Living Parables--June 21, 2022
"I have applied all this to Apollos and myself for your benefit, brothers and sisters, so that you may learn through us the meaning of the saying, 'Nothing beyond what is written,' so that none of you will be puffed up in favor of one against another." [1 Corinthians 4:6]
The people we put in positions of honor or leadership will end up shaping the kin of people we become. There is no way around that. So it is particularly important to pay close attention to how we allow other people's examples to affect our thinking, our acting, and our way of seeing the world. Both for good and for ill, we become like the people we allow to be our role models, sometimes in ways we do not even perceive we are doing it. We had better be wise about the ones to whom we give that power to shape us.
The apostle Paul certainly seemed to think so, at any rate.
And there's a line from Octavia Butler's piercingly incisive dystopian novel, Parable of the Talents, which seems to back Paul up on this point. Butler writes (from back in the 1990s, mind you) these haunting words:
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery."
Paul might add, too, that to be led by people who are arrogant is to give yourself over to delusions of grandeur along with them. He knows what can happen when leaders get full of themselves and build little factions and demand that others give their allegiance unquestionably to them. Paul knows how easy it is for egos to get inflated and then little cults of personality to develop around them--and he knows that's bad news for the whole community.
But on the flip side, Paul also knows the power of leadership that looks like Jesus, and the ways some people have of making us to be more like Jesus because of their example and the way they create opportunities for us to grow to be like Christ.
So while Paul can sometimes be an utter realist about how rotten we can be to each other, or how we humans have a way of bringing out the worst in each other at times, he also has seen the ways good leaders can model best practices to bring out the best in us, too. Paul himself, for example, learned about the depth of Christ's love even for enemies because other leaders showed him a courageous love when he was first welcomed into the Christian community after having persecuted it. Paul learned about the importance of gentleness and humility from having seen good leaders model it themselves, to the point where Paul himself strived to embody it for the people and congregations he served.
So perhaps Paul might offer a hopeful corollary to Octavia Butler's stark advice:
To be led by a servant is to learn the dignity of serving.
To be led by someone who is humble is to understand the quiet power that does not need to brag or bluster.
To be led by people who do not need to puff themselves up is to belong in a community built on solid ground.
To be led by someone who is generous is to be brought into an economy of grace.
To be led by someone freed from their own ego is to find you and those you love freed from obsessing over what others think of you, so you are free simply to love and serve all.
At the risk of sounding a little saccharin, I do think there is reason to hope that good leaders can grow goodness in us, just as truly as rotten leaders can bring out the worst in us. And I do believe that Paul did his very best to model the kind of gentle serving that he had learned as the way of Jesus. Here in these verses from First Corinthians he holds up the way he has learned to deal with his relationship to other leaders, like Apollos, and he understands that the rest of the congregation is watching him. They are looking at him and listening to the ways he works alongside others. They are paying attention to whether he gets consumed by petty squabbles, or whether he needs to pull rank or brag about how great he thinks he is. They are listening to see whether he puts other people down as his way of puffing himself up. They are scrutinizing whether he leads like someone who really knows the way of Jesus, or is just another pompous blowhard in a long line of pompous blowhards.
And because Paul knows that they are all watching, he does his very best to keep his own eyes on Jesus, so that Paul himself will keep being shaped more fully and completely by the character of Jesus. Paul understands that being a disciple of Jesus in public is to be a walking, living parable, and that people will draw conclusions about what the Reign of God is like from what we show them and how we model it in our lives.
For us, even two thousand years later, I'm convinced that's our work as well. We are called to be servant-leaders ourselves, whose way of leading looks like Jesus' kind of leading: the kind that takes the towel and washes the feet of the rest, the kind that doesn't need to brag, and the kind that wields strength only and always in gentleness. There is a world of difference between bad leaders who use the language of religiosity to cover over the same old crookedness and egotism, and Christ-formed leaders who don't need to keep telling you how devout they are because it just radiates through the ways they serve without tooting their own horns about it. Paul knows that his readers are watching him--not just to see if he walks the talk, but also to learn how to embody the way of Jesus themselves.
Today, someone is watching you. Someone else is listening to you. They are looking to you, whether you like it or not, and whether you perceive it or not, as a role model. How could we embody the gentle leadership of Jesus, even when we don't think anybody is paying attention, so that we can be authentic in our witness... and so that others may see Christ in us?
Lord Jesus, keep our eyes on you so that we may be shaped in your likeness to love and serve as you do.
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