Whither Servant Leadership?

In many of the gospel passages we have in our lectionary, we often get two things going on in the same passage. Sometimes there is a saying of Jesus and then a story, or perhaps two separate stories. And sermons are often based on one or the other of the parts of the passage.

Such is the case in tonight's gospel, which begins with a discourse on the scribes and then has the well-known - and where preaching is concerned, well-worn - story of the poor widow's giving of all she had to God.

It would be a safe bet that greater than 80 percent of all sermons preached on this gospel today have focused exclusively on the poor widow, and, indeed, that is how an earlier version of this sermon began.

But events overtook me as I was trying to come up with something meaningful - and novel - to say to you about the widow and her generous offering to God. For the last five days I have been preoccupied with the uncertainty about the future of our country's leadership. I have had phone calls and e-mails from several of you and from friends and family expressing distress about what has happened or not happened. One graduate student I spoke with on Thursday said she could not do her work because she was so preoccupied with getting the latest news about the election. Others have expressed their upset about their views - which are quite diverse - about the fairness of the Palm Beach voting, the merits or perils of a re-vote in Florida, and of the dire prospects for civilization as we know it if either Bush or Gore prevails.

In the midst of the many different views about what has happened and what should happen, there is in everything I feel and in everything I've heard from many of you one thing in common, namely a yearning for leaders with integrity, a yearning for leaders who will work for the good of us all and not just pretend to so that their own ambitions can be satisfied. And so, I have chosen to emphasize what Jesus has to say about the scribes. I'll come back to the widow later.

Before we look at what Jesus says this week about scribes, it is well to remember what he said last week. He complimented a scribe for his grasp of the essence of the law of God that we are to love God and love our neighbor. Jesus said of him, "He is not far from the kingdom of God." This is important to remember because in these days we are tempted to paint modern scribes - politicians - all with the same brush as ambitious and avaricious and corrupt to the core. But Jesus reminds us that there are good scribes who understand the precepts of God and live by them, just as there are good and decent politicians who truly work for the common good and subordinate their own welfare to that of the people whom they wish to serve.

This week Jesus points to some scribes who remind us of another kind of politician. He says this:

What Jesus is talking about here is the prerogative of the scribes to work out the estates of deceased members of the community. In doing so, some scribes plundered these estates, thus leaving the widows with practically nothing while, at the same time, appearing to be righteous members of the community. The reference to the wearing of long robes was a way of saying that these men were not dressed for manual labor and were thus set apart from rest of the hard-working populace.

We can interpret this brief passage as one in which Jesus tells us that people who try to appear to be good and righteous while really only serving themselves will be greatly condemned. The reference to the widows in the description of the scribes serves as a link to the second half of the reading in which we hear of a poor widow unceremoniously offering everything she has to God.

What a contrast! The selfish and arrogant versus the self-less and modest. I wonder whether this contrast crystallizes the roots of our distress about the historic and profoundly disappointing events of this past week.

We Americans long for great leadership. In the recent presidential election, many of us found ourselves wanting more than either candidate could offer. The closeness of the results confirms that neither candidate truly captured our hearts. We want so much!

• We want a president with a vision.
• We want a president with integrity.
• We want a president with inspirational leadership.
• We want a president with command of the issues.
• We want a president who cares about people.
• We want a president who will serve as a role model for our children - and for us.
• We want a leader who puts us and our welfare ahead of his or her own ambitions and pride.

But few presidents have lived up to our expectations. We have had forty-two presidents. All of them go down in history - school children memorize their names - but how many were great? How many presidents will pass the test of time? Not many! Greatness, by definition, is limited to a few.

What sets the great apart from the rest is not the haughtiness and pridefulness of the scribes, but the quality we see Jesus extolling in the poor widow. Whatever may be the truth about the private lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, the qualities we prefer to remember and honor them for is self-sacrifice and dedication to higher principles. We honor many others who never became president for the same qualities – Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, to name only a few.

The poor widow and the leaders in our history whom we honor remind us of the central themes in the gospel of Mark that we have been encountering for many weeks, the theme of the suffering servant, the theme of the least among us who will be the greatest, the theme of service to others coming before our own needs, the theme of loving others as ourselves.

Perhaps it is the paucity of these qualities in our current leaders that we find so disappointing and so distressingly highlighted by the events of the past week. And perhaps it is because of this that we will renew our commitment to be - in the words of Woodrow Wilson - in the Nation's Service and - in the words of Jesus - to serve rather than be served. Renewing the country's values may perhaps best begin in the renewal of our own.

I believe, as I hope you do, that God's goodness works through all things and that through our relationship with God great good can somehow be fetched out of our country's current turmoil. Perhaps here in this place - a place quite self-consciously dedicated to the Nation's service - we can learn from the events of the past week and connect them to the suffering servant model of Jesus. Jesus calls us to put others before ourselves, to surrender ourselves in the service of others even, as in his case, if doing so leads to suffering and death. We can expect this of our leaders and politicians only if we are willing to exercise leadership in the same way.

Amen.