Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York, October 26, 2008: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46
It doesn’t get any more core than this for us: Love God with all your heart, your soul and your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s what the Bible teaches and it is what we strive to do.
They are simple commands, with many ways to follow. There are many paths that lead to the destination. The path of this congregation has been the path of bringing races together, worshiping and being formed as Christian people together. This has been true since the merger of St. Simon’s and St. Luke’s.
And over time this has led to a wider inclusion that involves having gay and lesbian people at the Table. This was true even at the time of the merger, of course, but we have become braver over time about talking about it.
It makes for a unique place. There isn’t any other church in Rochester quite like this one, majority African-American with a very significant white population and a significant number of gay and lesbian members, including the clergy person. It is a particular way of telling the good news, and of living out love of God and love of neighbor.
Before we do anything else as a parish, this reality of who we are gathered around this Table is enough to celebrate and to proclaim. It is who we are and who God calls us to be. It is our purpose, our core.
It isn’t the end, of course. It produces, as it should, a deep concern for this city and its diverse people, a commitment to justice as a way of life. I was reminded of this over the past two days at our diocesan convention. This parish is, in many ways, the conscience of this diocese when it comes to matters of justice. This too is part of our purpose, who God calls us to be.
I speak of our particularities this morning, the things that make this place unique, that give us purpose and meaning because we are entering a time of being tested, and we need, above all things, to remember and celebrate and proclaim these things about ourselves no matter what.
You will hear more details at the forum following the Service, but suffice to say that for at least the last twenty years the financial chickens have been scratching around in the yard and they are finally coming home to roost. The news is not good and it is going to have real consequences for our common life.
The depletion of the resources upon which we have depended is dramatic and threatening to our future. That is simply the truth and there isn’t any way to sugar coat it.
But having been brutally honest with ourselves, how do we react? Because it is also simply the truth that we can choose how we react to this reality.
I have had several weeks now to live with this bad news and I’ll admit it put me through a time of high anxiety, a fair amount of fear, and not a little bit of self-doubt. I got to spend some one-on-one time with our new bishop earlier this week, and he helped me see that I can choose how I react to all this. The questions before me are three simple ones: Michael, do you believe in God, do you believe in this parish, do you believe in yourself?
It’s not just about me, of course. Those are the questions before us. Do we believe in God? Do we believe in this parish? Do we believe in ourselves?
I want you to know that the answers are each “yes” for me. Yes, I choose to believe and trust in God. God loves me and that is the only truth in the end that really matters. Yes, I believe in this parish, what it stands for, the (albeit imperfect) manifestation of the kingdom of God that it is, who we are and who we are called to be as a people of God. Yes, I believe in myself. I believe that I have had to struggle before to keep on keepin’ on and I have the capacity to do it again.
And I’m here to tell you that I believe those things are true not just about me, but about us.
We gather here week by week to worship, to say thank you, to believe in the God who loves us no matter what. We have a strong sense of purpose, a vision that we are living into and that we will continue to live into despite any financial difficulties we may be having. And we are a resilient people, there is too much good news here for us not to be. Our courage, when tested, will not be found wanting.
We believe in God. We believe in this parish. We believe in ourselves.
We are being tested. To pass the test, Church, we have to keep on moving forward, with our eyes on the prize.
Gonna keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Never turning back
Never turning back
Gonna build this church together…
Gonna work for peace and justice…
Gonna act with grace and courage…[1]
[1] Words (first verse) from Pat Humphries, copyright © 1984, Moving Forward Music. www.emmasrevolution.com
Monday, October 27, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Matthew Shepard and the Church
Ten years ago a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, was beaten and left to die in rural Wyoming. Two days later he did die. His death received national attention, joining with the death not too long before of an African-American man, James Byrd, dragged behind a truck in Texas.
The two deaths revealed the intolerance and hatred of "minorities" that still lies just below the surface of America. It can be said that we have come farther along in these last ten years both in terms of sexual orientation and race, but hate crimes continue as a sign that we have many miles to go.
I had a personal relationship with the death of Matthew. Besides being a gay man myself, Matthew was also an Episcopalian, as, of course, I am. In addition, I was President of IntegrityUSA (for all of ten days) at the time of his death. I felt compelled to attend his funeral at St. Mark's, Casper, on behalf of his sister and brother gay and lesbian Episcopalians.
There I came face to face with the hatred that killed Matthew in the guise of protestors from a church in Kansas led by a man named Fred Phelps. They held signs proclaiming Matthew was a "fag" who was even now burning in hell, and their verbal taunts were even more horrific. The only consolation was a group of good souls standing silently between them and those of us waiting in line in the cold outside the church.
Mr. Phelps and his followers are in the extreme even in the realm of those Christians who are of the opinion that sex between men or between women is intrinsically sinful. And yet the entire church that remains ambivalent about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is culpable in the physical, psychological and spiritual violence inflicted on us. This includes my own beloved church, much as most of it would term itself "progressive." Real discrimination continues and discrimination is at least spiritual violence, pure and simple.
In the Episcopal Church, one of the options for the general confession in our liturgy includes repentance for "the evil done on our behalf." It is a powerful phrase, although the church has barely begun to unpack the many ways it is true and face up to them, which is the only way for repentance to be genuine. The awful truth is that the death of Matthew Shepard was part of the "evil done on our behalf." Any amount of ambivalence or hostility toward lgbt people is in collusion with such an evil act.
Someone at the time of Matthew's death, on various listservs on which Episcopalians can be found, emotionally declared that the church had "blood on its hands." The statement was met with a great deal of protest and even outrage. As a leader, I myself distanced myself from the remark, its own collusion. It was, however, the truth.
My deep prayer as I contemplate this anniversary is that one day, in my lifetime, the church (at the very least, my church) will own up to this truth, repent of it, apologize, and finally amend its life to erase the ambivalence. As Matthew showed us, it is a matter of life and death.
The two deaths revealed the intolerance and hatred of "minorities" that still lies just below the surface of America. It can be said that we have come farther along in these last ten years both in terms of sexual orientation and race, but hate crimes continue as a sign that we have many miles to go.
I had a personal relationship with the death of Matthew. Besides being a gay man myself, Matthew was also an Episcopalian, as, of course, I am. In addition, I was President of IntegrityUSA (for all of ten days) at the time of his death. I felt compelled to attend his funeral at St. Mark's, Casper, on behalf of his sister and brother gay and lesbian Episcopalians.
There I came face to face with the hatred that killed Matthew in the guise of protestors from a church in Kansas led by a man named Fred Phelps. They held signs proclaiming Matthew was a "fag" who was even now burning in hell, and their verbal taunts were even more horrific. The only consolation was a group of good souls standing silently between them and those of us waiting in line in the cold outside the church.
Mr. Phelps and his followers are in the extreme even in the realm of those Christians who are of the opinion that sex between men or between women is intrinsically sinful. And yet the entire church that remains ambivalent about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is culpable in the physical, psychological and spiritual violence inflicted on us. This includes my own beloved church, much as most of it would term itself "progressive." Real discrimination continues and discrimination is at least spiritual violence, pure and simple.
In the Episcopal Church, one of the options for the general confession in our liturgy includes repentance for "the evil done on our behalf." It is a powerful phrase, although the church has barely begun to unpack the many ways it is true and face up to them, which is the only way for repentance to be genuine. The awful truth is that the death of Matthew Shepard was part of the "evil done on our behalf." Any amount of ambivalence or hostility toward lgbt people is in collusion with such an evil act.
Someone at the time of Matthew's death, on various listservs on which Episcopalians can be found, emotionally declared that the church had "blood on its hands." The statement was met with a great deal of protest and even outrage. As a leader, I myself distanced myself from the remark, its own collusion. It was, however, the truth.
My deep prayer as I contemplate this anniversary is that one day, in my lifetime, the church (at the very least, my church) will own up to this truth, repent of it, apologize, and finally amend its life to erase the ambivalence. As Matthew showed us, it is a matter of life and death.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Stewardship Rather Than Ownership
Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, October 5, 2008: Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46
The tenants in the parable we just heard are guilty of murder. However there is something behind the murder, something that motivated it. That something was greed.
Greed is something we might talk about easily these days. It is greed that has gotten us into the financial mess we are in as a nation and a world. It is greed that has driven the desire of a few to make nearly obscene amounts of money in high risk schemes that have ended up hurting significant numbers of people who thought they had managed to achieve the American dream of owning a home. And now it has all come crashing down. Whether we support the “bail-out plan” or not, we are justifiably angry that it seems that the very ones who perpetrated this disaster are those receiving the bail-out.
And it should be lost on no one that we can come up with $700 billion to solve this crisis, and we haven’t been able to come up with the resources to solve the crisis of our healthcare system or the increasing levels of poverty and despair in our cities.
We have shown our true priorities this past couple of weeks.
I say “we.” Most of you probably think that I should say that it is the politicians and those in financial power who have shown their priorities. And you would be right. But I still say simply “we.”
For this is a moment when that phrase from one of our general confessions comes into play in a very stark way: “the evil done on our behalf.”
We have been in collusion with this greed. That’s the truth. It is particularly true of those of us, including this parish, who have any money invested in the stock market. We have been perfectly happy to look the other way at the greed of the few, as long as we were making money too.
This is all about stewardship, our fundamental stance toward the gifts we have been given, which are, of course, simply everything.
The tenants in the parable were stewards for the landowner. But instead of exercising their stewardship, giving the landowner the portion that was his, and keeping for themselves the portion that was theirs, they exercised greed. The opposite of stewardship is greed.
The downside of our capitalist economy is that it tends to breed greed. I’m not advocating for a different economic system necessarily. I don’t think that the Bible advocates for any one economic system. But there is a biblical standard for the values that undergird any economic system, and those values are summed up in the word “stewardship.” Without a strong sense of stewardship, capitalism tends to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
What is this “strong sense of stewardship?” It is the fundamental belief that what I have been given does not belong to me. I am a steward of it. “Ownership” is an illusion. Nothing is “mine.” Everything belongs to God.
This is not how it works in our world. We think we own things as naturally as we breathe. One of the first words we learn as children is “mine.”
Part of the conversion we are called to as followers of the God of the Bible is from the value of ownership to the value of stewardship. It is not an easy choice. There is almost nothing in the world around us that supports us in taking this stance.
But take it we must. It is one of the demands of the Bible. There’s no way around it. Our natural instinct is to rebel against the word “demands.” But the truth is that God does have some, whether we like it or not.
The demand is that we relate to the creation as stewards. And this makes for fulfilling another, related, demand of the God of the Bible, the demand of justice.
In the passage from Isaiah this morning, the prophet uses the image of the vineyard, and complains that the vineyard of the people is yielding unproductive “wild grapes.” At the end of the passage he speaks of the nature of these “wild grapes.” They produce injustice, they bleed people, and they cause the cry of those who have not.
Whatever our economic system, these things should not be.
Now it must be said that seeing ourselves as stewards and acting as stewards does not mean feeling guilty about the things we have. God wants us to have. Our having only turns bad when we do not share substantially, when our acquiring things becomes more important than our sharing things, when “mine” overtakes “ours.”
For most of us it is so easy for our concept of what we need to get wildly distorted. In my own life I am surrounded by things I thought I needed when I acquired them. Truth to tell I needed much less than half of them. I am like the child who has piles of toys he or she never plays with.
What is the answer to all of this? Three simple things:
· My ongoing conversion from ownership to stewardship.
· My commitment to simpler living for the sake of others and, indeed, for the planet.
· My willingness to share substantially from the gifts I have been given.
There is much talk these days about “Wall Street vs. Main Street.” In God’s economy both must be ruled by these values. If they are not, we will continue to find ourselves in these financial crises every few years. And we will continue to live in a world where a significant number of people do not have the simple things they need.
It’s really very simple: let us commit ourselves to stewardship rather than ownership as a way of life.
The tenants in the parable we just heard are guilty of murder. However there is something behind the murder, something that motivated it. That something was greed.
Greed is something we might talk about easily these days. It is greed that has gotten us into the financial mess we are in as a nation and a world. It is greed that has driven the desire of a few to make nearly obscene amounts of money in high risk schemes that have ended up hurting significant numbers of people who thought they had managed to achieve the American dream of owning a home. And now it has all come crashing down. Whether we support the “bail-out plan” or not, we are justifiably angry that it seems that the very ones who perpetrated this disaster are those receiving the bail-out.
And it should be lost on no one that we can come up with $700 billion to solve this crisis, and we haven’t been able to come up with the resources to solve the crisis of our healthcare system or the increasing levels of poverty and despair in our cities.
We have shown our true priorities this past couple of weeks.
I say “we.” Most of you probably think that I should say that it is the politicians and those in financial power who have shown their priorities. And you would be right. But I still say simply “we.”
For this is a moment when that phrase from one of our general confessions comes into play in a very stark way: “the evil done on our behalf.”
We have been in collusion with this greed. That’s the truth. It is particularly true of those of us, including this parish, who have any money invested in the stock market. We have been perfectly happy to look the other way at the greed of the few, as long as we were making money too.
This is all about stewardship, our fundamental stance toward the gifts we have been given, which are, of course, simply everything.
The tenants in the parable were stewards for the landowner. But instead of exercising their stewardship, giving the landowner the portion that was his, and keeping for themselves the portion that was theirs, they exercised greed. The opposite of stewardship is greed.
The downside of our capitalist economy is that it tends to breed greed. I’m not advocating for a different economic system necessarily. I don’t think that the Bible advocates for any one economic system. But there is a biblical standard for the values that undergird any economic system, and those values are summed up in the word “stewardship.” Without a strong sense of stewardship, capitalism tends to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
What is this “strong sense of stewardship?” It is the fundamental belief that what I have been given does not belong to me. I am a steward of it. “Ownership” is an illusion. Nothing is “mine.” Everything belongs to God.
This is not how it works in our world. We think we own things as naturally as we breathe. One of the first words we learn as children is “mine.”
Part of the conversion we are called to as followers of the God of the Bible is from the value of ownership to the value of stewardship. It is not an easy choice. There is almost nothing in the world around us that supports us in taking this stance.
But take it we must. It is one of the demands of the Bible. There’s no way around it. Our natural instinct is to rebel against the word “demands.” But the truth is that God does have some, whether we like it or not.
The demand is that we relate to the creation as stewards. And this makes for fulfilling another, related, demand of the God of the Bible, the demand of justice.
In the passage from Isaiah this morning, the prophet uses the image of the vineyard, and complains that the vineyard of the people is yielding unproductive “wild grapes.” At the end of the passage he speaks of the nature of these “wild grapes.” They produce injustice, they bleed people, and they cause the cry of those who have not.
Whatever our economic system, these things should not be.
Now it must be said that seeing ourselves as stewards and acting as stewards does not mean feeling guilty about the things we have. God wants us to have. Our having only turns bad when we do not share substantially, when our acquiring things becomes more important than our sharing things, when “mine” overtakes “ours.”
For most of us it is so easy for our concept of what we need to get wildly distorted. In my own life I am surrounded by things I thought I needed when I acquired them. Truth to tell I needed much less than half of them. I am like the child who has piles of toys he or she never plays with.
What is the answer to all of this? Three simple things:
· My ongoing conversion from ownership to stewardship.
· My commitment to simpler living for the sake of others and, indeed, for the planet.
· My willingness to share substantially from the gifts I have been given.
There is much talk these days about “Wall Street vs. Main Street.” In God’s economy both must be ruled by these values. If they are not, we will continue to find ourselves in these financial crises every few years. And we will continue to live in a world where a significant number of people do not have the simple things they need.
It’s really very simple: let us commit ourselves to stewardship rather than ownership as a way of life.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
By What Authority?
Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, September 28, 2008: Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32
They had had enough. It was one thing for this itinerant preacher to roam the countryside causing little pockets of religious fervor here and there and winning the loyalty of a few people. It was quite another for him to ride into Jerusalem as if he were some kind of king, then to enter the Temple and start teaching as if he had the authority to do so.
It was too much.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
For them it really was a rhetorical question. They were the ones with authority, not him. They knew that. Everybody knew that, except, it seems, this upstart.
Clearly Jesus upset human authority, the authority that created and made for an orderly society. You can’t really blame the religious authorities for questioning him. He was upsetting the apple cart, and such an upset can certainly be volatile in a city where great crowds are gathering for Passover and the Roman army is everywhere, waiting to crack down at any moment.
Jesus, however, comes into this situation and does not seem to care if he is upsetting things; in fact, he seems deliberately to be doing so. The religious authorities have the sense that at least some things are about to come unglued and so they act to stop it.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
Authority. As long as there has been human society there has been authority, someone to be responsible for keeping order. No society has ever been able to live without it. There must be some order to life if people are going to live together.
Authority is necessary. It is also dangerous, because it is so easy to abuse. It is seductive. Having received some, most people instinctively want more. Authority equals power and power is something human beings crave.
Authority can be used to protect and defend; it can also be used to oppress. Authority can be used for good, or it can be used for evil.
The Church has been given a certain measure of authority in society, and, of course, there are individuals within the Church that are vested with authority. But the struggle to use authority for good or ill has been very much alive in the Church’s life as it has everywhere else. The Church has often been in the position to uphold the social order of society, even when that social order included things like slavery, for instance. Oppression of various “minorities” of people has frequently been upheld by the Church, even practiced within its own life. We really don’t have a very good track record on this at all.
This coming Saturday, the Episcopal Church, in a service in Philadelphia, will apologize for its role in slavery. It is long overdue. It was an abuse of our authority of enormous proportions. Yet I am a little leery of this apology (and I am not alone). I’m not sure as a Church we have done sufficient work really to know just what we are apologizing for. And our actions speak louder than our words. Just one example, anti-racism training was mandated by the General Convention at all levels of the church in 2000. To date only half a dozen of our 110 dioceses have implemented it. We are finally about to in our own diocese, mainly at the urging of this parish.
It is a long journey we need to take to learn just what it is we have done and are still doing to prop up a social order of white privilege. And that is, of course, only one of several “social orders” that we continue to prop up.
And we also need to learn deeply what a betrayal this has all been of God, of Jesus, of the biblical witness. What is this biblical witness?
The Bible believes in order, and it even provides for human authority. But it has a definite purpose for that order and authority, and that is to build a community of justice. Order for the sake of order, authority for the sake of authority is not a biblical vision. The Bible recognizes that order can actually be opposed to justice, and demands that the people of God put justice first.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says,
Yahweh, the God of the Bible, is no friend to order, but insists on justice and is ready and able to intervene in decisive ways, against legitimized order if necessary, to establish justice. If God must choose between order and justice, God characteristically chooses justice.[1]
That dynamic is what was going on in the Temple that day between the religious authorities and Jesus. Jesus had been teaching in the Temple as he had been throughout the Galilean and Judean countryside. What was he teaching? He was teaching the good news of the kingdom, the kingdom of God, where justice reigned supreme. And those especially in need of justice heard the message and were transformed.
Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God ahead of you.
That statement turned the natural order of things on its head. It would have convinced the religious authorities that Jesus was either simply insane or was a significant threat to social order.
But what Jesus was doing was what Paul says in the reading from the Letter to the Philippians we have this morning. He was continuing to preach and practice a message of self-emptying as the only way to practice true authority. Humility and obedience to God’s values even when they conflict with human ones are the standards by which to measure this authority. Only this kind of authority can truly glorify God.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
“Self-emptying authority” seems like an oxymoron, but it is God’s way of authority and God means for it to be our way as well. It is authority that is characterized by at least these three things:
· It does not seek the glorification of self, but the glorification of God.
· It does not exploit anybody, anywhere for anything.
· It understands completely that it is only a surrogate. In Christian terms Jesus is Lord and nobody else. Any other authority on this earth derives from him and his principles or it is illegitimate.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
In the end Jesus would not tell them, because they refused to acknowledge that God was at work around them and that, therefore, their authority was only derivative and not absolute.
In this season of electing persons to positions of civil authority may we keep in mind what qualities of leadership to look for, and may we make these qualities our own, we as a Church as we struggle to come to terms with our past collusion with authority used for ill and we as individuals strive to live out our baptismal promise to love our neighbors as ourselves and work for justice and peace among all people.
[1] Peace (Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 110-111.
They had had enough. It was one thing for this itinerant preacher to roam the countryside causing little pockets of religious fervor here and there and winning the loyalty of a few people. It was quite another for him to ride into Jerusalem as if he were some kind of king, then to enter the Temple and start teaching as if he had the authority to do so.
It was too much.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
For them it really was a rhetorical question. They were the ones with authority, not him. They knew that. Everybody knew that, except, it seems, this upstart.
Clearly Jesus upset human authority, the authority that created and made for an orderly society. You can’t really blame the religious authorities for questioning him. He was upsetting the apple cart, and such an upset can certainly be volatile in a city where great crowds are gathering for Passover and the Roman army is everywhere, waiting to crack down at any moment.
Jesus, however, comes into this situation and does not seem to care if he is upsetting things; in fact, he seems deliberately to be doing so. The religious authorities have the sense that at least some things are about to come unglued and so they act to stop it.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
Authority. As long as there has been human society there has been authority, someone to be responsible for keeping order. No society has ever been able to live without it. There must be some order to life if people are going to live together.
Authority is necessary. It is also dangerous, because it is so easy to abuse. It is seductive. Having received some, most people instinctively want more. Authority equals power and power is something human beings crave.
Authority can be used to protect and defend; it can also be used to oppress. Authority can be used for good, or it can be used for evil.
The Church has been given a certain measure of authority in society, and, of course, there are individuals within the Church that are vested with authority. But the struggle to use authority for good or ill has been very much alive in the Church’s life as it has everywhere else. The Church has often been in the position to uphold the social order of society, even when that social order included things like slavery, for instance. Oppression of various “minorities” of people has frequently been upheld by the Church, even practiced within its own life. We really don’t have a very good track record on this at all.
This coming Saturday, the Episcopal Church, in a service in Philadelphia, will apologize for its role in slavery. It is long overdue. It was an abuse of our authority of enormous proportions. Yet I am a little leery of this apology (and I am not alone). I’m not sure as a Church we have done sufficient work really to know just what we are apologizing for. And our actions speak louder than our words. Just one example, anti-racism training was mandated by the General Convention at all levels of the church in 2000. To date only half a dozen of our 110 dioceses have implemented it. We are finally about to in our own diocese, mainly at the urging of this parish.
It is a long journey we need to take to learn just what it is we have done and are still doing to prop up a social order of white privilege. And that is, of course, only one of several “social orders” that we continue to prop up.
And we also need to learn deeply what a betrayal this has all been of God, of Jesus, of the biblical witness. What is this biblical witness?
The Bible believes in order, and it even provides for human authority. But it has a definite purpose for that order and authority, and that is to build a community of justice. Order for the sake of order, authority for the sake of authority is not a biblical vision. The Bible recognizes that order can actually be opposed to justice, and demands that the people of God put justice first.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says,
Yahweh, the God of the Bible, is no friend to order, but insists on justice and is ready and able to intervene in decisive ways, against legitimized order if necessary, to establish justice. If God must choose between order and justice, God characteristically chooses justice.[1]
That dynamic is what was going on in the Temple that day between the religious authorities and Jesus. Jesus had been teaching in the Temple as he had been throughout the Galilean and Judean countryside. What was he teaching? He was teaching the good news of the kingdom, the kingdom of God, where justice reigned supreme. And those especially in need of justice heard the message and were transformed.
Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God ahead of you.
That statement turned the natural order of things on its head. It would have convinced the religious authorities that Jesus was either simply insane or was a significant threat to social order.
But what Jesus was doing was what Paul says in the reading from the Letter to the Philippians we have this morning. He was continuing to preach and practice a message of self-emptying as the only way to practice true authority. Humility and obedience to God’s values even when they conflict with human ones are the standards by which to measure this authority. Only this kind of authority can truly glorify God.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
“Self-emptying authority” seems like an oxymoron, but it is God’s way of authority and God means for it to be our way as well. It is authority that is characterized by at least these three things:
· It does not seek the glorification of self, but the glorification of God.
· It does not exploit anybody, anywhere for anything.
· It understands completely that it is only a surrogate. In Christian terms Jesus is Lord and nobody else. Any other authority on this earth derives from him and his principles or it is illegitimate.
By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?
In the end Jesus would not tell them, because they refused to acknowledge that God was at work around them and that, therefore, their authority was only derivative and not absolute.
In this season of electing persons to positions of civil authority may we keep in mind what qualities of leadership to look for, and may we make these qualities our own, we as a Church as we struggle to come to terms with our past collusion with authority used for ill and we as individuals strive to live out our baptismal promise to love our neighbors as ourselves and work for justice and peace among all people.
[1] Peace (Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 110-111.
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