Cussing Out Jim Collins in German

July 16, 2007 by djackson.

The daughter of a good friend spent some time in Germany recently.  Late one night in Salzburg a drunk staggered onto her bus.  The driver promptly eight-sixed the booze-hound but like the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable the man refused rejection.  Each time the driver turned to resume his seat, the wino would sneak back on board.  The exasperated conductor finally ejected the offender with extreme prejudice.  The inebriate’s backpack crashed to the sidewalk and spilled its contents across the pavement.  The victim gave vent to an earthy Saxon oath, the pneumatic doors hissed shut, and the bus disappeared in a fog of diesel smoke.

That little drama put me in mind of Jim Collins best-seller, Good to Great.  Collins undertook to discover why some companies become twenty-game winners in the big leagues while others muck about the minors, never rising higher than some AAA farm club.  His research leads to a metaphor:  your business is a bus with you at the wheel. 

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there.  No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.  They said, in essence, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus.  But I know this much:  If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

There you have it!  No drunks on the bus.  They smell.  They puke and urinate.  They sing off-key drinking songs and they pull the cord each time the vehicle passes a liquor store.  We’re making up this journey as we go, we’re trying to get to somewhere great, and we have no time for the ramblings of the chemically altered.  Bacchus and his backpack can literally hit the bricks.  We have better things to do.  Leave the snivelling lush and his pathetic belongings to diminish in the distance as we hammer down for the unknown glories of an unspecified Shangri La.

Calvin Miller posits a different image in his book The Empowered Leader:  he tells his readers to take the train.  He quotes his mother, who once told him as they watched freight cars thunder down the tracks, “Engineers only pull levers; the journey is up to the rails.”  Miller expands,

Great Christian leaders ride the rails of divine obedience.  They are responsible for levers.  They are responsible for the distance.  But they are not responsible for the direction.  Direction is God’s compass, given to those who lead.

“God is sovereign,” Miller asserts in the same passage, “and all of history is but the train for which God laid the rails in eternity past.” 

Such a view makes the conductor - not less important, but important in a different way.  No longer responsible for the destination, she can pay attention to the passengers.  Knowing the train runs on the right rails, she can be less concerned about bouncing the wrong people.  Drunks can share the destiny because they can’t derail the journey.

Jesus was not a Jim Collins kind of guy. 

Jesus rode the rails of the Calvary Express like Casey Jones pushing the 382 to a date with destiny on the southbound Cannonball route.  He said over and over, in various ways, that he simply followed the twin tracks of prophetic Scripture and his Father’s call.  He insisted that despite all appearances his train offered non-stop service straight through death to the throne of Heaven.  What looked like a crash at Calvary was in fact a break-through, and the empty tomb was a roundhouse where God reversed the direction of all human destiny. 

The bus-drivers of Jesus’ day disliked his approach.  They specifically objected to the passenger list.  Jesus loaded his carriages with half-pickled prostitutes and pocket-picking IRS agents.  The dining car echoed to the bellowed ballads of rowdy parties.  Al Quada jihadists and Roman GI’s found themselves sharing a seat.  Demoniacs with no self-control jostled religious officials who were all about control (and all about self), women busted into this man’s world with loosened hair and lavish offerings, and Jesus let the children blow the steam whistle.  And the Lord never once said anyone was the wrong sort.  People could always decide to get off, and sadly many did, but nobody went with the imprint of the Master’s sandle on the seat of his toga.  To the tipsy reject on the side of the track, weeping over the violated contents of his pathetic backpack, Jesus said, “Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece.” 

All that was a bit much for a bunch of sphincter-clinching theologians whose white-knuckled hands clutched the wheel at precisely ten and two.  They had to steer the switch-backs of imperial politics and negotiate the hairpin curves of an unpredictable populace.  They had no room for a would-be Messiah made drunk with delusions of grace.  They gunned him down in a drive-by and dumped the corpse in a convenient cave.  They roared into their self-directed future and never saw the cliff until their tires spun on empty air above the unavoidable abyss.

I think our calling as the church is to get the right people onto the train - and to remember that the right people are anybody who wants on board.  I think of that Teutonic tippler swearing impotent oaths to the Salzburg sky and it reminds me of a line from Dorothy Parker’s short story “Big Blonde.”  The central character spends her energies on the imposed duty of being happy because the shallow and selfish riders on her bus will brook no sorrow.  In her final abandonment, in her own drunken ejection to the unforgiving pavement, Parker writes that “she saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things.”  The bus fare has finally become more than her bankrupt soul can afford. 

To people like that, to all the alcoholics abandoned on mean streets and the big blondes whose sorrow no one wants to share, Jesus the conductor cries, “Come to me all ye that labor and are heavy laden - all weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things - and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and low of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

All aboard!

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