Lost in Faith

Last night I spoke to our group leaders and challenged them to be “Spiritual Parents” to those they are influencing. I Thessalonias 2:1-13 was my main text but I stole some thoughts from Will Willimon formerly chaplain at Duke University. His thoughts on “Leadership” and Jeremiah are priceless so I have reproduced them below.

8/26/2001 – Christian Leadership 101

Dean William Willimon

Passage: Jeremiah 1:4-10

Sermon:
For those of you who are new here, Orientation Week continues as I now attempt to give you the skinny on what it takes to be a success at Duke. I’m assuming that you want to be a success. You are the best of the brightest. Something like 93% of you were presidents of your high school classes, captains of your football teams, first violin in the school symphony. Today I ignore the 7% of you who weren’t cool enough to get elected to anything and speak to the 93% of you who got to Duke because you were leaders.

Recent army recruitment advertisements urge young people to join what they call, “An Army of One,” which is not like any army that I ever heard of. But I guess those ads mean that even the army must come to terms with the desire that all of us have nowadays to be leaders. In the new army, everybody gets to be a general.

Which may explain why leadership is all the rage at universities these days. We have courses in microleadership and macroleadership, leadership skills and leadership techniques, Professors of leadership (some of them calling to mind the old, “those who can, do, those who can’t teach”), and Institutes of Leadership. While one can understand why a culture in which George W. Bush is our leading leader would be anxious over leadership, I still find all this leadership stuff amusing.
Students generally flock to these courses. After all, who among you does not enjoy thinking of yourself as a potential leader? Most of you are at Duke hoping one day to be in charge of something. Why, this summer, I was even invited to address a group of TIP students (participants in our Talent Identification Program — you know, the nerdy little sixteen year olds who think it’s cool to spend their summer studying chemistry rather than playing baseball or lying on a beach). While other sixteen year olds are looking at one another and thinking, What do I need to do to get you on a blanket on the beach? they are thinking, How can I lead you into following me?

I know enough of “leadership studies” not naively to believe that leaders are born, not made. I know that there are such things as leadership skills, strategies and traits. Still, something in me resists this push for recognition of, in their words, “the science of leadership.”

Maybe my resistance is due to my being Christian.

Today’s scripture is Jeremiah’s account of how he got to be a prophet, a religious leader in Israel. Take it as a paradigmatic story of Christian leadership. The first thing you will note is that this whole thing was God’s idea, not Jeremiah’s. “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah,” is how the story begins (v. 2). Which is hardly ever how most of our leaders get born.

This summer we read Donald McCullough’s biography of Truman. Though young Harry failed at just about everything he undertook, he had an indomitable sense of destiny. He had in his head the odd notion that this kid from Missouri would one day be a Hannibal, a Caesar, or a Lee. Jeremiah had, so far as we know, none of this on his mind. I think, from the text, he must have been about say, eighteen. And you know what most eighteen year olds have on their minds and it’s not, “How can I grow up to become an abrasive prophet who goes up to the palace and tells the king that he’s a fool and that his kingdom will be destroyed.”

To underscore the divine origins of Jeremiah’s vocation, God tells him, “Before I formed you in the womb, while sill in utero, I knew you as mine, I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (v. 5). This whole thing was God’s idea, from the first. Jeremiah’s ambition, his sense of destiny, his alleged skills had nothing to do with it. All of this is from God.

Picture your application to Duke last year. On your admissions essay, you say, “Since I was a fetus, I had a dream to come to Duke and take charge….”

The story goes out of its way to assert that nothing about young Jeremiah — no talent, no inclination, no natural ability — suggests that his call makes sense, as we usually make sense. In fact, when told of his call, Jeremiah protests, “I don’t know how to do public speaking! I’m only a kid. I get nervous in front of a crowd. My SAT scores were two hundred points better on the math than the verbal.”

Most eighteen-year-olds whom I know are always trying to appear older than they actually are. Jeremiah, on the other hand, though he is a young adult, says, “I’m only a kid!”

Most eighteen year olds try to appear all grown up until they come to that point where they feel that they are being asked to get in over their head, stretched beyond their abilities, then they protest, “OK. I lied on my admissions form. My AP Math course was a joke. I can’t take advanced calculus. I’m only a kid.”

And it is then that the voice of God moves from call to rebuke: Don’t pull that, I’m only a kid business. You’ll go where I’ll send you. You’ll speak what I tell you. I’ll watch over you.” Again, this whole call thing is God’s idea. It is not based upon a savvy assessment of potential professional skills or personal attributes but rather upon the inscrutable gracious choice of God.

In my experience, students are slow to get this point. They stagger in my office their junior year, saying that they are miserable because their life has gotten disrupted, they are thinking about changing their major, trying to get the courage to tell their parents that their life course has been disrupted by the call of God. God wants them to go to law school and not grad school, or God has just assigned them to elementary school teaching and not law school, something like that.

“This is nuts,” they will protest. “I’ve got these habits. I’m not the greatest person in the world, not by a long shot. I’ve got baggage.”

And I listen politely, then I tell them, “You poor young fool. Have you never read a bit of the Bible? Ever heard of the call of Jeremiah? God is a sucker for people like you!”

In fact, if you think of the call of Jacob, or Moses, or Mary, or the Twelve Disciples, you might conclude that being totally inept, immoral, cowardly, and dumb are the only qualities God looks for in calling potential leaders!

I came away from my reading of the call of Jeremiah with the conclusion that there’s no such thing as “leadership” as science or art in the Bible, at least in Jeremiah, at least nothing that resembles my acquaintance with “leadership studies.”

The call of God tends to tell us more about God than about the recipient of the call. Isn’t it odd that God needs someone, particularly an inept young Freshman like Jeremiah to do what God wants done? One might think that being God means the ability to work solo. You might thing, if God were God, then God could do anything God wanted by God’s own self. No. Something about the God of Israel and the church reaches out to ordinary young people, like Jeremiah, to get the job done.

For another, it is odd of God to pick Jeremiah. Jeremiah knows as much. He lodges a basic objection: I can’t talk good. In saying that he is not good at public speaking, Jeremiah is not acting humbly. He really isn’t any good at any of the skills listed on a job description for a prophet.

To Jeremiah’s objections, God promises to give him all he needs to do the job right. Perhaps God believes in Jeremiah more than the boy believes in himself. Maybe an all knowing God sees something in Jeremiah, some potential awaiting development, that Jeremiah can’t see.

From this vignette I derive three Principles for Biblical Leadership:

1. Leadership begins in the mind of God, as gracious inclusion of humanity into the plan and purposes of God. The roots of biblical leadership are essentially theological rather than anthropological. God’s choice tells us more about the quality of God than the positive qualities of the people who are called to lead.

2. Speaking of the people who are called to lead, they are almost universally, laughably, the wrong people. That is, it is almost as if God goes out of God’s way to pick those who, at least on the face of it, have no virtues or qualities that suggest they would be good leaders. Perhaps God likes a challenge. Maybe God, being a Creator who makes something out of nothing, considers vocation a continuing aspect of creation. Any God who could make an introverted kid like Jeremiah into a really quite wonderfully prophetic leader must be some God.

3. The qualities of “good leadership” are more gracious gifts of God to be gratefully received rather than skills, techniques, or knowledge to be savvily developed. When the chips are down, all biblical leaders have for credentials is faith in the promise, “Go. I will be with you” (1:1).

I know. It goes quite against our grain to conceive of leadership in this way, as the choice and work of God, rather than something that we do. We enjoy thinking of our lives as something we decide, a project we have chosen, a path we have conceived on our own. Specifically biblical leadership begins, not in our ambition to rule, or in realistic assessment of our talents, but rather in summons. As Jesus put this in Gospel Leadership 101: “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last….” (John 15:16a)

We fear loss of control. We have anxiety over what life is like to be accountable to someone other than ourselves. It is somewhat frightening to construe our lives in such a theonomous cast, to have our lives lived in constant reference to the purposes of God. A life tethered to the movements of God can be tough. But it is also invigorating to receive the freedom and the dissonance of living the called life in a world where all too many people are answerable to nothing more than their own ill-formed desires.

Sometimes the call comes early (Jeremiah felt it from his time in the womb. “Before you were born…from the womb.” Jer. 1:5), sometimes it comes late as with Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17). Whenever the call comes, in saying “Yes” to the summons, we yield to the adventure of a life free of the ideology of personal autonomy that so enslaves this culture. We are owned, commandeered for God, being used for purposes greater than ourselves.

And with this demanding, even frightening call comes a promise for young Jeremiah, an astounding promise: I will put you over kingdoms and nations, I will give you authority to pull down empires and make new kingdoms (v. 10).

The absurdity of telling something like this to this kid! You shall be a prophet! You will speak truth to power. You will go up to the palace and bring this whole kingdom to its knees so that I might plant a new kingdom in its place. What absurd ambitions!

Yet, have we not noted, this is an absurdly gracious God. The God who would create a world out of nothing, on the basis of nothing but words, the God who would make a chosen people out of a rag tag tribe of nomads, a God who would raise Jesus from the dead – is just the sort of God who would think it cool to call a kid to speak words that shake the whole world. Would be just the sort of God who would think it fun to make a claim on a life like yours, to have your name since you were in the womb, to have plans for you, a job to fill, a task to undertake.

Jesus begins his ministry by assembling a gaggle of ex fishermen, tax collectors and assorted peasants. He turns to the twelve of them, calls them each by name and says, “I’m going to take over the world. And guess who’s going to help me?”