Leadership is Dangerous!
Last year I was interviewed by a young man who was training for ministry in a very evangelical denomination - the Nazarenes. He had chosen to do a project on cross-cultural ministry and was investigating what it was like to minister to the LGBT culture. The questions he had to ask me, however, were really aimed at missionaries in a foreign country. One of them was “how can you tell the leaders in your community?” As soon as he asked it, he apologised saying that the question wasn’t relevant. But I answered it anyway. I said, “Oh, its easy to spot the leaders in the lgbt community – we’re the ones with the knives in our backs!” He was rather taken aback – and I explained that many people in our community still live as if they are oppressed. They behave like the slaves did in Egypt. Whilst we may be free, we have no idea how to use our freedom and we often behave in ways which are difficult and dangerous. In this way we are not that different from the People of Israel whom we have been hearing about for the last few weeks.
The Exodus – Image of the Church
Around the same time that MCC was founded, in the late 1960s, a new image of the Church started to gain ground. This image of the Church saw us as being the “people of God” on a pilgrimage or journey. It was an image which borrowed heavily from the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. This image stressed the fact that we are on a journey, that the journey takes time and, sometimes, it feels like we don’t know where we are going! If you read the book of Exodus you will be struck by the length of time the Jewish people wandered around in the desert – the writer tells us it took 40 years! You will also be struck at how argumentative the people were (a theme explored in our devotional booklet this week), how disobedient they were to God and the leaders God raised up, and how they just didn’t 'get it'. Yet these were the people God chose out of all the nations of the Earth. I read Exodus and am encouraged!
I want to talk about three themes which are common to our own journey through life and the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt: we need to learn to enjoy the journey and discern its purpose; to learn to eat the bread we are given each day; and we need to learn how to deal with the desire to grumble.
Learning to Love the Journey and discerning its purpose
The journey to the Promised Land was, we are told, very exciting. After a series of plagues against the Egyptians, the Jews fled the country of slavery, but, at the last minute, Pharaoh changed his mind and tried to get them back. God led them through the Red Sea enabling them to escape the Egyptians. By day God led the Jews by a pillar of cloud and by night a pillar of fire. Each day their needs for food were met. But despite this they still doubted God and God's love for them. They left Egypt very quickly but, it seems, it took 40 years for Egypt to leave the Jewish people. They still were tempted to worship in Egyptian ways and not in Jewish ways; they still hankered after their pain and the culture they left behind which they were told was not Godly. It took 40 years to turn slaves into free people.
What of our culture is still Egyptian? We have left slavery, we have made a decision to follow Jesus, to make God’s will dominant in our lives and to rely on the Holy Spirit for our inspiration and lead. We have been called out of the land of slavery and have been told to embrace freedom as God’s own daughters and sons. And yet, there is much of our past culture, our past behaviours, our past values, which call us back. We, like the Jews, may have left Egypt but sometimes I wonder if Egypt has left us.
I was reminded of this during the long process Ian and I went through when buying our house. We went to see the show house and were, at first, delighted that the sales representative was obviously a gay man. However, our delight did not last for long. When we asked about mortgages and life insurance policies, and all the questions that might be asked, he glibly told us not to bother with life insurance as “what queen wants to live past 40 anyway?”
At first I thought he was trying to be funny, but it dawned on me that his life values were rather different to ours. Interestingly I saw him on television a couple of months ago talking about cosmetic surgery and how it had transformed his life. An acquaintance of mine is contemplating spending over £3,000 to have the botulism virus injected into his face to mask some, very minor, signs of ageing. The culture of the body beautiful, of living for today and forgetting about tomorrow is part of the “Egyptian” culture of slavery. It does us no good but sometimes we have so much of Egypt within us that we can't see it for what it is.
We see this in wider issues in our city and community. When I first moved to Manchester the Gayfest / Mardi Gras festival was overshadowed by huge rows between the organiser and the Council. Every year there was public mudslinging, so much so that one person even wrote that such events are the traditional preparation for the event! That has got better, but now the leaders of various gay organisations in the city get vilified. Our culture often does not condemn or challenge such behaviour: instead we have a cultural label for such people “drama queens”. We have been in Egypt so long that such behaviour seems normal!
A few years ago I attended a church growth conference in California in a church that is not part of MCC. It was nice to be in some warmer weather, it was good to listen to world class speakers, and it was intriguing to be in a church owned by quite a conservative denomination which welcomed our people. At the end of the week the 30 or so MCC folk gathered for a debriefing. We were asked to name what the high points of the week were for us and also to name the low points. To my amazement over half the MCC folk started to unload about how oppressed they felt because most of the speakers did not use inclusive language about God. Never mind the fact that they made strenuous efforts to use inclusive language about people - to make sure they did not assume that to be a pastor was to be male - and never mind the fact that we were welcome, as MCC, to be there in the first place.
I got annoyed, and said so which probably did nothing to endear me to my American colleagues. But later on I got to thinking about this more deeply. I remember when I was the one who would have been getting very hot under the collar if politically incorrect language was used. I remember being so affected by oppression sickness that anything, or anyone, who did not espouse values of inclusiveness was written off. It took some time to get the 'Egyptian' out of me.
The purpose of the Exodus was to change the Jewish people so that they left behind Egypt and the aspects of the Egyptian culture which were damaging to them. The Exodus turned them from a group of freed slaves into the People of God. Our journey of discipleship does not end when we become Christian – it starts. We are called, constantly, to refine, to change, to become more like Jesus. Wesley called this changing “from glory into glory”. As we change, as we mature, as we become more like the one we follow, we get nearer to our own Promised Land – a Church where all are free, a place where we can worship without fear, where we are valued by God, a place where we learn the maturity to use our gifts in a Biblical ministry of service. We become a place where people become well, where the suicidal and desperate find hope, where self esteem is raised and we see ourselves, and each other, as God sees us. We become well along the way and we are healed from oppression sickness – but of course the first part of this is to recognise that we are sick in the first place!
Bread for the Day
The second theme I want to tease out from this story of the Exodus is that of being given bread for the day. In the reading this afternoon we heard of the Jewish people being told to get up in the morning and gather the bread, or manna, from heaven that God provided for them. If they took too much and tried to save it for the next day, then it rotted and was filled with maggots. If they relied on God to provide for them each day, then the bread tasted as if it were made of honey.
Sometimes we act like the Jewish people in the story and try to gather up more bread than we are entitled to, but refuse to rely on God to feed us each day. We come to church and we often expect the spiritual nourishment we receive on a Sunday to last us for the week. By the time we get to Tuesday or Wednesday we are hungry again. Then we come back and try to cram ourselves full again on Sunday. Of course this binge eating on spiritual food involves the law of diminishing returns. If the only time we meet God is on Sundays in worship we will start to feel that “we are not being fed”. We will look to worship to meet spiritual needs that it cannot and will not. Instead, we need to follow the advice that God gave the Jews long ago and seek to be fed by bread from heaven each day.
There are lots of ways of doing this and sometimes it is hard. I find it hard to discipline myself to pray each day. I kid myself that I do not have the time, yet I can make the time to read the newspaper from cover to cover each day. I kid myself that I get bored, but have had to learn that boredom is something to work through. There are many different ways to pray each day and thousands of different resources designed for different types of people.
I personally find receiving Holy Communion in a quiet mid-week service very relaxing and a good time to meet God in quietness and calm. I find the discipline of using the Catholic prayer book a good one – though one I need to work on. I also find using a rosary a very good discipline of giving over 20 minutes to prayer and meditation.
Sometimes we get too hung up on the forms of prayer. At last year’s summer school I was criticised by one student, in particular, for saying that I use forms of prayer which come from my Catholic tradition. He felt that as MCC was a Protestant church there was no place for such things – he also felt that Catholics are not really Christians. I pondered this for some time and reflected back to him, after a few days, that perhaps we had not been very good at being clear that MCC defines itself as being ecumenical and that Catholic spirituality is as much at home here as are other forms of evangelical and charismatic spirituality. In the final analysis God is not really bothered how we approach God’s own self in prayer, but is passionate about the fact that we need to pray.
A pastor once told me that when people tell her that they are “not being fed” in their local church, she tells them to “pick up the fork and start eating”! Now this pastor is rather famous for being blunt, but I think she has a point. If you find that your spiritual life is dry, that you are yearning for more, then you need to make time each day to pray and not just rely on the worship on a Sunday afternoon to give you all you need.
Grumbling
The third theme which struck me about the Exodus is about how a group of people who had seen the marvellous things that God could do in their lives, could forget it all so quickly and grumble and complain. At the edge of the Red Sea, as Pharaoh’s armies approached they cried out, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought us here to die”. Grumbling was an easy thing for a people infected with oppression sickness to do. Moses, however, turned the tables on them and told them that when they grumbled about him they were, in fact, grumbling against God! It took some time for the people of Israel to take responsibility for the things they wanted to put right, instead of waiting for someone else to do it for them. It was easier to moan about Moses than to reflect on their own shortcomings – leaders, after all are an easy target.
It seems to me that the Jewish people looked back to the pain of slavery and got nostalgic. It sounds crazy but I can think of modern examples. One of our American clergy tells of her mother living with the pain of cancer for years. Of course her mother made a lot of her pain and complained constantly about it. Eventually surgery and treatment cured her mother. Delores went to see her but was surprised to find that her mother was still depressed, still angry, still moaning. When Delores asked her what was wrong, her mother replied “I miss my pain”. My own mother is not one for keeping quiet about the things that are wrong in her life. She is not one to suffer silently. For years she has moaned about the level of care she has had to give my grandmother – and to be fair it is not easy if you are the only child and the responsibility for caring for a parent falls to you alone. But now my grandmother is in a nursing home. I thought, rather naively that my mother would now be happy – but guess what she is still moaning and grumbling.
When I worked full time as a teacher I really resented the time that teaching took out of my life. I resented the stress of a job which I did not enjoy. I moaned and grumbled and made it the excuse for everything. I couldn’t leave, I argued, as I would not have enough money to live on. I would like to say I took a step of faith and God has not let me down. Well the second bit is true, God has never let me down, but I didn’t take a step of faith; it got that bad that I did not have the strength to go back. We can all take responsibility for some of the things in my life that I don’t like.
Think about the things you dream of, think of the things you dream of for this church. Nurture those dreams, keep on dreaming them but then don’t grumble if they are not met! Instead, also dream of the part you can play in helping make those dreams, those visions, a reality.
This is not meant to sound harsh, but the process of taking 'Egypt' out of us requires us to mature and develop. The people of Israel took 40 years of a long and winding journey to get to where God wanted them. That journey was full of disappointment as well as joys. It had miracles and fighting. For some it was very difficult as they grew more and more aware that, although God had led them out of Egypt, they had to take responsibility for getting Egypt out of them.
It was easy to see where Moses was going wrong – he was the leader, out there at the front. Every time there was a mistake people would blame him and those closest to him. Of course that was so much easier than wondering if they could do something different themselves to make things better. It took 40 years of wandering in the wilderness for the Jewish people to realise that they had only really one choice: to obey God and be part of the solution, or to disobey and be part of the problem. Now, 6,000 years later, we are continually faced with the same choice.
It takes courage to say, “As for me and my house, we will follow the Lord”. However, saying this, daily, as we evaluate the culture we come from, as we spend time with God in prayer, and as we learn that grumbling is not the answer, means we become more and more the people that God dreams of.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.