Sermon for the 11 th Sunday after Trinity – August 3, 2008
“ I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed. ”
YOU MOUNT the step. You arrange your papers, adjust your light, get glasses on the bridge of your nose, clear your throat, get a glance out at the faces, make a cross and open your mouth. What comes out? What is this speech good for? Why come and listen to a preacher? What does he know that we don't?
Back when I was attending college, there was a middle-aged, skinny man with a high domed balding head covered with freckles from being out in the sunshine all day. He carried a big ragged Bible; wore clothes of a country boy. He made it his daily witness to stand on the steps of Sproul Hall for hours to preach at the hippies and socialists and debutantes and black panthers, the new drug culture emerging in Berkeley. He shouted that they were sinners. He smiled, grimaced, accused, quoted Scripture, and generally enjoyed himself. He always drew a crowd, but the crowd saw him as entertainment, a bear-baiting crowd it was, looking to knock him off his intended rant for the day. They called him Holy Hubert , and treated him and his message as a joke. If somebody got saved that way, I never heard. For Hubert, it was apparently worth it. For one thing, it made him strong facing a mob of Berkeley freaks with the message of Jesus.
Preaching is hard work, but so is listening. We're not used to sitting attentive to speeches. We listen to the news that sums up the State of the Union address rather than sit through the whole hour-long oratory. We don't live in an oratory culture, rather a sit-com culture. Some of us really can't follow with our minds: it takes a kind of discipline to track what someone is telling us.
One can hear many kinds and styles of preaching. There is the rant, like my friend Hubert. There is the “three points and a poem” technique popular years ago. There is straight Bible exegesis—a verse by verse study, with applications. There is great vocal and emotional work, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his “I have a dream…” (I wish I could preach like that.) There is responsive preaching, where the sermon calls for Amens and Halleluiahs , or even repeating the key word, everybody say, “Key Word.” (That's manipulative: I don't do that.) There are sermons that try to please everybody, and there are sermons that seek to offend. There is “come to Jesus” preaching, straight evangelism, looking for conversions by the end of the hour. Some shout, some use sound systems, some pace back and forth, some shake that big ragged Bible in the air. In all these ways and means, there is or should be one purpose, one cause served.
While in Alabama I heard about a minister who feared to deliver his first sermon: he was truly rattled as he mounted the pulpit to face all those expectant people. He had worked hard on his message and this was his moment of truth. But as he looked down on the book rest where he placed his notes, he read a small brass inscription: “Sir, we would see Jesus.” From that moment he knew why he was there. Preaching is revealing God; it portrays the presence of Christ. It is bringing the living Word through the written Word by means of the spoken word. It is one way we come to know Christ in His Church. It is one way that He used himself.
Preaching is an art form, as is hymnody, liturgy, and architecture—all of which we have here and use to impart a sense of God's loving presence, awesome power, and life-changing truths. A professional preacher may give the message, as is common in churches, but in some parts of the globe it is done by lay preachers in house churches, people on street corners, mothers to their families, professors to college classes.
But the objection comes: “Don't you preach at me.” People feel offended that you take a superior position to them and deign to instruct them, especially using God as your authority. Who the heck are you to invoke God against your fellow man? The fear of offending makes us shy of ever opening our mouths for God. That fear must be overcome. We have a preaching God who speaks to and through people. Our lives are testimonies of what God has done, and a personal story is better by far than some didactic treatise on theology for the purpose of bringing a soul to God. Something happens when we speak for God: we are filled with God in doing so. It's good for us , and for our faith. People we meet feel isolated, ignored, uncared for, unspoken to and so a word well spoken in love can be much more welcome than we may expect. St. Paul said, “How will they hear without someone preaching to them?” and he was right. Romans 10:14
Listening to sermons for a minister is sometimes hard. We know what the preacher is doing. I've caught preachers in lies, intentional misstatements of fact. I've caught many Bible misquotations, and many more leaps of illogical logic. But an honest, heart-felt message that starts with God's Word, ends with God's Word and has a lot of His Word within it, you can hardly fault. It has power on its own, and this is the point of preaching.
We don't preach our own sermon. That takes a lot of effort, results from hours of study, notes, editing, practicing, critiquing, rewriting and technique. That usually results in sermons that all sounds the same because they are all the same guy on his hobby horse, doing the same thing again and again and expecting better results. I know very good preachers who spend days preparing, but I have never been able to do that. From the first, I had no such time to prepare, and since the Holy Spirit had gotten me into this I felt certain He could produce through me a message from Him—better than any I could have devised—and give it to me in a short time, ready to deliver. Since I started, 27 years ago, my sermon preparation time has always been about 2 hours or less. I have a title come to me from the readings, so I can put that in the newspaper on Wednesday. I prepare a sermon page on my computer Saturday evening with the Prayer Book lessons and some selected scripture I find on the word or phrase that I've been given to preach on. I go to bed, set my alarm for 4:30, rise and at 5 a.m. I sit down and type. It's always been right there.
What I'm telling you is not how superior I am. I'm not. I'm lousy. If you heard a sermon by me , you'd hate it. So would I. This is a cooperation between God and man where He works with us and leads us and gives us what we need through what we ourselves do through Him. It's always been incarnational, like the Bible, like the Church—man and God together, doing what is pleasing to Him. And that is why you could do this just as well or better than I.
Preaching doesn't always take the form of speaking. St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, in all circumstances, and only if necessary use words.” Our lives are sermons woven out of chance meetings, fears and retreats, conflict and resolution, peacemaking and forgiveness and loving. When we know how this fit the pattern of Jesus' life, we may add a word or two of how we feel about His example, His sacrifice, His gift of life to us, His heaven awaiting us.
How are we to listen to sermons? I had a gentleman attending my first church in Woodland who would participate in the Morning Prayer service I led, and right after announcements and the sermon hymn, he would immediately go to sleep. His snores were quiet, but his wife would jab him out of embarrassment. I never took it personally. Sermons were nap time for him. I don't recommend that to you.
It is hard work listening, for the pleasant sound of my voice might lull you into other thoughts. Thoughts are always lurking there to take away your attention. A sermon will always lead you where your own thoughts were not going, so you have to be more of a train than a car. You have to stay on the tracks, and the preacher supplies those. You can't turn where you want. You must stay on track. That requires trust. It's why preachers try to be entertaining, because you might stay with them longer, waiting for a punch line or a clever ending. For a couple of years, I walked in the aisle in order to shake you out of the easy lull in seeing me way up here prattling away.
What we should expect when listening to preaching is for God to speak to us personally. It may not be the words of the preacher, or the conscious intent of his message, but God uses such moments to show Himself. If we attend the message, take in the meaning, remember the points being made, and open our hearts to God's whisper in our spiritual ears, we are always able to bring something home to our benefit. No one ever went to hear Jesus preach who could honestly say, “Well, that wasn't worth the walk.”
It was the week after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and Jesus was about to arrange His Last Supper. “There were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship at the feast: these therefore came to Philip, who was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus… and they tell Jesus. Jesus answereth, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified… If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be… Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. There came therefore a voice out of heaven, saying , I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. The multitude said that it had thundered: others said, An angel hath spoken to him. Jesus said, This voice hath not come for my sake, but for your sakes. Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.” John 12:20-32 Sir, we would see Jesus . They thought a nice speech from him would make their day, and instead they got God's voice out of heaven and Christ's anguish before His Passion.
When we would see Jesus, it is the preacher's bound duty to give Him to us. St. Paul got little respect from the original Apostles until he had gone to the ends of the earth with such remarkable success in delivering the Gospel and planting churches everywhere. His message was always the Gospel, the good news of what Jesus had done in His life, death and resurrection. When we get too far from the Cross and talk psychology, politics , or—God forbid— religion , we lose the thread and are only preaching for ourselves. Sir, we would see Jesus . If I ever do this right, that is all I will ever do. PFH+