“As Jesus went ashore,
he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them, because they were like
sheep without a shepherd.”
I am grateful this
morning for two posts on the Episcopal
Café blog site, one by David Sellery and the other by Andrew Gerns. Both are priests in our church and their
writings led me down several very fruitful paths of reflection on today’s gospel
reading.
Sellery ponders the nature
of crowds. Way back in 1841, Charles
McKay wrote an influential book titled The Madness of Crowds in which he
famously stated, “[People], it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen
that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one
by one.” He blamed a crowd mentality on everything from financial bubbles to
witch-hunts to the popular style of men’s beards. Surely McKay was thinking about Beanie Babies
when he wrote:
“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object,
and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught
by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
McKay’s writings inspired other thinkers.
In his 1886 book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche observed that “insanity in individuals is something
rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” He, of course, provided the philosophical
underpinning for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was even more descriptive:
“Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence,
and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to
tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”
Apparently he had
just finished shopping at Suffolk’s Wal-Mart.
Given this mindset,
we might expect that a sermon preached on today’s text a hundred and fifty
years ago might emphasize how Jesus drew particular individuals out of the
crowd, empowered them to be disciples, and basically dismissed the rest as a
mob possessing heighten needs and unrealistic expectations, but having little
or no value. But this is not at all how
Jesus treats the crowd in today’s reading, is it. He has compassion for them. He teaches them. He touches them. He heals them. In short, he is a shepherd to them. He values the crowd.
Francis Galton didn’t
subscribe to this approach at first, but he came around. In 1906 the British mathematician visited a
local country fair where he observed a competition to judge the cut and dressed
weight of fattened ox. Over 800 people
placed a wager. Galton recognized that most
were not experts and had no real insight on the matter. Surely their wagers would be all over the
map. Galton saw this as a test of democracy. He later wrote, “The average competitor was
probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the
ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on
which he votes.” What was the average
person capable of doing? For most, very
little. What could a group of
individuals produce? Not much, according
to the prevailing thinking at the time.
After the competition
was over and the prizes were given out, Galton secured all the tickets from the
organizers and ran a series of statistical tests. Sure, he reasoned, some intelligent wagers
would come close to guessing the actual weight, but the presence of all the
uniformed people had to skew the results.
Therefore he reasoned and the average of the guesses would be way off
the mark. Imagine Galton’s surprise when
he discovered that the crowd’s average guess was 1,197 pounds, while the actual
weight was 1,198 pounds. Not one single
individual wagered a guess closer to the actual weight than the collective
wager produced by the whole! This led
Galton to conclude that crowds can have astonishing collective intelligence
that far exceeds the cognitive capacity of individuals.
In 2004, wanting to set the
record straight, James Surowieki published a book to challenge McKay’s now
ancient work. He gave it the title The Wisdom of Crowds: Why
the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business,
Economies, Societies and Nations. In it he argues that
groups often are able to make better decisions collectively than a single
individual member is capable of doing.
Do you remember Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire? When phoning a friend,
the correct answer was indentified 65% of the time. In comparison, polling the audience produced
the correct answer 98% of the time.
According to Surowieki, three conditions are necessary for a group to be
intelligent: diversity, independence, and decentralization. The best decisions, he says, are the product
of disagreement and contest rather than compromise and consensus building. This is an
especially hard truth for faith communities such as ours because we value so
highly ‘getting along’ with one another and we don’t want to risk hurt feelings
by having actual differences of opinion on substantive matters. Surowieki highlights another challenge we
face:
“Groups that are too much
alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and
less new information to the table. Homogeneous
groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less
able to investigate alternatives.”
What we learn from all
of this is the crowd has value. It needs
to be respected by its leader and nurtured.
And Andrew Gerns’ blog about generous leadership gives real insight into
what this looks like. Generosity, he
says, is about more than money. It is “a spiritual quality
that trusts that God has given us the people we need, in the situation we have
to do God’s work.” It is a style of
leadership, he says, that “both calls out and relies upon the vision of the
people of God in community.”
What are the qualities of a generous leader? Based on the writing of Tim Stephens, Gerns’
identifies the following; and as you listen, think how each might apply to
Jesus and the leadership style he employs in his ministry with us:
·
Generous
leaders want their people to succeed.
·
They
are not competitive with their team.
·
The
have an open-door policy and are generous with their time.
·
Generous
leaders would rather err on the side of grace than be just or strict with
policies.
·
They
have an open hand.
·
They
freely share what they are learning.
·
They
love to give away credit to others even when they could rightly keep it for
themselves.
·
Generous
leaders care about their team. They know
about each team member’s goals and dreams, and diligently try to help them
fulfill those desires.
The opposite of a generous leader is a selfish leader and it looks
like this:
·
They keep the credit for themselves.
·
They circle all conversations back to themselves.
·
They hide competitive advantages from the team.
·
They are always looking to determine blame for
mistakes (“Whose fault was this?” rather than “We made a mistake, let’s learn
from it and keep going.”)
I am sure you have plenty of experience with both kinds of
leaders. I have and you don’t need to
phone a friend to figure out which I preferred.
In a 2002 article titled Love is the Killer App, Tim Saunders
makes this startling statement:
The
most powerful force in business isn’t greed, fear, or even the raw energy of
unbridled competition. The most powerful
force in business is love. It’s what
will help your company grow and become stronger. It’s what will propel your career forward. It’s what will give you a sense of meaning and
satisfaction in your work, which will help you do your best work.
Saunders says there are
two reasons why leaders who love will succeed more than those who do not. First, he says, there is an abundance of
choice in today’s market. “Choice,” he says, “spells doom for villains. At a time when more of us have more options
than ever, there’s no need to put up with a product or service that doesn’t
deliver, a company that we don’t like, or a boss whom we don’t respect.” The second reason he identifies is that you
can no longer keep secret your inferior product, snotty company mindset, or
boorish individual behavior. Modern day
communication means information is out there everywhere and people are acting more
and more on what they know and learn from others. They will not support what they do not
respect.
In this morning’s gospel
reading we find Jesus valuing the crowds that come to him, even at a time when
he is seeking solitude and rest. His
life is dedicated to helping others succeed, to forming teams and communities
that care for one another, to extend grace rather than shore up hard line rules
and regulations, to give freely, to teach openly, to credit others when credit
is do (think of how often he praises a person for his or her faith, openness, or
generosity), and to empower disciples to carry on his work. He is not a tyrant who capitalizes on a mob
mentality to in order to manipulate others for his own benefit. Rather, he gives of himself so that others
might be healed and whole and able to give themselves to others in kind.
Milton Mayeroff, in his
book On Caring, wrote that love “is the selfless promotion of the growth of the
others.” Isn’t this a description of how
Jesus loves us! Isn’t it a description
of the love we have for a spouse, for our children, for our grandchildren, and
for our aging parents! Isn’t it the kind
of love we seek to bring to this place and to our community! May Christ who embodies this love give us
grace and power to live it.
