A Weary Wednesday

Wednesday morning I woke up extremely tired. This weariness persisted through my morning walk, breakfast, shower and commute. It was not because my sleep had been cut short, interrupted or otherwise disturbed, nor even because the day before had been particularly strenuous or exhausting. Intuitively, I knew that this weariness was closely related to the section of study material I had browsed through late Tuesday night before heading for bed.

For a moment I thought about quickly blogging about being so tired, but there really was no time, let alone clarity of thought. I was quickly engaged in several hours of meetings, and was therefore too busy to be tired or reflective.

Not long after emerging from the meetings, and starting to look over the other things on my plate, our practice leader stepped into my office. He had a message he had to deliver to me, as well as to the rest of our practice, concerning deadlines for reporting "sales credits" for entry into the new sales tracking database. It was clear that this was a message he did not personally believe in, but felt obliged to deliver. It was not a message I cared to receive either, and as I got my assistant to pull out the details on what was supposed to go into this reporting, I felt the same sort of tiredness descend upon me.

Although it has been highly profitable and has grown considerably over the years, Mercer has never been a sales focused organization. The current generation of management seems determined to change that, however. The slogans, messages and admonitions about RevenueGrowth@Mercer are everywhere. The pressure to grow the business faster has also been increased in the face of losses incurred recently by sister companies — entities that have long had a much more sales oriented culture than Mercer. The supreme irony, however, is that the losses incurred by our sister companies are fairly closely related to some questionable business practices that had developed precisely in response to a sales mentality gone too far. All strictly without permission or encouragement, of course, since the firm values "integrity above all".

Talk about dissonance between values and behaviour.

Dissonance between values and behaviour was the subject of the study material I was looking over Tuesday night, and more closely this morning. The surface message was that we need to work at eliminating such dissonance from our lives if we are to truly emerge as effective Christian leaders. So far, no disagreement.

The problem for me is that I keep running face first into any number of sources of dissonance between values and behaviour right within the Christian community. Right within this leadership study. Even right within this chapter on aligning values and behaviour.

One source of dissonance that emerged early, and has persisted throughout the study has to do with the use of scripture. We say that as Christians we value the Word of God, and want to be formed by it in all that we are and do, particularly as leaders. And yet, we rarely allow the scripture room to speak on its own terms. Instead we come to it with the issues already pre-defined, expecting it to speak to our issues on our terms, and using it as the authority for our own prognostications. We've been doing this so long in our Christian sub-culture that we can't even see that this is what we are doing, even when we talk about being formed by scripture.

In large measure, I think this is what happened to the Pharisees in Jesus' day. They had already defined the issue of right living before God in terms of obedience to the regulations of Torah, and were determined live scrupulously by them — not like their forefathers whose sin had led to exile, from which the people had never fully returned; at least not in the way prophesied by the prophets.

What they could not see was that their very scrupulosity was laying on their poor brothers burdens that were as egregious as the exploitation of the poor that their forefathers had practiced — which exploitation was what the prophets had repeatedly warned was going to end up in God's judgement of exile. Ironically, the Pharisees' very practice of righteousness was their sin. And they couldn't see it; the light within them had become darkness and so they majored in minors and missed what was of major importance — compassion and restorative justice.

In the same way, I think the exercises in our current study chapter come close, but ultimately miss the point. Much is made of Jesus rebuke to the Pharisees about cleaning the outside of the bowl while the inside is full of greed and wickedness, and of the need to look deeply at the interior of our lives. Much is made of the need to avoid pretense, by ensuring that it is the inner reality of our lives that receives our attention, not just the whitewashing on the exterior. Much is made of the fact that what we truly value is not what we say we value, or think we ought to value, but what actually drives our actions. Yet in the end, the exercise aims to:

• discern leadership values in scripture — that is, figure out what our values "ought to be";
• articulate a statement of personal values — that is, figure out what scripture, relationships and experience suggests we would want as our values;
• align our behaviours with what our "stated" values say they ought to be, by making behavioural goals — that is, use effort to make the exterior look like what we think it should look like

Just how does this differ from what the Pharisees were all about?

It seems to me that Jesus' rebuke is all about seeing clearly; looking clearly and accurately at what we really value; letting the light shine in on the darkness and allowing the darkness to be replaced by the light. The whole call to metanoia is about changing how we see the world, how we see reality, how we see ourselves — or rather letting the good news transform the way we see. Then what we see will change us.

Lord, open our eyes, that we may see You and be changed. Amen