Church Leaders Are Losers

About this sermon

Throughout the stories that compose Christianity’s pedigree and history we are presented with the most unlikely cast of characters that are commissioned with the unrealistic expectations of God. At best, they are unremarkable and at the very least, completely unsuited and unqualified for what is eventually accomplished through them. What is common among all of these individuals is that by any standard we have to measure a person’s value to society, they would come up short. David, the first great king of Israel is, appeared to his contemporaries this way. He’s introduced as an unlikely opponent of the Philistine warrior Goliath. Goliath is everything we would bet on in a one on one duel. He’s a towering figure with all the confidence to suggest that he’s a formidable adversary. As we all know, David is victorious and this is the first step towards his eventual ascent to the thrown as king. And the Old Testament is filled with unlikely heroes, but if you fast forward to the New Testament, we get an even more exaggerated depiction of the kinds of people God chooses to carry out his plans. Jesus picks his twelve apostles who will inherit his divine authority and who does he pick? Complete nobodies. Again, by every scale we have to measure the quality of a person, these guys would fly completely under the radar. And while Jesus lives, these guys reinforce conventional wisdom by living up to the low expectations that society would inflict on them. They struggle to understand Jesus’ teachings, they dispute who will be the most important in Jesus’ new kingdom, and when Jesus’ life is threatened, they run and hide and stay hiding through his trial and execution. And yet, the Goliath that the apostles were to overcome was the whole unbaptized world. Jesus told them to go and make disciples of all nations by teaching them everything Jesus had taught them and to baptize them. They had no political authority, no great wealth, no military might, no great cunning, and no impressive skills and they were supposed to instigate a cultural and religious revolution that would change the course and character of humanity. Inexplicably, they were successful and that accomplishment still has scholars scratching their heads today because there is no satisfying rational explanation for why or how it happened, at least not one that consensus can be built around unless you admit the possibility that God did it. And then, throughout the Church’s history, there are characters that have acted as conduits for the perpetuation of Christ’s kingdom that had no business being history makers. People like St. Augustine, St. Joan of Arc, St. Juan Diego, and the children of Fatima. So, what are the takeaways from the themes that emerge from these stories? The first is that it tells us something about God and his role in our history - specifically that he’s been actively involved because everything we’re taught to believe about how great people do great things in history is at odds with the stories of these collaborators with God who accomplished great things in spite of everything that suggested they wouldn’t. Again, these people were unremarkable, unqualified, and if we want to be crass about it, they were losers; but the fact that they were losers made it so that God’s glory would be revealed most explicitly through them. St. Paul tells us that it is in our weakness that God’s strength can be employed. Next, it teaches the remarkable potential of what God’s grace can do in your life. If he can transform the cowardly St. Peter into the rock upon which his Church was built, into the man who faced down the Roman empire and allowed his own blood to be the first seed that would eventually become a new Christian Rome, then imagine what he can do with you. Lastly, I think there’s a caution in it. Because we may come across people who exhibit remarkable gifts and accomplishments from within the Church today, but we probably don’t know their past. All we see is the greatness and so we treat them with the kind of respect we would had they accomplished that all by their own merit. And the risk in that is that our leaders become celebrities and they can be tempted to believe their own hype. They forget that they are actually losers coasting on God’s grace and as soon as they stop believing that, they stop depending on it. I think this is the kind of thing that can help us trace the origin of so many scandals in the Church. It can be incredibly heart breaking to learn that someone you looked up to in the faith was leading a double life and I think this can happen when they stop depending on grace as because they start to think that their great accomplishments are due to their own ability rather than God working through their weakness. And then, they fall from grace because they stop seeking it and scandal becomes inevitable.

Topics

• Leadership
• Church & Fellowship
• The Church