Church on Morgan
The Secret of Leadership
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] This morning's gospel text comes from the Book of Mark, chapter 10. And we're going to be looking at verse 35 to 45. Would you now hear this word from the Lord? James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him. That's Jesus. And they said to him, teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you. And he said to him, them, what is it you want me to do for you? And they said to him, appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory. But Jesus said to them, you do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They replied, we are able. And then Jesus said to them, the cup that I drink, you will drink. And with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized. But to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint. But it's for those for whom it has been prepared. And when the 10 heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, you know that among the Gentiles, those whom they recognize as their rulers, Lord, it over them. And their great ones are tyrants over them, but is not so among you. Instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant. And whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many. This is the Word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. I don't know how familiar you are with James and John. They're pretty prominent characters in the Gospels. We're told elsewhere that Jesus kind of gave them a nickname. They were brothers, James and John, sons of Zebedee. They got called out of a pretty lucrative fishing career when Jesus disrupted their life. But Jesus often referred to them as the sons of thunder. We have some sons of thunder in our church. If you go upstairs, you can pick them out quick. Part of the reason He called them the sons of thunder is here's just like a taste. This is the kind of way these guys showed up in the world. One time they were in a village, a Samaritan village, and they did not believe that Jesus was being offered appropriate hospitality. And so they said to Jesus, hey, I think it would be more than appropriate if we just called down fire on these people at this point. This is kind of the way that they're just big feelings, big passion, kind of rough, big personality people. But they were some of the first disciples that Jesus called. We see throughout the whole deal that not only were they early invitees into this thing, but they were in Jesus' inner circle of the handful of times where Jesus gets away with just a subset of the disciples. It's Peter, James and John. They were close to Jesus. But it's on this day that they make one of the most bold requests, maybe arguably the most bold request in all of scripture of God, which is that in Mark's account, James and John approach Jesus. And they say, and I love this. If you have kids, you've heard this. I want to ask you something, but I need you to say yes, right? If you're like, well, come on, like what? No, we're going to ask you. But first, before we ask you, you have to say yes to which Jesus says, all right, what is it? And they say, when you come into your glory, when you come into your kingdom and they're imagining a major sort of political overhaul moment of power and empire and rule, when that happens for you, we would like to be on your right and your left. We would like to be the VPs. We would like to be the COOs and the CFOs and the CEOs. We want to be number one and number two in your effort. Will you make us leaders in that? In Matthew's account of this story, it's even more bold and ridiculous. We're told that it wasn't even James and John who made this request, but it was their mother, which is like, please, like James and John's mother is still rolling with them, you know? And going, hey, I've got an idea, Jesus. What if my boys were in charge of everything? We've seen this story before too, yeah. Turns out that leadership isn't just something that we're currently obsessed with, but it appears that it's something we've always been obsessed with. I read an article this week from Forbes that I was just curious about the scale and scope of the leadership industry, of which I am a very engaged participant. In the early years of ministry, I was probably hitting at least five to six leadership conferences a year. I have a whole room in my house that is only filled with leadership books. There is not a leadership podcast that you can probably talk to me about after the service that I haven't already heard of and engaged in, right? And it turns out it's not just me and it's not just now, but this leadership industry thing is massive. According to Forbes, it's about a $400 billion industry every year, which just put that in perspective. We spend about 700 billion on public education, right? That's how much money is put into leadership development and according to Forbes and by much of the study, for that $400 billion that we collectively spend to grow in leadership, it's pretty depressing, but the vast majority of it doesn't seem to work. It's all kind of a lot of fury and chaos and noise, but it doesn't really produce much of anything. We are obsessed with leadership. We don't necessarily seem to get it. Perhaps that's why we're obsessed with it. One thing I want to note though upfront, 'cause sometimes people read this text and they kind of miss. Like Jesus doesn't critique their desire for greatness. He doesn't critique ambition. He doesn't tell them that they shouldn't seek out leadership or be leaders. His critique to them and their desire to lead is just simply this. You don't know what you're asking. I've come to hear it compassionately. Like I appreciate the dream. I'm here for the ambition. I love the desire that you have for your life to matter and to be meaningful and to count and to be invested in a direction that's significant, but you don't understand what you're asking. This morning I've been this week, I've been wondering if that's also true of us. That maybe part of the reason why so much of the leadership stuff that we consume doesn't seem to make much of a difference is that we like James and John, we don't know what we're asking. We don't know what we're signing up for. We don't know what we're actually interested in. I mean, what is it that we don't get about leadership? I read a funny sort of critique about how leadership is completely taken over, especially for those of us who are parents and our children, right? That from the day they're born, we begin crafting their resume of leadership, right? My child, you know, leveraged a campaign among he and his twin to exit the birth canal and then shortly thereafter, right? lobbied for recyclable diapers in his preschool. And it was at kindergarten that my sweet daughter moved the school to move to 2% milk before in middle school, sort of leading a team to go to a country to introduce golf and clean water. I mean, it's just sort of like this is how, I mean, we are so obsessed with leadership. We want it for ourselves. We want it for our kids. It raises the questions of what is it that we want for them? What do we think leadership is? What is it that the disciples, James and John, thought they were asking for? What is the quiet part spoken out loud? Here's my sense of what we want. When we say we want to be leaders and we want our children to be leaders. And there's some altruistic stuff in there, for sure. But I think mostly what we say when we want our kids to be leaders is we want them to have control and agency over their lives. We want them to be in charge. We don't want them to have to live on the other side of someone else's decision. We want them to have the autonomy to direct and steer and shape their life. We want them to have security, financial security, job security. We don't want them to be the first line that's cut when layoffs have to happen. We want them to be the person who decides who gets laid off. We want them to have autonomy and security. We want them to have comfort. We want them to have a life that doesn't feel like it's always agitated by need, but that they have everything that they need. This to us is what I think we imagine about leaders. Leaders have autonomy, leaders have security, leaders have comfort. And Jesus steps into those assumptions, the quiet part that we rarely say out loud and says, here's what you don't understand about leadership is that if you want to be great, you have to be a servant of all, a slave, tall. I mean, we see Jesus model this and is very answer. They go, Jesus, we want you to do something for us, but you need to say yes. And what is Jesus' response? Go back and try again. No, I think it would be fair, but he says, what can I do for you? My pleasure, right? Like, this is Jesus, the creator, the king of the world going, how may I help you? What can I do for you? How might I serve you, right? What you miss about leadership, about being the greatest is ironically, it's about becoming the least. It's about becoming the greatest servant of all. Henry now and the great spiritual writer said this, that leadership begins, think about this. Leadership begins the moment someone else is flourishing is more important to you than your own. Leadership begins in the moment when someone else is flourishing is more important to you than your own. That's the minute you become a leader. That's what leadership looks like. I mean, Jesus said like love, no greater love than this, that a person would lay down their life for one another. Which sounds remarkably similar to Jesus' definition of leadership. I've been wondering lately, like leadership and love may not be that distant. The true leadership might actually look a lot like love. Someone who puts others' interests above their own. This is what leadership looks like. By the way, this is why I think we get so worked up about executive compensation. I heard Simon Sinek do this thing recently where someone was asking about this and he goes, I actually don't think we care about the money. I don't think we care about the dollars. That's not what's really happening here. He said, I'll prove it to you. If I told you today that we are gonna give Mother Teresa $150 million to me, she's live. We're gonna give Mother Teresa $150 million for her life of leadership and service. Does anybody offended? Does anybody care? We're like, heck no, I'll contribute, I'll pitch in too. If we came around Nelson Mandela and said, given your work and effort and the difference that you've made and all of that, we wanna pay you $250 million. Would we be upset about it? We wouldn't. The reason we're upset, the reason why we get really bothered by exorbitant sort of executive pay is because it seems like they've betrayed their primary responsibility which is to seek the flourishing of others. That their compensation has come at the expense of others. This is kind of like the how this is the Bezos moment of having the largest yacht in the world but your employees working themselves to the bone. You kind of go, there's been a failure of leadership here. This is where we're offended. We're offended because you've betrayed your first calling, which is to be a servant of all and you've used them to benefit yourself. It's like leadership one-on-one. It's not about the money. It's about how you got it and at whose expense, right? Jesus says, when we say we want to be leaders, we don't know what we're asking. Part of what we forget is that leadership is about serving others. But the truth is you've heard that. I got 15 books on my shelves that tell me that. Servant leadership, right? What I think we really miss about servant leadership, the thing I have a whole lot fewer books on my shelf about is the cost that comes when you put others flourishing above your own. The thing we miss about leadership, what you're not thinking about when you're signing your kid up for the leadership track of whatever is you're not thinking about the cost of leadership. This is what Jesus says. You don't know what you're asking. Second question, do you think you can drink the cup I'm about to drink or be baptized with the baptism that I will be baptized with, which is code four. You say you want to be a leader. Are you willing to die for it to sacrifice your own life for others? I think you're asking to secure your life, but leadership is about giving away your life. You haven't considered the cost. You've forgotten this is the secret part about leadership. This is the part that they're missing is how much it costs to be a leader. Every once in a while, I'll be having a conversation with say a board member here at church or a family member or a close friend about some hairy moment that went down in the life of our church a couple of years back, like, hey, heads up. There's some stuff you probably never heard of before. It's probably important for you to know, but a couple of years ago, this thing sort of happened and here's kind of what went down and here's how we handled it in the rest, right? It's kind of like the heavy stuff. And more often than not, someone on the other side of that conversation will have this kind of moment of like, I don't know how you, I don't know how you do this. I don't know how you're still doing this. I don't know how you're still here. Like I had no idea. Here's what I've found to be true. That's not just true of me. That's true of every leader everywhere all the time. You can't imagine, we don't know how much it costs. Every teacher you've ever had, every mentor who stepped into your life, every coach that's been a leader for you, every elected official, every boss, anyone who has ever invested in your own flourishing, it came at a cost, right? But mentor who took an hour away to come have coffee with you every month didn't do it because it was like the best hour of their week. They were leaving their kids, their family, their responsibilities, fighting traffic, making that thing possible, right? Like the boss that you had who kind of worked hard for your promotion and tailored that job just for you, like someone else had to figure that out and pick up all that thing. That middle school soccer coach who seems to be having such a great time on the sidelines, like you don't know that two of those family sent them emails that week complaining about why their kids weren't getting time for this volunteer gig he has. No one has ever invested in your flourishing. No one has ever led you as a servant that didn't come with great cost. I couldn't help but just start, it was like somewhere deep down I knew this but I think I just like the disciples forgot it. And this week as I just sat with it started to like crack me open and begin to just think about all the people in my life who've invested at some point in me and the cost that came on the other side of that that I'm unaware of. One of the people we don't talk enough about here at Church on Morgan is Ned Hill. He was the guy who gave me my job, hired me at Edenton Street and 12, 13 years ago who had a, I can only imagine a relatively comfortable life as a senior pastor walking towards retirement at a historic 200 plus year old church and this 30 year old rabble rouser walked into the room and said, what if I don't wear the blazer in bow tie? What if I say words like X, Y, and Z? What if we put crazy posters up around this place and we take these kids and all these, what if we dismiss all the historic Sunday school teachers who've been here for years and recruit new ones? What if I changed the entire program? What if we start a new church and you fund it and I take a hundred of your people with me to do it, right? And Ned was like, let's go. Let's do it, right? I hadn't seen him in like a year. I'm walking down the street the other day and walked by, he's sitting there with his wife on his third retirement, which I'll save for another day, but having lunch, and they both say to me, we're so proud of what's happening at church. I'm working, we listen every week. I'm like, you listen every week? And the more I thought about it, I'm like, of course he does. This place took years off of his life, right? Like I will never know what it cost him. I can only imagine the meetings, the committees, the people who were like, are you crazy? This will kill our church. This person isn't on brand. This feels reckless. They're too young. What about our fun? I mean, I cannot and just handled it. Never knew about it. I started to realize that's been true of every person in my life who's like created space and made space for something to happen. This is what true leadership looks like. There's so many headlines about leaders who fail, but I sitting inside of that realization of what leadership costs, and that my own flourishing has come at the expense of so many, I couldn't help but just feel surrounded by love. I kind of overwhelmed with gratitude for all the people who've stepped up in my behalf and worked to serve my own flourishing. Maybe wonder why we miss this. Like how come we don't get this about leadership? How come we do forget that leadership is about service and its service actually comes at a significant cost? Why do we miss that? And I think it's because... This is not a perfect metaphor, but I was, you know, some of y'all have ever seen a movie Fight Club, whatever, but the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club, right? This week I've been wondering if the reason why so many of us miss the cost of leadership and we only see the benefits is because the first rule of true leadership is you don't talk about what it truly costs. There's a hidden and invisible vulnerability as author Andy Crouch says to true leadership. There's a weight that a leader carries that those on the other side of the leader will never know. True leaders don't talk about the true cost. Let me give you an example, because to do so would be to violate their primary responsibility which is to serve your flourishing. So like some of the best examples would be, every morning the president is given a briefing of all of the horrors that threaten our society and civilization. And right after he walks out of that meeting, he has to go to press conferences and committees and coffees and fundraising and engagement, knowing in the room that that individual is carrying the weight of something that no one else in the room has any sense of. But for a president to walk into that room and go guys, if you knew like, let me tell you what I found out this morning, right? It would destabilize our entire country. It would paralyze all of us. It would riddle us all with fear. And so the true cost of leadership is that you don't talk about what it truly costs so that you might truly serve the flourishing of others or an executive who leads 100 or 10,000 employees who knows that like our cashflow is like running low and the financing or not 100% sure how this is gonna work. And we have some competition who's coming in from the other and then they go in front of a meeting or an interview and somebody says, how's the company? And they go, it's great. And let me tell you about our brand new product. This is what it costs to be a leader because if they stood up and said, I'm really scared about this, this, this, and this, the entire company would shut down. People would be so scared. They wouldn't be able to do their work. They wouldn't be able to show up. They won't be able to get done what needs to get done. This is what real leadership looks like. It's the secret of leadership. It's the part we don't see. But it's true of every leader. It's why one of my least favorite quotes I came into early in ministry that I have wrestled with. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer says one of his works somewhere, this great theologian from the 20th century, who was a part of the resistance to the Nazi movement, but he said, a pastor should never complain about their congregation. I was like, never? (congregation laughing) Cong, a pastor should never complain about their congregation because God did not put you there to be their adversary, but to be their advocate, right? This is the role of every leader. It's why one of my biggest pet peeves is watching parents complain about the role of parenting in front of their children or on social media. There's like few things that disgust me more than when I see some parent go off on a social media platform that their children are on about the weight of parenting, right? It's like you're violating the primary responsibility that you have to care in the flourishing of these people. Max Dupree, who is the CEO of Herman Miller for a time, he said that bad leaders inflict pain and good leaders bear it, right? This is what we don't understand about leadership. This is what we forget. Now, I wanna be clear, no one can survive the weight of leadership without sharing it with someone, but who you share it with deeply matters. It's an inner circle, it's your board, it's your friends, it's someone outside the organization. Nobody can survive this thing alone. Even Jesus along the way, this is so disheartening. He's clearly carrying the weight of what he's up to because right before the scene, for the third time, he tells his inner circle, guys, we're headed to Jerusalem and I am gonna die, right? He's trying to share the weight of it, but even in his inner circle, they don't fully realize it. He's got knuckleheads going, can I be number two? It's like you don't even understand what you're asking. This week, I'm thinking about this, I saw this text differently than I've ever seen it before. It's the Old Testament lesson for today, Isaiah 53, often attributed to Jesus' life and ministry, but I think Maggie's got on the slides, but this is Isaiah 53, this is our Old Testament lesson, right? About Jesus' life, ministry and leadership. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, he was afflicted, but checked this, yet he did not open his mouth. Always been curious about that phrase, but like a lamb that has led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before it shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. This is what true leadership looks like. This is what they didn't understand what they were asking. You hear that sobering stuff and I'm kind of like, who wants to be a leader? Can I sign your kid up to serve every other kid to make themselves last at great significant cost to themselves? You're still fired up about that conference, that book, right? The truth is, I hope so, I hope so. We need more leaders in this world. We need more people working for the flourishing of others. We need more people to lead like they love those under their care. And Jesus gives us a little bit of hope. He says, you know, James and John, they got into the gig for one thing. They didn't end up getting it. They wanted privilege and protection, but in time they joined the true club of true leaders and it cost them everything. It cost them their lives. But in the process, they got to see something. Debbie Thomas, she says it this way. They got to see that service isn't a second class means to a first class life. That service itself is abundance. That service itself is power. That service itself is glory. This is what we see in the life of Jesus. That we're right to be moved by great leaders and long to become them, but we should be clear about what that actually is and what that actually entail. Our friends, I want to invite you to join me just a prayer as we wrap up this morning. God, we're so humbled by your leadership. It's hard to fathom. We will never know what it costs you to love us in this way and to seek our own flourishing. The ways that that has shaped so many people, so many leaders in our life who have loved us and worked for our flourishing when we had no sense of the cost. Today, God, we pause just for a moment to give thanks to those who have loved us and led us well. God, we pray inspired by your love and leadership and by those that you've placed in our lives that we would be the kind of leaders who also quietly love those around us. We trust you, God, even in the hard days and the heavy weight of the responsibility that you've given us. It's in your name, we pray. - Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
The good news about true leadership. A sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost on Mark 10:35-45 by Rev. Justin Morgan.