One of the things which I have enjoyed most in my five interims is teaching classes about what it means to be a Presbyterian. As Randy Taylor said to a group of us in the Guesnard House 15 years ago, being Presbyterian is sort of like Smucker’s Jam …

If the label says Smuckers,

it has to be good!

Being Presbyterian, he said, is like that. If your name tag says “Presbyterian,” it has to be good. Well, Randy said smiling, “…most of the time anyway.” I know, and you know that some of the time being Presbyterian is not always good.

One of the classes in the five week curriculum for new members is entitled “Leadership in the Presbyterian Church” and on this particular occasion 15 years ago, I had two people in my class of prospective members named Walt and Patricia Munch-heimer. Walt was the new Associate County Manager for Escambia County and a very bright chap. After class on that Sunday, he asked for an appointment on Monday morning to talk with me about some of the things I had said in the class.

To make the long story with Walt as brief as possible, we met that Monday morning and what he wanted to ask me was to teach an hour-long class at the County’s Annual Retreat on Leadership. That Sunday we had discussed a topic which should be well known to Presbyterian clergy, but it was really strange stuff to Walt. He knew all about theory “x” and theory “y” as management styles, he had read all of Dr. Waino W. Soujanen’s books on Collegial or Co-operative Leadership, but he had never heard of anything as strange as “Servant Leadership.” The idea, though almost an oxymoron to Walt, intrigued him nevertheless, and he was fascinated by the concept and felt it would fit nicely into his retreat curriculum. “Of course the County will give you a handsome honorarium,” he said “and you need to plan to stay around a few minutes after the lecture to answer questions and to mix with the county’s staff who come to the class.” It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my ministry.

It will not surprise you if I tell you that the idea of servant leadership is not taught in colleges and universities which have management degrees. The only place it is taught, and there only rarely, is in seminaries and the reason it is taught so rarely is that most seminaries, just like most preachers, are more enamored of ideas like “senior pastor” or “head of staff” than they are with clergy as servants. Consequently, the idea which Jesus both practiced and taught to his disciples gets very short shrift in our seminary curricula today.

That is understandable. Most churches want a take-charge kind of minister … a person who fits the stereotype as well as the image we carry around in our head of the meaning of “head of staff.” No church wants a minister who hesitates to be assertive and only responds to requests or suggestions or orders from someone else. That’s what servants do, right? And that’s who servants are, right? “This is the real world, Jesus, and we don’t know what you might have had in mind when you encouraged this life-style for your disciples, but you need to know that it just won’t work in the contemporary church. A pecking order is absolutely necessary and without some semblance of that, there can be no accountability … and we are all smart enough to figure out what happens when no one is in charge.”

But listen … it has only been a few moments since Jesus took a towel and basin and washed the disciples’ feet … an act performed only by a servant. And out of the strange dialogue which ensues after this radical act of ministry, Jesus reminds the disciples that a servant is never greater than the master he serves. The clear word from Jesus in the towel and basin incident is:

You are the foot-washers, and it must never be the other way around. You have been called to serve, and you have been with me long enough to have seen that life-style in action. That is the leadership mode I want you to follow when I am gone.

How we ever got “head of staff” and “senior minister” out of that I’ll never know. But remember, I said in the beginning that, unlike Smuckers Jam, Presbyterians are not always perfect!

I have spent a good bit of time telling you what I think a portion of this text says. Now I would like to say what I think it means for me, for some preachers, and for all church members who hold positions of leadership in the church as well as those who don’t, but are nevertheless a vital part of the body of Christ which meets in this place. In short, I would like to try to say what it could mean for all of us.

First of all, who is in charge here is evaluated by acts of love rather than by momentous decisions or celebrations of power and prestige. This whole section of John’s gospel is called by scholars “Jesus’ farewell discourse,” so there are certain themes and events which mark its purpose. One of those themes is illuminated in the foot-washing incident I mentioned earlier. That story reflects not only a model of leadership, but also the kind of love we are called to show one another. Alone with the disciples, Jesus wants them to understand that one day they will be in charge as he has been. He does not want them to be authoritarian know-it-alls. Nor does he want them to be mamby-pamby pollyannas. He wants them to be servant leaders. To always remember that the servant is not greater than those whom he serves. And further, to remember that love, not expedience or profit or self esteem, is the motive force in acts of leadership.

Another dramatic insight into love occurs when Jesus, probably familiar with both Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of the ultimate act of love, reminds the disciples that he will give his life for them, and implicit in the text is that they may be asked to do the same for others.

Acts of love such as Coffee Club, IHN, pastoral care, special friends, home communion, prayer circles, and all of the things the Presbyterian Women do throughout the year … these are all marks of servant ministry. They have nothing to do with horn tooting … acts of love are gifts in response to the one whose ultimate gift to us was his life.

The second meaning of this text, as far as who’s in charge in a servant ministry, has a clear caution against how we use a hierarchical flow chart of responsibilities because we are all, preachers included, branches of the one vine, Jesus Christ, who sustains our common life and ministry. No matter how hard one tries, no one can tell one branch from another.

To God who is the gardener the branches are all the same and have the same care and the same responsibility to do acts of love or to bear fruit. It would be terribly foolish to push the parable too hard here and spend any time at all arguing about what happens to those branches which are cut off from the vine. This is a story, not a theological discourse, and its clear meaning is living intimately with Jesus as the branch lives intimately with the vine, and that is where the grapes come from. As George said so well to the confirmands last week, there are no grape-less vines. The branches are pruned for one reason only … to produce more grapes for the vine. The only measure of discipleship in the fourth gospel is how much we love Jesus, and for John that was not an act of the will, but a gift from Jesus to us.  And we do our best to love as Jesus loved … and when we do that we understand beyond a shadow of doubt what it means to be a branch … or to give it a management metaphor, to be a community of servants rather than a group of wild branches which have never realized the intimacy of staying close to the vine which nourishes them.

That is radical Johannine theology … decisions of governance and mission are made in the light of the radical egalitarian love of the vine for the branches…of Jesus for his friends. When a church understands Jesus’ love and keeps itself close to that love, then who’s in charge no longer consumes its energy or mission. Listen to the words of 1 John again:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the children also. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey God’s commandments.

The mark of the faithful community where servant leadership is practiced is how it loves, not how high its steeple is or how many folks are on the roll, or how big the budget is. There are only two marks of the servant church and those are how much it loves Jesus and how much it loves his brothers and sisters. The reliability and the validity of those marks are measured by acts of love and kindness and any church can do that if it stays close to the vine which nurtures it. And that vine is Jesus Christ.

What is the end of all this? Something truly magical and marvelously exciting happens. Servants become friends and we are no longer called servants for now the master has shown us who we are.  Amen.