This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.
Story
If you were here in church last week, you heard the story of how Moses led the ancient Israelites out of slavery, away from the mean old Pharaoh, and into freedom. This week, we’ll hear another story about Moses.
So Moses and all the Israelites escaped from mean old Pharaoh, and Moses led them into the desert. They had to cross the desert, hot and dry, in order to get to the Promised Land, the place where they could live in peace and freedom.
They walked and they walked, day after day, for three whole months, until at last they reached Mount Sinai. They decided to camp there for a while, and they set up their tents.
Moses left his brother Aaron in charge of the campsite. Moses climbed Mount Sinai, and there he talked to his God, who gave him rules and laws for the Israelites. There were laws against stealing, against murdering people, against lying. There was a law against worshipping any other god or goddess. The first ten laws God gave to Moses are sometimes called the “Ten Commandments.” And most of these laws still make sense today.
Moses went back down the mountain bringing those first ten laws to the Israelites. Next day, Moses climbed back up the mountain for more laws. God gave him lots of laws. Some of these other laws sound strange to us today, like the law that said if one ox hurts another ox, the owner of the first ox has to sell it and divide the money with the owner of the second ox, and the owner of the second ox has to butcher it and divide the meat with the owner of the first ox. God had many laws and rules for Moses to bring to the Israelites. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times.
Then came a time when Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time.
Back at the campsite, the Israelites began to wonder where Moses had disappeared to. Some people decided that maybe Moses and the God of the Israelites had abandoned them. They went to Aaron and said, “Make us a new god.”
Aaron told them to bring all their gold jewelry. He melted it all down, and made a calf from it — a golden calf.
When the people saw the pretty golden calf, they said, “This is our god now, the god who led us out of Egypt.”
Aaron made an altar for the golden calf, and said, “We’ll have a big celebration tomorrow for our new god.” The next day, they worshipped their new god, and they cooked lots of food, and drank lots of wine.
Up on top of Mount Sinai, the God of the Israelites became aware of what was going on down in the camp of the Israelites. God said, “Those Israelites have made a new god for themselves! They made a calf out of gold, and then they offered it sacrifices, and worshipped it; just as they used to offer sacrifices to me, and worship me! They are no good — no good at all. I will strike them down and destroy them. And then I will lead you to the Promised Land by yourself.”
But Moses convinced God to give the Israelites another chance. Then he hustled down to the base of Mount Sinai.
What a sight met his eyes when he got there! People were dancing, and laughing, and eating, and drinking, and generally having a wild time. Moses stood at the gate of the camp, and he roared out, “Who is still loyal to the God of the Israelites? Come to me if you are!”
Quite a few people ran to Moses and said they were still loyal to the God of the Israelites.
“Go and get your swords,” Moses said to them. “Our God has told me that we have to kill off all the people who aren’t loyal to him.” And that’s what they all did: they killed all the ones who worshipped the golden calf.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. Moses had to go back up to the top of Mount Sinai and apologize to the God of the Israelites. God said that Moses had done the right thing; God said the people who worshipped the golden calf would get punished; and God sent an angel to help the Israelites on their long journey. But God also sent a plague to the Israelites, and many of them got sick.
Here’s what I get from this story: The Israelites were wrong to have made themselves a golden calf, after they had promised to be follow Moses’s leadership, and follow the God of the Israelites. I don’t like the tact that Moses killed off those who disagreed with him, but then I remind myself that it’s just a story. It’s just a story, but it’s a good story about remaining true to your ideals, and true to your community.
[Story based on the book of Exodus, mostly ch. 32]
Readings
The first reading comes from the book of Exodus in the Torah, and tells about the time when the Israelites had only just escaped from Egypt.
“The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim; and Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ ”
[Exodus 16.1-3, New Revised Standard Version]
The second reading is from the book Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph C. Rost:
“Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.
“First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.
“Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….
“Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.
“Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.
“Fifth, and most important, followers do not do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership.” [pp. 108-109]
Sermon
If you were here last week, you heard a sermon about Moses. And this week, here’s another one: the second sermon in a series about that great Jewish leader, Moses.
The words to the old African American hymn, the one we just sang, go something like this:
When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
The Lord told Moses what to do:
to lead the tribe of Israel through.
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land
Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.
The story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt is a story of escape from slavery, a story of how to reach freedom. No wonder this story had special meaning for the African Americans who were enslaved in this country. No wonder they created hymns to tell the story of Moses. No wonder the white slave-owners sometimes tried to prevent African Americans from having access to the complete Bible; the story of Moses is potentially explosive, it is revolutionary.
It is a story that continues to have revolutionary potential, even today. Some religious liberals dismiss the Bible as being outdated. But we religious liberals would do well to remember that one reason the old stories of Moses have survived for thousands of years is because these stories contain great power. We religious liberals who are struggling to make this world a better place would do well to remember that we could tap into the power that is in the old story of Moses; a power that could change us for the better. And this morning, I would like to look at two parts of that story that might have some small power to change us.
The first part of the Moses story that we heard was the story of the golden calf. Moses goes up Mount Sinai to talk with the God of the Israelites. He’s gone a long time. The Israelites get impatient waiting for Moses to return, so they make themselves a new god: they make a calf out of gold, and they build it an altar, and they worship it.
Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: Someone emerges as a leader in a community, and things start to change. But then the leader gets caught up in the big picture, forgetting the details, and so his or her followers go astray, they lose their sense of mission and direction, they start pursuing false ideas (or to use some current buzzwords in the non-profit sector, “they dilute their mission”). When the leader returns to earth, he or she finds the community in disarray; chaos reigns; nothing is getting done.
When I hear the story about Moses and the golden calf, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses probably should have trained Aaron better so that take his place when he went up Mount Sinai. This is a classic problem in churches and non-profits: leaders often forget to train their replacements. Clearly, this problem goes back thousands of years. Second, I observe that the Israelites couldn’t stay focussed on their mission for that relatively short time when Moses was on the mountain. This is another classic problem in churches and non-profits: people forget to stay focussed on their mission, and get distracted by useless things like making golden calves. Clearly, this is another problem that has been going on for thousands of years.
In the first reading this morning, we heard a second part of the Moses story. The Israelites have escaped from Egypt, they have escaped from bondage and slavery. But to their dismay they discover that escaping from bondage is not easy. They find themselves in the wilderness. They do not know where their next meal is coming from. Egypt may have been bad, but at least they got fed. In the sonorous poetry of the King James version of the Bible, the Israelites say: “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: A new leader takes a community of people in a bold new direction, and pretty soon the complaints begin. People say, Maybe the old ways didn’t work so well, but at least we were comfortable. People say, let’s go back to the old ways, let’s go back to the flesh pots. People start digging in their heels; they find little ways of demonstrating their discontent. Everything grinds to a halt.
When I hear this part of the story, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses seems to have forgotten one key task of a leader. Moses should have read this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there is an article titled, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” The article points out a great and ancient truth of leadership: leaders have to “use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies”; often they have to communicate their vision far more often than they expect. [Harvard Business Review, January, 2007, pp. 99 ff.] Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago, and Moses did not adequately communicate his vision for the Israelites. Second, I observe that the Israelites indulged themselves inn being passive. OK, Moses didn’t adequately communicate his vision, and OK, you didn’t have enough to eat; but come on, Israelites, can’t you go out and look for food on your own? Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago: the Israelites sank into passivity.
Half a century ago, another great leader took inspiration from the story of Moses and the Israelites. Half a century ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in an explosive situation. He was the minister of a church here in the United States. Let me be more specific: he was the Black minister of a Black church in a time and a country where to be Black meant to suffer from oppressive laws and an oppressive social system, where to be Black meant to be treated as less than fully human.
When he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King found himself thrust into a situation where he was in a position to provide critical leadership to Black people in the United States. And it is clear that he studied carefully how he might provide effective leadership. He knew the story of Moses in his bones; he knew the great courage of Moses, but he also knew all about the problems Moses faced. He studied other great leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi; he studied theorists like Henry David Thoreau. He knew how to lead.
From all this, Martin Luther King was able to communicate a powerful vision, a vision which he preached and proclaimed over and over again. He thrilled people with his vision. I still get chills when I read or hear his “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let freedom ring, let it ring from every village and hamlet” — powerful words, words with the power to move us to action. And to back up this powerful vision, Martin Luther King had specific strategies to mobilize his followers to action, strategies like non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.
But there is more to the story of Martin Luther King than just a powerful vision, and specific strategies. Martin Luther King had great followers. He had truly great followers. A great leader is nothing without great followers. And this brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading by Joseph Rost. This second reading is written in such dry academic prose that even though Rost is one of the best leadership theorists alive, you may have missed what he was talking about — as your head nodded and you drifted slowly off to sleep. So let me bring out three key points in what Rost had to say.
First, true leadership brings about real change. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt — that’s real change. Martin Luther King changed the laws of the land — that’s real change. Real leadership lead to real change.
Second, people who are passive aren’t engaged in change; by definition. There are three categories of people: leaders and followers, both of whom effect change; and passive people, who do nothing except perhaps try to maintain the status quo.
Third, sometimes followers have to become leaders. Followers can’t just go off and do their own thing when they feel like it. In order to effect real change, followers have to stay in relationship with their community, and at times they may have to step forward and become leaders.
And while Joseph Rost doesn’t say this explicitly, let me add a fourth point: Many times, people don’t want to change. They show they don’t want change by remaining passive. This was true of Israelites. This was true of many people, black and white, during King’s time. This seems to be true of religious liberals today.
Let me say a little more about religious liberals today. I should remind you that the phrase “religious liberal” does not refer to politics; it does not refer to Democrats who happen to go to church. To be a religious liberal is to take a liberal approach to religion, to not be a fundamentalist.
Many religious liberals today do not wish to effect change — even though they may say they want to effect change. From what I’ve observed in half a dozen Unitarian Universalist churches over the past twenty years, on the whole we religious liberals have been resisting real change in a very specific way. We say we want to change the world, to fix all the things that are wrong with the world — as long as we don’t have to change anything in our nice, comfortable churches. Even though we are too small to effect real change in this broken world, we keep our churches small through passivity. We stay small even though demographic evidence shows that there are millions of people trying to get into our churches because they believe in what we are doing; yet we keep them out through passivity, and through hyper-individuality.
For these are our two primary ways of resisting change: passivity, and hyper-individuality.
By passivity, I mean sitting still and doing nothing. It’s just like the Israelites when they sat in the wilderness, doing nothing about it except to wish they were back in slavery in Egypt. We can see this happening in all the liberal churches right now; we can find people who, when asked to follow a larger vision, simply do nothing. I know I have been guilty of passivity; many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have been guilty of passivity; Unitarian Universalism as a whole has been guilty of passivity.
By hyper-individuality, I mean wanting everything to be done your way. When a leader comes along and proposes real change, the hyper-individualist will say, Well that’s not the way I would do things, so count me out; I don’t want to follow you, nor will I step forward as a leader. Do you see how this is just another form of passivity?– because the hyper-individualist winds up doing nothing. They say that preachers often preach the sermon they need to hear, and I know that hyper-individuality is my besetting sin, the way I usually choose to resist change. HPyper-individuality runs rampant in Unitarian Universalist churches; hyper-individuality runs rampant in liberal religion.
But passivity gets us nowhere. We need good leaders, and we need good followers.
Good leaders need good followers. Martin Luther King could not have done what he did without good followers. He needed people who chose to get involved. He needed people who would become deeply involved, for he was calling on people to put their lives on the line. He needed people who could step forward and become leaders when he was in jail. He needed other leaders to come and be followers, just as Dana Greeley, the then-president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, left his presidential duties and traveled to Alabama to follow Dr. King. And Martin Luther King needed followers who did not see themselves as subordinates, but who saw themselves as full participants in the great endeavor of leading this country towards an acceptance of full equality for African Americans.
Martin Luther King succeeded in large part because he could mobilize huge numbers of people in the Black churches. Since then, the health of the Black church has declined, but in those days people in the Black churches knew how to be followers, and they knew how to be leaders. Martin Luther King also succeeded in part because he was able to call on large numbers of people in the liberal churches. Since then, the health of the liberal churches — churches like this one — has declined, but in those days we knew how to be leaders, and we knew how to be followers.
I tell you this because we need to rebuild the liberal churches — we need to rebuild this church. If a new Martin Luther King came along today, we would not be ready. We need to remember how to be good leaders — and we need to remember how to be good followers.
Personally, I believe the biggest issue facing us today as a religious people is global climate change and environmental destruction. I am waiting for new Martin Luther Kings to emerge, leaders who will galvanize us to end environmental destruction. And these new leaders will show us how poor people, and communities of color, and other people on the margins, are disproportionately affected by environmental destruction. They will show us that when Hurricane Katrina hit, poor people and African American communities bore the brunt of the destruction; when hazardous waste is dumped, rarely does it get dumped in the white suburbs; when the sea level rises due to climate change, it will be the poor people in places like New Orleans who will suffer the most.
These new leaders will have a vision for us, a vision of a new kind of freedom: freedom to enjoy and participate in an economically and ecologically sustainable future, no matter what color your skin might be — a sustainable future for us, for our children, for their children, for all the generations to follow.
I am already aware of new leadership emerging all around us, new religious leaders who are ready to galvanize the liberal churches. We need to make sure we are ready when the call comes. When someone comes along and says, Let’s create the Promised Land right here and right now! Let us create a society of ecological and economic balance, a heaven of ecojustice! — when that call comes, may each of us, and may this church, be ready to answer that call.