Greeting from Archbischop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
You are created in God's image!
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| Devotional by Rev. Steven Pace |  |  |  |
| Delivered to the MCC Board of Elders on Thursday, January 18, 2007
And we share the same need that God's grace be evident in the religion and the religious institution that we put forth through Metropolitan Community Churches. As leaders, we are called to approach our lives with God and others in a spirit of gentleness, humility, and openness. And we are called to understand that "grace" is about building our lives and institutions with authenticity, integrity, and faith. It is through such faith that leaders of this institution affect the vision of MCC and carry out our purposes and calling in this world. This vital role of Leadership is this is the subject of our study today. Today's lesson is rooted in a familiar biblical story found in several chapters of Exodus, especially chapters 32, 33, and 34. Its focus is the leadership of Moses; its story is that of the Golden Calf. For this study, I have also utilized Rabbi Harold Kushner's book, Overcoming Life's Disappointments, as well as two books by Phillip Gulley and James Mulholland: If God Is Love and If Grace Is True. These thoughts and a portion of these words are mine; some belong to other authors. I trust God to give life to them all. THE LESSON A Jewish legend tells the Golden Calf story a little differently than the Scriptures: After Moses received the original set of the Ten Commandments from God atop Mount Sinai, he began to climb down the mountain to deliver God's word to the people. Moses was an old man and it was hard for him to negotiate the climb, but he did so because he was inspired by what he was doing. Halfway down the mountain, when he saw the Israelites dancing around the Golden Calf, the writing disappeared from the tablets and suddenly they were just two large, heavy stones, too heavy for Moses to handle. At that moment, they fell from his grasp and broke. When Moses thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden. But when he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to do the hard things that were asked of him. So, according to the Jewish legend, God summoned Moses back to the mountaintop to work with him on fabricating a second set of tablets and to restore his sense of purpose before Moses could continue the task. The impact we make in other people's lives is not always visible. It is not always articulated to us. But it is always real. We learn the lessons of leadership in our everyday lives and through interactions with the people that make up our lives. We learn lessons of leadership: - from the people who challenge us; - from the people who disappoint us; - from the people who inspire us; - and from the people who are faithful no matter what. Moses drew the strength that enabled him to persevere, not from the gratitude and appreciation of the people he led, but from the God who led him, summoned him, and promised to be with him. He drew strength from a God who, in the words of a later prophet, "renews the strength of those who trust in God so they can walk and not grow weary" [Isaiah 40:31]. Sometimes the wisdom we need is to remain loyal to people who may not repay our loyalty. It is the wisdom to recognize, as Moses did, the frailty of the human soul. People are not perfect. People can be weak, selfish, unreliable, and easily distracted. And they sure can screw up our well-thought out plans! But just as God would be lonely if God could love only people who remembered to thank God, so too, we would be lonely if we put people out of our lives because they fail to appreciate what we do or understand our vision. In large part, Moses' wisdom was his ability to keep sight of the goodness in people -- even in those who disappointed him deeply. He could look at the Israelites after the giving of the Law and see how many of God's rules they were breaking every day. And at the same time, he was able to see them doing good things -- acts of kindness, self-restraint, and charity; acts they would not have done had they not come into the presence of God at Sinai. The people were less than they might be, maybe even less than they should be, but they were more that they once had been, and that insight helped keep Moses going. Perhaps the most challenging thing we are called to do is remain aware of the redeeming qualities of people who have hurt us or disappointed us. Sometimes our personal and professional relationships stimulate people to grow and become more than they were before. Through the concepts of Servant Leadership, Robert Greenleaf taught that one of the best tests of leadership is whether those who are being led grow as persons; do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous; and more likely to become those who lead and serve others? The greatest challenge to Moses' leadership and to his ability to remain dedicated to a people who did not always appreciate what he did for them came in the episode of the Golden Calf. During Moses' prolonged time on the mountain top, the people fashioned an idol and danced around it, proclaiming "This is the God who brought us out of Egypt." But a careful reading of Exodus 32 leads us to suspect that the Israelites, for all their complaining, knew how much Moses' leadership meant to them. They wanted the calf to replace the absent Moses as the visible embodiment of God's presence in their midst. Now this is worth noting: Moses saw only the calf! He never heard the discussion that we find in the biblical text, about how much they missed him. (And this is also worth noting: The people never took time to tell him.) Moses was furious at the people's betrayal of the Covenant and he let the tablets fall to ground, shattering them. Moses' dream of forging the former slaves into a people who would unhesitatingly follow God's laws had also been shattered. But Moses held onto the broken pieces of the dream, to remind himself of what he once dreamed of doing, and to remind himself of the lessons learned when he discovered that his dream would not be realized. So Moses ascended the mountain once more, this time to fashion a second set of tablets that would bear the same words. But there is a difference in the two sets: The first set of tablets was fashioned by God. As for the second set, God instructed Moses, Carve for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon them the words of the first tablets. [Exodus 34:1] Unlike the originals, the replacement tablets were a joint Human and Divine effort. If the original tablets came from God and reflected the perfection of God, the second set reflected the will of God and the ideals of God filtered through the limitations of human beings and the reality of human experience. Moses learned a valuable lesson: We can and should set high standards for people, And at the same time we must be prepared to see them fall short of those high standards, to sometimes not understand, and to sometimes work against the very efforts that are being made on their behalf. For the rest of his life, Moses would keep the pieces of the original tablets in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the second set, to remind himself of that lesson. For Moses, the words on the first set of tablets, the ones carved by God, were demands that turned out to be too much for the people. The words on the second set, a joint effort of God and devoted humans, were a vision, a summons to be more than we are, and as such they endure to this day. The first set was based on demands and unrealistic expectations; the replacement set was based on hope and forgiveness. Part of the wisdom of Moses was his ability to cherish the broken pieces of his idealistic dream while replacing them with an alternative vision tempered by experience and reality. The most valuable, most enduring lesson we can learn from Moses comes not from his successes but from his failures. And there we can find two paradoxical skills of leadership: One is to create a shared vision and do everything in our power to inspire others to accomplish it. The other is the lesson of Letting Go -- that is, when something isn't working, to have the humility to let go and create a new vision. In her book entitled Sacred Therapy, Estelle Frankel wrote "The story of the broken tablets teaches us that when we abandon old pathways, it is important the we hold onto the beauty and the essence of the dreams we once held dear...for ultimately the whole and the broken live side by side in all of us." Leadership is also about facing our past with gratitude and our future with confidence, even as we carry with us the memories of dreams that never came true or the ways that things used to be. We must be able to inspire change, and to lead others into willingness to embrace change. And we must remember that any time our initial hopes or dreams may be disappointed, there are other, more attainable dreams waiting for us. I pray that we all have the courage to find the Moses in us, and the wisdom to learn both from our successes and from our failures. Whoever we are as MCC, whatever we become, we cannot see only the calf. We must ensure that the religion and the religious institution we put forth is a joint Human and Divine effort. Amen. Rev. Steven Pace may be reached by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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I bring greetings and gratitude to you today from MCC of Greater Dallas and the Rev. Colleen Darraugh, as well as from the AIDS Interfaith Network in Dallas, which serves 1700 men, women, children, and teenagers who are living with HIV and AIDS. 
