Leadership in the Face of "I Don't Want That"
Service:
I Don't Want That
Speaker:
Michael Relland
Guided Reflection
Think of leadership. Think of all the leaders in our world, what they do, the goals they espouse, what they think. Now choose a leader who lives out the values you hold, a leader in whom you find inspiration. How was this person a leader to you? What did they do that guided you when you needed it? How are you like this leader? Do you act this way for others? How are you a leader?
SERMON
Tomorrow we celebrate Washington’s birthday. So today I will speak of leadership, of leaders we admire, of the qualities of leadership. I would have done this during the week we were snowed out. I wanted to acknolwedge the leaders we have here in our own congregation. Then the snow gave my sermon for me, as we found leadership in those who have helped us through our transitions for lack of a better word, as we move through the wilderness, from building to building. we should remember this kind of leadership as i move through my discussion today of the qualities that make leaders out of us. Today i address the special qualities we see in a leader and i hope we can find them in ourselves as we move through our own difficult times.
Quality no 1 of being a leader: leaders dispel the negative, petty concerns in favor of positve action.
you know the things that bug us, bother us to the point that we are left with feelings of negativity? Leaders do not dwell on these. I had a favorite professor in the education department who spoke of teachers and the positive influence they have. of teachers, who want to instill in us the best of who we are, but who often merely find themselves saying NO a lot. A weird thing, isnt it, that those who inspire us would be so negative. a study i read back in school listed the average number of times a teacher says no in the classroom in an average day—guesses? over 100! saying ‘No, I don’t want that is not the best rule. My professor says there exists a dialectic, a way of talking and thinking that defines the world in terms of either what it is or what it isnt. one is helpful, one not as much in her opinion. The best example I can find is congress. the political parties seem to exist on a dialectic of what they are against rather than what they are for. one party says a thing, the other discounts it. back and forth. i know this is supposed to be healthy, but it does not show them as leaders in my opinion. good argurers, yes, but leaders, no. the leaders i follow don’t dwell on what they don’t want, they focus themselves and us on what we do want by simply stating who they are, what they stand for. If you say this is who i am, then the world changes around you. if you spend your time saying no, i don’t want that, no not that either, then you could get stuck that way. think of the difference in the classroom if we took all the no’s out and replaced them with statements about who children want to be. this might foster leadership.
Quality no. 2 in a leader: a leader lives the values held deep inside
Story of Jesus Tempted (Matthew 4:1-11)
The Picture I have in my mind of jesus tempted by the devil is very clear. he resists evil. he resists temptation itself. i picture him at the top of a mountain, or as written here on top of a temple, looking out at the possibilities of life and saying, this is who i am. when he rejects the devil’s offerings of fame and fortune he is not stating merely what he doesn’t want, but abot who he is. in this case, it is faithfulness to god. it is his core value he holds deep inside that is expressed. and in scripture, this is a really important reference to the even stronger story of the jews walking in the wilderness and having their faith tested. because this is who i am, i am about this, even during struggling times. and when you are about something, when you live for something, you don’t even have to say i don’t want that. you live for things, not against them. we uu’s live for things. some would say to a fault. some would say we don’t say no to anything. diverse forms of sexual identity. yes. diverse races and creeds. yes. republican, democrat, independent. yes. yet we are human. and we falter on this. and we need to be reminded of those things we live for. We need leaders who show us, through their example, through the very picture of them on a high mountain, show us who we want to be.
quality no. 3 of being a leader: our loeaders embody the things we want.
they act the way we would have them act. think of dr. martin luther king and the uu principles he displayed in his life, the ones i spoke of in our service last month. our leaders say what we want them to say. think of obama and his deft use of words. indeed, it was his words that propelled him to the front of a political party and a lot of our imaginations. he gave that speech, july 2004, the keynote address at the dem natl convention, and that was that. he said the words, he displayed the skill we prize in using words. i admire the way he can use words to great effect. through this he embodies what we might want in a politician, a rhetoric of civility and authority.
ok, so far my picture of leadership is that there is a hero-like personage on a mountain who discerns and really lives values, that this leader always dwells on the positive, and that such a leader embodies the things we all want. these aren’t high expectations at all! and i wonder why i am so disappointed when i hear about the latest sexual scandal, or hateful comment or basically anything in our leaders that i don’t like. it’s partly because i think they’re all jesus, fighting the good fight, never tiring, always doing what i want, when i could be doing some of it myself. there are two kinds of leaders, i suppose, the ones doing things we want and the ones doing other things. but remember, we are not dwelling on the i don’t want that, the complaigning, the kind of criticizing that is not backed up by the more positive this is who i am. we have an opportunity to not expect so much of them, but instead set our high expectations for our work.
And Leadership is born with our work. a few weeks ago it may have come to your attention that there were open positions on our board here and on the nominating committee that helps find people to serve in volunteer spots in and around our congregation. while i am not charged with finding the leaders in our midst, i thought i could help by having us write about the things we find in our fellowship that add joy, happiness and beauty. you wrote these on little index cards a few weeks ago. they were lovely statements about what we care about and this was to get you thinking about who you are in this congregation. This is the beginning of leadership. do you think time with children in worship is precious? well, how are you living that? a more in your face way to say it is what are you doing about it? you want to grow as a fellowship, or get our own building, or have more time to greet people, then what are you doing about it? it would be better to say , if you want to grow, how do you live that? and if you don’t know, then you find another to brainstorm and you make something happen. so, writing your joys on a card, while it seemed nice and fairly inocuous, is the beginning of a large mission statement of what you want to be about. so a working definition of leadership is living out what you are about.
this is leading to quality no 4 of being a leader: Leaders express more.
After we spent that sunday expressing our joys, we had a town hall meeting—more details on how and why we come together and what our plans are. there was a poll taken about me as a leader, but this is a fellowship, not a heirarchical church where the minister is head. this is not a place where i determine who we are. The town hall was a meeting to clarify more of who you are. this coming weekend, you are having a retreat where you celebrate who you are, but challenge yourself to be really more. you want to be more, because that’s what leaders are. they are more. they express more. the worse thing a leader can do is hide who he is. we see politicians who have to hide themselves or their ideas because it’s more political. well, then they’re not the best leaders. they’ve got strategy, but they’re not deep leaders. hey, it’s their choice. i think they trade in a little of their deeper wisdom for a little more power. power is helpful, yes. but they made this choice to be less of themselves—like a movie star they have to hide their real self, which may be more powerful, to function as a public self. we make these choices too. have you ever hid some of yourself to make things ok? i’ve had congregants share how they hid some feeling they had just to get along with someone else in the church or some policy in the church. i get that. i do not say we are all perfect leaders. we have to go inside to hide just as we can go inside to find what we deeply care about. but we need to learn to express more. we can do that.
so, leaders 1) dispell the negative 2) lives the values held deep within 3) embodies the things wanted by the community and from each other, 4) they not only express themselves, they express more.
quality no 5 in leadership—speak the truth.
let me tell you the truth. you are a fellowhip that a few years ago split, in part over how you want to run yourselves. and there’s also the pain of it. you are a fellowship where the people running it—the leaders—feel isolated. they can and should speak for themselves—they are, after all leaders. and not defacto leaders cause no one else would do the job. they took the job but then it got harder than it needed to be. so maybe there needs to be more communication. now dr. king, he got tired too. jesus, yes. he cries out at the end of his story, lord, why have you forsaken me. and we’re not asking you to be any of these people. but some of us in this room feel forsaken. or stuck. or confused about why we have a sister church 8 miles away that doesn’t talk to us. but all these negative feelings are the i don’t wants not the this is who i am. unfortunately, we have to move through the negative, the wilderness. we hold up leadership to such great heights, we must demand more of ourselves. this saturday, there will be a guided discussion about a lot of this, but it won’t all be hashed out in an afternoon. it may take several years for that index card to become something you look back on with pride and wonder as you find yourself living the dream of your community. so the working definition of leadership is walking thorugh the negative, the wilderness, the temptation, the listing of all the things you don’t want and the things you fear and the false images of success, and live out your index card joy
the story jesus and the devil asks a central question: whose are you? do you succumb to temptation? it is set in the wilderness, recalling the wandering of the jews in the wilderness, who needed to remain faithful to their principles just to survive. if you haven’t noticed, we are in the wilderness. and in scriptural tradition, the wilderness is a place for demons, a place for negativity. and it’s a great thing to see we do so well at this so far. i don’t know if we are being tested, or if fate has decreed that right when we need to make decisions about how we move forward we lose our base camp. and yes, we need new board members to survive, but more than this we need to come up with some plan where we work together, each person contributing with a sense of leadership, like you’re leading with your own values, like you’re lending your own values to the path we make through the wilderness.
the little index cards. The beginning of leadership. you should look back on them as you would seeing your first attempts at writing letters, or your first assignment in school where you got a sticker or a good grade. they are beautiful, but they can be much more. our joys and visions of beauty we wrote were quite vague. i imagine them to be a pool in the wilderness, where we settle ourselves with what we makes us happy. we wade there in a pool. where does the water come from, though? What’s in the wilderness? leaders know the answer to this, or they ask. then they act.
