1

Good Shepherd Sunday: Jesus the Good CEO When you picture Jesus, can you picture him like this?

The Good Shepherd. It is really easy to do so, isn’t it? But could you picture Jesus as a CEO?

I am not sure I can, and I am not sure if that is a good thing or not, which made writing this sermon a rather hard thing to do. Let me begin with a personal story. Hong Kong is a wonderful crazy place to live: most of the churches have $ signs atop of them; the big banks were run by big CEOs. I did not get to know too many of the really big people when I was there. I knew just a few and I have to say I was often struck by their ordinariness and their love of working. But in the lives of most of us in Hong Kong the big CEO was a figure of importance, a figure of our imaginings and our conversations. Mr Li Ka-Shing the chairman of the massive Hutchison Wampoa Group, the richest man in Asia, had his headquarters right next to St John’s Cathedral in a shiny silver tower. Many of the people who came along to the Cathedral were not familiar with Anglicanism and although the way we did things clearly was attractive to them, we were not very good at explaining ourselves. We had a Dean, a sub-Dean (me) and multiple chaplains, Officers (like our Wardens) lay canons, and a cathedral council. Frankly the structure was baffling for many in the congregation.

2

I remember once in a meeting the treasurer let out a little gasp and said, I now understand it, the Dean is the CEO. You are the CEO, he said with a grin to the Dean, and all the clergy and quite a few others, winced. It might seem obvious to you, or simply strange, but calling the Dean the CEO had seemed like a category error for the clergy and yet for others there it was a straightforward and manifestly true statement. The treasurer’s insight should not come as a huge surprise; corporations and churches have similarities. Many businesses have mission statements and some folk in Hong Kong were surprised that the Church had a mission statement too. This is from Luke 4 :18-19:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, ‘to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

The idea that the Dean could be the CEO of the Cathedral was not an original thought. Back in the mid 1990s apparently one of the more popular business books was the best seller “Jesus CEO.” So on this Sunday, what is sometimes called “Good Shepherd Sunday,” should we forget the image of Jesus with the staff/crook and flock of sheep. Should we instead picture Jesus in Melbourne coming out of a high rise office with his Armani suit and iPhone and personal secretary. Could this be your image of Jesus? If not why not?

Rev. Gordon has for the last few weeks been preaching and using the PowerPoint to explore the idea of seeing Jesus. But if we just expect to see a man with some sheep and an impossibly white nightshirt are we not very much limiting our view of Jesus? What about Jesus the CEO?

3

Jesus the Shepherd or Jesus the CEO is about the idea of leadership, of course. Yet also the idea of Jesus as CEO is also about how much the modern world around us informs or shapes our faith. If we see everything through the lenses of the world, with a Dean or Bishop being a CEO and Registrar or Treasurer being the CFO we might end up seeing the church as purely a business, which it is not. We might also tend to project all the successes and failings on the leader, or the CEO. That is how we operate in the modern world. Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who knows the expectations of the world) preaching at Easter. He said. Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation. They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means (that) pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve. But back to Jesus as the CEO or even the idea that a Dean could be seen as CEO. There is something else amiss here. If we are to look at the Gospel text today and also in other Gospel texts we see Jesus refers to himself as shepherd. When he is doing this, he is not comparing shepherds with other kinds of leaders. Jesus was not saying I am the good shepherd as opposed to I am the good fisherman or I am the good carpenter. He was not selecting shepherds over other occupations. No! He was comparing himself to bad shepherds or hired hands. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. John 10.12 In the Bible there are numerous verses that look at what bad shepherds do. Ezekiel 34: 6, ‘my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock’; or Jeremiah 50:6, ‘My people have been lost sheep; their shepherds have led them astray and caused them to roam on the mountains. They wandered over mountain and hill and forgot their own resting place.’ This is what Jesus is expecting us to compare himself with when he talks of himself as the good Shepherd. If you were to write a book called Jesus CEO, you could have better titled it Jesus the good CEO. It would have least got us thinking about bad CEOs. By the way, Jesus CEO was written in 1996, pre ENRON, pre AIG scandal, the Northern Rock or HBOS, Credit Crunch, Lehman brothers, gosh the list goes on. Goldman Sachs. That might be cause for a wry smile. Yet on a Sunday when we think about the Church and our shepherds we might comfortably think of the good; good Bishops, good priests our Good Shepherd. But what of the bad? That is not so easy to think about, not so comforting. But in a sense, that is what you are invited to do on this Sunday when you think of the Good Shepherd. Jesus is the good shepherd as opposed to the bad shepherds, the hired hands.

4

I am not sure that we should term Bishops, or Deans as CEOs. The Church has been around a lot longer than many, if not all businesses and corporations. Our models and structures can and do work. I think the term Bishop is a good one, the term Dean is rather pleasant and inclusive. But I urge you to pray that your priests, your Dean and your Bishop work for the good and model themselves on the one good shepherd. It is his voice that we need to listen to. Amen Dean John St Paul’s Cathedral Bendigo 21st April 2013