In many business circles today it is de rigueur to talk about succession planning. Succession planning is one of the great arts of being able to run a successful business or corporation. According to many of the great gurus of business management, the need to make sure that you provide succession is absolutely critical to the survival and the growth of any business or any corporation, or almost any entity at all. Recently, there was an article in Forbes Magazine by Stephen Miles, who is with the company Heidrick and Struggles in New York. Miles outlines four steps that every corporation, every business, every institution should follow if they are going to develop proper succession planning, particularly for those who are in leadership positions. As I read over these, I couldn’t help but be struck how in keeping they are with the words from our text this morning from John’s Gospel. It seems there is a modern, direct correlation between the four steps that Miles suggests are necessary for succession and Jesus’ own teachings about his ministry and succession, for Jesus had an earthly ministry.
Jesus’ ministry lasted a finite time, and there came a point when he realized it was ending and needed to do something about it. He knew that if the ministry that he had and the work that he was doing on behalf of God was going to continue into future generations, there needed to be a plan, there needed to be a level of succession, and in the passage from John’s Gospel what we find is Jesus giving a prayer to the Father. It is known as the High Priestly Prayer, and if you look at it very closely it is poetic. There is a cadence to it. There is a lilt almost to it. It is beautifully written by John, and deliberately written in this form. He is praying for those who are going to succeed him, his disciples. He knows that his hour is coming. He knows that he is going to have to leave this world and his earthly ministry. He is getting ready for his crucifixion, but he wants to draw them in, he wants to tell them what is going to happen, and he prays for them that they might have the means and the strength to be able to continue.
What is fascinating is that it is all very clearly planned. It is interesting reading something by a business writer and a theoretician on business and corporate governance to go back and read Scripture in the light of this, because you realize just how organized Jesus he was in his relationship with the disciples, and there is a very specific, very concrete, very dynamic way of addressing his succession. I want to look at what Stephen Miles said in his essay in Forbes, because I think there is much in it that helps us understand not only how Jesus treated the disciples, but also how the disciples are examples for ourselves. There comes a point – and wait for it at the end of the sermon – where you enter into this and it involves you!
It starts off with the first principle: you need to engage those with whom you are close. “There is a need to fully engage,” says Miles,” your stakeholders” and Jesus does that. You will notice that for the three years of his ministry he spends a disproportionate amount of time with the disciples. He takes them on the hillsides to give talks. He takes them away from the world for retreats. He takes them into the midst of the City and the Temple to face conflict. He introduces them to people on the street. He encourages them to engage religious leaders. You are can see that Jesus is involved in engaging his stakeholders in the ministry there is not a point at which they aren’t engaged. There isn’t a point where they stay to one side, because Jesus is always revealing himself to the disciples; he is not concealing things from them. What is fascinating is that Jesus uses the disciples to get a message to the world. He doesn’t tell the world what he is going to do; he talks to his stakeholders, his Apostles, and he tells them what he is going to do. That is why Jesus prays. It is for those who are following him, whom the Father has chosen, that he is in fact sharing the Word of God.
You notice that Jesus never outlines for the disciples in his ministry very specific and concrete tasks. He doesn’t say to them, “You are to go and do this” or “You are to go and do that” – very rarely does he give them that. Sometimes, he sends them out two-by-two giving them instructions. Sometimes he’ll talk about possible persecutions that they are going to face. But, in this High Priestly Prayer there is no outline of a mandate, there is no job description for the perfect Apostle, there is no blow-by-blow description of everything that they are supposed to do. Rather – and this is key – he wants them to live in relationship with him and with his Father. As we talked about last week, he wants them not to be left as orphans; he wants them to abide in the Father; he wants them to abide in him. It is not a matter of having a job description; it is a matter of having a living relationship that was the key.
There is a magnificent statement by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the great French flying ace. He once said: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” In other words, get their hearts, get their passions, and get the things that really matter most. In this High Priestly Prayer, Jesus is bringing his stakeholders close to him because he wants them to experience the love and the power of the relationship that he has with his father. He wants them to have this living and vibrant experience, and he draws them in close and cares for them.
Miles also suggests that any corporate governance and succession planning should include an assessment of your internal candidates, and alongside it, do a stress test. I love that! A stress test! Sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it? But he is not wrong. You have to assess whether candidates are able to do the work. Jesus needs to do an assessment and a stress test of the disciples. He is putting them on a treadmill really. And he is worried about them. Will they be able to endure? Will they be able to take the rejection of the Word. Will they be strong enough to be able to do what God has asked them to do? Will they be able to get to the destination?
He is worried that there is this great potential for them to retreat out of the world, particularly after his Crucifixion. There is a sense in John’s Gospel that they did retreat a bit right after the Crucifixion but Jesus knew the disciples needed to engage the world. The great American preacher, Tom Troeger suggests that the notion of getting away from things is so embedded in our culture that we could identify with the disciples. In other words, let’s run away from stress, let’s get out of the city, and let’s make sure that we are not engaged in the problems of the world. Everybody it seems, is craving some kind of retreat from the world. Our lives are built around in fact the pursuit of moments of pleasure and those moments of pleasure are moments of retreat. He argued that this isn’t entirely a bad thing. In fact, in Christian faith and in Christian history, Christians have in fact retreated at many times. That is why there were monasteries and convents! People feel the need to get away, and not to be faced with troubles.
The danger in this, says Troeger, is that if it is taken too far we face the very challenge that Jesus gave to the disciples right from the word “Go!” Jesus prays to the Father these very words: “I do not ask you to take them out of this world, but to send them into the world.” The motivation between the High Priestly Prayer, the motivation of Jesus, is always to get the disciples to go into the world, because Jesus knew that once they get into that world it is not going to be easy. He prays for them to be protected. I love what John Calvin says in his commentary on this wonderful text, “It would be wholly unbecoming if the Father were now to reject and not protect the ones whom the Son had spoken to.” He is right! Jesus asks that they be protected. He asks that they be nurtured and, if they face the troubles of this world, then they are given the peace, and the strength and fortitude to be able to carry out their ministry. It is a beautiful image! Having assessed the candidates and realizing one of them (Judas) would betray him, Jesus nevertheless believed that this group of people, these Apostles, would take the Word of God into the world, that they would succeed him, and they would carry what he had given to the next generation – an immense challenge!
Miles then says that once you have assessed whether an individual candidate or candidates are good, and have done a stress test on them to see if they are actually going to be the ones that you are going to appoint, then you have a very awkward, terrible English “business-ese” phrase: “You need to onboard the Chosen One.” What he is getting at is that once you have decided who it is that is going to succeed you, then between you leaving and them taking over, you have got to get on board with them. Jesus is masterful in the way that he treats the disciples! He gets on board with them, and he suggests that as his successors, he give them something: someone to empower and strengthen them, and that is the person and the power of the Holy Spirit. He wouldn’t just send them out into trouble, but would give them an inner power, and that inner power is what we celebrate next week, the power to carry on the ministry of Jesus.
This past week, on the subway I ran into a young man who was extremely agitated and delirious. From the look of his face, it appeared to me that he had been sniffing some substance. He was dirty, had a hood on, and his clothes weren’t fitting well. He looked emaciated, didn’t seem to be at peace at any moment. Then, he did a strange thing, he got up and started hopping around from seat to seat. You could tell what the people were thinking: “Holy Jesus, don’t let him sit next to me!” I almost prayed “Holy Jesus, don’t let him sit next to me!” He couldn’t stay put for a minute, he was so ill at ease. I felt sick for him. He had no sense of the world around him. He even got off at one stop, only to come right back on again, because it was the wrong one. Finally, he got off on the same one I did and he just wandered around. He stared at the exit sign, but that was it. He just stared at it! Finally, he decided to go where everyone else was going, and actually followed me up the steps at the station, but then went out into the street. I thought, “Here’s a young man who for whatever reason – who knows his history – is checking out of the world.” It is just not doing it for him. He has no peace. He has no place. He has nothing. It is awful. When I looked at his face, I saw fear and agitation.
I am not sure that I want to suggest to you that the disciples of Jesus were like that young man on the TTC, but I am suggesting to you that the world can sometimes be a difficult place for people. It can be a difficult place for those who want to check out of the world. It can be a difficult place for those who stand for something that the world does not always agree with, and Jesus knows this with the disciples. He knows that if he sends them out into the world with the Good News but doesn’t give them any power, doesn’t give them any Spirit, doesn’t give them any relationship, then basically as my quote from earlier suggests, he would have only given them wood and hammers, and wouldn’t have given them “the passion for the sea.” Jesus gave them the passion for the sea. He gave them the power of the Holy Spirit.
When I look at those disciples and what they endured, and then I look at ourselves two thousand years later, and realize we wouldn’t be here if wasn’t for them. If it wasn’t for their witness, their courage, if it wasn’t for the power of the Holy Spirit within them, then we wouldn’t be here, because we are their successors. We are the ones, the Church, who continue the very ministry of Jesus in his High Priestly Prayer. What is needed for his successes today is passion. What is needed is an invigorated passion of the Holy Spirit for the things of God. It is that passion more than anything else, more than any gift, that is so desperately needed in the lives of believers today.
At a service that I conducted not long ago, people came into the Chancel area after the service and looked around as they had never been here before. They were in awe of this beautiful sanctuary. But then, they came up here to a stone “To the glory of God and in loving memory of Sir John Craig Eaton.” They stood there and looked at one another almost with terror, and then turned to me and said, “He is buried there – right?”
I said, “No, this isn’t Westminster Abbey. We don’t bury those in whose name it is erected. No, there are no bodies – that I know of anyway – that are buried under Timothy Eaton Memorial Church.”
They talked about not only the fact that the body wasn’t there – and I assured them of that – and that was of great comfort, but they talked about legacy, and they talked about the name of the place, and it was a very interesting comment that one of them: “You know, I always thought it was strange that they would name a church after a person who had been an entrepreneur. Usually churches are named after their location, or maybe a saint, or maybe named after some great event within the life of Jesus – the Resurrection or the Ascension – but Timothy Eaton just doesn’t seem to fit.”
The more I think of it, Timothy Eaton was a man of faith, and there were a lot of things that could have been built in his memory, but the family decided to build a church, a place of worship to the glory of God. And this was based on somebody who actually believed something, somebody you could connect with, who had a sense of a presence within our culture. Surely, it seems to me that the Church in fact, if anything, is built on that very thing. It is built on faith. It is built on belief. It is built on the reality of everyday living the Christian life. It is true. This is because if Christ is its foundation, and the Apostles were the ones who were set apart to be its witnesses, and all of it is to give glory to the Father, then it seems to me the Church must be passionate in its faith.
Succession planning for the Church of Jesus Christ begins again today! It begins every week. It begins every time people of God gather together, for it is then and for us that Jesus also prayed, “As I am in the Father, they may be in me, and all of them may be one.” The great succession plan includes you! Amen.