What Makes a Great Leader?

Joshua 3:7-17

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A great leader.  What makes for a great leader?  I went on the web to do some very in-depth and extensive research on the topic and here’s what I found.  A website called Success.com had an article called “Everything You Need to Know to Become a Great Leader”.  One section of the article listed ‘7 Qualities of an Effective Leader’.  Certainly, a list of seven qualities of an effective leader in an article on everything you need to know to be a great leader from a place called Success.com should suffice in telling us what makes for a great leader.  Please don’t mind if I drip with sarcasm.

Well, the first quality was “Be strong but not rude.”  I guess that means be assertive, be direct, say what you expect from others, but do it politely.  Be sure to say please and thank you.  Second, “Be kind but not weak”. It seems they were saying that kindness is speaking the truth rather than dealing in delusion.  Third, “Be bold but not a bully”.  Seize the moment, take the risk, be inspiring; but don’t pressure people with bully tactics.  Fourth, “Be humble but not timid”.  Humility is to stand in awe of the inherent worth of others knowing you’ve a place among them too.  Timidity fails to claim that place.  Fifth, “Be thoughtful but not lazy”.  Be thoughtful, have ideas, dream dreams, but get your boots on the ground and act on them.  Sixth, “Be proud but not arrogant”.  Be proud of your accomplishments, but don’t be haughty.  Lastly, “Have humour without folly”.  Have a sense of humour and be witty, but don’t be silly just to be liked.

This list was just one of a bazillion such lists you can find on the net.  They all seem have to something in common in that they emphasize the qualities of character and the set of skills a great leader should have and/or try to develop.  There’s also another school of thought out there that says great leaders are born not made and either you are or you aren’t.  Still the emphasis is on the innate qualities of character and the skills possessed by a particular individual.  A leader is an individual person whom others follow and leadership is what leaders do to lead the followers.  

In my humble opinion, this highly individualistic way of thinking about leaders and leadership is one of the root causes of why our culture has such a problem with narcissists winding up in positions of power.  It is also why most of the leadership advice out there can be summed up under the general rule of thumb: “Great leaders know best how to either curb or to utilize their narcissistic tendencies.”  I am of the persuasion that leadership, like power, should always be a shared.  Entrusting individuals (or acquiescing to them) with sole leadership responsibilities is an open door to disaster.

When I think about how leadership works in the church, I find that something else is at play.  God is the true leader and God places people in positions of leadership among his people in order to speak and act through them so that God’s people will know that God is among them.  In the church, whenever you got somebody rising to leadership on their own accord or talents or assertion or the people putting somebody in a place of leadership because they think he or she will make a good leader, you’re likely to have a problem.  In the church God is the leader and church leadership reflects that.

Our text today is about how God began to make Joshua the leader of his people in the wake of Moses’s death.  In verse 7 the LORD tells Joshua: “This day I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses.”  “To exalt” means “to make great”.  In the world of faith, it is the actions of God that make a leader great not their own.  This means that as Joshua is now the leader of the Israelite people, God will make him great.  Joshua’s authority to lead will come from the simple fact of the obviousness that God is with him and working through him.  It is God’s promise to Joshua that he will act to let the people of Israel know that he is with Joshua as they enter Canaan just as he was with Moses as they wandered in the wilderness.  God will make Joshua into a great leader just like Moses so that the people will know God is with them.  In the world of faith, great leaders are, therefore, people whom God raises up to let his people know he is with them.    

Before going further, we might want to ask how Moses was a great leader?  A quick look at Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy show that Moses spent a lot of time in the presence of the LORD.  God spoke through him.  God acted through him.  Moses got the elders of the tribes to judge disputes rather than do it himself.  He mediated between God and the people.  At some points in the story, Moses even displayed a more Godlike quality of character than God.  After the Golden Calf incident Moses reminded God to act compassionately towards the people with whom God shared a deep bond of tender love. 

Moses fell short once.  There was the time when the people were again complaining of thirst there in the wilderness.  God told Moses to go to a particular rock and speak to it.  Instead, Moses broke out “the staff”, gathered the people around the rock, yelled at them, and then struck the rock with the staff to bring forth water.  The incident made Moses look like he was doing things only God could do.  He put himself in the place of God and that became the reason why God wouldn’t let him enter the Promised Land.  Great leaders are in cahoots with God and do as God directs them.  They don’t stand in the place of God and act of their own accord.

Looking at Joshua, as far as his only qualifications go, he was a good warrior whom Moses took to be his assistant.  As such, he spent a lot of time watching Moses spend a lot of time in the Tabernacle talking to God.  He was also one of the twelve spies that Moses sent into Canaan the first time they came to crossover into it.  He and Caleb were the only two to give a favourable report.  The other ten just scared the people and told them that there were giants in the land that they would not be able to defeat.  So, Joshua had a heart for wanting to do what God wanted even if there seemed to be reasons to be afraid.  Thus, he had the example of a prayerful mentor to follow and a desire to do what God wanted.

In our passage today, Joshua gets his first taste of what it is to lead God’s people.  He simply has to do what God tells him to do.  What did God tell him to do?  Tell the priests who carry the Ark of the Covenant to carry it out into the middle of the Jordan and stand still.  Oh, and let’s not forget that the Jordan was flooding at the time.  It was likely mid-Spring and the snow on top of 9000ft high Mt. Hermon was melting flooding the Jordan Valley.  The Jordan isn’t a very big river, but when it floods it rages.   But to assure the priests, Joshua said that God said that as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests carrying the Ark of the LORD, the Lord of all earth, set foot in the Jordan, the waters upstream will begin to heap up and the people will be able to cross on dry ground.

This event is reminiscent of two prior events that we read about in the Bible.  First, Creation itself, when God separated the primordial waters of to create a bubble in which to place his creation and when God separated the waters of the sea to create dry ground.  To the ancient Israelites big bodies of water, whether in the form of a sea or a raging flood, were a symbol of chaos, of dark forces that only God could control and bring to order and out of them create something new.

It also sounds very much like the parting of the Red Sea.  God parted the waters of the Red Sea so that first generation of Israelites could escape Pharaoh and his army.  God parted the waters, walling them up on either side, and the Israelites crossed on dry ground.  When Pharaoh’s army followed, God let the waters fall back on them and drowned them.  That was the last act of God debasing the greatest power in the world at that time and its gods.  

So back to the Jordan, Joshua’s first act of leadership was to get the spiritual leaders to lift high the symbol of God’s presence and boldly take the risk of stepping into the flooding waters of chaotic Jordan River and, then, to be just let God be God and God will do what God does – create something new.  

There’s some wisdom here for church leaders. The hardest struggle for church leaders truly is just letting God be God.  It can be so easy to let personal charisma win the day; or to manipulate religious symbols and conjure up the vibes of the good ole days to motivate people; or, and worst of all, to just plain bully people with guilt and fear into what you want them to do all the while believing it what God wants.  In the church we have to let God be God and let God do what God would do rather than just striving for what we think makes for a successful church or a successful leader.

To try to apply this to us today, the decision for churches to resume worship services in their sanctuaries during COVID has great symbolic value even in a culture that’s not so Christian anymore.  At least for the people of faith, gathering together in the presence of God to worship God is a profound reassurance that God is with us and all will be okay.  I’m reminded of stories of congregations in Europe during WWII on both sides of the war continuing to worship in their bombed-out sanctuaries.  Those acts of public worship sent a profound message to their communities that God was still present and would create something new.

The churches of our Cooperative have begun to worship together in our sanctuaries.  There is the threat of the flood of a second wave of COVID.  In light of that, the leadership of the Coop and of our individual churches have come to the conclusion that we need to stand on the dry ground of gathering for worship while we can and to do so responsibly; hence, the spaced out seating and the masks and the no singing and the shortened service time.  We are gathering safely and we hope that it sends a message to our broader communities that God is still present and hasn’t forgotten them.

Throughout COVID there have been Christian communities who have rather brazenly put God to the test by disregarding safety protocols.  There have been ministers who rather egotistically played the religious trump card of false faith by arrogantly preaching that God will miraculously protect his people so it’s safe to jump off cliffs.  In so doing they have modelled a behaviour and an attitude that has done more to spread this pandemic than to curb it.  In the end, they have only discredited God and made faith in God something to be mocked rather than the seedbed of salvation.

To wind this down, it is good to stand again on the dry ground of worshipping God together.  Though the flood of chaos rages outside, we lift high the LORD of all the earth and together in Christ Jesus filled with the Holy Spirit we pray to our heavenly Father for the healing of his Creation and by this we try to tell our neighbours that God has not forgotten them.  Amen.

To See Something More

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

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I don’t know about you folks, but I find this thing of Moses not being able to go with the Israelites into the Promised Land to be troubling.  It hits that question, “Is there really any reward for faithfulness?”  “Is there any reward for being devoted totally to God?”  Moses had a very special, indeed unique, relationship with God.  As I says here in verse 10, “Never since has there arisen a Prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”  It would seem that if anybody should I say deserved to cross the Jordan into Canaan, it was Moses.  So why, God, why not let Moses just maybe touch it with his big toe.                    

Well, the reason given was this one time when the people were grumbling about not having any water at a place called Meribah.  God told Moses and Aaron to go to a particular rock and speak to the rock and water would come forth from it.  This event is reminiscent of the time about forty years prior in Rephidim when the people were literally a day away from death by thirst and God made water gush from a rock.  He had Moses get the staff that he used to do most of the plagues against Egypt and part the Red Sea and al that.  So there at Meribah, Moses again got the staff and gathered the people around the rock God showed him and then preceded to dress them down quite severely: “Listen you rebels!  Must we bring water out of this rock for you?”  Then Moses struck the rock twice with the staff an    d water gushed forth, enough for the people and the livestock.  

God got angry at Moses and Aaron for that.  They were only supposed to speak to the rock, but Moses struck it…twice…with the staff that he wasn’t told to use.  I guess it looked like they were playing God. Especially, by saying “Must we bring water forth from this rock.”  Moses said nothing about God providing the water.  So God said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust me to demonstrate my holiness (Because you did not trust me to be God) in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this assembly into the Land I have given them.” Aaron died not long after that incident.   He, like Moses, didn’t seem to have any illness.  God just took him.  In our passage it is Moses’s turn.

To me, that seems a petty reason for God not letting Moses even set foot in the Promised Land (and I’m not the first minister to have not seen the fruits of his labours).  There have been other reasons given over the years to try to explain why.  One of them was Moses was the leader of “that rebellious and stiff-necked” people, particularly that first generation of Israelites whom came out of Egypt, who were afraid to cross over into the Promised Land the first time they came to it because those sent to spy it out said giants lived there.  God did not let any of that generation live to cross into the Promised Land except for Joshua and Caleb, two of the spies who said the Israelites could take the land.  Moses and Aaron were the leaders of the generation, and as ‘the captain always goes down with the ship”, God wasn’t going to let them cross over either.  Leaders must always take responsibility for what happens on their watch.

Another more practical leadership concern for God getting Moses and Aaron off the scene could be that the Israelites would need leaders with different skill sets for going in and settling the land.  They would need strong military leadership as opposed to the political, so to speak, skillset of Moses and Aaron.  Moses and Aaron had led the people out of Egypt and through the wilderness, but it was time for them to pass the mantle, Moses to Joshua and Aaron to his son Eleazer, for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land.  These new, younger leaders would have a difficult time leading if the older, more popular figures of leadership were still around.  Just ask any minister who has been called to a church where the recently retired minister is still involved.  It doesn’t work.  Maybe the death of Moses and Aaron was a transitional necessity for the people to make a new start in settling the land.

But anyway, troubling though it maybe, why Moses had to die without setting foot in the Promised Land is a question without a good answer, for me at least.  It’s just a non-perfect, non-storybook ending to the life of the man who was the face of God to the Israelites and the face of the Israelites to God.  Moses had a relationship with God only exceeded by Jesus.  We could say that Moses was a suffering servant who died for the sins of his people in the wilderness, and that his life and death are a prophetic foreshadowing of what Jesus would come to do.  It would take a more than a few paragraphs of some heavy theology to do that and that’s what the Good Friday Sermon is for.  So maybe we’ll wait.  

Well, that’s the troubling aspect of this passage.  When I look a bit closer there’s some comfort here with respect to Moses’s death.  Maybe it is a fact of life that we will not get out of life everything we’ve hoped and striven for and anyone who says you can is trying to sell you something.  Moses did lead a good full life, and indeed a faithful life, and a life filled full by God’s presence.  There is reward in life well lived as you live it, I suppose.  But looking here at what the text says about Moses’s actual death particularly in the Hebrew with its nuances that don’t come over into English very well, it seems we can say that Moses died a good death.  Though he was 120, he was still in good shape.  So he wasn’t suffering ailment.  It was just his time to go and when he went something very special was happening.

When you read this passage in Hebrew, it isn’t just that God took Moses up on the top of Mount Nebo and showed him a vista of a beautiful land.  It rather says that God took him up there and caused him to see the whole Land that God had promised to give the Israelites…caused him to see.  In the Hebrew language verbs of sensory perception can often be loaded with spiritual depth.  For example, “to hear” the word of the LORD isn’t just to physically hear it with your ears.  It is to understand it and live accordingly.  We’ve not heard the word until we are doing it and understanding why.  So it is with the verb “to see”.  “To see” is to have a God-given vision; a knowing, an understanding, an experiencing of what God is up to, an experiencing of what God is up to in a situation.  “To see” is to see as prophets see, which is to perceive what God is doing right now or what God is soon to do in the future.

God “caused” Moses “to see” the “whole land” and after that he died.  Moses saw something more than a vista there.  In the video I put up a couple of pictures from up on Mt. Nebo looking into Israel/Palestine.  It is quite a beautiful sight.  On a clear day you can see all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.  Beautiful though it is, I think Moses saw something more than that. 

I have been around a number of people who are dying.  In their last days two things were evident.  One, God was with them and they knew it.  They had a strong sense of God’s presence.  Two, they were seeing things.  They were having visions of the goodness to where they were going.  They were seeing people, loved one’s they hadn’t seen for a long time waiting for them.  Before we die and as we die, God comes to be with us and often gives us a foresight of what is to come and it is good.

I believe that up on Mount Nebo, even though Moses could not cross into the land, God caused Moses to see the Israelites settled in the land, to feel the fulfillment of the Promise.  And more so, I think God was helping him to see beyond the immediate future of settlement in Canaan to the Day when all things are made new.  I believe God was causing Moses to see that there is something bigger and more glorious waiting down the road for us all…and that’s when Moses died.  

Something else that is rather interesting is that the Hebrew seems to indicate that it was God himself who buried Moses.  That’s how profound their relationship was.  The Hebrew indicates it and Jewish Rabbis from long ago comment on it.  But, that’s just some food for thought.  Still, it is comforting to know that in our death our Lord is with us and he will open our eyes to see.  Amen.

God's Distinct Personality

 Exodus 33:12-23

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One thing that I have learned in my 20-some years of ministry is that every congregation is different.  Just as every church building has its distinct feature or features, so every congregation has its own distinct personality.  It shows itself in how the people relate to one another and newcomers and in what sort of ministry they do together.  

Sometimes you can say that it is the personality of the minister that forms the distinct personality of a congregation.  This is certainly the case in larger congregations and particularly if the minister has been there awhile.  At my first church in West Virginia I followed a minister who had been there for 23 years.  He had seen the congregation through three major floods in which his house got flooded too.  Any given minister will go through one crisis like that once in a career.  He did it three times in ten years.  He was feeling old, tired, burned out, slightly depressed when he retired; the congregation mirrored that.  In the five years that I was there, the personality of the congregation changed.  The depression and fatigue lifted.  They became known as the fun, fellowshipping church in town, and they started to grow and even continued to grow after I left.  

Small congregations are a different matter.  It is rare to be able to say that a particular minister has had any effect on a congregation that has been small for a long time.  Ministers don’t tend to stay long enough in multi-point, small church charges to have an effect on a congregation’s distinct personality.  In small congregations it’s typically lay leaders who give a congregation its distinct personality.  These leaders are either the matriarch or patriarch of the church or at least have the blessing of the matriarch or patriarch.  It’s these lay leaders who determine whether the distinct personality of a congregation will have a sense of humour, or be friendly and hospitable, or be generous, or active in the community, or studious about the Bible, or devoted to prayer.  It can go the other way too.  Lay leaders can make a congregation conflicted, cold, oppressing, lackadaisical, or even lazy or the dreaded one from the Book of Revelation – lukewarm.  

It is amazing the effect that the personalities of ministers and key lay leaders have on the distinct personality of a congregation.  This is why Jesus chose twelve leaders and discipled them intensively for three years rather than trying to get to know and form a personal friendship with everybody that followed him.  He needed his distinct personality to rub off on and become part of the distinct personality of those who would lead his followers in his name after he returned to the Father.  

Looking at our Exodus reading, the relationship between God and Moses is an interesting study in the formation of a distinct personality in groups of people.  Of all the people of Israel, it is Moses only that God chose to bring into his presence and speak directly to and then through to the people.  Very rarely would God speak to anybody else or to all the people.  And though God is visibly present with the people, (you know, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night) and they know God is with them, it’s Moses whom God deals directly with.  This passage we look at today is actually God’s fullest self-revelation to anybody in the Old Testament and it is Moses who hears and sees this.  Therefore, we are correct to assume that Moses will be the Israelite leader who will bear the brunt of the responsibility of resembling the distinct personality of God to the people of Israel so that it will shine forth in their distinct personality as a people.  The question we might want to ask is whether Moses was able more to reflect God’s distinct personality or his own or was it a mixture of both?

This passage picks up after the Golden Calf incident where the people of Israel made an idol to be an image of God that looked like a golden calf and then worshipped it in a very unbecoming Pagan fertility cult kind of way.  Both God and Moses were incensed about it.  At first God wanted to destroy the people and start over at making a people with Moses like God did with Abraham.  But in response to God’s desire to be wrathful, Moses actually acts more like God than God himself was acting.  Moses talked God out of destroying his people by basically saying, “What would the Egyptians say about you if you simply delivered your people from them only to destroy them in the dessert?  What kind of a God would you look like in the eyes of the nations?”  With his ego sufficiently adjusted, God changed his mind about destroying the Israelites, but God is still very upset.  God then decided that he would just not accompany his people into the Promised Land for fear of getting so angry with them that he really would just go ahead and destroy them.  God said he would send an angel to go before them.  Moses in turn reminded God that the people were God’s people, not his, and convinced God that he still needed to go with his people because it was God’s presence with them that made them distinct among the nations.  God’s presence among his people is what should form their distinct personality – not Moses’s personality, not an angel.

This conversation between Moses and God healed the rift between God and his people and it was like a spiritual mountaintop experience for Moses.  And as I said, Moses acted more according to the nature of God than God was acting.  At the apex of the conversation Moses asked God to show him God’s glory and God was glad to do it.  God passed before Moses showing all him his goodness all the while proclaiming the name “Yahweh” which means “I am who I am, I will be who I will be” and adding “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to who whom I will show mercy.”  As he passed in front of Moses, God protected Moses with his hand and kept him from seeing his face as he passed by, but let him see his back (and we have to appreciate the Hebrew humour here of God showing Moses not his face but his backside).  

Well, grace and mercy are two words that deserve a moment of thought.  In my opinion, they are no longer good English words for translating the Hebrew here.  They are theologically loaded words that have come to mean something to our ears that is not in text.  We tend to hear the words “grace” and “mercy” with ears tempered by a theological tradition that focuses on human sinfulness as a first thought when thinking about God, if that makes sense.  For centuries the Western church has taught we are sinful worms that deserve to die and go to hell and that God is holy, which we define as morally upright and pure, and because God is holy we believe he is thoroughly disgusted with us and our sinful deeds and is therefore going to get us.  Because our theological tradition is predisposed to think of God primarily through the eyes of humanity’s sinfulness we tend to believe that grace and mercy are defined as God’s response to our sinfulness rather than qualities of his personality.  We say if we believe in Jesus God will be gracious to us – show us unmerited favour – and show us mercy – God will acquit us of our sins.  

Well, that sinful worm, courtroom acquittal stuff isn’t what is at play here in the Hebrew language.  It is certainly in the theological bias of the translators, but it’s not in the Hebrew.  The Hebrew word here for “to show grace” carries the meaning of being moved compassionately by the need of a person and acting to meet it.  “To show mercy” in the Hebrew means to show compassion to someone for whom you feel a deep, tender bond of love, like parents and children.  We should rather translate this verse of God’s self revelation as “I am who I am and I will be who I will be and I will act with compassion for whomever I feel compassion and I will form a bond of deep tender love for whomever I feel a bond of deep tender love.  That sounds a lot different from “I am a sinful worm deserving death but God acts towards me with unmerited favour and acquits me.”

But anyway, I don’t won’t to ride that horse for too long here.  What I really want you to get is that in God’s self-revelation here to Moses, Moses got caught up in a sense that God is as God is and God does as God does and what God is and does is that God responds compassionately to us in our deepest needs because God feels a bond of deep, tender love for us.  This incomprehensibly deep love is God’s distinct trait of personality.  It is this distinct trait that Moses is to model to the people and especially to the leaders of the people.  Moreover, it is this distinct trait that God’s people are to pick up by osmosis simply God being present among them.  As I said, Jesus formed this distinct personality, his distinct personality, among the twelve disciples by focusing intensively on his relationship with them.   Moreover, after Jesus ascended, the Father poured the Holy Spirit upon his people so that everyone could taste of the deep bond of tender love that is his distinct personality and can spend intensive time with Jesus especially when we are together.

It is a good exercise for a congregation and its leadership to spend some time asking what is the distinct personality of this congregation and what is the role that I play in forming that?  Is it the compassion and bond of deep tender love that is God or is it something else?  Is compassion and the bond of deep tender love the distinct personality that people sense when we pass by as we as individuals go about our daily lives and as we as congregations interact with our respective communities.  We would think that all we need do is put our own personalities aside and let God’s shine through, but it’s not that easy.  It takes prayer, personal devotion, and speaking the truth to one another in love.  It takes us as congregations committing to be compassionate with one another even with our warts and wrinkles.  It takes us committing to strive together to foster a bond of deep tender love in our midst.  I guess the word for all this is maturity, maturity in Christ.  Growing to the full stature of the presence of Christ Jesus who is in our midst in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Winding down, in these last few months if anything, COVID has given us a break from the habits of church as we’ve always done it.  Even when we are able to gather for worship the physical distancing protocols in a way blatantly make the point of how important fellowship, how important relationship is in who we are as congregations.  We aren’t here simply for personal spiritual edification or because it’s our duty to worship God.  We are here because God has planted a seed of himself among us, a seed of a bond of deep tender love which beckons us and so we come to partake of God’s deep tender love.  So, let us strive to nurture and be nurtured by God’s distinct personality and may it grow and become even more so the distinct personality of who we are.  Amen.

 

God's Economy of Abundance

 Deuteronomy 8:7-21; Exodus 32:1-14

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My father was an insurance salesman.  In the mid-80’s the company that he worked for was starting to branch out into investment services.  So, they sent him off to a few seminars to train him on how mutual funds work.  For a while whenever I visited him he would strongly encourage me to try to save up my money to buy into a mutual fund.  Save whatever whenever even if it was just  $10 a month until I could get enough to open an investment account.  I don’t remember if it was $1,000 or $5,000 you needed.  It didn’t matter.  I was going to university and working part-to-full-time in a restaurant.  No matter how much I made, there was never enough to put any aside especially after university when I was out on my own – rent, utilities, education loans, car payment, insurance.  It was hard for recent graduates to get in the game, even harder now.

But, I think back and I kick myself.  I probably could have done it and I wonder what would that $5,000 investment be worth today? Even conservatively invested in stocks it would likely be worth more than $50,000.  That’s an increase of ten times its original buy-in price.  But don’t get too excited; when you consider cost of living into the factor it’s not that astronomical.  It takes close to $20,000 today to buy what $5,000 could buy back then.  I would spend over $20,000 today to buy a car comparable to the Mercury Lynx that I bought in 1985 for $6,500. So in reality, the actual value of a $5,000 investment in 1985 would really only be a growth of two-and-a-half times it’s actual worth.  That’s saying that every dollar invested back then is worth in actual value $2.50 today.  That’s still money for nothing, checks for free.  So, who can complain?  

Well, investment specialists tell us that’s the way wealth works.  Wealth somehow mysteriously grows over time on its own.  Wealth generates wealth.  That of course is the case if Capitalism is your economic system.  Capitalism tends to generate wealth quickly; particularly if you’ve already got wealth.  The reason for this is that Capitalism claims that wealth trickles down, that making the super wealthy wealthier will in time raise the standard of living for everybody.  So, invest your nest eggs in the very wealthy, forgive them of any tax burden, and they will cause innovation and jobs to happen and everybody will get wealthier. 

But…and it’s a big one…Capitalism has a fundamental flaw; it makes its dollar on exploiting the fundamental human flaw of self-interest, a flaw that manifests itself as greed and powerlust and leads us into an idolatry of wealth which in the end comes back to bite us and I’ll give you at least three bites.  

First, there will always be a great and growing disparity in wealth between those who have and those who have not.  In Capitalism there will always be a percentage – between 8-10% -  people who have not, and a majority percentage of people who barely have anything, a slight percentage who have it pretty good, and less than one percent – the billionaire class – who, like Pharaoh in Egypt, own everything and in one way or another everybody works for them.  

Second, let’s not mention the debt that everybody is carrying.  Some incur debt by just trying to make ends meet.  Others incur it by trying to maintain a lifestyle that’s beyond their means.  Debt is slavery and interest on debt is nothing more than money for nothing to billionaire class.  It’s robbery.

Third, political power like a good murder investigation tends to follow the money.  A deeply troubling thing about Capitalism is that once you are nearing the top of the food chain, the more you have wealth-wise, the more power and political influence you gain.  Therefore, the people at the top of the economy are always trying to influence governments to act to their benefit because they believe that if its good for them its good for everybody.  It should concern us that in pretty much all of the global democracies where everybody’s interests are to be looked after, that the majority of the elected individuals come from that slight percentage who have it pretty good.  It should especially trouble us when one of those in the billionaire class becomes a national leader.  There’s two much power and influence economically and politically vested in these top of the food chain individuals for whom self-interest has been financially lucrative.  It means that the majority of the people like you and me who barely have anything, and especially those who have not, don’t really have elected officials who know what it’s like to be us or what our real needs are.  They don’t look after us.  They rather, out of self-interest, look after themselves believing it better for everyone.

But, this is not necessarily the way an economy need work.  I believe God has given us a better alternative, if we are willing to consider it. Let’s look at the ancient Israelites for a moment and ponder their economy.  When God led them out of Egypt, he began to form an economy for them.  This economy had two forms of material assets: livestock and gold. 

Let’s talk livestock.  Exodus 12:37-38 tells us that when the Israelites began the Exodus and left the city of Rameses where Pharaoh had enslaved them to build monuments to himself, they were 600,000 men besides children and we can assume as many women and they had “livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds.”  This meant they had both sheep and cattle.  As the story goes along, this livestock seems to be always with them, miraculously so I would say.  Given the barrenness of the land where they journeyed I don’t see how it was other than a miracle that the livestock made it.  God kept that basic “universal” material asset of livestock alive.  Oddly, when they complained on several occasions about not having meat to eat, they still had all this livestock.  Why didn’t they eat it? I don’t know but it’s likely that it was too important of an asset, like a savings account or family business, that you just didn’t eat it.  Livestock could be traded, it could provide clothing.  Many of us will take up a more austere lifestyle rather than burn through our savings.  The livestock was needed for more than just food.

The Israelites also had gold.  As they left Rameses, they asked the Egyptians for gold, silver, and clothing and the Egyptians, after those ten plagues, so wanted them gone that they were willingly very generous.  Exodus 12:36 says, “In this way they plundered the Egyptians.”  So, they also had some “bling wealth” when they left; superfluous wealth.  So, when they left Egypt they looked like a wealthy nation, well-dressed and well-adorned.  One could say this was reparation for their enslavement in Egypt.

So anyway, in God’s economy God made sure his people had a “universal” base wealth and some gold when they left Egypt.  Secondly, as they wondered about in the wilderness where there was scarcity of food and water, God always provided what they needed for everyday survival so that they didn’t lose any of their universal base wealth, and nobody had to steal, and not grew bitter because some people had it really good.  

Thirdly, our Deuteronomy reading pictures the Israelites as they were about to enter the Land that God had promised to give them.  They still have the “universal” base wealth of livestock, but the gold was converted to something else.  God tells them that as they settle in the Land he will cause their wealth to grow.  He will provide them with property, houses, livestock, fields, crops, wine and figs, even mining; they will lack nothing.  There will be no scarcity of anything.  God will provide an abundance.

The economic principal here is that God will provide his people with an abundance for everybody.  They didn’t need a wealthy class to make wealthier so that things will get better for everybody.  In fact, they legislated against that.  In the Old Testament Law every 50^th year was to be a Year of Jubilee in which any Israelites who had to sell themselves into slavery due to economic hardship was to be set free.  Also, if anybody had to sell their land for whatever reason, all lands were to be returned to the original family allotments.  Thus, they weren’t supposed to have real estate moguls.  Sadly, there is no record that the year of Jubilee was ever observed and a wealthy class did arise who exploited the nation and became the reason why God eventually exiled the nation to Babylon leaving behind only the poor.  Regardless, the economy that God gave to ancient Israel was that he would provide an abundance for everybody and he gave them an institution of Law that was prohibitive of too much self-interested amassing of wealth in order to prevent inequality and injustice and poverty and debt.

Moreover, gratitude was an expected response from God’s people.  Like we do today at Thanksgiving, the people were to gather annually to give thanks to God and to remember that it was by his hand that we all are fed.  No one in ancient Israel had the right to say, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”  God provided abundantly enough for everybody.  In God’s good creation God provides abundantly enough for everybody.  

But, wait a minute.  We live in a world today where there’s poverty.  It is not self-evident that God provides abundantly enough for everybody. Our self-interested pursuit of more wealth, of trying to live like bazillionares, has created scarcities and inequalities that make humanity look like an infected boil on God’s face.  We pollute and are destroying the good planet that God made us stewards, not masters, over and this planet is the source of God’s abundance towards us.  Our tendency towards self-interest, greed, and powerlust has made it so that it is not evidently obvious that God provides abundance for everybody.  We can’t readily see it because of the cloud of smog we have created that obscures God.

Let’s take a quick look at our Exodus passage because I think we can gain some insight into what humans do when God is obscured behind a cloud and it involves gold.  God and Moses are up on Mt. Sinai obscured in a cloud.  Moses has been gone forty days and they figure he’s dead.  Unable to see God and not knowing what’s going on they went to Aaron, the second in command, and asked him to build them an idol, an image of God, to go before them since they don’t know what happened to Moses, the man with the staff, who led them out of Egypt.  

Aaron obliged.  He told them to bring him their gold earrings that they got from the Egyptians on the way out of Egypt.  Gold is a superfluous form of wealth.  It’s valuable simply because we humans like shiny things and we believe that shiny things make a person look wealthy.  God did not mean for the gold that the Egyptians gave to the Israelites to be used as a symbol of bling wealth for the Israelites.  No, he meant it to be used for adorning the Tabernacle, the tent, in which he would live while they were travelling through the wilderness.  Shinny things artistically reflect the glory of God.  God made sure all the Israelites had gold when they left Egypt so that they would have something to contribute for building the Tabernacle.  It was not supposed to be for their own personal wealth.  

Well, Aaron says bring your earrings, you know, the gold that hangs from your ears…and what are ears used for?  Ears are for listening.  This is symbolic.  It’s like Aaron is saying take the gold out of your ears so that you can hear what God is saying.  What has God said to you?  Don’t make images of me out of gold and silver.  But, what do they want?  An image!  So Aaron takes the gold from their ears and casts this golden calf and says here’s the God who brought you out of Egypt.  

The image of a calf is important.  In Egyptian religion, the land from which they came, the image of the god Apis was a bull.  The Egyptians believed Apis gave Pharaoh his kingly power and wealth and virility.  In Canaanite religion, the land to which they were going, the image of the main god Baal was also a bull.  Baal was the god of agriculture who brought rain and like Apis people believed he also gave kings their power, wealth, and virility.  If Apis and Baal were still around today (and I think they are) they would exist as the image of the Bull Market and would be believed to give billionaires their power, wealth, and virility.

This whole Golden Calf thing went south when the people started to worship it in the way pagans worship their fertility gods.  They rose up to play; wink, wink.  Moses comes down and smashes the tablets of the Law, has the idol pulverised and mixes it with water and makes the people drink it, and a lot of people died that day by plague and sword.  This sounds like some sort of Modern day parable.  Take your gold, your superfluous wealth (which is not really yours) and give it towards the making of an idol that resembles rich and powerful men and worship it with immorality and be smitten with plague.  I’m not trying to be funny here.  Quite frankly, this scares me.  Because it is the way we do economy here on planet earth and if this Golden Calf incident is any indication, God who made everything certainly cannot be pleased with us and how we do wealth.

But anyway, this is Thanksgiving Sunday.  Today, we, the people of God, humbly come before him acknowledging that he has provided for us an abundance of what we need to live.  We also come confessing that we struggle with this wealth thing, with our own self-interestedness.  We also come as those who have open ears to what God wants. We are willing to take the gold out of our ears to listen.  We come as those who know and want to know more fully the joy of generosity and the freedom that comes with just letting God in his great love for us provide abundance for everybody.  We come as those whom God has gifted to know how to share.  For that, let us be thankful.  Amen.

 

 

Ten Creative Words

 Exodus 20:1-21

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There’s a scene that shows up in movies of the family drama type from time to time.  It’s late in the evening, the kids are in bed, and the parents are in the kitchen shouting at each other.  And of course, it turns out the kids aren’t in bed.  I mean, seriously, who could sleep through all that shouting?  Instead, they’re gathered in a huddle around the corner in the hallway with their little hearts racing as they listen to their world descend into chaos.  This heated conversation between the parental types is full of JC’s and GD’s.  Their verbal assaults on one another are so full of anger and hurtful intent that they might as well have been murdering one another.  And, what were they fighting about?  It could have been any number of scenarios.  She says, “You’re just like your father. Stealing money from the family to support your heavy drinking and gambling.”  He says, “You’re just like your mother.  You just want my hard earned money so you can have everything Sally Jones has including her husband.”  She says, “And who in the office are you seeing now.  You’re always there even on the weekends.”  The lying abounds.  Finally, the children step into the kitchen and scream, “Mommy.  Daddy.  Stop it.  You scare us when you fight.”  Boom.  Reality check.  The room goes silent.  The adults in the room suddenly realize they can’t play like that without it having serious consequences on the ones they love most.  If this were an ‘80’s or earlier feel-good Christian family drama, they would realize they need God’s help and wind up going to church on Sunday as they strive to work it out for the kids sake.

In the movie plot, those ten words that the children spoke brought about a new creation in the midst of a broken chaos.  “Mommy. Daddy.  Stop it.  You scare us when you fight.”  Those ten words changed the family dynamic forever.   They were spoken.  Then, there was silence.  The parent’s hearts were sparked with familial love.  Suddenly, there was space for things to change.  The speaking of those ten words powerfully created a new world for that family to live together peacefully, to heal, to be together rightfully related to one another and to God, and to perhaps in time become a beacon of light to other troubled families.  

Words can often be more than just words.  Sometimes, they can create new realities.  I call these creative words.  If I were to liken the Ten Commandments to something it would be to the effect that the ten words that those children spoke into the midst of the chaos of their parents broken, self-absorbed worlds.  We wrongfully call the Ten Commandments “commandments” because this leads us to think of them as things that we should not do or God will get us.  We think of them as “Law” when in fact they are words, creative words, creative words spoken by God that create a new reality in which people might live together in peaceful and healing community, rightly related to God and to one another, and be a beacon of light to the broken human communities that are everywhere. 

In Jewish tradition, they call the Ten Commandments the Ten Words.  They lean on verse one there where it says:  “Then God spoke all these words…”.  These are words that God spoke, creative words that will come to the end for which God intended them – human community that is truly in God’s image.  When God speaks a word it is creatively powerful.  

I want to emphasise the Creative power of the Ten Words and draw a quick analogy to the words God spoke Genesis Chapter 1 when God spoke the Creation came into existence.  The first creative word God spoke at Creation was “Let there be light.”  God didn’t so much mean physical light.  He created the Light by which we are able to see the things of God in the midst of Darkness and understand them.  The Ten Words are a manifestation of that Light in that they illuminate what right relationship to God and to others looks like.  And add to that, the type of human community that results from people trying to keep these Ten Words shines like a beacon with the Light that God created to undergird his creation.

The next creative word God spoke at Creation was to speak a bubble into the midst of the primordial waters of Chaos.  He separated the waters above from the waters below and created space for God to then speak the words to create the rest of Creation.  The Ten Words themselves also create this kind of space, space where true human community can arise.  Another name for this space is trust.  The space that the Ten Words create in human relationships is trust.  We can’t have true community without trust.  All of the behaviours the Ten Words speak against are things that destroy trust.  The abuse of power that comes when we put ourselves or something else in the place of God doesn’t build trust.  We may claim that law and order protects and holds community together, but not when those who claim to uphold law and order murder, steal, lie, covet, and adulterate.  There is no lawful, ordered life where trust does not abound.  Power wielding and intimidation do not create trust.  Whereas, humility before God and others and respect for others does.  Trust provides the space for true communication to happen, space where broken people can rest and heal.

The next creative word God spoke at Creation was to create dry ground; land, terra firma.  Love - compassion for God, for one another, for family - is the terra firma upon which we stand in the bubble of trust that arises by keeping the Ten Words.  All the negative behaviours the Ten Words speak against are things that love does not do.  Yet when we love, we find we fulfill all of the Ten Words and our relationships have firm ground to stand on.

The next creative words God spoke at Creation (I’m lumping three days together) were to fill the bubble – the oceans, the sky, the land – with life.  So also, life lived according to the Ten Words is true life.  It is life lived in which we reflect the image of God into his creation.

The last creative word God spoke at Creation was Sabbath rest.  We think of the Sabbath wrongly if we think of it as simply a day that we shouldn’t work on.  Many of you have childhood memories and heard stories from your parents and grandparents about how they weren’t allowed to do anything on Sunday except sit and stare blankly into space for fear of offending God by working on the Sabbath.  The Sabbath is space and time for us not just to stop working, but more so, for us to take the time and have the space to intentionally repose with God, kick back with God, and enjoy the wonders of his creation.  Without Sabbath rest life because onerous and increases the likelihood that we will stray from keeping the Ten Words and break trust with the people we love. 

Remember last week’s sermon about God making water come forth from a granite rock to restore life to his people who were likely less than a day away from dying of dehydration.  It is no coincidence that event comes just before the giving of the Ten Words of the granite mountain of Mt. Sinai.  Just like that water, living according to these Ten creative Words is life-giving, soul-thirst quenching in a world where human relationships can be hard as granite for lack of trust and love.  So, let God be the one and only God in your life.  Do not create images of God that make God out to be something other than God is.  Don’t make God serve the vain purpose of “me, myself, and I”.  Keep Sabbath rest.  Bring honour to the one’s who reared you.  Do not take life, or commit adultery, or steal, or lie, or covet other people’s stuff.  This is all possible by sticking to Jesus’ summary of the Ten Words – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbour as yourself.”  Love fills full the Ten Words.  Amen.