A sermon :

What does it take to be a leader? What is it that makes a leader?

Some are leaders by consent, called to lead. Some have become leaders through intimidation ­ the dictators who have seized power and who have littered our history over the centuries.

Cometh the hour, cometh the leader sometimes, Winston Churchill is the best example for us. Lincoln and Roosevelt for the United States.

Good leaders are inspirational, they become role models, people follow them and like to imitate them. They are loved by those they lead.

Dictators lead by force and fear.
I suppose for Greece it has been the arrival of Alexis Tsipras to represent the mood of the people under the economy of austerity. The popular will has rejected the established leaders.

It doesn't happen in religious societies. The king of Saudi Arabia owes his power to the religious state. The religious leadership of the country endorse his rule so each one supports the power of the other, and they both survive.

In the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, it is said that many of the psalms were more than just songs of worship and praise. They were ceremonial anthems sung at annual festivals when the relationship between king and people and God was reaffirmed.

The king was supported by the priests, the priests were supported by the king, the people were reassured of their religious contract.

The people had their history and their prophets to remind them what happened when this three way contract was broken. The prophets continually reminded them that God had saved them from the Egyptians.
God had given them this land they had settled in.Reminded them of their obligation to worship and obey. Whatever was going wrong or had gone wrong in the past was always said to be the result of God’s response to their actions ­ Blessing or punishing what they had done.

If the king had erred, they said it was God who punished by bringing disaster. The fortunes and misfortunes of the people were also attributed to acts of God. God either saved them from their enemies or handed them over to be conquered. The Philistines, the Hittites and the Amorites were all said to be acting out God’s plan.
But if you read the stories of the Patriarchs and the Kings, their personal relationship with their God seems different, not quite so devout or obedient.

Abraham is given the promised land but doesn't go there. He goes to Egypt instead.
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a long essay about the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. What was happening when Abraham raised the knife over his son? Was Abraham challenging God, calling his bluff ? Did his God expect him to plead for his son's life. Did Abraham know the knife would not fall?
There are other reasons, that it was a story of human sacrifice, and human sacrifice was common in some of those societies.

I like those stories of the Patriarchs. Jacob is my favourite of course. Jacob always does exactly what he wants to do. God rarely comes into his story and when he does, it doesn't seem to change Jacob at all.
How does the stairway from Heaven change Jacob ? How often does he pray to his God? How often does he acknowledge his God? Not often!

He treats all his family in an ungodly and unfair way, his brother, his wives, his children.
The same theme is repeated time and time again. God is the creator and Lord but in the distance. The main characters to do what they like. Their stories and adventures are stories without their God, the shadow of their God is written in the background,hidden behind a cloud.

God was still seen by the people as a God who punished and rewarded. Like a distant king or Emperor he ruled from afar, and all should live in awe and dread of his intervention in their lives.

That aspect of God was carried over into the Christian religion. That God controls everything. If you don't eat your greens, God will ....., if you don't go to church, God will send you to hell on judgement day. Powerful stuff, until you realise that if you don't eat your greens nothing happens.

The prophets of the Old Testament retold the past more than foretold the future. You fell off your bike because you didn't eat your greens.

The Old Testament people though obeyed all the rules ­ as laid down in the book of Leviticus. When they didn't then the prophets railed against them. Obeying the law kept the religion alive. The priests punished the breakers of the law.

There were stories of devout men, Joseph and Daniel. Their faith gave them leadership and high office in the land ­ though it was not in their own land. They worked for their conquerors.
At the time of the New Testament Israel was ruled by a foreign power, the Romans, there were religious sects like the Essenes and the strange community at Qumran, and there were sects of Mystics who

found secret interpretations of the scriptures, the priesthood was divided into conservative Sadducees and liberal Pharisees.

Judaism had become a fashion religion with rich young foreigners converting and becoming part of a temple aristocracy.

The rules of the religion were strictly enforced on the ordinary people.
Into this scenario comes the figure of Jesus. Immediately displaying those qualities of leadership that created a following. Follow me he said, and they did.

His mission, not to restore the king, and not to restore the religion. He deliberately breaks the religious rules ­ those rules about the sabbath and not eating unclean food.

He ignored the hierarchy of the given social order and shared the table with all and anyone and helped all and anyone who asked for help. Render to Caesar what is Caesars. So he was not a revolution wanting the Romans out.
His mission was to restore God, nothing more, nothing less. But not the distant ruler whose wrath was threatened and whose vengeance was promised, who dealt only in reward and punishment.

Jesus presented himself as the son of God differently. A God of compassion, a God of personal relationship, and more than that, the light of this new God shone within you ­ not at you from afar.

What sort of leader was he? Was he gentle Jesus meek and mild, or a character who had a presence, a quiet authority. One whose strength was in that presence and in the way he spoke. He was a leader. He was a spiritual leader.

He taught a personal religion and he said you could take it or leave it. But if you took it, then you would see and then you would understand

what he preached. You would be like the blind man whose sight was restored or like the lame man who was cured and able to walk. The world would be different.

It was a leadership that inspired action, the spiritually enlightened saw the world differently and lived in it differently. You became the spiritual leader of your own life. You were part of God, you acted for God.
He spoke with authority but did not demand obedience.

It was only afterwards that his followers turned him into a different type of leader. They and the church they built fused him back into the Old Testament.

They brought back the Old Testament God who punished and rewarded. You had to fear the wrath of God again and they made Jesus into his agent, watching your life closely and reporting back to the God of wrath.
Christians were then in the same position as the people of the Old Testament. The Kings and priests and rules were there again too, but as popes and priests, and Kings claiming the divine right to act as they pleased.
Christianity was an Old Testament religion. The Kings and priests bowed before teachings of Jesus but did not practice them. They still went to war, they still made slaves, they never turned the other cheek.

Gentle Jesus was set into the historical New Testament and all have to wait for his second coming with Angels bearing judgement swords and pots of fire to destroy all life.
It was a leadership of fear.

But it seems there was no historical Jesus. No physical evidence of his existence, only rumour about what happened to him and his followers.

The Gnostic Gospels suggest that Jesus came as a manifestation from the cosmic God. He was a spiritual being and his teaching is universal, found in all the great religious literature of the world.

His gift was to empower every person who listened to him. To give them leadership of themselves as human beings; to give them an inner spiritual strength and a sense of union with God.
His leadership was to change the social order, no longer to be a hierarchy but a place where everyone supported and helped one another in this pilgrimage of life.
It is the simplest of truths and yet the most difficult to follow.

Today we wrestle with those very same problems. Many people feel no connection with religion; many seek meaning and purpose in their lives and it can be a spiritual hunger.
If our church does not follow that simplest of truths, How can it lead? How can those who seek find leadership and authority in their own lives?

The challenges of today seem no different to the challenges of so long ago.