The Leadership Team

The Leadership Team

Acts 7:54-8:3

A long time ago, I was golfing with the most honest pastor that I’ve ever known.  He was a generation ahead of me.  As a result, he was a mentor.  As we stood together on the tee for the next hole, he looked at me and said, “Marky…do you know what the problem with ministry is?”  I believe that I actually said to him, “No…but I bet I’m about to find out.” “The problem with ministry is that the job description is just so broad.  No one can be good at all this stuff.  Sooner or later, you just get exposed.”  With that thought lingering, I hooked my tee shot into the water.

What he said was true, not just of ministry, but of any job where you are working beyond your current skill set and your comfort zone.  If you are growing or trying to grow something worthwhile, you will fail and have setbacks.  You will also learn that there are some things that you, yourself, are just never going to do well. Will you hide from the things that challenge you? Will you dare to ask for someone’s help? Will you ask someone to teach you?  It can take a lifetime to make peace with saying the words, “I don’t know how to do this.  Can you help me out?”

I had a friend who went through chemical dependency treatment years ago.  He and his wife literally tore their lives “down to the studs” and then slowly built a new life together.  They did amazing work!  As part of his recovery, he bought a boat.  For most of us, owning a boat might be the kind of thing that would drive us to drink in the first place.  For him, boats were home. He had been raised on them in the Pacific Northwest.  Boats were where he felt competent, where he felt good.  So, he and his wife set off down the Mississippi which sounds great if you’ve never spent time on the Mississippi.  If you have, then you know how treacherous that river can be to navigate.  

Anyway, they were having a lovely time.  Late one day, they approached a port city along the way.  They radioed ahead to the port master, asking about a slip at the dock for the night.  The port master assured them that would be no problem.  He asked, though, if they had ever docked there before.  My friend, wondering what this guy’s problem was, said, no, he had not docked there before.  “How about if I give you some help, just talk you through this?  The current is a little tricky.”  “Thanks,” my friend said, “I’ve got this.”  “Okay…if you say so.”  My friend then navigated his boat wildly back and forth through the channel until he made a historic, and shall we say, “smashing” landing at the dock.  That was the day when he began to add phrases like, “I don’t know…” and “Can you help me?” to his new life.

The truth is that we’ve all acted like we can do anything and everything, and wondered what the other guy’s problem was, (you know… the guy who was trying to help us.) We have all spectacularly smashed the boat.  Life is complicated.  We couldn’t possibly be good at it all.  What are you going to do?  You could narrow your dreams and lower your expectations.  You could create a sort of narrow little zone of competency.  However, if you intend to take a risk or two and dream a few dreams, then you don’t get to play it safe.  We all will fail.  We all will need help.  We all are broken.

What the help may teach us is that most things that are worth doing are done by groups of people.  Instead of wishing I had eight arms like an octopus to get this complicated job done, it occurs to me three more people doing this job with me might give us all the arms and all the talents that we might need. Of course, working in groups has its own challenges—no doubt! Do you remember those group projects in school?  Have you ever been on a church committee? However, the truth is that working together might be an essential part of how God wants us to work in the world.

This is where we find the church in its earliest days. How will all these people create a community of care?  Who will rise to lead them?  How will they possibly survive in a world in which the powers that be are fundamentally opposed to the fact that this new community exists at all?

When it comes to leadership, it is absolutely no surprise that Peter rises first.  He was clearly the most charismatic and bold of the disciples.  He had strong opinions and no problem putting those opinions into action.  Jesus, himself, is said to have nicknamed him, “the rock” and told him that he would be the foundation for the church.  Who else was going to lead?

The thing is that we know and Peter, himself, knew that there was more to the story.  Peter had feet of clay.  There were plenty of times where his boldness left him not only willing to walk out on the water but sinking like a stone.  His boldness put him at odds with Jesus, himself.  And, perhaps most tellingly, in the critical moment when Jesus was arrested, Peter’s professed loyalty to Jesus turned out to be all talk and no action.  Peter didn’t walk the walk.  Before sunrise, the man who said he would lay down his life for Jesus denied ever knowing the man—three times.  Yet…this is who God calls.

If you’ve read the book, then you know that this is God’s m.o.  The story that we are told, over and over again, it that God loves to work through broken people, through real human beings, not saints.  Moses is on the run form the authorities.  Saul is crazy as a loon. David sends a good soldier on a suicide mission to cover the fact that he slept with the man’s wife and got her pregnant.  Almost every prophet presents God with a long list of reasons why they should not be a prophet.  (The only exception is Isaiah who appears to be that totally annoying person who runs around saying, “Pick me!  Pick me!”)  All the leaders in the Bible are a total piece of work—completely human, and children of God, all at the same time.  In fact, some of the very things that can make them a real pain are the traits which make them candidates for doing God’s work.

Back to Peter…it wouldn’t really be fair to expect a man who battled the winds of the Sea of Galilee and nearly broke his back hoisting nets to be all that smooth when it comes to people skills.  If you were working in his boat, I’m not sure he would be diplomatically asking you to please adjust the nets.  I’m also pretty sure that Peter never smashed a boat into a dock in his life.  Still, though, when it came to Jesus, whom he had followed and loved, he had failed spectacularly.  While the Gospels assure us that the risen Jesus had forgiven him, I suspect that the wounds to Peter’s notion of himself and his power had to be so fresh and so painful.  Has he even had time to learn what was there to be learned?

I think the answer is no.  He’s struggling.  His life as a perfect person is over. Like us, when faced with something complicated like Jesus death, he doesn’t start with his own responsibility.  He never really says in any of his early speeches in the Book of Acts:  “We all failed him.  I failed him, too.  We are all responsible.” Again, we’re dealing in human beings here, not saints.  He rails instead against the authorities who definitely played a huge role.  In an interesting moment, he discovers that a couple who sold their property and gave the proceeds to the community, actually held some money back for themselves.  He goes after these people tooth and nail.  The man who had been forgiven, himself, offers them none.  The truth is that Peter is not only a piece of work, he is also a work in progress.  When he rails against the Jewish leaders or against people for their failures, we kind of wonder, “Peter, can you pick up the pace on this progress.”  And yet, God works through him.

Of course, God also calls others into leadership, people like this young man named Stephen.  Stephen didn’t live long enough for us to know his human, broken edges.  Stephen is young and handsome.  It is said that he had the face of an angel.  Not only that, besides being easy on the eyes, Stephen can speak.  There’s none of that Nazareth, country twang that you would have heard in Peter’s voice.   Nope…this guy is the whole package.  However, maybe because he is so faithful and so stunning and so passionate, jealousy rises.  False charges are filed against him.  He is arrested and put on trial.

If you spend time thinking about Stephen, you know that this is the guy who could have talked his way out of anything.  However, in court that day, he had no intention of doing any such thing.  Instead, just prior to our text, he essentially recites the history of God’s relationship to the people and of the people’s failure to live up to their covenant with God.  He knows his stuff.  He is filled with God’s spirit.  He holds nothing back but instead just boldly tells the truth and lives his faith which, often in history means that you’re not going to live long.  Do you remember the line from the Don McLean song, “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”  That’s Stephen…like a shooting star that streaks across the sky which doesn’t last long but leaves you staring, slack-jawed into the night.  That day, the authorities drag Stephen out to the edge of town and begin stoning him to death.  As he is dying, Stephen continues to preach.  As he is dying, Stephen asks God to forgive those who are killing him.  Finally, Stephen becomes our first martyr.

Here’s the thing… You’d have thought that a guy like Stephen, or someone just like him, would have been the perfect compliment to Peter—kind of a good cop/bad cop kind of thing.  However, the other leader who was going to emerge in our faith was right there when Stephen was being stoned to death.  He wasn’t there as an outraged, silent witness.  He was there because he was one of the authorities.  True, he wasn’t throwing stones, himself.  No…he was standing guard over the robes of those who were throwing the stones.  After all, a person could work up quite a sweat, stoning someone to death.  Our other leader stood there and watched and nodded in approval.  This, friends, was Saul, the man whom we would come to know as Paul, the man who would have as much to do with the spread of Christianity in the world as any other person.

That was not today’s work.  Today’s work, based on his new resolve and renewed clarity of calling, was to hunt down as many Christians as he could find, to tear them from their homes, and send them straight to prison.  You see, this whole Christianity thing was just the latest blight, a disease that needed to be pulled out be the roots, one person at a time.  Saul would be a leader in this persecution, and he would bring his tenacious will and his sharp mind to bear in that effort, terrorizing one person after another.

This work would continue until God decided, “I could use a guy like him—tenacious will, sharp mind.  I could work through him.”  You see, it’s the same song, just a new verse.  God’s not drawn to saints but to broken human beings.  God loves nothing more than turning someone who looks like a total lost cause into the very person who’s going to lead us a step or two closer to the promised land.  God’s not in the business of rejecting people.  God loves nothing more than redeeming these people, taking the best of who they’ve always been and putting those qualities to work in a whole new direction.   A fisherman turned failed disciple with no people skills and a former prosecutor and persecutor whom everyone fears and hates? Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new leadership team…