A sermon preached by President Roger Ferlo at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland on September 28, 2014:
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I have a question for you from this morning’s reading: Is the Lord among us or not?
Now, that’s a question about authority, which means it is a question about power.
Does anyone here remember the Occupy Wall Street movement? It seems to have disappeared, and one of the reasons people think it dissipated is because there was, in the end, no one with the authority to speak clearly for the group.
The same has been said of the peaceful leaders of the protests in Ferguson—they were fragmented, spontaneous, with no sense of a center or a leader, and it all quickly devolved into violence.
It’s hard to blame anyone for this. As both people in Occupy and, I think probably in Ferguson, would tell you, the idea of following a leader is problematic in these parlous times, given what kinds of directions leaders for whom authority means power have lead us: Putin muscling around in eastern Europe, the police chief in Ferguson calling using military-scale weaponry to intimidate unarmed demonstrators in their own streets, and then feebly apologizing weeks and weeks later, but not disarming.
So in these days when leadership has become so problematic, the Biblical question asked this morning has a new resonance:
Where is authority to be found?
Is there a Lord among us or not?
In fact, the Biblical answer to this Biblical question tends to be a skeptical one, especially when it comes to describing the relationship of authority to power.
At the heart of the story of ancient Israel and Judea is a deep mistrust of men and women—but mostly men—who claim power. It was only with deep reluctance that the prophet Samuel agreed to anoint a king for Israel. Authority and power were the Lord God’s alone. And when Israel does get a king, even a king as great as David, the most memorable story we have about him is the story of his abuse of power, as he sends the husband of Bathsheba into the front lines of battle, knowing he will be killed and clearing the way for him to force Bathsheba into his bed. And as far as kingship in Israel was concerned, that was as good as it got. It was mostly downhill from there, with prophet after prophet speaking truth to corrupt, backsliding and treacherous kings in power.
Even before there were any kings in Israel, at the center of Israel’s own foundation story, the story we heard in part this morning, human authority and the power of leadership are exposed as very fragile indeed.
It is a classic moment in Israel’s history described in this morning’s reading. Moses has led the people of Egypt out of bondage only now to put up with their incessant grumbling in the desert and their nostalgia for easier days when they were slaves. As the story opens today, the people are in turmoil—and rightly so—thirsting for water in a desert where there is no water. Moses’ weakness in the face in yet another crisis is evident to everyone around him, including to himself. And the Biblical writer makes no attempt to hide the fact that Moses, the leader, is not all that great.
“What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”
Moses might be the man in authority, but the power is God’s, and time and again, God makes God’s power known through Moses’ own weakness, which paradoxically becomes a form of power, a power in weakness. He takes the same staff that the Lord had given him to part the waters of the Red Sea so that Israel could be freed from bondage and strikes the stone that releases a flood larger than anyone could have expected:
“Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
And then we have this story of Jesus facing the Pharisees. Again, the issues at stake are authority and power, because authority and power are vested in the Jerusalem establishment, the chief priests and the elders who confront Jesus as he was teaching. We tend to hear these stories in isolation, but this is part of a series of stories in Matthew and it is highly charged as the story nears its climax in Jesus’ arrest and execution.
Jesus has just entered the city of Jerusalem in what might be described as a parody of power, riding through the city gates on a donkey with the crowds waving palm branches. He proceeds immediately to the Temple precincts, to the seat of religious and cultural power in the city of Jerusalem, and in an act of prophetic violence—an act designed to turn the tables on power—he literally does just that, upending the tables of the moneychangers whose trade in coin makes it possible for sacrifices to proceed and for the priestly establishment to flourish and maintain its power and authority.
No wonder the chief priests confront him:
“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
Jesus shrewdly outsmarts them, relying on the power of his wit rather than the power of the sword, tricking them into showing their hand while cleverly hiding his own, answering their question with a question they cannot safely answer. Jesus asks them, “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”
And they argued with one another. “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
Matthew doesn’t end the matter there. He has Jesus then tell a story that places the powerless—those with no authority at all, those whom authority despises—at the center of power, a place of moral power that the powerful have abdicated by their refusal to listen, their refusal to believe, their need to protect themselves from the topsy-turvy reversal of values that John had proclaimed and that Jesus embodied.
Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”
The powerless and the despised take their place at the moral center of power in a Kingdom of paradoxes and contradictions, where the emptying of power—what looks like weakness, an inability to toe the line, to play by the rules—is a means of redemptive grace, a taste of what the kingdom of God really looks like.
“Let the same mind be in you,” says Paul. “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…”
So let me ask again, in this day and age, when power and authority, whether of priest or politician, are sharply questioned, in a time in our own country when the mistrust of power runs deep, and when the abuse of power—whether in Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, the Middle East, or as close to home as Ferguson, Missouri—when the abuse of power is all too evident and visible—visible in ways it has never been before—where is true leadership to be found? Is the Lord is among us or not?
Let me tell you two recent stories of leadership seem to me to ring true to this Gospel.
Several weeks ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, made headline news in the UK when he said that he sometimes doubts that God existed. The British papers had a field day, strongly implying that anyone with doubts like this was a rather weak leader for 80 million Anglicans. He must be a bit of a bumbler, said the British press, which likes to pillory its clergy.
As usual, for its own purposes, the press got it wrong. Welby’s frank admission of recurrent doubts has deep roots in Christian religious experience, roots as ancient as the Psalmists cry of desolation, roots as deep as Jesus’ own experience in the days before his arrest, roots that extend into all of our lives as Christians, if, like Justin Welby, we are courageous enough to be honest with ourselves.
Here is the full quotation:
There are moments, sure, where you think, “Is there a God?” The other day I was praying as I was running and I ended up saying to God: “Look, this is all very well but isn’t it about time you did something—if you’re there—which is probably not what the archbishop of Canterbury should say.” But then he said this, “It is not about feelings. It is about the fact that God is faithful, and the extraordinary thing about being a Christian is that God is faithful when we are not.”
I have to say, as an Episcopal priest, that’s a leader I could follow.
And then there is the case of Captain Robert Johnson of Ferguson, the head of a set of state troopers in Missouri. After several nights of violence in Ferguson, when the police chief there sent out military vehicles and cops with huge machine guns to encounter unarmed crowds, many with their hands up, the governor asked the state troopers to take over policing.
In his August 24 profile of Johnson, Dan Barry of the New York Times wrote that when he came into Ferguson, he “redefined leadership in crisis, equal parts police official, preacher, mediator and neighbor, unafraid to convey his own inner conflict, unafraid to cry.”
At a protest, “the captain bowed his head to pray with a few black men, their hands resting on his blue uniform shirt. When he raised his head, his eyes were red. He accepted a hug, and he abruptly left.”
He was not uniformly loved in the end. He had to order the use of tear gas, he had to arrest some journalists, he had to impose a curfew. He was not perfect, but he was faithful.
This is what he said: “I see myself as a man first. Then a policeman, and being a black man. I’ve just tried to stand on that line of what’s right. Just walk down that line, and try not to separate my feet from side to side.”
I love that, because that’s how a state trooper has to think. What does a state trooper does when he pulls someone over and gets him out of a car and suspects he’s been drinking? He makes them walk a line. If he goes to one side or the other, he’s drunk. Here he uses the same metaphor to talk about what it’s like as a leader to follow the line, because if you move your foot from one side or to the other, you’re likely to be seen to be drunk, but drunk with power. And to walk that straight line is to exercise power and authority with empathy and compassion.
His boss said, “He happened to be here, and he happened to be African-American. He was perfect for it. God took care of us in that respect.”
Maybe so. What we know for sure is that in that time of crisis, his empathy, his compassion and his humility—as well as his sense of order and decency—are rooted in his Christian life. He preached at a local church service in the midst of this crisis:
“This is my neighborhood. You are my family. You are my friends. And I am you.”
Simple words, but in those tense circumstances, those words bore tremendous authority. Those words demonstrated moral power. They were, in fact, deeply Christian.
Remember what we heard from Paul: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit. But in humility, regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 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…”
For servant leaders like Welby and Johnson, in these mean and cruel days, thanks be to God.
There is a Lord in this house. Amen.