Sermon Proof

James Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (2007) has written an account of the pathos-filled life of John Newton as he made his grievous way from being a harsh slave-trader to being a fierce, popular evangelical preacher in England. Newton only very lately and reluctantly owned up to his former life as a slave trader. One statement from Newton, reported by Walvin, caught my attention as he wowed and wooed congregations with his preaching:

A large majority of our congregations are, I fear, sermon-proof—they come to the house of God, and return like a door upon the hinge (p. 77).

Newton’s statement got me to thinking about “sermon proof” church goers who may attend church, regularly or sporadically, but who allow no effective impact from a sermon. Likely there are many reasons that they may be sermon-proof:

-bored because they have heard it all before;

-being self-made and not receptive to any claim to the contrary;

-exhausted and in despair, too weary to listen;

-overextended, too rushed to slow enough to listen;

-distracted by cell phones and so lacking an attention span long enough to hear a word.

We may indeed come to church with any or all of these “protections” against the claim of a sermon.

Or perhaps a cause for being sermon proof may be found in the preacher, rather than the listener. It may be that the preacher,

-offers fluff, cleverness and entertainment without any substance that merits attention;

-relies excessively on familiar formulations that can carry no fresh freight for the listener;

-recites “stories” as “illustrations” that are perhaps tired or that do not compute meaningfully beyond themselves;

-takes an ideological slant that is much too obvious, that perhaps offends the listener or, conversely, that confirms the listener, without evoking any fresh challenge or need for growth or change;

-is excessively erudite about substantive matters that have no compelling connection to the life of the listener.

There are myriad ways to assure that there will be no active, engaged listening to a sermon. Such an offer is a particular temptation of sermons that are “text free,” that is, that have no link to the claim of a biblical text. An actual connection between the preacher and the listener is a tricky, delicate matter; there are more ways to distort that connection than there are ways to see it through effectively.

I have reflected further on what might be a definitive marker of a good sermon in our context of fierce ideological dispute. I propose, for now, that a major mark of a faithful sermon in our context is one that evokes the agency of the listener, to recruit effective, sustained action over time in the performance of the gospel. So much of our preaching has situated the listener as a passive recipient of the gift of God’s grace. That passivity, moreover, is greatly reinforced by a sense of helplessness before issues that are too deep, too large, and too complex for us to address in any effective way. The combination of “pure grace” plus realistic despair invites abdicating passivity.  But good preaching is, quite to the contrary, on the one hand a summons to agency in order to weigh in on the hard issues of the day where the wonder of God’s love is at stake. On the other hand, good preaching is an empowerment to agency, appealing to the definitive claim of our baptismal identity, “marked as Christ’s own forever,” and so as witness to the gospel of good news. The purpose of good preaching is both to summon and to empower engagement on behalf of God’s governance amid a political economy in which the forces of fear, greed, and violence have too often prospered and dominated through our abdicating acquiescence.

Faithful preaching is always, I suggest, the articulation of an urgent either/or that invests in the good news of the gospel or that signs on, to the contrary, for a life organized against the good news. Thus consider:

-Moses confronts the Israelites with such an either/or:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life so that you and your descendants may live (Deuteronomy 30:15, 19).

Moses makes clear that “choosing life” entails embrace of the Torah commandments. The negative alternative is to opt out of such Torah obedience, i.e. out of covenantal life that is lived back to the emancipatory God.

-Joshua confronts Israel in the land of promise with an either/or:

Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living (Joshua 24:14-15).

Israel can choose YHWH, and what follows is embrace of the “statutes and ordinances” of the Torah (v.25). 

The alternative is “the gods of the Amorites” who know nothing about God’ holiness or about neighbor love.

-Elijah summons Israel to choose:

If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal then follow him (I Kings 18:21).

It is the same decision as with Moses and Joshua. The actuality of such a choice, voiced dramatically at Mt. Carmel, concerns the specific narrative of Naboth’s vineyard in I Kings 21. In that narrative the rule of YHWH is linked to the small scale neighborly community of Naboth, a peasant farmer, as Baal is allied to the aggressive confiscatory practice of Ahab and Jezebel. In choosing YHWH, Israel chooses a way of being in the world that concerns generous consideration of the land and compassionate consideration of the neighbor.

Of course it is not different in the narrative of Jesus. His summons to a decision is in the most simple and terse imperative, “Follow me” (Mark 1:17, 2:14). Following Jesus is a summons to a life of self-giving vulnerability on behalf of the neighbor. He issues just such an invitation to the man who knelt before him:

Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me (Mark 10:21).

The man chose otherwise; he will not sign on with Jesus. The reason he will not and does not sign on with Jesus is that he had “many possessions.” He wanted to retain control of his own life in his own interest, and so he made his decision.

It is the same in all of these imperatives of either/or.  It is an offer of engagement in the world-making of a community of wellbeing, or in the negative alternative of living for the sake of self-serving and self-sufficiency that goes under the rubric of “other gods.” Good preaching issues the summons for our particular context. When we passively abdicate, we are readily carried along by the dominant ideology among us of fear, greed, and violence that is expressed in anti-neighborly rhetoric and in anti-neighborly policy and resource management. Or alternatively we may, by our daily insistence, live a life of hope, generosity, and justice. There is indeed no circumstance among us in which either/or is not visible and operative. The purpose of a sermon is to make available the effective role of agent for the sake of a world other than the dominant one all around us.

I could think of three riffs that give voice to this either/or that is before us. First, from Paul’s ethical inventory in Romans 12 I have in rather simple fashion settled on three markers of a life “transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2). These three markers are:

-The practice of hospitality that refuses the endless toxic grind of hostility (Romans 12:13). That generous hospitality is extended to strangers, those unlike us who do not belong to our particular community of preference.

-The practice of generosity that shows forth the abundance of God’s generous gift-giving creation (see Romans 12:8). Such a practice issue refuses the self-seeking parsimony of the world that is grounded in a fear of scarcity in the conviction that there is not enough to go around for all.

-The practice of forgiveness that aims, every time, to break the vicious cycle of revenge in the interest of reconciliation (Romans 12:19-21). Jesus is insistent that retaliation is no acceptable practice, but forgiveness is the creation of alternative possibility in the world:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evil doer (Matthew 5:38-39).

The community of faith is summoned to and empowered to conduct itself in a very different way after the manner of our self-giving Lord. It will be seen that these three markers of alternative life--hospitality, generosity, forgiveness--overcome the dichotomy of subject-object. For they are interactive, and thus run in both directions from giving to receiving. The practice of hospitality runs both ways, from giving to receiving it. It is the same with generosity and forgiveness as well. The sermon is a summons to and an empowerment to this alternative way of living that is congruent with the Lord whom we follow.

-A second iteration of this deep either/or that occurs to me is the familiar Prayer for Peace by St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen.

In the first part of the prayer Francis provides an inventory of the markers of the alternative life he commends.  The active verbs at the outset concern being an agent (instrument) of God’s peace. The pairs of contrasts are exactly a perfect set of either/or, and we are left in the prayer to choose one side of either/or or the other. In the second part of the prayer Francis sees that the split of subject-object is overcome, as the force of love, giving, and pardoning runs in both directions.

A third riff, long before the other two I have suggested, is the either-or voiced by the Apostle Paul concerning self-securing existence or a life given over to the wellbeing of the other.  He attests the “either”:

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these (Galatians 5:19-2l).

The positive alternatives commended by Paul constitute is a life given and governed by God’s own Spirit:

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity; faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (5:22-23).

It is impossible to avoid the demanding either/or put in front of us by gospel faith:

-in the imperatives of Romans 12;

-in the prayer of St. Francis, or

-in the contrast in Paul between flesh and Spirit.

The work of the preacher is to enunciate this either/or in practical ways, so that the congregation may become a convocation of agents who are knowingly and daringly engaged in the practice of world-making that refuses the dominant world implied in these several contrasts.

It may be that such preaching will not penetrate everyone who is sermon proof. It is certain, in any case, that it belongs to our human character to be agents after the God in whose image we are made. The preacher must take care not to give in to the passivity of grace or to the indifference of weary despair. Active agency begets energy, and alongside energy are born wellbeing and surely joy in lives dispatched in generative ways. The meeting around the either/or is always again a reperformance of the choice voiced by Moses, by Joshua, and by Elijah. This summons and empowerment call to my mind a hymn we used to sing in my younger years that is a summons to agency:

Hark, the voice of Jesus crying, “Who will go and work today?

Fields are white, and harvests waiting, Who will bear the sheaves away?”

Loud and long the Master calleth, Rich rewards He offers thee;

Who will answer gladly saying, “Here am I, send me, send me?”

If you cannot cross the ocean And the distant lands explore,

You can find the lost around you, You can help them at your door;

If you cannot give your thousands, you can give the widow’s mite,

And the least you give to Jesus Will be precious in His sight.

If you cannot be the watchman Standing high on Zion’s wall,

Pointing out the path to heaven, Off’ring life and peace to all;

With your prayers and with your bounties, you can do what Heav’n demands; 

You can be like faithful Aaron, Holding up the prophet’s hands.

Let none hear you idly saying, “There is nothing I can do,” 

While the souls of men are dying, And the Master calls for you.

Take the task He gives you gladly, Let His work your pleasure be;

Answer quickly when He calleth: “Here am I, send me, send me.”

(“Hear the Voice of Jesus Crying,” The Evangelical Hymnal (1922) (#307).

Agents who are summoned and empowered never imagine there is nothing we can do.