Unitarian Universalists see the usefulness of Jesus not in a divine sacrifice, but in a human life that we can model. Buddhists, too, revere a human spiritual leader. On the holiday celebrating Buddha’s enlightenment (Bodhi Day, December 8), we recognize not what the Buddha achieved for us, but the way great leaders show the greatness we can achieve for ourselves.
Perhaps we’ve lost the thread over the last two Sundays since I’ve been away from the pulpit, but we are talking this month and next about leadership.
For a congregation that is looking to call your next settled minister, and who will soon elect a search committee and begin the formal search part of that process, it’s good to think carefully about the qualities that you hope to find in your next minister.
A minister is a leader. Your next minister will be a spiritual leader, a leader of many of the church’s programs, the leader of the staff team. And particularly in a small church a minister also needs to be a leader on the business side of the church, the money raising and money management, and strategic planning, and keeping the building in good repair.
The minister’s job is to lead the congregation both on a spiritual journey as people of faith, and on the practical matters of maintaining and growing the health of the institution.
So shouldn’t you want, just to give away the theme for today’s message, as you choose a leader who will be responsible for helping lead you on your spiritual journey, and helping lead the church on the practical needs of the institution, a leader who models in themselves careful attention to their own spiritual journey, and careful attention to the practical needs of their own life?
I think so.
Thoughtfulness about leadership is appropriately one of the five tasks of an interim ministry that we are looking at this year. These are our tasks, not just mine.
Together we explore:
The history of our congregation, as we did in September and October, asking identity questions such as, what is our congregational character, what is our story, what is our culture, what do we want to hold on to, what do we want to learn from and release? And particularly, how is this congregation different from other UU congregations, so we attract the minister who is the right fit for us?
This month and next we’re looking at leadership
January through Easter we will look at two of the interim tasks, mission and vision, trying to narrow down more exactly the purpose of this congregation, asking, “what are we here to do?” And what in particular are we working on that a leader with a particular passion and set of skills could help us achieve?.
Finally, in the spring, we’ll close the church year by looking at the ways that our church is, or could be, connected to other organizations as we do our work. We’ll ask, “Who are our support systems and our partners, both in UU organizations, and others we work with? Partner organizations like the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Alliance, and the North Hollywood Home Alliance. What’s are the issues for our church, here, in Studio City, which might be very different from a church located somewhere else.
But this look at the interim ministry tasks, and the issue of leadership specifically for these next few weeks, isn’t solely a academic look at the minister’s job and the church as an institution. I want us to think about leadership more broadly. Not merely the qualities that we look for in a minister, but our lay leaders on the Board, the Committee Chairs, the unofficial leaders, and the church members we will elect later this year to do the job of leading us through search.
What are we asking them to do? What qualities constitute effective, healthy, leadership? And how do we hold our leaders accountable to do what we need, and do it well?
Beyond the church, how do we choose good leaders for our government?
Many of you are leaders, at your work, or at your school, or in your neighborhood.
Families have leaders. Clubs have leaders. Teams have leaders.
Even a person alone exists in a kind of personal community of mind, body, and spirit. How should you lead yourself through the sometimes conflicting needs of food and exercise and entertainment, and rest, and time alone balanced with time with friends, to achieve your personal goals?
What qualities make for a good leader, is a spiritual question. Being a good leader, and holding our leaders accountable, is a spiritual practice.
Friday of this week, December 8, Buddhists will celebrate Bodhi Day, the day that Siddartha Gautama awakened from his many days’ meditation under the Bodhi tree and achieved enlightenment.
The Buddha lived another 40 years. He founded schools and monasteries. He taught. He gathered followers. He created communities. From his leadership one of the great world religions was born.
Earlier in November, I named two of the qualities I think are essential to the task of leadership.
One is that leaders are always leaders of communities. The Buddha was. The Buddhist community, the sangha, is one of the “refuges” of Buddhism.
The second essential lesson of leadership I see, has to do with where a leader positions themself in relationship to the community. The Buddha didn’t set himself apart from his followers. He neither raised himself above them, nor retreated beneath others. He positioned himself as a member of the community. Close enough to reach both the enthusiastic at the front, and the reluctant at the back, but primarily one of the bunch, part of the flock, surrounded by the bulk of the community and looking very much like them.
The example of the Buddha gives us yet a third lesson for leadership.
When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he then wished to lead others to what he discovered. He did this by teaching.
What did he teach?
Here are the four truths that the Buddha came to understand. These are called the Four Noble Truths.
First truth: Suffering exists. You probably already knew that.
Second truth: Suffering has a cause. Hmm… But what is it?
Third truth: The end of suffering is possible. Well that’s good news.
Fourth truth: There is a path from suffering to the end of suffering.
Ah, well that’s what we’ve come to learn, right? What is the path, Buddha? Show us the path.
And then the Buddha shows the elements of the path, an eight-fold path. But don’t think of these as eight steps climbing up a mountain. Correctly, one works on all eight elements simultaneously and they support and re-enforce each other, like eight sides of a single jewel. The first named are two markers of wisdom: right understanding, right thought. An enlightened person sees understands reality clearly and truly. Next named are three aspects of ethical conduct: right speech, right action, right livelihood. An enlightened person aligns their behavior with the principles of love and compassion. The remaining three elements of the path emphasize self-control and discipline: right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. An enlightened person does the work and trains the mind.
This is, in essence, the total of the Buddha’s teaching. He spent the rest of his life repeating this lesson. In thousands of sermons collected in Buddhist scriptures he returns to the elements of the eight-fold path again and again, explaining and retelling according to the needs and capabilities of his audience.
It is a simple teaching, and a rich one. Easy to grasp, but challenging to live.
And so, it is also an essential part of the Buddha’s leadership, that he did not teach the eightfold path only through his preaching, he also taught the eightfold path by living it. He lived his teaching. He used his life as a sermon. He let his life be the evidence that proved both the worth of what he knew, and the possibility that one could, indeed, live in such a way, because he did: enlightened, free of suffering, by following the precepts he discovered while sitting under the Bodhi Tree.
A leader models.
A leader does themself, what the leader asks others to do.
A leader shows the way, by walking the path, then invites others to do the same by walking their own path.
A leader’s greatest lesson, and the evidence of the value of their lesson, is the model of their own life.
A leader walks the talk.
Not only will a leader who models what they teach avoid the obvious failure of being a hypocrite, but by actually living by the principles that the leaders recommends to others, the leader’s life becomes a testament to value of the teaching, and proves that it’s possible to live by that teaching.
Some religious teachings just seem too much. Love your enemy? Are you kidding me? Give all that you have to the poor. Boundless compassion for every sentient being?
But far better than arguing with me about it, show me. You do it. Then I’ll see whether it actually leads to the life of spiritual health and joy you claim it will. And if you can actually live what you teach, then I can imagine I might be able to live that way, too.
A commandment from a leader who is confidant they have all the answers is much less effective than an example of a leader following their own journey as they encourage you on yours. A list of bullet-pointed rules on a code of conduct, or a scolding sermon from the pulpit, is much less effective than a leader who models ethical conduct every day, the small and the large, including the way the wrestle with the complicated ethical situations that come up in real life and that cannot be contained in a set of rules divorced from the messy context of human beings and human lives. The disciplinarian, who leads by fear and force, is less effective than then a leader who models discipline by the way they hold themselves accountable, keeping their promises, doing their work, being where they’re supposed to be, at the time designated, prepared and presentable, because taught by example, we see both that self-discipline is a good, and, because the leader can do it, that self-discipline is achievable.
The Buddha taught that the end of suffering is achievable by anyone. Enlightenment is a rare achievement, but our response shouldn’t be, “Wow! Look what he can do!” But “Wow! Look what we can do!”
Look what I can do.
A hypocrite is a leader who asks others to do what the hypocrite won’t do themself. The opposite is a danger, too: a leader who does themself what they don’t ask others to do.
A leader is not the one who wins the prize and rides off in a blaze of glory. Maybe that’s a hero, or maybe a saint. A leader is not the one who does the work for you. That’s a savior. A leader is the one who opens the way and encourages the followers to make their own way.
Here is my path. Yours might be similar. Let me show you. Now you do it. Let me help make your own way, have your own experience, claim your own success. By my model, you can see that it is possible to achieve what you hope to achieve. And by my model, you know, that a merely human person like me can do the work required for themself.
Clinton Lee Scott, who was for a time the minister of the First Universalist Church of Los Angeles, warns about our tendency when we see someone else doing hard work to admire them, rather than to see them as a model of what we might do for ourselves.
He writes, “To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom. Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.”
This is a danger that the Buddha warned against throughout his life.
This is a danger, too, in the orthodox Christian interpretation of Jesus’ work, that Jesus is a divine being, who in performing miracles shows that he is something different from his followers, God incarnate in a way that you and I are not. But what, then, does that do to his teaching? Sure it’s easy for you, we might say. Or, well that makes sense if you’re God, but I’m only human. Unitarians hold that Jesus’ power as a leader was that he was human like us, and that by his teaching and his model, he shows what we can make of our own human lives.
If we elevate the Buddha or Jesus to divinity, then it’s fair to wonder whether boundless love and compassion and fierce commitment to justice isn’t some kind of miracle, beyond what mere humans are capable of.
We need a leader who walks with us. Who struggles with us. Who faces the same challenges that we face. Who gets tired. And has private sorrows. And uneven skills. And a soul that leaps up at some inducements and is cool to others. And a body that makes its own requests, some days more loudly than others.
We need a leader who fails, now and then, and then models how to pick themself up and try again, how a leader makes apologies and amends, because like all of us, a leader sometimes gets it wrong. We need a leader who models sympathy at the weaknesses of others not anger, who understands “the secret struggle of every person” from the inside, because they feel it too. A leader who models lifelong learning and transformation in their own life, as well as encouraging it in ours.
And then shows us how to make our way through this glorious mess of life. How to be a person of integrity, and patience, and responsibility, and love. How to solve the problem, when it gets sticky, how to stay with the situation, when it gets tough. How to fail humbly, and succeed generously. How to step up with courage, and step back with grace.
A leader who shares, as Clinton Lee Scott says, “their insights and values” not merely spoken through their words, but modeled through their life. Not a hero who does for us, but a leader who does for themself, and helps us do the same. With the aim that as part of one community, the leader has walked with us to a place where their life and ours share the same truth, the same means, the same goal.