Leaders and Tyrants and Bosses, Oh My!

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.19.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:35-45

This last week, I put in my last order for the last batch of books for the last two classes of my formal education.  My Doctor of Ministry program won’t be the last time I take classes, but I can’t imagine that I’m ing to press any deeper into the degree world.  

And so those final books are wending their way to me via Amazon, another great big stack of Leadership Literature, all of which I’ll diligently read my way through.  Over the last few years, I’ve encountered plenty of great big useful ideas in the materials I’ve read, practical stuff that will come in handy as I work to navigate the highly complex multitiered corporate hierarchy here at Poolesville Presbyterian Church, Inc.

But I’ve also encountered stuff that isn’t about leading.  It’s about what I like to call “Leadershipping.”  The “leadershipping realm” is that strange world in which a river of jarn pours like an everflowing stream from the mouths of CEOs and organizational consultants whose brains are filled with every possible buzzword.   If you’ve spent any time in the modern American workplace, you’ve tten to know these people.  

These are the folks who stand at the head of the table with their Powerpoint  clicker clicking away, who talk about how important it is to leverage the dynamic convergence of synergistic and visionary partnerships.  They will smile and nod serenely about the need to proactively integrate transparent and holistic win-win paradigms into all mission-critical core competencies.

And for confidently casting their powerful spell of magically delicious leadershipping words, they’re getting $300 an hour plus expenses.  Or...more likely than not...they’re your new boss.   It’s amazing how often things work out that way.

Leading human organizations is and has always been about power.  Individuals who project power and who present themselves as confident will always move to positions of  authority.   And when it comes to understanding power and the dynamics of power in human groups, I’ve found myself also formed by books that step outside of the realm of modern corporate leadershipping and into the realm of war.   

Those ancient classics include the works of 19th century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, and the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu.

There, power is more clearly about power.  Leadership, for von Clausewitz, involves the capacity to pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.  The successful leader must be audacious and self-confident, cunning and shrewd.   They must be willing, said von Clausewitz in “The Principles of War,” to be absolutely demanding, and severe to the point of cruelty.  They must be driven by deep passions, by consuming ambition, by fierce pride, or by a burning and all consuming hatred of their enemy.

For Sun Tzu, writing in China five hundred years before Christ, the art of war revolves around those same practices, coupled with a profound skill at deceit.  To overwhelm an enemy, the enemy must have no idea what it is you intend.  Subordinates also must have no idea what it is you intend, and the control of information should be carefully managed to insure that no-one knows any more than they need to know to accomplish your goal.  Deceiving your own troops is equally important, so that you can lead them boldly into a place where they have no choice but to fight to the death.

Looking at how he built Apple, I think Steve Jobs might have spent some time with both von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.  Leadership in war and leadership in business may be more closely related than we think. 

But this approach to leadership and power is not at all what Jesus lived and taught.  If anything, Jesus seems to have presented a polar opposite ethic for leadership.    The section we hear in today’s reading from Mark’s spel expresses a completely different view of what it means to lead, and what it means to have power.

It’s a story divided into two discrete sections.   The first section is the recounting of a request from James and John, the sons of Zebedee.  The request is a straightforward one.   In Mark’s Gospel, they come to Jesus, and ask:  “When you’re  sitting on the throne in heaven, can we get the best seats?”   Luke gives us no details about James and John, other than to say that there was some dispute ing on about who was going to be the greatest.   

In Matthew 20, we hear the same story, only this time it’s James and John and their first century helicopter mom.  It’s Momma Zebedee who comes to Jesus for a Parent/Messiah conference and...showing that mothers in the first century were not all that different from mothers today...asks that her exceptional boys be given special consideration.

Jesus, who at this point already has a strong sense of where he is being called, challenges them.  Do you have any idea what you’re asking?   The answer, of course, is that they really don’t.  With the image of a powerful, kingly messiah still etched into their consciousnesses, they think that to share in what awaits Jesus will mean positions of prestige and power for both of them.

But Jesus knows already that his path leads to some significant unpleasantness.   In response to their question, he tells them that yes, they will get to share his fate.   “The cup that I drink you will drink,” he says.  In saying this, he’s evoking an image of suffering from the Hebrew tradition, where drinking from a cup often means unpleasantness.   As I suffer, you too will suffer.

Then, after he lets them know that he can’t give them what he asks, the other disciples get a whiff of it.   Then the disciple drama kicks in, and Jesus is forced to call a time out and gather them around to explain what it is that actively being a leader means in the Kingdom.

It means a very different thing than what they are used to.  Greatness and power, Jesus tells them, are ing to be completely flipped on their heads.  He makes it clear that he understands what power looks like in the world.  Power in the world looks very much like the power that...well...we encounter every single day in the world around us.

Be it political, economic, or military, Power obscures and controls as it seeks its own end.  It manipulates the world around it to deepen its own strength.  It does not shy away from the application of violence and coercion, wherever and whenever it is necessary.  

It has always been this way.  It was that way in China five hundred years before Christ.   It was that way in Europe in the mid 19th century.  It was certainly that way in Judea in the first century, as Rome and the Herodian dynasty played that game.

But Jesus tells his disciples, and tells us, that power in the Kingdom of d is different.  Those who would be powerful in d’s kingdom set aside the yearning for control over others, and become instead their servants.   It’s a complete inversion of everything we understand about power, and about what it means to be in a position of authority.

We find this unsettling, because we think we understand power.  We’re sure that power looks like strength and confidence.  Power moves boldly around the podium, tall and strong, reading the talking point rhetoric from teleprompter like a boss.  Power is surrounded by the trappings of material success, by the well-written, best selling books, by hundreds of millions of dollars, by the roar of partisan crowds.  It is as bright and shiny as a well polished ceremonial blade.  

But in all of the Gospels, Jesus tells us that power does not look like that at all.  In Mark and Matthew and Luke, we are told power looks like a servant.  And in John, Jesus doesn’t just teach it with words.  He takes water and a cloth, and he cleans the feet of his disciples.  

As  a nation, we’re thinking a great deal about what leadership means right now, or we should be.  As we consider what Jesus taught, we’re forced to recognize that our standards may stand in tension with him.

As individuals, we need to consider both how we respond to power and how we express it in our own lives when we are given it.   Do we truly value the humble and the gentle?  Do we really show humility and a servant ethic when we are called upon to lead?

Because no matter how much we study it, we don’t seem to have tten it.  

So let’s work on that a bit, and listen, and with the disciples struggle to understand.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.