People are attracted to leaders who challenge them. People follow leaders who see in them the better person that they can become. People are loyal to leaders who are ethical and worthy of being followed.

Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/18_12_16.mp3

The Third Sunday of Advent – December 16, 2018

Welcome to the thirty-eighth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or on the right side of the page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend you think would benefit from By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It is my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace, and to trust that it is good for business. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we will reflect on the readings for the Third Sunday of Advent. This is Gaudete Sunday, the week when we light the pink candle in our Advent wreath. Gaudete means rejoice and, once again this week, our scripture readings have a theme of rejoicing. The Prophet Zephaniah says, “Shout for joy, daughter Zion! sing joyfully, Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, daughter Jerusalem! (Zep 3:14) The psalmist sings, “Cry out with joy and gladness,” (Is 12:2-6) and Paul writes to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!” (Phil 4:4)

And what is the reason for all this joy? Well, Christmas of course! Christmas, the celebration of the birth of our Savior—Emmanuel, “God with us.” And that is the second theme of the readings this week. We don’t need to wait until December 25^th to rejoice, God is with us now! As Zephaniah said, “The LORD, your God, is in your midst,” (Zep 3:17) and Isaiah proclaimed, “for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel!” (Is 12:6) and Paul wrote, “The Lord is near.” (Phil 4:5) Yet, in the Gospel from Luke, John the Baptist preached “one mightier than I is coming.” (Lk 3:16) He is and He also is to come.

So, we are reminded, in this season of Advent, of that which already is and that which is to come. I think this is important because sometimes we can get so bogged down with the challenges of our daily lives that we forget to step back to put things into perspective. We can become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of items on our task list we don’t know where to start. We can get stuck in the mire of the insignificant that the important passes us by. So, what should we do?

Good question! In fact, that is the question that was asked three times in this week’s Gospel. (Lk 3:10-18) The crowds, the tax collectors, and the soldiers all asked, “What should we do?” (Lk 3:12) These were ethical questions from people in a variety of professions. Each time, John the Baptist instructs them to do the right thing.

Notice what happened. He didn’t give them the easy answer. To the crowds, he said, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” (Lk 3:11) And, to the tax collectors, he instructed, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” (Lk 3:13) And to the soldiers, he demanded, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.” (Lk 3:14)

He didn’t lower the bar, to raise their self-esteem. He gave them the truth. He challenged them to be better and the people who heard him were attracted to him because of what he said, and they followed him. They were drawn to him because his message was compelling, and they knew it was good and right. They “were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ. (Lk 3:15)

There are important leadership lessons in this Gospel. People are attracted to leaders who challenge them. People follow leaders who see in them the better person that they can become. People are loyal to leaders who are ethical and worthy of being followed.

Whether they explicitly recognize it or not, all business leaders refer to standards for decision making. These standards are hierarchical, like rungs on a ladder. In some organizations, decisions are made from the bottom rung of the ladder. Leaders of these companies ask, “Is it legal?” The guiding question for companies that operate on the next higher rung is, “Is it ethical?” And from the top rung of the ladder, where values-based companies operate, the primary question is, “Does it honor our core values?”

I’ve mentioned before on this podcast that I interviewed dozens of CEOs who were successful because they were leaders who honored their core values during the process of writing my book, The Value of Core Values. One of these leaders was Mark Mazur, the burly president of MJM Electric, a family-owned and operated commercial electrical contractor. The company wires phosphate mines, breweries, powerhouses, and even nuclear power plants. It is some of the most difficult and dangerous electrical work there is, so safety and quality are their priorities.

MJM Electric had a problem with their employees cutting their fingers on the job so their safety committee recommended giving every employee a pair of cut-proof gloves. Now, there is no law requiring safety gloves. Hard hats are required by law on a job site, but not cut-proof safety gloves. These gloves are much better than leather gloves, but they also cost about ten times as much.

Knowing that his employees were continuously cutting their fingers, Mark Mazur believed that the ethical thing—the right thing—to do was to provide each employee with a pair of these safer, yet more expensive gloves.

The workers liked the new gloves so much they started using them all the time, even at home. They were wearing them out and losing them so fast that it was costing the company a lot of money. So, the question came up, how many pairs of these cut-proof gloves should the company provide each employee? They decided to give them as many pairs as they needed and not worry about whether they wore them out, lost them, or took them home. Mark Mazur said, “If we spend $20,000 a year on gloves and nobody cuts a finger it would be money well spent.”

If MJM had been operating from the bottom rung of the ladder, they wouldn’t have furnished gloves at all because they weren’t legally required to. If they had been operating from the middle rung, where ethics guide decisions, knowing their people were getting cut on the job, they might have supplied one pair of gloves. But because the company operates from the highest rung, where core values guide decision making, they did the right thing, in spite of the cost and supplied as many pairs as necessary.

As a result, MJM attracts the best electrical workers from the unionized labor pool. Mark Mazur knows that when his employees are happy and trust everything they do, they produce higher quality work. It’s that simple.

In business, hopefully, we aren’t stooping below the “is it legal” rung and making decisions based on what we can get away with, like lying, cheating and stealing like the tax collectors or the soldiers. Unfortunately, “Will we get caught?” is the standard some use. But we should note, although they may get away with it in the short term, ultimately, it catches up with them. Just look at the salespeople at Wells Fargo, Bernie Madoff, or more recently, President Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen.

Most of us would never consider breaking the law. Instead, it is the other types of ethical decisions, like MJM’s, that we face most of the time. If we are to glorify the Lord by our lives, we can’t just pass the legal hurdle and not doing something wrong, we need to ask ourselves are we doing what is right. In the Gospel, doing what is right meant giving your second coat to someone who has none. For MJM, it was giving a second, or third pair of gloves to the person who showed up to work without them. Potter Steward, a former Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, said, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”

So, what should we do? St. Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, doesn’t just speak to what we should do, but how we should do it when he wrote: “Your kindness should be known to all.” (Phil 4:5) St. Paul challenges us to go beyond what is legal and what is ethical, to the higher rung of what is kind.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of the snack company KIND, said, “One of the magical things about kindness is that it’s what we nerds call a ‘happiness aggregator.’ People confuse kindness with being nice, and they’re very different. You can be nice and be passive, but kindness requires action.”

So maybe it is time to step back from the enormity of items on our task list and ask ourselves, “How do I tackle all this and do it with kindness?” By spreading kindness, we may find the joy that is promised on this Gaudete Sunday. As St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”

When we are kind, it comes back to us like an echo repeating itself, and what more joyful than that?

Let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us work through our challenges with kindness this week so that we may spread the joy of the Lord, by our lives.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth.

May God bless you abundantly and may you glorify the Lord by your life.  Amen

Remember to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or the right side of this page and help us spread the word by forwarding to a friend, sharing on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Just click the icons at the top of this post. Also, check out the Resources page on our website where you can find links to the books and videos mentioned in By Your Life. And let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.