Preaching Notes for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost (July 5, 2015)

The Rev. Dr. Dawn Chesser

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

What makes a good leader? Is it age? Is it measurably increasing a nation or a group or a body in its size and strength? Is it winning the trust of those whom one is entrusted to lead? Is it having the blessing of the “elders”? Is it being honest and transparent about both one’s strengths and one’s flaws? Maybe good leadership is some combination of these things or includes aspects of all of them. As we follow the story of David over the next few weeks, it might be a good idea to keep these questions at the front of our minds.

Today’s text tells us that for David, the most important thing was that whatever he did, “The Lord, The God of hosts, was with him.” David continually sought God’s guidance in everything he did, through prayer and praise, through struggle and lament, through confession and mercy. His life was lived in constant and intentional relationship with his Lord God, and his leadership was anointed with God’s blessing.

At Discipleship Ministries, we believe that strong leadership must be rooted in strong spiritual practices. Our goal is to equip leaders for ministry by providing them with the tools they need to lead. Chief among these tools is developing and strengthening our leaders’ relationships with God in Jesus Christ.

This is a time of transition in leadership in many of our congregations. Changes in pastoral leadership are always difficult, whether they are welcomed and joyful, or unwelcomed and perhaps perceived as forced upon the congregation or the pastor. It is important during this time, as new relationships are being formed, that pastors and congregational leaders intentionally work, as David did, to ground their relationships first in deep spiritual practices and to continually seek guidance from the Lord in all they do.

If you are preaching on this passage and want to talk about how you and your leadership team can do everything you can first and foremost to ensure that “The Lord, the God of hosts” is with you in all that you are dreaming, planning, and doing, I would encourage you to use some of the resources found through the links below to talk about some specific ways you might work in a positive direction.

For an overall listing of resources on spiritual practices, check out:

Within this area of ministry (and others) you might read and discuss with other leaders as you are preparing your sermon, these articles:

“Transformation: Changing from What We Are to What God Wants”

“Breath Prayer: Personal and Community Prayers”

“The United Methodist Way: Living the Christian Life in Covenant with Christ and One Another”

As you work with your planning team, Bible study group, or leadership team, encourage them to pray that “The Lord, The God of Hosts” be with you in every minute of your ministry and your daily life. Take time to sit and reflect on the meaning of your leadership in your church, or wherever, however you practice ministry. How are people keeping in constant and intentional relationship with God? If they are not, how can you help everyone to be more intentional about this? If they are, then trust that the leadership will come.

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

As Paul comes to the close of his letter to the church in Corinth, he once again tries to steer these early Christians away from looking to outward, worldly appearances when judging leaders or teachers or preachers who come into their midst, and to focus instead on how the Spirit of Christ was revealed through them.

In a fascinating parody of his competition, his words become the very definition of the phrase “boasting in jest.” Douglas Wingeier sums it up well:

He claimed to be a better apostle because he had been beaten up more often, or endured more deprivation, or had to run away from an angry king through a window (11:16-33). In mockery of the honor of being the first soldier to scale an enemy wall, Paul boasted of being the first one to let down the wall! His key theme throughout is that he boasted in whatever revealed his weaknesses (11:30; 12:9-10). If he were to point to his own abilities or natural endowments, people would just see the human being. When he pointed to his weaknesses, then people could see the power of God at work in whatever he did (see 4:7-15). (Douglas E. Wingeier, Keeping Holy Time, Year B , Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002, 246.)

My friends, this is a word we need to hear in the church today. So often, I am afraid, we are prone to make judgments about the leadership ability of a pastor based on how close the person comes to the worldly ideal. Unfortunately, we continue to live in a world that favors Caucasian males in key leadership roles. In the church, we’d love for them to be on the younger side, with an attractive wife and a couple of cute, well-behaved children.

When we look to leaders we want to emulate, we gravitate toward those who have the most members in worship, the biggest budgets, the most staff, or who captivate their crowds through their inspirational speaking, whether it is primarily based on the Holy Scriptures or not. This is not to say that people serving in large churches with big staffs and big budgets do not show us the face of Christ. In many, if not most cases, they do! And that is a wonderful thing!

However, we do tend to measure our own worth and the worth of others by worldly standards. It is only natural that we would do this, given the media- and entertainment- and advertising-saturated world in which we live. It is very hard to swim against the stream.

But Paul encourages the good people of Corinth and us to do just that. To look not to outward signs of success and prosperity and beauty as the criteria by which we judge someone to be a valuable leader, but to inward criteria, to the person’s soul, and especially to those things about them that are less-than-perfect. We don’t have to be perfect to share the good news of Jesus Christ. We just have to be our authentic and most honest selves.

Mark 6:1-13

Usually I don’t make a big deal about Independence Day in church because I generally think it is important to distinguish the Christian Year and the Christian Calendar, and our distinctive celebrations as Christians, like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, from the secular year and the secular calendar and secular celebrations, like Mother’s Day and the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

But since this year the Fourth of July is on Saturday, I imagine that you cannot completely ignore the previous day’s festivities. And maybe you don’t want to! I have my opinion and you have yours. But even more important than either of our opinions is that it seems to me that the gospel lesson for today lends itself to talking about the very same sort of questions about power and authority that the founders of this country who claimed independence from Great Britain were asking.

This first part of today’s reading is, after all, about the people of Jesus’ nation—his own hometown folks, in this case—who were on this occasion questioning not just his miraculous ability to bring about healing, but the very nature of his power and authority.

These were, after all, people who had known Jesus since childhood. As such, they just couldn’t believe that all these folks were gathering around their hometown boy. To the hometown crowd, Jesus was nobody special. He was not a leader or an important person in the town of Nazareth. He was the son of a simple carpenter. He had no power at all!

Then, in the second part of today’s lesson, we learn about the instructions that Jesus gave to his twelve disciples. We hear how he sent them out two by two and gave them the power and authority to cast out unclean spirits and heal people. And he told them that when they went, they were to take nothing with them—no special symbols of power, no uniforms, or guns, or titles that distinguished them as people who had power and authority over others.

They were to take only the clothes on their backs, and they were to approach the people they had come to serve in a spirit of great humility. They were to go to anyone and everyone who would receive them and extend a hand of hospitality and compassion. This was to be their first approach, always. Even though they had a lot of power and authority, they were not to use it to intimidate or manipulate people. They were, instead, to approach anyone who would listen with open hearts and humble attitudes.

No matter what the people had done before, or who they were, they were to begin every relationship with an offer of peace and understanding. And wherever they were welcomed in, they were to stay there for a while. Only if a place would not welcome them and if their hosts refused to listen or talk with them were they to change their attitude. In that case, if they were met with indignity or rejection, then they were to walk away and not look back.

This is an unusual position for someone with power to take. Most times, when a powerful person enters a room, you know it right away. Powerful people strut around with an air of importance and authority. They want to make sure that no one misses that they are there. They glance around when they talk to you, always searching for a more important person to impress.

But Jesus called his followers to disregard the world’s ideas about what gives a person power and authority and to believe, instead, radically in God. That is, to believe in God more than they believed in the standards of what makes a person powerful that the world had established. Jesus demanded that his followers lay aside all of their claims to self-importance, and instead, trust God as helplessly and innocently as little children, grateful and expectant, yet not knowing exactly what lay ahead for them.

Jesus required that his followers believe in heaven, which they could not see, even more than they believed in the world, which they knew. This was precisely the challenge that Jesus laid down the day he called Simon Peter and Andrew to leave behind their old way of life and to follow wherever he would lead.

That’s the way it always is for followers of Jesus. Always, they are required to leave behind their old way of life. Always, they are called to put aside the standards of the world and whatever understanding of power and authority they might have held before Jesus called to them to follow him.

Maybe they didn’t have much authority and influence to begin with, and maybe their souls still secretly yearned for a little more power and prestige. But before Jesus called to them, at least they knew what to expect. They knew what to aim for. They knew where they ought to be headed.

But following Jesus changed all that. The true follower of Jesus will leave behind that old understanding of what makes someone powerful in order to make room to chase after a completely different approach to power and authority. And whether in the days of Simon Peter or in the present age, the only equipment we ever get from God is the power to recognize and banish evil spirits.

People come to the church today in the very same predicament as the original twelve disciples who were sent out by Jesus two by two. They don’t know a thing more than the first followers did. All they know is that they trust Jesus and feel that they want to follow him. For whatever reason.

  • They want to follow him, to be in God’s hands instead of in the hands of this world.
  • They want the peace of God in their hearts and souls rather than the temporary and uncertain peace that any worldly status can offer them.
  • They want the eternal joy that God promises more than they want the passing joy of having grabbed some power for themselves in this time and place.
  • They want to turn their backs on the old way that leads them to scramble and claw for a place at the top of the heap.
  • They want to believe that heaven is right now all around them, if only their eyes could be opened to see it.
  • They want to be changed, to be radically altered, and to keep on changing.
  • They want to put aside forever the burdens that the world would put on their shoulders.

And they are not ready. They are no more ready to think of themselves as disciples than Simon Peter and the eleven others were. They are not prepared to think of themselves as fishers of people. They don’t even know what it means to cast out evil spirits.

But isn’t the temptation to use our power to control other people just another form of evil spirit? Isn’t it the very thing we’ve already cast aside when we decided to follow Jesus?

The only question is we have to ask is this: Are we prepared to deal with the evil present in this generation? Jesus says that, with God’s help, we are. So I think we should believe him. I think we should all be inspired by his trust in us. I think we should step out in faith from our places of worship declaring for all the world to hear our independence from its evil definitions of power and authority.