Unitarian Christians regarded Jesus not as a supernatural savior, but as a role model of how an enlightened human person should take care of themselves and the world we share. As we end our study of leadership and prepare to celebrate Christmas we can ask, “How Would Jesus Lead?”
So I did something fun this week.
I re-read the Gospel of Luke. It only takes a couple of hours.
When I was a child, my family attended a Methodist Church. I happily went to church every Sunday. In the Methodist church the entire congregation has Sunday school at the same hour, children and adults. And then the entire congregation joins together for a second hour of worship.
So I sat in the pew when I was little. I like to think I was well-behaved, but who knows. And I had three brothers in the pew beside me, so chances are were weren’t that well-behaved.
When I got a little older, age 13, I attended what the Methodists call the Confirmation class. In the Methodist practice infants are Baptized, and then later, when the child is old enough to understand the Christian doctrines, the child is instructed and “confirmed” in the faith.
Part of the education of the confirmation class was to read portions of the Bible for ourselves for the first time. All of the kids were assigned to read one of the four Gospels. You could pick. I choose Luke because there were four gospels, like there were four brothers in my family. I was the third brother, and Luke was the third Gospel: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
So I read Luke and I realized this Christian stuff, and particularly the character of Jesus, was a lot more complicated, and frankly, a lot weirder, than I had so far been lead to know in my Sunday school classes.
There are a lot of miracles, for instance. Lots of healings. More than one person comes back from the dead. Supernatural stuff with Satan and the Devil. Jesus speaks in riddles. He says things that sound mean. He’s angry quite often, not the gentle shepherd that had been pictured on the bulletin board in my Sunday school class. He walks everywhere. He lives nowhere. He’s not a quiet teacher but he’s constantly surrounded by crowds of unruly people demanding his attention and going to extremes to catch a glimpse of him, more like a Hollywood star beset with Paparazzi than a spiritual guru.
I had a lot of questions.
So, I came back to the confirmation class ready to get my questions well answered and my faith, now shaken, re-confirmed.
But instead, I didn’t get good answers. I found the Confirmation class teachers (lay volunteers, bless them) were no more able than I was to reconcile the gentle moral teachings I learned in Sunday school with the bizarro text of the Bible. My faith stayed shaken. The Gospel story didn’t feel like a spiritual guide to me, but what it was, an ancient text by ancient people for ancient times. I finished the confirmation class, but after the ceremony I never went to church again.
Until I found Unitarian Universalism, 15 years later. And there, I realized, that I wasn’t the first person to notice the weirdness of the Bible text. And I wasn’t the first person who frankly dismissed all the miracles, and the Satan stuff, and wondered at the character of Jesus, so unlike a divinity and more like a fiercely driven social change activist. My thirteen year-old questions about the Bible were finally answered by the Unitarians.
Of course, miracle stories are simply people trying to explain a world they don’t truly understand, or a half-observed incident made more of in the re-telling, or stories made-up entirely because they’re trying to show how special and important Jesus was.
Jesus was a special human being, perhaps, but just a human being. He lived in a particular time, facing a society with particular issues, and critiqued it with a fierce sense of justice and a liberating vision. He says, “judge not” (Luke 6:37). But actually, he judges all the time. And gets angry at the people who don’t share his vision.
From the Unitarians I learned that it’s possible to remove all the miracle and mystery from Jesus and still have something valuable. A good human being, who tried to move the world of his day in the direction of love, peace, and justice. He worked hard. He said a lot of remarkably wise and provoking things. He taught others the principles he lived by. He gathered a community. He was, in short, not a savior, but a leader.
As we think about the qualities that are helpful to good and successful leadership, whether your own leadership, or the people you choose to lead you, such as the minister you will begin to search for next year, and as we move through this holiday season wanting to honor the numerous religious stories of this time of year, I wondered how I might relate the issue of leadership to the holiday of Christmas.
My first thought was to speak of Jesus’ leadership during the Christmas Eve service. But the problem with Christmas for Unitarians, is that what we admire about Jesus, his life, his teaching, his leadership, has nothing to do with the Christmas story. He’s just a baby on Christmas Day, not an example, a teacher, or a leader. The Christmas story is all miracles and angels. Jesus as son of God, born of a virgin.
The Jesus Unitarians admire is an adult. So I switched my sermon topic from Christmas Eve to today, and I found something else to preach about for Christmas Eve, and then I re-read the Gospel of Luke, and made notes about his leadership.
After you get through the birth stories at the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus appears as an adult in Chapter 3. He’s baptized by John the Baptist and begins his ministry. But the first thing he does is he goes into the wilderness. You can think of it as a vision quest. Here’s the beginning of Luke, Chapter 4:
“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.”
The devil tempts Jesus in three ways. First the devil asks Jesus to turn a stone into bread. But Jesus answers, “man does not live by bread alone.” Jesus is clear his mission is going to be about spiritual sustenance, not just physical needs.
The devil offers Jesus authority over all the kingdoms of the world. But Jesus refuses. His mission is not about earthly power.
Then the devil dares Jesus to leap off the roof of the Temple to prove he has faith that God will save him. But Jesus says testing God in that way is actually a demonstration of lack of faith. Jesus is more confident than that.
It’s one of those weird stories that disturbed me as a child. More appropriate for a scene from a comic book than a spiritual guide. But what does it tell us about leadership?
Jesus has principles. He stays true to his personal truth. He cannot be swayed from what he knows. He will not be corrupted by offers of personal wealth and power. That’s good leadership.
Later in the same chapter, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue in Nazareth, where he was from. He reads a chapter from Isaiah, which Jesus adopts as a kind of personal mission statement:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
It’s boastful, and arrogant. I’d be annoyed if I heard someone say that. Who does he think he is? And then he tells the people in the synagogue that his ministry isn’t to them, but to other people in other cities and parts of the country. Fine, I would say. Go. The folks in the synagogue are insulted. Luke says this:
“All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.”
What does that story say about leadership?
Jesus is sustained by an internal truth. Jesus is willing to say tough things. He’s willing to bear people’s anger. Being liked isn’t his first goal. I have to say sometimes Jesus seems almost intentional about antagonizing people. Like a reality show star he would say, “I didn’t come here to make friends.” But being friendly is not a bad strategy. It is possible to be principled without being a jerk about it. That’s a lesson I have to be careful about in my own leadership, too.
Jesus makes enemies throughout his life. I don’t think making enemies is required for good and successful leadership, but being an agent of change does annoy people who were better served by the way things were.
Furthermore, when Jesus says his message is larger than just for the local synagogue, he shows a lesson of leadership that is part of Luke’s theme for his gospel. Jesus’ message is not just for his own people. Jesus’ message is a universal message. He’s going to lead not just his own tribe, but include all kinds of people in his vision.
I started this examination of leadership by pointing out the necessity of a community to a leader. A leader is not a Prophet, doing their own thing. A leader is a pastor, guiding and caring for a community. How does Jesus do on that score?
Well Jesus clearly has followers. Sometimes he attracts his followers through the power of his teaching and healing. In Chapter 5, Jesus gathers his first followers after he gets in a boat with three fisherman and tells them to throw out their nets one more time even though they had been fishing all day with no luck. This time they pull in a tremendous haul. Luke writes this:
“When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.”
But at other times Jesus grows his community simply by command. Here’s how Jesus gets his next follower:
“After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.”
Would that growing a church were so easy!
A good, successful, leader, works diligently but also takes time for their own physical and spiritual rejuvenation.
Here’s Luke, again from Chapter 5:
“Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
Beyond his disciples, Jesus created a larger community, a diverse community of men and women, and a culture of generosity. Here is how Luke describes the growing community at the beginning of Chapter 8:
“After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.”
Jesus defines his community by shared values, not tribal connections of “people like me.” Luke writes:
“Now Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’
He replied, “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.’”
Jesus continues to grow his community throughout the Gospel. First the twelve, and later seventy-two. And then he further grows the movement by commissioning his followers to go out and do the work themselves. From Chapter 10:
“After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.’”
And Jesus is honest with his followers about the hardship of the task he is asking them to do.
“He told them: ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt…. If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’”
The way of Unitarian Universalism is to see Jesus as an example and a teacher for how human beings can live our lives and organize our societies to be more healthy and joyful for all. But if Jesus is a human example, not God incarnate, then Jesus must share some of the same flaws that all humans share. Not all wise, all-powerful, nor even all good.
That’s the human Jesus I find in the Gospels.
And if Jesus is a human leader, then he is only one of many examples of human leaders, and human teachers of leadership strategies we can learn from.
I see the positives in Jesus’ leadership: committed to principles, committed to communities defined by shared vision and values, not shared identity, willing to say hard truths and tolerate the blow-back, taking care of his own needs, tending to the community, empowering followers to become leaders in their own work, being honest about the hardships of the task, not just the benefits.
But these are not leadership lessons particular to Jesus. Many other leaders would teach you the same. As the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker once said. It isn’t the authority of Jesus that makes his teachings worthy. It is rather the worthiness of his teachings that makes Jesus an authority.
Unitarians follow Jesus’ teachings, not his person. And we follow other human examples, too. We looked a little at Buddha’s leadership style a few weeks ago. The Maccabees last week. We could look at Moses, too, or hundreds of other good, successful leaders, religious and secular. Positive examples or negative examples of leadership. Or a mix of both as I think Jesus was, and all people are.
The leader you choose to be your next minister will be human and will be flawed. As am I. As is every leader you’ve ever known. As all people are.
Eventually what matters, and this leads me to close this examination of leadership where it began, with the community, is that the community as a whole, leaders and followers, be a place of health and strength, teaching, learning, proposing, warning, making mistakes, gently correcting, experimenting, forgiving, imagining together, working together, creating together, holding together.