Leadership, Celebrations, Challenges

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1:10-18

Let me take this opportunity to say thank you to Bill Pollock for preaching last week.  My sermon today will be short.  But not as short as Bill’s sermon last week.  His preaching is always a display of economy and efficiency which I cannot match.  Twelve minutes on the dot, I was told by more than one person!

Today we have installed new leaders for the coming year.  They are not the ones who do the work while we watch.  They are charged with modeling for us the work that all of us are called to do.  Every single one of us exercises leadership or influence in some sphere of our lives.  And so I want to talk about the kind of leadership we need from each other as we begin 2015.

 

Both of our readings today remind us that God does not live somewhere above the difficult and ambiguous lives we lead.  God has freely chosen to be right in the middle of it with us.

Our reading from Jeremiah reminds us that when we feel lost, or scattered, or far from home, God will come and find us and gather us back towards home.  For those Jews who had been driven away from home in exile, this good news meant a literal return to their homes.  But for all of us, life bends and winds its way and often we find ourselves feeling flung out into some distant place.  Often we feel like we’ve lost our way, wandering in the darkness, unable to find our way back.  And the good news is that God is like a good shepherd, who comes in search of us, and carries us back to safe pasture, where we’re fed and watered with the rest of the flock.

Our reading from John’s gospel reminds us that Jesus Christ is at the center of our faith and of our lives together.  He comes to us not as a demanding tyrant, but as “grace and truth.”  Jesus Christ is absolutely everything for us.  He shows us what God is like.  And he shows us what a full and faithful human life looks like.  He is the arrival of good news.  The reason for a new joyful way of living.  For people prone to believe the lie that we’re all on our own, or that we’re unloved and unlovable, Jesus Christ bears the truth for us that we are God’s beloved children.

So the kind of leadership we need from our newly installed elders, deacons, and PW officers, and from the rest of our elders and deacons, and from all of our teachers, volunteers, committee members, and from all of you in your roles as full participants in our ministry together – the kind of leadership we need is a leadership that grows out of this good news.  We don’t need perfect leaders.  We don’t need leaders who’ve never messed up.  We need people who have experienced the grace of God in their lives in ways that have changed them.  We need people who know what it feels like to be broken but also what it feels like to be mended back together by the love of God through the support and friendship of others in the congregation.

For the past three months or so, I’ve been asking our elders to share their response to a couple of questions. 

1.     Looking back, what do you celebrate most about our life together as a congregation.

2.     Looking forward, what do you see as the major challenges facing us and what are your dreams about how we meet those challenges.

We’re still processing all this and we’ll continue to talk about it at a leadership retreat later this month.  But I thought it would be good today to share a little bit of what I’m hearing with all of you.

I wish you could have been there to hear the creative, thoughtful, prayerful responses.  You would have responded like I did: with thanksgiving that God has brought you here together with these people, and with excitement about our future work and ministry together.

Not a single thing was said that was fearful or nervous.  Not a single thing was said that was selfish or short-sighted.  No one pushed an agenda that would benefit some but leave others out.  There were different perspectives, but always the health of our lives together and our ministry was at the center.

It’s important to celebrate.  The rhythms of rest and celebration are built into the life of faith in the practice of Sabbath keeping.  But not everyone lives in these rhythms.  Sometimes we feel so pressured to get things done that we live in perpetual busyness and anxiety.  But it’s not good for any of us to keep charging forward all the time.  And it’s not good for us as a congregation to live like that either.  Here at the beginning of a new year is a good time to celebrate a few things.

We can celebrate all the ways God is using our congregation to selflessly reach out and make a difference in our community.  The celebration most often mentioned by our elders had to do with outreach and service.  Here are some of the things that were said:

“We’re putting our faith into action, especially on our Sunday Serve weekends.”

“I love our commitment to serving the needs of our wider community, beyond the boundaries of our congregation.”

“Our congregation has a mindset of helping others.”
“We’re living out our mission of being a congregation-led – and not a Pastor-led – community, serving others.  And our new members are stepping up and getting involved.”

We can also celebrate the relationships and friendships that develop as we worship and serve together.  When we sing, pray, laugh, eat, rake leaves, paint houses and talk with one another, we develop important friendships.  There is absolutely no rule that your best friends need to be here in the congregation.  But learning to share more of your struggles and joys with others here deepens our sense of belonging and our sense of a shared calling.

We can celebrate a new attentiveness to matters of emotional health in our leadership culture.  This emphasis on the connections between faith and emotional health has been at the center of our work as a Session these past two years.  I asked our elders to read two books that address issues like healthy communication, conflict avoidance, anger management, the acceptance of grief and loss, coming to grips with patterns you inherited from your family of origin, and learning to rest.  Those conversations have yielded powerful and significant growth in all of us.  And I look forward to the fruit these new discoveries will bear in our lives together. 

We can celebrate all the ways we feel challenged to grow and learn as people of faith.  We can celebrate the work of Holly and all our youth volunteers and teachers in building a vibrant youth ministry.  And we can celebrate the spirit of freedom in our community – that you get to be who you are and don’t have to pretend to be someone else.  All this has happened because of God’s faithfulness to us.  God’s Spirit is bearing fruit in our lives together, and it’s appropriate to celebrate.

But God also turns us toward the future, and asks us to move forward in ways that meet challenges, solve problems, and take advantage of opportunities that appear. 

As the Session looked to the future, we talked about challenges related to continued financial generosity so that we can resource our ministry efforts; we talked about the challenge of taking care of our wonderful building, completing a long list of projects already under way, and dreams for new projects in the future.

Yet far and away the most frequently mentioned challenge was related to outreach, evangelism, and growth.  Every single elder mentioned this in one form or another.  The ways we live together, worship, serve, eat, laugh and cry together will be a powerful witness for our family, friends, and neighbors that we’ve found good news for our lives.  Our elders are passionate about sharing our newfound gladness and our sense of purpose in life with others who are looking for these very things. 

And that bring us back around to our readings for the day.  We live together with Jesus Christ at the center.  He is grace and truth for us.  He is the healing and forgiving presence that mends our brokenness and frees us to be ourselves.  He is the power that gathers us back home when we’ve lost our way.

Teresita Fernandez is an artist, a sculptor.  She received a MacArthur Genius Grant for her pathbreaking work in 2005 in the amount of $500,000.  There are no strings attached to that award.  It is given so that an artist can keep doing his or her work.  In 2013 she gave the commencement address at her alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University.  In that address she talked about the beauty of mended things.

When she wanders through museums, she is more attracted to broken pieces of pottery, to the shards, than she is to the pieces that are fully intact.

“We are conditioned to think that what is broken is lost, or useless, or a setback,” she says.  And then she continued:

“In Japan there is a kind of reverence for the art of mending. In the context of the tea ceremony there is no such thing as failure or success in the way we are accustomed to using those words. A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to ‘to patch with gold’.

Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it ‘good as new.’ But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to ‘good as new’ and instead [make things] ‘better than new’ . . . They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl’s unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post-repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.

Here lies that radical physical transformation from useless to priceless . . . “

This strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for what God is doing among us, and for what we’re called to be and do together.  This is what real leadership looks like.  We’re about kintsugi – the beauty of broken places that have been mended.  And we’re willing to let those mended places remain visible so that others can see them.  These little mended cracks in your life, these rivers of gold, these patched places – this is our good news, held out for others, free of charge.  May God bless our new leaders and empower fruitful ministry in the coming year.  Amen.