“When You’re Up to Your Neck in Alligators”

Exodus 17:1-7

When you’re up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. As I learned during congregational redevelopment training, a key to pastoral leadership is always remembering to let the main thing be the main thing. In other words, even as you battle with the alligators you must never forget that your primary objective is to drain the swamp.

Another colleague, this time at a national conference on evangelism, urged all of us to not allow the tyranny of the urgent keep us from letting the main thing be the main thing. During my final year of seminary my clinical pastoral education professor told our small group that once we were out in the parish we would spend a lot of time and energy killing snakes and putting out fires, just another way of saying that we’d be wrestling a lot of alligators.

The primary reason I answered God’s call to be a minister was to become a preacher and pastor. I understood, and rightly so, that a Presbyterian minister of Word and Sacrament’s primary task is to be the Teaching Elder who feed’s God’s people on God’s Word. My preaching professor drummed into us every day that the sermon was our primary task: not moderating the session, not visiting the shut-ins, not attending meetings, not personnel management – the sermon. That was the main thing that was supposed to be the main thing.

Another professor talked at length about “paying the rent.” The rent we would have to pay in our pastorates would be those things I mentioned above: the meetings, the urgent fires that needed to be extinguished, the visitation, and the administrivia that comes with managing an ecclesiastical institution. We had to do all those things in order to be free to do what God had called us to do. We had to wrestle all those various alligators in order to be free to drain the swamp.

The problem is that “paying the rent” has a way of taking priority over the main thing. Back in 1985 this really got to me. I left parish ministry because I felt more like a manager than a minister. The problem with that was that I ended up wrestling another sort of alligators without the payoff of being able to preach, teach, and do pastoral care.

In the intervening years I have finally learned that, although preaching, teaching, and pastoral care are still important, the main thing for the 21^st century church has become visionary leadership: leadership in evangelism, leadership in mission, leadership in working with a congregation to discern God’s vision. That’s the main thing: leadership. The preacher, teacher, and pastor must also be a leader.

Moses answered God’s call to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt. He was to deliver them from the tyranny of the pharaoh into the freedom of the wilderness, and eventually to the Promised Land. Moses learned early on that leadership is hard and often unrewarding work. That’s because liberating people from slavery involved helping them learn how to be free: to take responsibility for their own lives and make their own decisions.

As Moses quickly learned changing the mindset of people is difficult. Ex-slaves do not automatically know how to be free. In fact, the freedom for which they had for so long dreamed was scary. Things like food and water that were given to them as slaves now had to be sought. In the 16^th chapter of Exodus the issue was food. “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 [Moses] have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” They actually longed for slavery. Being a slave was a horrible thing but it was all they knew. There was a certain level of comfort in knowing what each new day would bring. Once free that comfort evaporated. Each new day brought another form of exciting yet terrifying adventure.

In today’s text the issue was water. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” To frame the situation in local terms, a lot of people are questioning Gary Williams’ abilities as the basketball coach at the University of Maryland. So what if he led the team to a national title in 2002? That was then. This is now. What has he done for us lately?

Back to Moses: as God’s appointed agent he had done battle with pharaoh. He had led them through the Red Sea. He had brought them out of slavery. But once in the wilderness with its trials they forgot about all the things Moses had done and adopted their own version of a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude. “Hey Moses, you’re the one who led us to this place. You’re the one God chose to lead us. So lead! Do something! Fix it! Make it all better!”

An overriding truth that Moses had to re-learn from time to time, a truth that he constantly had to convey to the children of Israel, was that neither he nor they was in charge. God provided the miracles. God parted the Red Sea. God sent the manna from heaven. God revealed to Moses where the water was. Moses was the leader but God was in control. So when the people lashed out at Moses they were really lashing out at God. When they questioned his leadership they were really questioning God’s omnipotence.

Over the millennia nothing much has changed. Using the words of this morning’s prayer of confession to illustrate the reality of our lack of faith and trust in the Lord, “Why do we, at the first sign of trouble, begin to doubt you [O Lord]? We harden our hearts, insisting you solve the problems we put to you. We quarrel amongst ourselves, and hoard what we fear we might lose. Though you shower us with your love and power, we abandon hope.”

For the first six and one-half years I was in West Virginia one of my primary tasks was to help lead a group of small churches into structuring their loose confederacy of congregations into an organized entity known as the Mountain Valley Presbyterian Parish. I arrived there with a vision of how things should be. I had a model in mind, one that had worked other places. Surprise! Surprise! There was resistance to that model and that vision. Folks liked things the way they were. They didn’t want to share a pastor with other churches. They didn’t want seminary interns in their pulpits two out of every three weeks. They didn’t want to change their times of worship. They didn’t want to give up one iota of their autonomy. Things may or may not have been going to hell in a hand basket, but it was their hand basket: the one they liked because it was comfortable.

Needless to say things didn’t work out. That’s one of the reasons I ended up here. In retrospect I wasn’t a very good leader. It was my model and my vision and by golly I was going to implement it. You might say that I was more than a tad inflexible. And competitive: my whole time there I let myself be drawn into an ongoing struggle with an elder over who was going to be the alpha dog. We both wanted to be in charge. Eventually it all fell apart, victim of their need to keep things the way they were and my need to do it my way.

One of the things that elder and I forgot was that neither one of us was in charge. Moses only accomplished what he accomplished by the grace and power of God. How did Moses find water in today’s text? God showed him where it was. Only by God’s grace were the children of Israel led out of Egypt. Only by God’s grace were they able to survive in the wilderness. Only by God’s grace were they finally able to enter into the Promised Land: God’s grace, God’s love, God’s power. Moses, for all of his importance – and he was important, was merely the instrument through which God worked his will.

I used to have a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” My boss is the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He is my Lord and Savior. He is in control. I forgot that a lot in West Virginia. From time to time I forget it in Maryland. My boss is a Jewish carpenter, and so is yours. Jesus Christ and no other is the Head of the church. Not I and my sometimes inflexible vision of what ought to be. Jesus Christ.

Ultimately it is to him that I am accountable: not the presbytery, not the session, not the congregation. Although I, along with the session, have the important task of spiritual leadership at Grace, we are not in charge: the God revealed in Jesus Christ is. It is God’s vision that we seek, not ours. It is God’s model that we must implement, not ours. The bottom line is that we are merely instruments of his will – his will, not ours. We are to seek and follow that will as we lead this congregation. That is our main thing, and we cannot allow ourselves to be overly caught up in wrestling alligators.

Yes, there are urgent pastoral needs. Yes, there are financial issues. Yes, the building must be kept up. Yes, worship must be planned and carried out. Yes, there is a session agenda that must be put together. Yes, there are all kinds of administrivia to be worked through: all of it important but not ultimate.

Grace Presbyterian church, like almost every modern mainline congregation, is in a wilderness of sorts. The good old days are gone. Stuff that was important ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago has become a distraction. A lot of what makes us comfortable also has a way of deadening our senses, especially that spiritual sense by which we discern the will of God. We don’t want to change our ways of doing things.

That includes the ways I’ve gone about doing ministry in the past. I constantly need to remind myself that I’m not in Vinton, VA or Belington, WV anymore. I’m here. What used to work then often doesn’t always work now. By that same token, what used to work for Grace in the past doesn’t always work very well in the present. Nor is what worked so well in Cameroon always appropriate for Maryland. We cannot allow ourselves to become slaves to the past. We cannot become the modern equivalents of the children of Israel on their way to the Promised Land, longing for the fleshpots of whatever our Egypt used to be.

A couple of confessions: I don’t really want to be a visionary leader. Many days I’d prefer to emulate the United States Congress, putting in my time until I can leave what needs to be done to some future pastor. That’s confession number one. Confession number two is that I’m not very good at this visioning thing. In terms of a vision for the future of Grace I only have some vague suspicions, some unformed ideas. Whatever God’s vision is for Grace it remains a fuzzy picture to me. But as uncomfortable as I am with such ambiguity, I much prefer it to being that hotshot pastor with a surefire model of ministry that I am bound and determined to impose on you. I have no need to remake Grace in my own image.

Uncomfortable as it is I find comfort in knowing that we’re all in the same boat. I doubt that any of you have a clear vision for Grace’s future. If one of you has such a vision I’d sure like to hear about it – please reveal it to the rest of us. The following words of Donald Olsen’s commentary on the text about unclear vision bring me a certain amount of comfort. “Fruitful church leadership requires one to have the ability to follow. First, we follow our best perceptions of God’s leading, understanding that we see only as in a mirror dimly and we hear with imperfect ears. We may hear some truth, but only one thus far has heard the whole truth and nothing but the truth… [His name is Jesus.] Secondly, we live among a faith community of followers who also see dimly and hear only in part. As we gather in the presence of Christ, grace must abound: grace that is able to forgive our misplacement of authority and call us anew to journey together toward the vision promised by God.”

So how do we, even imperfectly, capture God’s vision for Grace? Well we can start where Moses started; we can cry out to the Lord. We can and we should pray, asking God for his vision. Only after that can we go about trying to implement it. Otherwise we’ll just keep on wrestling one alligator after another. Amen.