The Path of a True Leader
Sub Dn. Timothy Grace explores the qualities of true leadership through the lens of faith, drawing examples from St. Andrew, St. Paul, and modern saints. He emphasizes selflessness, humility, and the strength found in embracing one's weaknesses. The sermon invites us all to consider our roles as leaders in our own lives by following Christ's example.
Transcript
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The founding editor of the Wall Street Journal's sports section, the writer Sam Walker, once conducted a study on the most dominant sport teams in history. From thousands of teams that ever won a title across any sport, he eliminated those with only some incidental successes, ending up with no more than 16 teams which he called tier one teams. These are the best sport teams that have ever existed. They include teams like the New Zealand All Blacks in rugby, the New York Yankees, Barcelona's soccer team. I was looking for the SN football club, but I couldn't find them.
Now, once the most successful teams were identified, Walker started looking for the success formula. What is it that they all had that made them a tier one team? And he looked at all kinds of things like the presence of a superstar in the team, the amount of overall talent, the amount of financial resources, a great coach. None of these things were what linked these teams together. But there was one factor, one thing, and all these teams had it. And that's what made them a tier one team. And that one factor was the team captain.
The team captain, his or her disposition, attitude, and qualities on the field is crucial. Today we are looking at the qualities of our own captains, our leaders in our church, following Christ through our commemoration of St. Andrew, the first called, the first to put his hand up for the team, so to speak, and also through looking at what St. Paul says life is like as an apostle.
We begin with St. Andrew. When we look at his life, we see that he plays a crucial role in presenting people to Christ: his brother Simon Peter, the boy with the loaves and fishes, the inquiring Greeks who seek after Jesus as recorded in John 12. He even prophetically prays over the regions of Kiev and Baantium before they were the great Christian cities they would become. As we'll hear about in the synaxarion today, he even presents these whole geographical regions to Christ.
He introduces them and then he himself gets out of the way. He disappears. We don't actually hear much from him even though he is the first called, unlike his more famous brother Simon Peter and some of the other disciples like James and John. He displays this quality that we see in many of our leaders of selflessness. And this self-effacing element is a feature of Christian progress. We see it in the very persons of the Holy Trinity.
The son does the will of the Father and reveals the Father. The Father begets the Son and sends him. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and makes the Son known. This intimate selflessness is presented to us in the very icon of the Trinity also known as the hospitality of Abraham due to the presence of three angels that visit him. This icon is not meant to be a literal depiction of the Holy Trinity, but let's call it our closest approximation of what we could depict.
What we see in this icon is that each of these angels is looking at one another. It shows that they are totally captivated by fulfilling what another wants. The bodies of the two angels on the side make a chalice shape. So the central angel, who represents Christ, we see him depicted in this chalice-like shape and it gives a eucharistic image to the icon. It shows that all the persons of the Holy Trinity don't have their own individual will but have one united will. This attitude of losing one's self-will and one's self-aggrandizement features in all the saints.
They all in some way replicate St. John the Baptist's words that he must increase but I must decrease. This downward path is in fact shared by all the apostles. Here we turn to the epistle where we see them display this kind of descent, the descent of the self and denial of the self to the point that they even share in Christ's complete detachment from the things of this world. They have become, as St. Paul says, a spectacle to the world, the refugees or what he means is the rubbish of the world.
They are poorly dressed. He says they are homeless. They are rejected. They are attacked. In living lives like this, they truly live the kind of life that Jesus lived on this earth. He said, "Birds have nests, foxes have dens, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." The apostles are those who come closest to Christ in his sufferings. We see this paradox that the closer one gets to persecution, to suffering, and rejection, the closer one has approximated Christ.
This was almost an offense to the Corinthians who were wealthy. They were honored and respectable. Someone like St. Paul comes along with this life of persecution, suffering, and they are scandalized by him. This apostolic fervor or image is kept alive today in many of our saints. We think of the 20th-century saint St. John Maximovic and Father Gabriel Allen Boyd writes of him this. He says that even as Archbishop of San Francisco, he lived in almost absolute poverty. His appearance caught everyone off guard. His clergy cassock was made of blue Chinese so-called peasant cloth. It was a favorite of his because it was a gift from the orphans who had been in his care in Shanghai, crudely decorated with crosses that they had hand-stitched for him. His bishop's miter was often a cloth cap to which he had glued paper icons. Even in the United States, although serving the divine liturgy every day, he still went barefoot no matter what season it was. Eventually, after he was hospitalized with an infected foot, his metropolitan ordered him to begin wearing shoes. So, from that day on, he took up wearing sandals.
Thus, he was an embarrassment to those who thought a bishop needed to have a more dignified appearance. Nevertheless, among the people from his flock who truly knew him throughout the world, there were always those who recognized that even while he was still living, he was a spiritual hero, a shining exemplar of God's self-sacrificial love, an apostle. He really embodies what we see in these early captains of our faith. We see that this mantle of the apostle is something that can still be continued by the saints. They share in the holy scandal of Christ not as showing off or as some kind of virtue signaling but all for the people in their care. In a similar letter that St. Paul is going to write to the Corinthians again in his second one, he says these things. He says, "We are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. We always carry about in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." And he says, "All this is for your benefit." He says to the Corinthians, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. So these leaders live in such a fashion, not to fulfill some kind of egotistical agenda, but that the life of Christ can be manifested in their flock.
Now, let's bring it back to us. We are not tasked with being great apostles who will travel the world to preach Christ and be crucified like St. Andrew was. But we can all participate in this humble path of going down, of denying the self. St. Paul tells us in the epistle today, be imitators of me. He says, "Copy me to a certain extent." We can all in some way share in this life that lives for others. Are you a leader in some way of a team? Perhaps you are a husband in a marriage. Perhaps you are a parent in a family, a leader at school or at work. Or maybe you are just a leader by the fact that you share in the priesthood of all believers as a Christian and thus you are a representative of Christ. What kind of captain are you?
How much do you think of your own will, your own agenda, your own needs and desires first? A captain on a sports team who was like that wouldn't last very long. Or how much do you instead consider that of other people? One of the qualities of team captains that Sam Walker found out that stood out was a willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. Are these the kind of tasks that you do around the house, around the workplace, in your own circles?
Let's remind ourselves that St. Sophonia of Essex tells us that our hierarchical structure in our church is an inverted pyramid. It’s not a pyramid the normal way around with the head person at the top and everyone existing to serve him or her but rather an inverted one with Christ at the bottom holding up the whole structure. Then those who would join him, his apostles, his friends, the leaders of the church are joining him in holding up all of the people. That needs to be our guiding model or metaphor for any leadership.
Something else we can do is we can welcome any shameful humiliations that come our way because this is a good way to help us descend. We note that the apostles shared in the scorn and the shame of the cross and this led to their glory. Father Zachchariah of Essex says that when we experience shame for Christ, we enter into his wavelength. He who endured shame for us. He gives the example of Zakius. Zakius who did this shameful act of climbing up this tree and he invited the scorn and the ridicule of all the people around him. But this act of moving toward Christ despite the shame attracted Christ's attention.
He says it's particularly powerful when we experience shame in the sacrament of confession. He says the deeper the shame we feel in the sacrament, the greater the power and the grace we will receive for the regeneration of our life. Each time we disclose our thought with simplicity and trust to a priest, a small regeneration of our soul takes place. The illumination of the soul by grace imparts the courage needed to make the leap of confession. We admit our failure and the priest then helps us see the target from which we have deviated, restoring us to the path of repentance that leads to life. Our heart is humbled which attracts God's healing grace still more.
A final thing we can do in this downward path is to follow the words of St. Basil the Great to make voluntary that which is involuntary.
The apostles use the involuntary things that happened to them, beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, persecution, slander, even their very deaths as a way to draw closer to Christ as if they had chosen these things as if they were voluntary. It comes down to this attitude that our captains had. So we as a body are like a winning team because we have a great captain in Jesus Christ and his apostles are leaders who follow in his steps and are just like him, and we who bear his name need to continually shape ourselves to also tread this path. So may we follow the footsteps of St. Andrew and the apostles and live lives of self-denial, putting ourselves lower, welcoming humiliation and welcoming involuntary suffering so that others might live and know Christ. May it be so for us in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
