"Let The Judges Speak, Part One: The Prophetess"
What makes a good leader?
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Text: Judges 4:1-10
He was a little shorter than I had anticipated, but definitely more charismatic. This past week, I had the privilege of sitting down for a whole morning with the Rev. Eugene Rivers from Boston, Massachusetts. The reason for Rev. Rivers' visit to Toronto, which many of you may have heard or read about, was to deal with the problem of gang violence that besets parts of our community. I spent the morning with him as a representative of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue of Toronto (CJDT), an organization to which I belong. The purpose of meeting Rev. Rivers was to discuss some of the issues the CJDT has dealt with as Christians and Jews, sitting down in dialogue with one another, listening to one another and sharing with one another, in the hope that he could perhaps take back to other leaders some wisdom and insight. However, we were also there to provide support for him and encourage him in what he is doing, for it seems that whenever anyone seeks to bring forth leaders to do good in the community, people of faith should be there to encourage them.
It was a wonderful morning. We laughed a lot; we cried a little; we shared the faith with one another. More than anything else, we had an honest and frank discussion about real issues concerning a real God. That is what Rev. Rivers brought to his visit to Toronto. When it was over, we exchanged cards so we can stay in touch, because I found someone with whom I, and indeed all of us in the CJDT, can engage in a meaningful way. I have thought about that a great deal, because it seems to me that one of Eugene Rivers' great concerns as a leader himself, is that we need to have leaders in all aspects of our society.
Reverend Rivers told us that no matter where we are or in what situation we find ourselves, every one of us has the potential to be a leader. Whether it is in our homes or in our workplaces, whether it is inside organizations or churches or government or the courts, wherever it might be, all of us have a leadership role and responsibility.
As he spoke, I remembered something my father told me years ago. During the 1960s my father was in Bermuda helping bring about racial integration in some of the schools. As you can imagine, in the hot and explosive environment around race issues in the 1960s, this was a very tense and a very difficult thing to do, but my father was steadfast in his belief in the importance of racial integration. Once when the chief of police in Hamilton, Bermuda addressed parents and teachers where my father was teaching at the time. He did so after a terrible riot where school buildings had been burned, where offices had been destroyed, and where young people were running rampant in the streets, creating violence and terror. The police chief said that society needed leadership: “If the parents won't provide the leadership, and the teachers daren't (because of intimidation), then the police must.” He said, “Every facet of society needs people who will provide solid, caring, loving and strong leadership. Otherwise, the end result is going to be the intervention of the police, and by that time, it is too late. The social problem has already developed and escalated.” Eugene Rivers was saying something similar. It applies not only to one segment of society, or to one race: The need for strong, committed, caring and compassionate leadership applies to all of us.
Now, you can go to any bookstore these days and find all manner of books dealing with leadership. I was reading one not long ago by John C. Maxwell, titled, Developing the Leaders around You. His argument is that every one of us has a sphere of influence and a sense of leadership in some aspect of our lives. A key ingredient is to understand that when we do provide any leadership it should have a ripple effect, like concentric circles, creating other leaders. He says that the truly great leaders are those who use their influence not for their own purposes in order that power and influence might coalesce around themselves, but rather to influence others to lead in a meaningful and a proper way.
Well, this turned my mind to the Book of Judges. Today is the first in what will be a series on this incredible group of people in the Old Testament. The rest I will do in February. The judges were a fascinating group. They lived in the time between Israel's invasion and conquest of Canaan and the arrival of the kings, the first of which was King Saul. In that era Israel lived in the lands they had conquered in Canaan, opposed not only by the people that they had pushed out, but also by those in neighbouring countries. Part of the problem that the Israelites faced was the possibility of fragmentation and dissipation. Time and again during this period, they were in danger of being co-opted into the culture of the land that they had conquered; its promiscuity, injustice and lack of moral fibre could influence them. There was fear that they could not only be conquered militarily, but socially and spiritually as well.
Now, in this morning's passage we have an example of one such threat, when Jabin the Canaanite, had conquered the Israelites, and for 20 years had oppressed them with his military power. The judges, of whom Deborah was one, were also known as the Shephertim, those chosen to be magistrates within a society. Even the Bedouins had Shephertim: leaders who would provide guidance for the people. The judges were more than just ordinary Shephertim, they were also strong leaders in the community. They were leaders within each of their tribes, and their sphere of influence although sometimes very localized, was immense. They faced opposition, just like any leader. There were people who did not agree with what they were doing, and many of the tribes were fighting amongst themselves. So when Jabin came along and conquered the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun, they needed somebody to take the mantle of leadership and deal with the source of oppression.
In that context arose the great leader, Deborah. Later on in the Bible, she was referred to as “the Mother of Israel.” Her name derives from “Zeborah,” which means “to speak.” This woman arose from amongst the people of Israel as a leader, but she wasn't just an ordinary leader, she wasn't just a judge, a magistrate, a wise thinker. She was also what the Scriptures called “a prophetess.” She spoke the word of God; she provided wise counsel and guidance for the people when they needed it; she was a strong and a capable person. However, more than anything else, she had been given the gift of “charisma,” to use the biblical term, the spiritual gift of leadership.
So, it wasn't just her natural abilities that made Deborah a great leader, it was also the fact that she had been chosen by God and given unique and special gifts to help the people of Israel in their oppression. Now, all of this raises the question: What was it about Deborah that made her so special? What kinds of gifts had God given her that provided leadership for the people of Israel?
Here, my friends, we have an incredible challenge, because Deborah was one of those marvellous people who rise above the ashes of the ordinary to provide meaningful leadership. In her story there are lessons for each and every one of us.
The first, most telling thing about Deborah is that she was a leader who was willing to lead. Very often I hear people say that there were not that many great women in the Old Testament, or that there really isn't a sense of great leadership amongst women in the Bible. The Bible is nearly all about men, and they are nearly all old men; I hear this criticism over and over again. Yet, when I read the Bible, and I get into the story of Deborah, I realize here God had chosen a very special person to provide very meaningful leadership. As I hold her out as an example, I am sure there are aspects of Deborah's leadership that do not always go hand in hand with the New Testament view of what a leader might be. But within her time, within her place, there is much to learn. She was a leader who was willing to lead.
You can see the signs of this when the Israelites first sought her out, and she was willing to lead. They realized that she was a powerful leader. They could identify in her someone amongst the masses, someone amongst the ordinary people who they could turn to in their time of need. (Now, this is not the Deborah that you might read about in the Book of Genesis, who was the nurse of Rebekah, Jacob's wife. This is a different Deborah. This is Deborah, the judge, who would hear the appeals of people while sitting under a tree.) But the people who came to her for guidance were not just ordinary people from the street; they were the leaders, the military, the people in positions of power and authority. They came because they knew that she had a unique gift from God.
The second strong aspect of Deborah, and the reason she was willing to lead, was that she had a sense, as all the judges did, of what was right and what was wrong. That is the nature of the conversation that they had. The judges all had a conviction that God had a special covenant with their people, based on the law, based on the Ten Commandments, based on the Torah.
The judges dispensed advice not just on the basis of a whim or fancy, or what they happened to think was right at any given moment. They didn't dispense advice as a matter of expedience or by polling what everyone else around them thought. They spoke what they believed was right, and confronted what they believed was wrong on behalf of and under the authority of the word of the law, the Torah. So, Deborah was not wishy-washy, she wasn't somebody who put up a finger to feel where the winds were blowing at any given time; Deborah was a true leader, because she knew what was right and what was wrong.
Eugene Rivers was as blunt as anyone I have met, when he said to us: “This is one of the problems in our society today. We lack leadership that sees clearly what is right and what is wrong.” He continued to say that nature cannot stand a vacuum, and if leadership is not being given in the home, if leadership is not being given in the schools, if leadership is not being given by the church (he was very critical of the church), if leadership is not being given by those who care for and love and have a passion for the wellbeing of young people, then that vacuum will be filled, and it will be filled by gangs, who will come along and gain the affection of these young people and provide a sense of leadership for them, and they will lead them to death.
He said that unless leadership is given in other parts of society, then this vacuum, this void, will be filled. My friends, that applies to so many aspects of society. Anyone can come along and claim to be a leader and purport to have leadership skills, and say: “I will lead you,” but if they do not have the best interests of the people at heart, if they do not love and respect them, then they can lead them astray.
Deborah is an example of someone who led by virtue of strength of character that came from what she understood was right, and you can see that in the way she helped choose other leaders. Along came someone who was needed to provide military leadership, and his name was Barak. Barak was wet. He said to her, for example, when she sought him out to be a leader: “I will go into battle with you, if you will go with me.” In other words, I will only go into battle if you will hold my hand and be with me. This is what I would call a “paper tiger” or a “paper lion.” He'd been given the authority as a general, but he would only go if Deborah would hold his hand. What kind of a leader is that?
There is an old African parable that sums up Barak perfectly! The lion is the king of the jungle, so he thinks. However, he wakes up one day and decides that he will poll all the other animals, just to confirm that he is the leader. So, dismissing all the little animals as irrelevant, he starts with some big, mean ones. He goes up to the bear and he asks, “Who is the king of the jungle?”
The bear looks him in the eye and says, “Oh, great lion, you of course are the king of the jungle.”
The lion is ecstatic but, he thinks he had better poll some more to shrink the margin of error! So, he goes to the tiger and says, “Tiger, tell me, who is the king of the jungle?”
And the tiger says, “Oh, great lion, you, YOU, YOU are the king of the jungle, there is no debate about this.”
And so, the lion roars, and goes away thrilled. Then he thinks, I should do one more as a sample test case. So he goes up to the elephant, and says, “Oh, elephant, who is the king of the jungle?”
The elephant grabs the lion around his neck with his trunk, tosses him in the air, throws him against a tree, pushes him into a river and stomps on him two or three times. So the lion looks up and says, “Look, just because you don't know the answer isn't reason enough to get nasty!”
Well, Barak was just like the lion! He was, in fact, a “paper lion.” He was weak, and so Deborah said, “Do you realize that if you take me with you into battle that it won't be you, a man, who wins this battle, it will be a woman who eventually wins the battle?”
The passage that follows is this most awful story. It is the story of Jael, a Jewish woman who hates Sisera, the leader of the Canaanite army. After the Canaanites have been defeated by Barak, Sisera flees to a tent, where Jael eliminates him by putting a tent peg through his temple. The Bible simply sums it up by saying, “And then he was dead.” But the story is brutal. It is not about the tent peg going through the head of Sisera, it is a message about Barak. Barak was weak, he wasn't willing to do the strong thing. Oh, he won in battle, but he wasn't willing to take on the true mantle of leadership, as Deborah was.
What made Deborah so special was that she was willing to go into battle with Barak, a woman into the midst of the Canaanites, for the sake of being a leader to her people. This tells us that here was a leader willing to lead, a woman who was willing to sacrifice herself, to go into the most difficult of all situations, because she was convinced that it was the right thing to do. Have you noticed throughout the Bible that the people who have the courage to do the right thing are those who are ultimately rewarded? They are the people who eventually succeed. It's not that they do not suffer, face indignity and sometimes even rejection, but they are willing to be leaders when they have felt so called.
There was another, and last, element to Deborah that made her such a great leader: She was not only a leader willing to lead, she was a leader willing to be led. At the moment when Barak was to go into battle with the Canaanites, Deborah said something very interesting. She said, “Do you not realize that God will have gone before you?” Even if Barak was to go into battle and to defend his people, he needed to know that God had already gone ahead and paved the way. In theological terms, we call this “provenient grace.” This is one of the great misunderstandings of our faith. People think that the Christian faith is rooted in the past, that we have a God who is behind us, a Bible that was written hundreds of years ago and that all we are really doing is taking what was in the past and hauling it into the present.
Rather than seeing God as a living God, who anticipates and goes before us, we think that God is a God that we drag along with us from the past into the future. Nothing could be further from the truth! For all the biblical authors, God was always a God who was ahead of them, whether it was Moses who was crossing the Dead Sea, whether it was the disciples who had to go with Jesus to face the cross and the Resurrection, whether it was Paul on his journeys or whether it was Deborah going into battle, there was this understanding that God always goes ahead of us.
I like the line that Napoleon Bonaparte once used: “Leaders are always dealers in hope.” They always lead because they believe that something positive can happen ahead, not just on the basis of wishful thinking, but in the belief that God actually goes ahead and prepares a place and is active ahead of us. Many of us, my friends, lack courage. We lack conviction in all manner of things in our lives, simply because our faith isn't based on a God who goes before us. We think that there are inevitable disasters or rejections or problems or challenges, but I believe that if we have the courage to lead in a godly manner, in whatever the sphere, God rewards that, and goes ahead of us, even though the victory may not seem immediate.
In other words, the result may not be right before your eyes. Faith says that God goes ahead. Grady Stanley Jones, a wonderful missionary, tells a story set in the 19th century about a missionary who went to a very difficult and dangerous place in what was then known as the Congo. He was wonderfully received by the locals and was loved by them and loved them in turn. For years he had a tremendous relationship with them, and stayed within the confines of the community. However, after a while the missionary had to move on, but as he started to look ahead outside the village, he realized that he needed help to find his way. So he asked one of the tribal leaders if he would help him, and he said, “Sure, I'll do that. Come with me.”
This tribal leader started to go into the bush and cut down the trees and the bushes and the grass, and the missionary followed. Later, the missionary said to the leader: “Wouldn't it be easier if we found the path and walked along the path?”
The leader replied, “B'wana, don't you understand, I am the path? Everything has grown since we were last here. I am the path.”
My friends, that was what God said to Deborah. That is what God says to us: “I am the path. I provide the way. Follow me.”
The great John Kenneth Galbraith, who I heard give a lecture in Boston some years ago, said the following about leadership, and he is right: “All of the great leaders had one characteristic in common. It was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” My friends, wherever anxieties might be in our community, our society, our country, our world, our homes, our businesses, wherever anxieties might arise, we need leadership to address them. But they must be addressed out of compassion, they must be addressed with love, and they must bring the great joy of the faith that goes before us. This day, I believe that wherever you are, in this church or listening on the radio or on the Web, God is calling you to be a leader in some field and to be a leader like Deborah, one who has the courage when needed to lead, but also the faith to know that whatever it is you face, you are led. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.