“Jesus came preaching,” says St. Mark. Now, that may not seem like anything earth-shaking to you, but I suggest this morning that it is nothing less than astounding! Of all the methods that God might have chosen to change the world-the frailty of human words is just about the most surprising! I find it incredible that God should launch God’s movement to save the world in so frail a vessel as preaching. St. Paul found it surprising, too. Our Epistle Lesson was from II Corinthians. But in I Corinthians Paul wrote: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” Years ago George Arthur Buttrick wrote a book on preaching with the same title as this sermon. In it he said: “Jesus could have written books. Instead, Jesus came preaching. He trusted His most precious sayings to the blemished reputation and precarious memory of his friends.” (N.Y. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1932 p. 16)
In a more recent book on preaching by George Sweazey, the author reminds us that “Christianity is not something you talk about, it is something you do. Sitting through sermons can become the major Christian activity.” And, of course, that is not all that we are called to do, is it? “What we want is deeds, not words,” we sometimes say. But Dr. Sweazey says that that is a false dichotomy. Indeed, says he, words are deeds! The ancient Greeks had a saying, “By words alone are lives of mortals swayed.” Sweazey writes: “the talkers are the doers, if what they talk about is important. The greatest doer of all was called the Word,’ and words that start with him have changed men and nations.” (PREACHING THE GOOD NEWS, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Co., 1976. p. 3) He goes on: “If what a preacher says can alter even slightly the direction in which people are aimed when they leave the church, the effect can be beyond all calculation.” What people think determines everything. Lincoln said: With the public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public opinion goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. (Sweazey, op. cit., p. 9) Physicians and farmers labor to keep people alive. Preachers labor to make their lives worth living. And that is infinitely worth doing. Joseph Conrad said that words, “Have set the whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our social fabric... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.” Actions are important: but words motivate actions.
I. MOST FOLKS HAVE STRANGE NOTIONS ABOUT PREACHING. For one thing, I imagine that many people believe that a preacher mounts the pulpit and opens his mouth, and the words just come tumbling out. That may be true if one had only one sermon to preach; but when a preacher must come up with a new sermon for the same congregation week in and week out, year after year, it can become difficult business. Most folks, I imagine, simply do not realize the hours of blood, sweat, toil and tears that go into the making of a sermon. The old rule of thumb used to say that a minister should spend an hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit. Handy things like word processors have speeded things up a bit, but it still requires many hours of hard labor. There are not many “short-cuts.” I know; I’ve been looking for them for over 37 years!
A lot of it is just plain hard work, trying to tell the "old, old story” in a new way. A small girl said to her preacher-father: “Daddy, is it true that your sermons are inspired by God?” The pastor modestly replied, “I hope, so, dear.” “Why, then,” asked his puzzled daughter, “do I see you erasing and changing things in them?” Well, that’s the way sermons are built. You start with a Scripture and an idea and try to find ways of making it come alive for your hearers. You erase and you change and you pray and you agonize. And you are grateful for any new insight that can come. I am continually amazed at the ways in which God sometimes uses our poor, frail, human words to communicate His word to the world.
The verb “preach” itself has come upon evil days. It usually denotes something boring or didactic. “Don’t preach to me!” is the ultimate put-down to parents by wayward offspring. “As dull as a sermon,” is something else one hears in common parlance. But sermons are supposed to be about the Gospel: the Good News. That is what the word “gospel” literally means. And it seems to me that it would take extraordinary effort to succeed in making that Good News dull. Nevertheless, some preachers I have heard seem to have mastered it! A man went to see his doctor for advice about his snoring. The doctor asked, “Does your snoring disturb your wife?” The patient replied, “Does it disturb my wife? Why it disturbs the entire congregation!” John Ruskin defined a sermon as “thirty minutes in which to raise the dead.” British Methodist Colin Morris says that the average preacher, far from raising the dead, is well content if he succeeds in waking those who sleep. (Morris, Colin, THE WORD AND THE WORDS, London: Epworth Press, 1975, p.p. 10) Henry Ward Beecher once said: “If anyone falls asleep in church, I have given the ushers permission to wake up the preacher!” One wide-awake preacher I admire is Methodist Colin Morris of Great Britain, who says that “boring sermons are generally the product of dull personalities.” But he does admit that there are some exceptions to the rule.(op. cit., p. 32) Still, it seems to me that making the Gospel dull is something close to the unpardonable sin. As British mystery writer Dorothy Sayers once said of the Christian faith: “..we may call (it) exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.” (CREED OR CHAOS, New York: Harcourt, Brace and company, 1949, p. 7) The Christian Faith may be unbelievable...but it certainly is not dull!
In every age it is said by someone that preaching is outmoded. Many in the Middle Ages believed that the sacraments had replaced the sermon. Now, sacraments are important: they are “enacted sermons.” But they are not a substitute for the sermon. During the Reformation some Christians declared that since the Holy Spirit was given to every believer. (True.) Each could interpret the Scriptures for himself or herself. (Also true.) But that did not mean that everyone is equally qualified to interpret the Scriptures.The opinions of some are of more value than the opinions of others. Especially valuable are the opinions of those who have taken the time to do the hard study. Some Christians have made sorry spectacles of themselves by operating out of their ignorance, rather than Biblical knowledge. Just this week I heard an old story which was new to me. It seems that a preacher came across a character in the Gospels called “Simon the Leaper.” He imagined all sorts of things that this Leaper character might have done - leaping from mountain to mountain, hill to hill. Ands he preached a sermon on it. Then someone brought it to his attention that the man’s name was “Simon the Leper.” To which the preacher replied, “I don’t see the need to throw away a good sermon just because of a difference in pronunciation!” Without intelligent guidance, we can go off on all sorts of strange tangents. That is why Christianity is a communal faith. We need one another to correct each other’s heresies, if for no other reason! Sometimes when a layperson tells a preacher after church, “I don’t agree with what you said this morning,” it may mean that God has used the sermon to prick the listener’s conscience. Or it may mean that the listener was right and the preacher wrong! None of us has a degree in infallibility. As Colin Morris says about preachers who claim to know too much: “They would be modest enough to confess they haven’t the foggiest idea what is going on in the head of their family pet but lay claim to sure knowledge of what their Pal Up There is thinking about the National Economy, the Middle East conflict or the future of mankind.” (Ibid., P.17)
Over the years, there have been prophets of doom telling us that preaching is outmoded and ought to be discarded. In my own lifetime, I have seen preaching downgraded in some seminaries. Folks thought that some other activity might supplant it: Christian education, pastoral counseling, social action, or whatever. All of these are worthy pursuits, but nothing can replace the “telling of the old, old, story of Jesus and His love.” There has never been found a substitute for preaching, and every great religious revival from century one until today has been carried on the wave of good preaching.
II. THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD PLACE TO ASK: WHAT IS PREACHING SUPPOSED TO DO? For one thing, every good sermon should help the listener to understand the Bible better. But the real business of preaching is not the elucidation of a subject, but the transformation of a person. Its goal is to bring about a change in human lives. It is supposed to inspire, motivate, persuade, and move. In Acts, chapter 26, you have the dramatic event of St. Paul on trial for his life, and giving a defense before Herod Agrippa II. (Probably held in the theatre of an ancient Roman City we know as Caesarea by the Sea.) Remember how the King’s reply used to go in the King James version? “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” (Acts 26:28) There have been a lot of good sermons preached and at least one old Gospel song written on: “Almost persuaded.” But the Revised Standard Version is closer to the Greek: “You think in a short time to make me a Christian!” Yup! That is precisely what preaching is for! Trying to make Christians in twenty minutes!
Some preachers have reacted against preaching by saying that they do not want to be “manipulative.” To them Prof. Sweazey says: “Every human contact is manipulative. The participants in every conversation try to push each other around. Preachers from all sorts of pulpits work on us all of the time - politicians, columnists, commentators, editorialists, playwrights, essayists, teachers, bosses, luncheon club oracles.” (op. cit., p. 9) He might have mentioned spouses, and kids, too!! In addition, I would say to those preachers who worry about manipulating” people: “Don’t overestimate your power!” We can be grateful if just a few words catch hold of somebody’s imagination and turn them toward God. In the movie “Oh, God!” The grocery store manager played by John Denver, asks God, played by George Burns, what good coming among people and talking to them might do. God replies, “You never know...a seed here, a seed there, something will take hold and grow.”
I would suggest that those who believe that preaching is outmoded do not know much about history: ancient or modern. The Nazi movement in Germany was built by preaching of a kind. A rabid kind, to be sure; but preaching nonetheless. Communists have conquered as much of the world by talk as by tanks.That is why they spend so much time and money on propaganda. (It has been suggested that if we Christians would spend anywhere near as much time and money trying to get the Gospel out, the world would be Christian by now!) Most of the great movements that have changed history have been fueled by preaching. We might mention, in addition to the false doctrine of Communism, the spread of Christianity, the Crusades, the Reformation, the American and French Revolutions, abolition, the labor movement, the anti-Viet Nam protests, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X, and every political campaign. And when it comes to an eloquent use of words, we immediately think of Winston Churchill, and his effect on England during World War Two. He wasn’t a great strategist, I am told, but he was a brilliant orator. So it is silly for anybody to imagine that preaching is outmoded just when everybody else is making use of it!
Clyde E. Fant, in a book titled PREACHING FOR TODAY (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987) asks the question “What can preaching do?” And suggests that preaching can (note: can; not necessarily does) perform six significant functions: it brings Good News, it allows us to hear from the historic community of faith, it introduces us to the Word become flesh, it tells us the way things are, it offers a doxology to God, and creates the church and sends it into the world. Whew! That is some responsibility to place on the shoulders of preaching! But they are able to bear it. And have done so. Herman Melville in his classic Moby Dick gave what is perhaps the highest estimate of preaching ever written.He said: “The pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.... Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out,....and the pulpit is its prow.” (Would that that were true!)
III.Yes, Jesus came preaching, And then, in a strange turn of events, THE PREACHER BECAME THE PREACHED! And that is just as it should be. When John Wesley was asked what he preached, in order to gain such a tremendous response during the Wesleyan Revival of the 18th century, he replied simply, “I offered them Christ.” And that is what all we preachers must do, whether Wesleyans or not. In Protestant worship-the sermon is the equivalent of the sacred moment of the “elevation of the host” in Roman Catholic churches. It is a time when Christ is lifted up and proclaimed. Earlier I said that if a minister had but one sermon to preach, that might be easy. Now, I want to modify that statement a bit, and make a small confession: I do have only one sermon to preach. It is the same as St. Paul’s: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (II Cor. 4:5-6) That is the Advent message-and every week is Advent, for every Sunday we celebrate the Lord’s coming. And it is the preacher’s difficult and demanding task to proclaim that coming week by week by week. The danger is that we preachers and you listeners might come to take it for granted, and lose the wonder and amazement of the message. For it is an amazing message!
Mark Twain once wrote: “A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be scientifically regarded as a thing of beauty.” Just try telling that to the parents! But you know, that is just the way in which God most fully entered into our world, according to the message we proclaim at this season of the year. In the Babe of Bethlehem, God became personally present among us. And if that isnUt good news, I don’t know what is! The great German preacher Helmut Thielicke said: “The extraordinary thing is that the mystery of life is not illuminated by a formula, but rather by another mystery, namely, The News, which can only be believed and yet is hardly believable, that God has become man and that I am now no longer alone in the darkness.” That is the Good News we are called to preach. “I am no longer alone in the darkness.”
Of course, other people preach beside those of us who are called “preachers.” You may remember (from your U.S. History courses, of course,) that Teddy Roosevelt called the presidency a “bully pulpit.” There are other pulpits equally as bully. An eloquent sermon appeared in last Tuesday’s Detroit Free Press, preached by a cartoonist named Jim Borgman. It is hanging across from my office. I hope you’ll glance at it on your way home this morning. It shows three burly brutes, superhuman, sub-human, and non-human, each laden down with massive weapons, and beside them a crib, filled with straw and a baby. The caption under the cartoon reads: “Masters of the Universe Action Figures.” Beneath that: “Each sold separately.” Which “Master of the Universe” are we going to choose? That choice is what preaching is all about. As a result of a sermon, some of you within the sound of my voice may actually choose Christ! “You never know...a seed here, a seed there, something will take hold and grow.” God grant!