Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith’ (Heb. 13:7)
For someone with a name like mine, Christian leadership seems like an appropriate sermon topic. And what better way to begin a reflection on Christian leadership than with a quote from the sitcom Father Ted? It comes from the episode in which, for complicated reasons we won’t go into here, Ted has to go to great lengths to try to prove that he is not an adherent of Nazism. During the course of events he is heard to make the following remark: Nazis are nothing at all like priests. Nazis wear black and tell people what to do, whereas priests er more drink?’
Though we may not want our priests to tell us what to do, exactly, it seems that we do want our Christian leaders to stand for clear, immutable values. But what are the lasting values we want them to speak up for? Can we agree on any of them with Christians of other traditions, still less with non- Christians? And from where do we derive the sense that these are meant to last while those are not- which are culturally determined and which eternal?
As the letter to the Hebrews demonstrates, the early church had to get to grips with this very question right from the beginning. As Jews who accept Christ as the Messiah, are they or are they not still bound by the norms of Jewish practice like the food laws and the rituals of temple sacrifice alluded to in this passage? Hebrews also goes to some lengths to place Jesus squarely within the succession of Jewish prophetic leadership which began with Moses. Which is not to say that everything Moses did was perfect. When God first comes for him, he objects: his reaction might be summed up in the words of the somg we used to sing at theological college: Here I am, Lord, send someone else, Lord’. When he sees his people suffering, his response is to kill a man he associates with their oppression- a reaction which is very clearly shown to undermine his spiritual authority among his own people. And so it goes on, throughout Scripture. Jacob cheats and lies his way to his father’s blessing. David, the very model of Jewish kingship, commits adultery and murder. Are these, then, the leaders we are to remember and imitate?
Well, yes. For what marks them out, despite their many lapses from perfect conduct, is their awareness that they stand on holy ground: that their actions and imperfections are not the sum of who they are, but that God has touched them and called them out as they are, because he sees in them the possibility of becoming something greater. Their lapses from perfection may be written off as only human nature’, as if it is not realistic or appropriate to expect anything better from mere human beings- but in each case God refuses to recognise their self-imposed limitations on that humanity and demands that it be stretched, extended, redefined and ultimately reshaped altogether in the image of God, who himself took human nature and did extraordinary things with it. No longer can we claim to be only human’, for Jesus too was human. His humanity was the same stuff as ours, and because of that, our fallible humanity too is touched with a spark of the image of God.
So it is that Jesus Christ becomes the new benchmark, not only of religious leaders but of the whole of humanity. This- the same yesterday, today and forever, yet always flexible and never irrelevant- is what it means to be human. In a compelling book on Christian leadership, Vanessa Herrick and Ivan Mann explore the ways in which Christ challenges our ideas about what it is to lead. Taking as their model the famous servant song of Philippians 2, they see the Christ-like Christian leader as someone who can be vulnerable, yet without manipulation; one who serves, yet without compromising his or her authority. In a church led by such paragons, priests might very well wear black, but they don’t tell people what to do. For it is not what the clergy say that constitutes a lasting moral absolute- though you could be forgiven for thinking that many of us seem to be oblivious to that fact. It is the desire to live according to the pattern of Christ and walk in his way.
To try to live like that, of course, isn’t just a matter for priests. All Christians have the same responsibility to try to reflect the image of God back to the world in which we find ourselves. And of course that is often much easier said than done. If the great leaders of the Biblical story weren’t always able to live up to their calling, how much more true is that of us. Yet I think for us too, a good starting- point is the deliberate cultivation of an awareness that the place where we are standing- wherever it is- is holy ground. That too can be hard sometimes. Beset by the challenges of family life, job, illness or whatever, holiness may be the last quality to spring to mind as a description of our life. The estate where I live is a case in point. It’s the most socially and economically deprived part of Leicester, and one of the most deprived in the whole of the UK. The people who live there have been treated as rubbish for so long that many of them believe it. And behave accordingly. Drugs and alcohol have a strong grip. Religion is something that many of the white population gave up on long ago- and for many members of the newer Muslim communities, though by no means for all, it seems as though Islam can be used more as a badge of cultural allegiance and disaffection rather than of genuine piety. If this isn’t an abiding city, it is at least true to say that change here is painfully slow. Yet I do have a sense, as I make my way round the estate most days, that this really is holy ground. Many of the residents have no love for an no interest in the institutional church- and that causes me some inner struggle. But they know what a priest is, and they know- or at least think they know- what she stands for. I don’t see it as my role to tell them what to do. I see it as my role to live as inclusively and humanly as I can manage among them, my presence a reminder that whoever else may have turned their back on them, God has not and will not. They need hope. They need to know that there is more to being human than the daily struggle to put food on the table and coins in the gas meter. They need to know that they are loved and valued. That they matter. That they are human beings.
I’m sure all those things are true here too. If there is one absolute truth, one lasting value in which I can place my certainty, it is that each of us is incomplete without such knowledge. For each of these deep human needs stems from the same awareness that was borne in on Moses upon the mountain, the awareness that enabled him to do more than he ever imagined himself capable of, the awareness from which Jesus too derived the authority that was not compromised but rather confirmed by his death- the awareness that wherever we stand, that is holy ground.
Amen.
Mother Rowan Williams