How Did We Get Here?
A group of teens in Texas are suffering under a heat wave. They can’t figure out how to fill their days and, in a fit of exasperation, they decide to drive more than an hour to the town of Abilene to get ice cream. Their car has no AC, so they open the windows, and by the time they get to Abilene they’re coated in dust. They buy their ice cream with the last of their cash and taste grit on it from the road.
They end up sticky and thirsty on their drive home, and on the road, they start to bicker, then argue. What a stupid idea this was! Driving 100 miles for ice cream because we were hot and bored? The teens then try to figure out who to blame for their misery, and they realize that no one is at-fault. They found themselves on the road to and from Abilene in the absence of a choice ever having been made. Because they were hot and bored, they fell into a set of circumstances they never would have chosen.
The Abilene Paradox is the rationale mediation consultant Stewart Levine cites when organizations question why agreements are important. I’ve been taking a class with Stewart all week at the Cape Cod Institute, and I’m learning a lot about how important it is to pause and formulate an agreement, rather than simply getting on the road to Abilene.
Stewart writes about collaboration and resolution, while most of us live in a world of ready, fire, aim. We brag about getting to work rather than wringing our hands about what work we ought to do, but then we end up doing the wrong work and finding ourselves in places we never meant to be.
Many Christian ministers will preach this coming Sunday on the Gospel lesson that surrounds the Feeding of the 5K. In Mark’s account of the ministry of Jesus, we read,
“[The disciples] went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As [Jesus] went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” (Mk 6:32–34)
Mark is not the first setting where the metaphor of sheep without a shepherd appears in the Bible. We first read it in the account of God telling Moses to lay hands on Joshua and appoint Joshua his successor in Numbers 27:15–17. Ezekiel’s prophesy includes a long-form warning against shady shepherds in Chapter 34, verses 1–31. Throughout holy scripture we read that people want to be led by those who are good and care about their well-being. In the absence of good and caring leaders, they’ll follow just about anybody if the only choice is between doing so and having no shepherd at all.
In my more optimistic moments over the past week of tumult surrounding the 2024 Presidential election, I’ve thought to myself that it’s actually kind of wonderful that everyone seems to care so deeply about who our next political leader will be. I had lunch today, after my class on the Cape, with an alum of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School and her wife who serves on our Advisory Council. They are making their way to the Outer Cape in their massive RV, and in the park where they stayed last night, they heard people blasting the RNC proceedings over a loudspeaker. Okay, that broadcast didn’t match their politics or mine, but isn’t it amazing that an RV park of vacationers was paying attention?
Jesus was patently opposed to demagoguery. I wrote last week, and will go to my grave, arguing that Jesus didn’t appoint an earthly successor. He didn’t want Peter to be the next leader of the church. Rather, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to do that work through each and every one of us. Peter had access to the Holy Spirit, but so do I, and so do you. Jesus sent the only shepherd we’ll ever need directly into our hearts. Then Jesus told us to pool the Spirit’s energy through life in community.
How did we get back to a place where we, in search of shepherds, pined for dictators to tell us what to think? I’m not sure, but I’m betting that Jesus’ disciples who actually really did think that Peter would be the chief cornerstone, Spirit Schmirit, were a lot like us. We’d rather think that a leader “Out There” was going to come save us than believe that we already have everything we need in our hearts — love, love, and more love — to save the world.
We ended up obsessed with who our next President will be the same way that bunch of teenagers found themselves with sticky, dusty hands on the way back from Abilene. We didn’t get here through conscious decision. We can, however, consciously decide that we are going to claim the leadership we have, by virtue of the Holy Spirit in us, and replace our doom-scrolling with energy exerted toward making our communities better, more just, and more loving places to be.
