Canter Bridge

 

Now I think we need to see those faces again ….

VIDEO

Aren’t they beautiful?

When we talk about Christian leadership and Christian leaders, as we have this weekend, it is possible to lose our grip. It’s possible, although none of us would ever want to do this, to idealize Christian leaders … to make them heroes … to begin to imagine that for people like this, leadership is like falling off a log …

There is in fact a glory about godly Christian leadership. In fact, I think excellence—a word we’re all familiar with and a quality for which we strive—is a reflection in human experience of what we know as God’s glory.

Excellence and achievement can be very vain things …. self-absorbed people who are gifted people can produce excellence. But when excellence happens in the life of one of God’s sons or daughters who know where there gifting comes from and who use their gifting to serve others … that’s when excellence becomes a profoundly beautiful thing. That’s when it becomes easy to notice that human excellence lines up so well with God’s glory.

The people whom we’ve talked about … the people whose faces made that video something that brings tears to our eyes … are excellent folks.

It’s not too hard to put them on a pedestal … to make them something that they are not … and to imagine that Christian leadership … for them … is automatic … like falling off a log.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

*   *   *

Let me define Christian leadership in my own way:

Christian leadership is … engaging reality with courage and discernment … a thousand times a day … out loud and in public.

 

It’s hard work. It costs. Sometimes its deep joys are balanced with real hurt.

If Christian leadership as you and I have known it is tough, imagine what it is like when the resources and the stability we have come to take for granted are simply not there.

On the video we’ve just seen, we glimpse the faces of people who are engaging reality .. with courage and discernment … a thousand times a day … out loud and in public.

 

I don’t know all of them. But I can guarantee you that it’s rarely easy for any of them. Maybe never.

Yet, somehow, day after day, these hard-pressed men and women summon up the courage and discernment to do the needed thing. They find that God’s grace is sufficient. Sometimes only sufficient. Enough, but no more.

You know what? It has always been this way.

*  *   *

Let me read again the stunning self-description that Paul gives us at the beginning of 2 Corinthians:

For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many. (2 Corinthians 1:8–11 ESV)

One of the enduring qualities of the gospel is that it is inherently transparent. It is public.

I remember a pastor and mentor telling me as I trained for ministry in a New England church many years ago, a church were we struggled with presence of ‘secret societies’: ‘The gospel is public. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but it’s all out on the table to be debated. The gospel has no secrets.’

In a not so very different way, servants of the gospel—if that’s really who we are—have few secrets. The gospel demands that we be inherently transparent about who we are, where we are, what we’re up to, how we’re doing, what God has done in our lives, and what he has not yet done that we really wish he would do.

For any servant of the gospel authenticity about life with God and God’s calling on us and how it’s all working is not an option. It’s a requirement. We may not yet have arrived at where we want to be, but we must be on the journey towards God-trusting transparency.

God is so committed to truth—to reality, to the way things really are—that false claims have no place among those who serve him.

Paul makes no false claims. His report of recent events in his life is almost shockingly frontal:

For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the afflictions we experienced in Asia.

 

• What, did Paul lack the necessary skills?
  Did he and Titus stupidly bring these ‘afflictions’ upon themselves?
• Are these guys too naïve, too dim-witted, or too cowardly for the role of ‘apostle of Christ Jesus’ that Paul claims for himself and his closest co-workers?

No. These are just afflictions. Paul is walking, ahead of us admittedly, in the costly path of Christian leadership—his is apostolic, ours is something else—that so many of us and so many of those whose lives we’ve celebrated his weekend have walked.

It is, in this broken world, normal for those who step out in Christ’s name to suffer. It’s what Christian leaders sign up for.

Paul describes the intensity of their experience in a barrage of phrases that—if we listen carefully—leave us wondering just how bad things had become.

• ‘so utterly burdened’ // καθ ͗ ὑπερβολὴν
• ‘beyond our strength’ // ὑπὲρ δύναμιν
• ‘so that we despaired of life itself’ // ὥστε ἐξαπορηθῆναι ἡμᾶς καὶ τοῦ ζῆν

Over the last eight or nine months, I’ve had a clinic in reading between the story lines of suffering. Both of my sons have chosen military careers, and both have opted for the hardest thing the U.S. Army could throw at them. Christopher and John have successfully qualified as Army Rangers via the notorious 62-day ‘Army Ranger School’. It lasts 62 days only for 19% of the highly selective roster of young men who begin the course, which by the way is completely voluntary. For the other 81%, it is lengthened by ‘recycles’, ‘medical evacs’, ‘getting Day-One’d’, ‘peered out’ and the very high percentage of would-be Rangers who simply get ‘dropped’.

As you can see, ‘Ranger School’ has its own vocabulary, its own dialect, its own way of speaking.

I’ve learned that this insider dialect takes over also in how my boys (now Rangers) describe how hard it was. They don’t say it like I would. I’ve only heard one of their friends use the words, ‘I thought I was going to die that night’, although I know they have all sat out there somewhere in the darkness of the Georgia mountains or the Florida swamps and thought the very same thing.

I’ve had to listen carefully and learn to shudder when I hear my boys say more careful words about one stage of their experience or another, words like these:

• Yeah, it was cold …
• Well, it was my feet …
• Most of the guys were heat casualties that week …

You learn to imagine what stands behind those spare, understated, abbreviated summaries of pain.

Paul is being less careful about his own story of the tough times in Turkey, but we still do well to linger over his words and imagine what was going on inside his very human head and heart:

‘… We were so utterly burdened, beyond our strength, that we despaired of life itself …’

 

And then this:

‘ … Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death …’

This is authentic Christian leadership?

This is victory in Jesus?

This is what it’s really like to step out beyond the comfort line? To engage reality with courage and discernment a thousand times a day, out loud and in public?

For the apostle, it is.

 *  *  *

But Paul’s authenticity about the cost does not leave him defeated. Nor do the people we’ve talked so much about this week experience the cost of leadership as defeat. Nor, if you’ll allow me to say so, do I!

Paul says there are two things that happen precisely because he and Titus are so completely overwhelmed by what he calls the burdens they’ve carried.

First, there is this insanely important transference of trust. I bet you’ve seen it a thousand times. Paul puts it this way:

‘… But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God …’

He doesn’t merely observe that trusting God is a result of affliction. He goes much deeper than that. He finds that this is actually  God’s purpose in placing us in affliction!  The ESV captures this by supplying some words:

‘… that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God …

This does not exhaust God’s purpose in placing us in affliction as we seek to lead in his way. Surely he has other things going on as well, and we must also reckon with a broken world that scatters pain and destruction wherever it can.

But it is empowering to know that God is involved in our burdens and that one of his purposes in placing them upon us is to break us of our self-reliance—mercifully!—and to lead is into trust in him.

And then a second beautiful reality comes through Paul’s lines.  Just after writing that he and Titus felt like they were walking around with the sentence of death on them, he names God as ‘the God who raises the dead’.

And then three times—count’em!—he relates God’s deliverance:

v. 10, ‘He delivered us from such a deadly peril.’

v. 10, ‘… and he will deliver us.’

v. 10, ‘On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.’

Now who talks in this repetitive way?:

You talk this way when you’ve known the despair that comes when you think you will not be delivered.

You talk this way when you have the persistent hope that God will deliver you.

You talk this way when enough is at stake that your hope becomes a prayer: ‘God, deliver me … God, deliver us!’

There’s nothing clinical about this, nothing abstract. This is life … this is near-death … this is the language of everything being at stake most of the time.

And get this: this is the language of leadership as repeated resurrection.

I can tell you that many of God’s leaders around the world experience Christian leadership in just this way: as repeated resurrection from what feels like death.

I can tell you that I do, too.
And I bet—although you may have never used these words for it before—you know exactly what Paul is talking about.

Christian leadership = engaging reality with courage and discernment a thousand times a day out loud and in public.

Christian leadership = repeated resurrection from what feels like death.

Now there’s one more element of this passage that I’d like to touch on before I draw these thoughts to a close:

On the one hand, we have the painful experience of two of God’s servant leaders.

On the other hand, we have the deliverance brought about by ‘God who raises the dead’.

There’s a third body of participants in the drama of Christian leadership: those who care for leaders and pray for them.

Verse eleven widens the circle, so that it now places its arms around this ‘necessary population’: ‘You also must help us by prayer, so that may will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.’

You must help us by prayer …

 

Wow. What a gritty, real-world kind of statement about the role of those who may not be out on the edge, out on the front line, in exactly the same apostolic way that Paul and Titus are.

Paul does not demean such people. He does not say they should be somewhere that they are not. He does not call their occupation into question. He does not assign them to a spiritual second class.

To the contrary, he credits their prayer with:

• helping those who are hard pressed.
• generating the thanksgiving of many as their prayers are made effective.

The drama of Christian leadership is not at its core about education … seminaries … human effort …

Rather it is about our redeeming Lord choosing to accomplish his purposes in his world by deploying those whom he has called into deep, redeeming intimacy with Himself.

It is a drama. There is a story line. There is joy. There is despair. There is hope. There are victors. There are casualties. There is unspeakable celebration when the story has all been told. There is suffering while the story is still in the telling.

Sometimes our role in this drama is to lead others under a burden that is ‘beyond our strength’, one that feels as though we’re walking around with a death sentence hanging over our heads.
Sometimes our role in this drama is to care and pray for those who lead in that vulnerable place.

Either way, our role is a very great privilege, one we would be wise to sell all that we have in order to attain if it had not come to us as a simple gift from on high.

*   *   *

In this very same letter, Paul will say some absolutely galvanizing words. As we take God’s servants around the world into our hearts and minds, our memories, our concerns, and our prayers, I close with them:

For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness, “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. For we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. (2 Corinthians 4.5-7 ESV)