H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
May 20, 2001
GODS IN BOXER SHORTS; LEADERS AS SERVANTS
Texts: Acts 14:8-18; Mark 10:35-37; 41-45
OK, this is what happened to my sermon last week. It was in the black
folder which I carried into the sanctuary. After I led the Greeting and Call to Worship, I
left it by mistake on the lectern. When the processional hymn began, the head acolyte
carried the big lectern Bible down the aisle and placed it on the lectern on top of my
sermon. How is that for an image: The Word of God covering up the preacher’s sermon; the
Bible hiding the sermon from the preacher.
There were a few of you that suggested I lose it every Sunday. I respond
as did Jesus to the devil: "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test."
I
Now to today’s sermon: Gods in Boxer Shorts; Leaders as Servants.
There are two opposite but equal errors among us today: Leaders who
refuse to serve; and servants who refuse to lead. Which is your greater temptation: To
shrink back from leadership or to draw back from service?
To those who shrink back from leadership we have the word from Paul to
Timothy:
Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within
you through the laying on of hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity
[or fear], but a spirit of power and love and self-control (II Timothy 1:6-7).
To those who wish to lead but not to serve, we have today’s gospel
text. Jesus says to the disciples hankering after power:
You know that those who rule over the Gentiles lord it over
them, . . . . but it must not be so among you; for whoever would be great
among you must be your servant, diakonos, and whoever would be first among
you must be your slave, doulos.
How do we read this without some sense of the scandal the church has
become to the one it calls Lord with its politics, its accumulated riches, its hierarchies
and exclusivities?
We have a Lord who refused titles and ran from being made king, who took
a slave’s towel and washed feet, and who died a slave’s death on a Roman gallows.
So Paul reminds a church so prone to grandiosity and power games:
Have this mind among which is yours in Christ Jesus:
Who though he was in the form of God did not count equality with
God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself, poured himself out, taking the form of doulos,
a slave (Philippians 2:5-7).
II
New deacons, we lay hands on you today, a symbol of the Spirit’s
anointing for ministry, and we say lead us. So Holy Spirit come, we pray, and give
you not the spirit of timidity, but of power and love and self- control.
But we also say, lead as servants. Diakonos means
literally to go through, dia, the dust, konos, as a waiter waiting tables,
an orderly emptying bed pans. It is translated three ways in the New Testament: servant,
minister, deacon.
So it applies not just to deacons but to us all in the church as we
become priests to one another and to the world.
In Corinth some false apostles blew into town, described by Paul as
super-apostles, literally, hyper-apostles. They paraded their strength and mocked Paul for
his weakness.
Paul said to the community:
There are those who make slaves of you, prey on you, insult you
and put on airs. I was too weak for that (II Corinthians 11:20-21).
And he wrote:
Not that we lord it over you; we work with you for your joy (II
Corinthians 1:24).
Servant-leaders work with and promote joy.
Robert Greenleaf, an AT&T executive, wrote a book which applied the
principles of servant-leadership to the business world and the church. Here are his tests
for servant-leadership:
Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served,
become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to be
servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they
benefit, or at least, not be further deprived.1
So here are two good tests of servant-leadership:
 | One: Do those
served grow and thrive as persons? And are they likely to become servants themselves? |
| Two: How are the
least privileged in our society affected by our service? |
I add two more tests this morning.
| Three: Are you
willing to undergo the strenuous inner work so that you maximize the light you cast on
those around you and
minimize the darkness you cast? |
Parker Palmer defines a leader as "a person who has the unusual
degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow or to cast his or her
light."2 So leaders are called to the difficult, at times painful, inner
work, spiritual and psychological work, so that they cast more light than shadow.
Think of his definition of leaders. Do not each of us have the unusual
capacity to cast our light or our shadow on someone or some group? As a parent in a
family, a teacher in the classroom, a business person in the workplace, among your social
peer-group of friends. If we fail to do our inner work we will do more harm than good.
Sooner or later we learn this lesson
| Four:
We must strip ourselves of our godlike pretensions. We give up our psychological
grandiosity, our need to control, our perfectionism. |
If we let his mind form ours, individually and as a community,
what would follow? Paul describes it for the Philippians (2:3-4):
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count
others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the
interests of others.
Here is quite a counter-cultural notion. I don’t think you could write
a New York Times best seller based on that kind of advice. Or find a
magazine at Barnes and Noble with that as its central message.
III
The story about Paul and Barnabas in Lystra is illustrative. While Paul
is preaching he sees a crippled man who he perceives has the faith to be healed.
"Stand upright on your feet," he says to the man, and the man gets up and walks.
The crowd is wowed by the miracle and cries out: "The gods have
come to us in human likeness."
Barnabas they called Zeus and Paul they called Hermes,
because he was the spokesperson.
Amid all this religious frenzy the priest of the temple Zeus shows up
with his portable worship of Zeus kit, bringing oxen and garlands for their acts of
worship.
It’s a pretty heady experience to be worshiped. Most of us rather
enjoy a bit of adoration.
There was a legend from Roman theology in the background of this scene.
The legend told of the day Zeus and Hermes once came to Lystra incognito, disguised as
ordinary humans. No one had given them hospitality. Finally one old peasant couple,
Philemon and his wife Baucis, took them in. The result was that the town was wiped out
except for the house of Philemon and Baucis, who were made guardians of the temple of
Zeus.
When Paul and Barnabas showed up and healed the man, the villagers
remembered the legend and wanted to make sure they got it right this time around. It’s
like the joke about the man who lost $40.00 on a bet: $20.00 on the basketball game and
$20.00 more on the taped replay. Lystra didn’t want to blow it again.
So we can understand the townspeople. But what is striking in this story
is the response of Paul and Barnabas.
They showed their true integrity by their capacity to be horrified at
being objects of worship. As a public act of humility, decrying
this act of worship as blasphemy, they tore their clothes.
Zeus and Hermes in boxer shorts! Then they cried out: "See, we are
mortals like you." If their words didn’t convince the people, maybe the sight of
knobby knees and varicose veins did the trick.
They pointed the people beyond themselves to the God of creation. They
told them that this God had left clues for us in creation. Now this God has fully revealed
God’s self in Jesus the Christ, who was not a god in disguise but fully human like us.
He was crucified and is risen. It is by his Spirit this man was healed.
Paul and Barnabus had the spiritual integrity to be dismayed by the town’s
worship of them and told them the gospel of God in Christ.
I was at a James Taylor concert in Nashville, Tennessee, about ten years
ago. After one song, an adoring female in the audience yelled out, "I love you,
James!" Everybody heard. With a humility uncharacteristic of a rock star, James
Taylor said back: "It helps that we don’t know each other."
It appears that somewhere along the line "Sweet Baby James"
had learned something about leadership and celebrity and his own capacity for light and
darkness.
While in Louisville ten years or so ago, I attended a graduation
ceremony for Southern Seminary. The speaker was former President Jimmy Carter, whose
pastor was receiving a D. Min. degree that day. He had refused to wear the ornamental
plumage of academic cap, gown and hood. Instead he wore a modest gray business suit and
brown shoes.
After he spoke, the 500 plus students came to receive their diplomas. He
stood and shook hands with every one, this former President of the United States who
teaches Sunday School and works on Habitat houses.
IV
The texts for today have some probing questions for American Christians:
Are we willing to give up our pride of place, our worship of success,
our genuflection before wealth, our pretensions of perfection, our intoxication with
power, our hankering after celebrity and our love of notoriety? Are we willing to give up
our psychological grandiosity -- which in childhood is a survival mechanism for an injured
psyche but which in adulthood goes from silly to dangerous? Are we willing to give up our
racial, sexual and class superiorities, our flight from pain and suffering, our denial we
are dust, and recognize that we are humus, soil and human, like everyone else,
which is our true humility. Are we willing to strip ourselves of our pride of singularity,
which says: There is none like us, like me?
And follow the one who emptied himself, poured himself out for us and
for the world?
That is, are you ready to be servant-priests, roll up your sleeves and
minister?
There are some wonderful signs all about us that we are becoming more
and more a servant people. Here are just some:
The quarter of a million dollars we have pledged for low-cost
housing in Lakewood -- our mission tithe of our Cornwell Center Campaign.
The best year of Rice Bowl Offerings in our memory.
Increased involvement in justice and equity concerns in our
city.
Our youth going for a second straight year to Camden, NJ, for
a mission with urban children.
Another good year with Room in the Inn, housing the homeless
in our church one night a week.
Five years of missions in Ecuador. This year our city mission
trip led by Susan Aldrich is going on, but our mountain trip was canceled for
lack of volunteer help. God willing, let’s make sure next year we send people
to the mountains of Ecuador for our medical and educational mission there.
Our deacons took some bold steps Monday night:
They approved our funding and involvement in HELP, an
interracial coalition of faith communities dedicated to social change on behalf
of the less privileged of our city.
They voted to change the way we spend loose change offering on
Sunday mornings. Ordinarily, we receive about $200-300 every Sunday in loose
cash and change. We have budgeted this amount of expected income into our
budget. We are also about $85,000 behind on our budget, at this point.
In the face of this normal human anxiety they said, "Let’s give
every week to local missions all that is given in the offering plates in change and cash.
Let’s make every Sunday like Rice Bowl Sunday where everyone young and old puts
something in the plate for others." And they voted that they would make up any budget
shortfall caused by this change in use of loose plate offerings if we are in a deficit
condition at year end.
And they voted to dedicate the first seven
months of this weekly offering, starting in June, to Faith Memorial Baptist to
help our mission with them in Lakewood. Faith Memorial is going through a rough
patch right now, and this will help us partner with them in a special time of
need.
How about that?! Signs of a people being formed by the mind of Christ
who emptied himself, poured himself out for us and for the world.
1 Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate
Power and Greatness (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), pp. 13-14.
2 Leading from Within. Published essay, p. 4.
