked for the softball team, the one who ran and threw like a girl, they said. This , you understand, in the days well before Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Shamique Holdsclaw! In addition, my weakening eyesight, with the need to protect my glasses at all costs, and my shy personality, made it impossible for me to imitate Patrick. I just admired him and at the same time hated him; envied him and at the same time wished he would go away. The main thing was to avoid him; you didn’t want to get in Patrick’s way.
I was invited to join the school patrol, which meant that I would be able to stand with my Sam Brown belt and my badge at some intersection and tell the others when they could and could not cross the street. Oh, the power! It went well, until one day, some other kid was sick and they moved us around. They put me on a different corner from the one I normally guarded. Who knew that this corner was the one Patrick used when he walked to school? Who knew?
Well, that morning Patrick approached, made some smart remark, and stepped out into the street before my hands went down. I said, in my most authoritative voice, “Uh, um, you’re supposed to wait until I let you go.” Patrick stopped in the middle of the street, he turned around, it felt like, “High Noon.” Patrick sneered, “Don’t you tell me what to do. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
I remember very little about that day, except that I hoped I would get to go to a different corner for the afternoon. But no such luck. As Patrick approached, with a snarl on his lips and his sleeves rolled up, I knew what was going to happen, and it did. I went home a dirty, bruised, humiliated heap, wanting to disappear, and dreading the next day, when it might happen all over again.
I didn’t see Patrick the next morning until class started. He shot a glance in my direction, a glance that seemed to say, “Now you know who’s boss.” I trembled a little, but, what to my wondering eyes should appear, in the classroom doorway, our school principal, an elderly diminutive lady who looked like the kind you should be helping with her grocery sacks. But that day she drew herself up to her full five-foot-two and spoke one word, “Patrick”. The room fell silent. Patrick looked at the door, turned six shades of red, and followed her out, looking like a condemned criminal about to be executed.
Patrick never touched me again. And I learned a lesson in leadership.
It is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace.
It is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace. I learned that leadership that comes through bullying will be overruled by grace. I learned that leadership is not about putting others down and intimidating, but it is about encouraging and strengthening. I learned that if as a leader will strengthen through sheer acts of grace, through hope and love, size won’t matter. Money won’t matter. Prestige won’t matter. I learned that when leaders give grace, that’s when they do their best work!
Leadership in this church, I pray God, will always be marked by grace and not power, by love and not demand, by hearts made strong by God’s gifts and not by an ungodly insistence that we do what somebody says just because he says it. “It is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace”. Leadership in this church, I pray, will draw upon grace.
III
I learned that leadership comes from teaching truth and not from deception. I learned that leadership is exercised not by bullying people, but comes from a heart measuring out grace. Those are good lessons. But there is one more, and it is the greatest of all. Most of all, I learned that leadership is an unswerving devotion to the needs of the least, the last, and the lost. I learned that authentic leadership is not an attempt to rise above the rest, or to take on airs, or to parade accomplishments. Leadership is a total devotion to those who cannot, without help, become what God wants them to be.
I played “Follow the Leader” with Brooke more than with anyone else. We were such good buddies. We respected each other. We never got into the kind of rivalries that destroy kids’ friendships. I was good at some things that he wanted to know about, like piano playing or shooting caroms. He was good at some things I wanted to learn, like playing the French horn and pitching horseshoes. Our friendship was superb. Each of us led the other.
One day playing “follow the leader” took us, with our bicycles, to the nearby junior high school field. We were looking forward to getting just a little older, when we too would be in junior high and could play touch football and jump hurdles with the others. Brooke didn’t seem to know or to care that I had already figured out that there was no way on God’s green earth that I could get both of my left feet over one of those hurdles. If he did know, it didn’t matter. He was my friend and I was his. So we rode our bikes around that field, up and down its hills and valleys, around the track, delighting in a warm summer’s day.
Suddenly Brooke’s bike blew a tire. He took a bit of a tumble as the front wheel went wobbly, and the bike ground to a halt in the dust. Diagonally across the street from the junior high school there was a service station, with an air pump and patches for sale. We were not far from that station, except that there was a high fence all around the junior high school field. That meant he had to push his bike two blocks up to the gate and then two blocks back down the other side of the fence to the station. I let him go while I kept on riding my bike and enjoying my freedom.
But my slow and leisurely riding was interrupted after a while as Brooke called and said, “I need your help. I can’t get the wheel off. Can you come over here and help me?” Well, I had three choices. I could have said, “No, I’d rather stay here and enjoy myself. You fix it. It’s your bike.” But I didn’t say that; Brooke was my friend. Or I could have said, “Let me go two blocks up to the gate and two blocks back down on the other side of the fence. I’ll be a while, but I’ll come.” That would have been all right, but it just didn’t seem to be the right response. After all, when your friend needs you, he needs you, right here, right now.
So I took a third option. Not worrying about my own safety, not considering my total lack of athletic ability, concerned only for my friend in distress, I took a running leap at the chain link fence, I clambered eight feet up to the top, I got one pudgy leg over, and – ouch – snagged the other leg right on that sharp barbed wire. Do you know how much that hurts?! If you want, I can show you today the scar that never did heal properly.
That evening, at home, trying to explain to my mother how I had not only splattered blood all over the bathroom floor, but had also ripped a perfectly good pair of seersucker slacks, I could only say, “Brooke needed help, and I just wanted to get there as fast as possible.”
Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.
Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
Whatever else leadership is, it is Christ, bearing in His own body, for us and our salvation, the pain of tearing flesh and a seared soul. Whatever else leadership is, it is Jesus Christ, on a green hill far away, outside a city wall, suffering for us who cannot possibly help ourselves. Whatever else leadership is, it is Jesus Christ, climbing up on that cross, not caring for His own pain, up there to do His redemptive work, whatever the cost. That’s leadership. That’s somebody I want to follow!
For whatever else leadership is, it is the people of God, seeing the least, the last, and the lost, and loving them. Loving them enough to rush to serve them. Loving them enough to multiply ministries to heal their woundedness. Loving them enough to bear in our own bodies the wounds of Christ, to feel His compassion, to understand the hearts He would touch, to make the wounded whole.
If I am going to play “follow the leader”, I want to follow the compassionate Christ, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame of it all, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
If I am going to ask you to play “follow the leader”, if I am going to summon you to remember your leaders and submit to them, with joy, then I want to go outside the gates, I want to find the last, the least, and the lost. I want to go where Jesus goes. I would see Jesus. If it costs something, so be it. I want Him. I want Him for you. And I want you for Him.
