July 15, 2007
Text:
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Near Enough to Taste
In his insightful book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald
Heifetz, who directs the Leadership Education Project at Harvard University, compares
the art of leadership to cooking with a pressure cooker. “The cook regulates the pressure of the
holding environment by turning the heat up or down, while the relief valve lets
off steam to keep the pressure within a safe limit. If the pressure goes beyond the carrying
capacity of the vessel, the pressure cooker can blow up. On the other hand, with no heat nothing
cooks.” [1]
Maintaining the right
motivational temperature, then, becomes the adaptive leader’s critical
job: hot enough to mobilize, but not so
hot that it overwhelms.
Moses
had tried for 40 years to regulate that pressure cooker as he led the
Israelites out of Egyptian slavery, across a challenging wilderness, to within
swimming distance of the Promised Land. There
had certainly been times along the way when things had boiled over and even melted
down, but overall he had masterfully accomplished his charge. And now, at the end of his life, he had one
more speech to give – one last bit of hand-holding to contribute; one last
temperature regulation to perform. I
don’t know what the people around him might have been feeling as they settled
down on the near side of the river.
Perhaps they were electric with anticipation at nearing the journey’s
end, unable to contain their adrenalin.
Or perhaps, as I am more persuaded to believe, they were succumbing to a
fresh round of fatigue-fed apprehension, spiritual paralysis and fear. Perhaps even now there were those among them
who recommended a backward journey, back into the miserable but at least
familiar embrace of Egypt. Perhaps there
were those among them who argued that, while they had been lucky enough thus
far, there was no way their luck would continue; no way they were going to
succeed on the far side of the river.
Perhaps
that’s how it was, then, when Moses once more rose on weary legs and looked out
through aging eyes to address his gathered people. “Don’t be distracted by those voices around
you – or within you – who try to convince you that ‘God’ is dangerous delusion
or, alternately, that faithfulness and obedience are noble but impossible
aspirations.
... the Lord
will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering
your ancestors, when you obey the Lord your God by
observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the
law, because you turn to the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul.
And surely this commandment is not too hard for
you, nor is it too far away. In fact it is very near to you; it is in your
mouth and in your heart for you to observe. It is close enough to taste.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t the last time Moses
would need to give that speech. Centuries after this clarifying moment, the
people of Israel made their way back from a different kind of exile, through an
altogether different – but in some ways altogether similar – wilderness. Returning this time from Babylon and a
lifetime of exile, approaching a broken Jerusalem and a crumbled Temple,
despair was once again a tempting disposition.
According to scholars, that’s the occasion when
this story of Moses was actually remembered and retold. Looking back in their story, some astute
preacher recognized how much this new defining moment had in common with that
old one. Digging down, then, into their
corporate biography, he drew out forgotten inspiration to meet the present day.
Once again, the future looked dauntingly fearful
and steep. “Are we up to the challenge?”
they must have wondered with each other.
“Do we have the will, let alone the strength to make it through this
murkiness and start all over again?”
“And are we in this thing alone?
Is God here with us, and offering us anything we can even grasp?”
Moses at the river. The Israelites returning from exile. Both decisive, gut-checking intersections
that, where I grew up, would have been called “Come to Jesus moments” where circumstance, purpose and spiritual
constitution all intersect in a defining, decisive demand. It is a clarifying time of coming to terms
with who you are, what you want, and what you are willing to do – that, together
with what needs to be done. It’s when
what “is” looks into the eyes of “what needs to be” and swallows hard.
I wonder if that’s the wilderness in which many of
us are standing, staring into the fathoms of the river that separate us from where
we want to be?
Fear, for example, plays
an increasingly heavy-handed role in our everyday affairs. Ideologies and religious sensibilities that
once coexisted in relative and passive indifference have now hardened and
sharpened into lethal weapons. Terrorist
bombings – or at least the plotting of them – have come to seem almost
commonplace, and now everyday activities are blocked by interrupting
precautions. It is easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a traveler to board a
plane. Our internet activities and cell
phone activities are tracked and recorded.
Security precautions and investigations have bent even the simplest
routines, and we feel divided between the prudent scramble to keep ourselves
protected and safe, and the defiant refusal to sacrifice our constitutional
liberties. Do we give up our freedoms in
order to protect them? We are daunted,
conflicted and afraid, and we don’t know what to do.
I heard this week that the
war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq is costing Americans $12 billion dollars a
month. Since that money doesn’t emerge
out of thin air, detractors of the war wonder aloud what the domestic
consequences that financial investment will ultimately be on such treasured
programs as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and the like? Supporters of the war respond with questions
of their own: like “what would happen if
we don’t spend this kind of money on the war effort?” Continuing the war seems unthinkable. Ending it seems untenable. We are daunted, conflicted and afraid, and we
don’t know what to do.
Environmentalists – and
even those who eschew such a label – are increasingly calling our attention to
the unsustainable lifestyle that we are fueling; unsustainable at least as far
the environment is concerned. To put it
bluntly and simply: the foods we eat are
not healthy – to us or to the land from which we extract them. The cars we drive and the fuel we use to
power them are going to strangle us. The
longer we insist on driving ourselves alone to every destination, in our
inefficient and polluting vehicles, the shorter will be the life span of the
world as we know it. We are eating,
manufacturing, drilling and driving ourselves to death – and taking down with
us everything that has the resources to sustain us – every bit like eating the
goose that lays the golden egg. But we
seem to have neither the personal nor the political will – nor perhaps even the
expertise – to change. It is all painful
and dizzyingly complex. We are daunted,
conflicted and afraid, and we don’t know what to do.
And what about the
immigration issue: that thorny dilemma that not only brings people into
conflict, but our guiding principles and instincts as well – economic savvy colliding
with moral probity; prejudice at war with hospitality; legal clarity strangled
by practical impossibility. We are
daunted, conflicted and afraid, and we don’t know what to do.
It is a difficult time. And so it is on our behalf, perhaps, no less
than that of the Israelites that Moses approaches the thermostat to once again adjust
the temperature. To those who are
feeling overwhelmed, despairing that we will ever get out of this hopeless mess
and find our way through, Moses has a cooling word. It isn’t a creamy, air-filled, PollyAnna-ish
kind of word that blindly promises sunshine and light. Things will not get better simply because things always get better. We have lived too much of life – seen too
much sobering news footage – and have long lost too much of our naiveté to
drink that Kool-Aid. It doesn’t just happen. But it is a cooling word. For those, says Moses, who turn to God with
all their heart and soul and mind and strength…
... the Lord
will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering
your ancestors...
And to those who hear the promise
and bow in resignation at the very idea of living up that high ideal, this
reassuring word:
…surely this commandment
is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. In fact it is very near to
you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. It is close
enough to taste.
It isn’t, after all, about
making scoring “100” on the test; it isn’t even about passing. It isn’t about stature, as though grace were
a Disneyland ride that you must be so tall to enter. And it isn’t about walking a straight and
narrow line, as though blessing were a sobriety test. It is about trusting that blessing and grace
are close enough to taste, holding tightly to the hand of the one who has led
you thus far, and relying on that hand to lovingly, joyfully guide you
home.
[1] Ronald A. Heifetz. Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994) p. 106