You cannot be a slave of two masters.
Its very easy to get down these days. It seems that at every hands turn there is bad news and depression. If it's not in politics, it's in the Church. If there is not a crisis in a bank somewhere, there is a strike somewhere else because workers are being forced to tighten their belts. It is if there is a gaseous tension in air; everyone appears to be worried and cross. There seems to be no green pastures where we can just sit and rest.
I remember preaching on the Gospel appointed for today the last time it came up. It was 2007 and even then there was a feeling that the 'good-old-days' of what we called the Celtic Tiger (a time of tremendous economic growth in the Irish Economy) were coming to an end. I do not believe anyone expected the fortunes of our country to go down the tubes so quickly. But I remember passionately decrying the fact that as a nation we seemed to have been all caught up in a frenzy of spending and ludicrous debt. I remember afterwards thinking to myself, what was I thinking? Wouldn't we always have have enough? Time has proven that an illusion of wealth had been created and when world economic forces turned, a whole society has been affected.
Now I am no economist. Nor am I a sociologist. But I am preacher, and the burning question is "what have we to say to our people, in the light of the Gospel, about the situation we find ourselves?"
The accusation is often made that there is no leadership in the country (Church and state). How can we provide leadership for a people that are at best disgruntled, at worst despairing? The bushel has been lowered, the shekel raised, and there seems to be no-one like the man in the Gospel to cancel the debts.
These times are hard, as the song says. Lord tell us what to tell your people..............
What are you going to say?
There are different forms of leadership that can be given. There is moral leadership when we lead from the front by the way that we live, how we treat others and the choices that we make. That is sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. There is spiritual leadership that is almost always invisible and is spent at home with family or on our own in our prayer life and our own Bible study. Finally there is verbal leadership which is the most public form and can take a lot of bravery to know what to say or what not to say.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that if the first two aren't up to scratch then the verbal leadership that we give from the pulpit will end up sounding hollow or hypocritical. Without the solid foundation of moral and spiritual leadership verbal leadership can be like a building made of straw.