2024-09-16
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
September 15, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Psalm 19 The Federated Church, UCC
What an odd vestige of an earlier era these elements of worship may seem, this time in which we together hear words from an ancient book and then someone talks about it for twenty minutes. Why in the world would we do that? In what universe would we design such a thing?
As I prepare to retire six weeks from now, I feel myself drawn to reflect on this distinctive life we lead as Christians. Over these next weeks, I will be offering my perspective on some of the characteristics and dimensions of this thing we call church.
I want to begin these reflections with some ruminations about this particular part of the worship liturgy. In every worship service, we read from the Bible, and then we expound on it with what we call a sermon. What is it about scripture and sermon that we find crucial? And what are we most deeply doing when we engage in these two pursuits?
Let’s begin with scripture. Two to three thousand years ago, our forebears in the faith told stories, and eventually wrote them down. We have trusted that these stories have revealed God to us. And they have shaped our faith. We tell stories about a group of Israelite forebears who knew themselves to be created, astoundingly, out of nothing. People who were once enslaved in Egypt but who were shown a way out. People who were carried off into exile and eventually were led back to their homeland. And we tell stories about Jesus. A person who healed and taught and drove out demons. A person who called us to live by the light of our better angels. A person who told head-scratching stories—parables—about the core of human life. A person who was ignominiously put to death and, in some utterly mysterious way, came back to life.
And odd and archaic as these stories sometimes seem, every week we read one or more of them and trust that they have something to say to us about God and about the complex and mystifying lives we lead now. Outmoded though they may sometimes appear, they nevertheless embody, at their core, something that expresses the depths and heart of human life in God’s world. Each week, in encountering scripture, we seek to plumb those depths.
And we do so using a lectionary, a series of readings appointed on a three-year cycle to cover much of the Bible, a lectionary that invites us explore things we might not otherwise choose to explore. Sometimes, especially when a passage seems exceptionally odd, church members ask me why I use a lectionary, given that I could choose something that might initially seem more appealing or palatable. It’s a great question. And my answer is that, in using a lectionary, each week we are confronted by a story or perspective that is different from us. If I chose the scripture passage, I would do so because I would already think I knew what it meant. I don’t want that. I want to be confronted by something different from me. That way, I get out of the way and let something beyond me do the speaking. It’s much better for me, because I don’t have to rely on my own extremely limited wisdom. And it’s better for you, because together we get to be addressed by Someone or Something far greater than we are.
Much as I might like to explore further the notion of why it is that we read this ancient book, I’m going to shift now to the sermon and what it is we’re doing when we do this thing that I’m doing now. What is it we’re seeking to do in this enterprise we call preaching?
When I preach, as luminous and revelatory as the scripture is, and as necessary as it is to keep us grounded in something deeper than our own feelings and perceptions, I do not preach about the Bible. My goal is to preach about God. Here, in a nutshell, is what I’m seeking to do: I want you and me to encounter God. I don’t want to just talk about God. I want us to experience God. So I am seldom if ever interested in doctrine or dogma or questions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Theological minutiae has next-to-no interest for me. There are places for historical and scientific questions to be entertained. And occasionally that happens in a sermon. But that is not its main purpose.
The heart of a sermon is this: how does God show up in your life and in mine? That’s it. When I stand in this pulpit, just as when I visit you in the hospital or show up at a rally or attend a meeting of the church—when I stand in this pulpit, my job is simply to point to God. Because you and I so often forget to take note of the Holy Presence who is always accompanying us, my very work—the primary reason you appoint me to this position—is to say to us all: “Look, there’s God!”
And I do this, and Betsy and our staff and guest preachers do this, because you and I so easily forget. We get caught up in a zillion other pursuits and sail blithely right on by the shining Holy Face who is beaming at us even and maybe especially in our frenetic and fevered blindness. Because we are so easily distracted, the church sees fit to designate preachers to say: “There’s God!”
We preachers call attention to this blessed presence in a whole host of ways. All of us who preach are, of course, limited by our own unseeing. We are prisoners of our own biases and blindness, our misguided and wayward perceptions. Which is why I spend as much time as I do reading what others say about a particular biblical passage and about the world in which we live and about the ways God shows up in our lives. That study and prayer and writing takes time, by the way—probably twenty hours a week, or an hour of preparation for each minute of delivery, as the common preaching wisdom goes.
Every sermon is fundamentally about grace. Grace is always at the core. It’s about what God is doing in our midst, and God is always doing something good. The God we worship is never manipulative, never punitive. The God who is at the center of everything is reckless in giving, wasteful in generosity. Good is always pouring forth from God like a firehose, and our job is to catch as much of a sip as we can from that ceaselessly flowing grace such that we are satiated and filled to overflowing by the affection and blessing that never let us go.
One of the things this means is that I never use the word “must” in a sermon. Decades ago, a preaching teacher of mine admonished us students about that, and I have always sought to heed that counsel: never use the word “must.” Our relationship with God is not one of obligation or duty. It is not fundamentally a contract we have with God. That relationship is not about tasks we’re required to perform. Our work is not to be responsible. It’s simply to be filled with love and to let that love bubble over to others.
This is different from the way most of us were raised. Most of us grew up thinking God had it in for us, that God was peering out at us from behind the bushes, just waiting for us to make a mistake and then to pounce on us and punish us. Just speaking for myself, I know I am constantly afraid of letting God down. I always feel inadequate. So, in some place deep within me, I always expect the worst. Preaching is my way, our way, of reminding ourselves that the only thing God really cares about is that you and I know ourselves to be treasured and adored.
So in our forgetting, preaching reminds us to pay attention. And in our self-flagellation, it reminds us to accept the divine embrace. One of the other things preaching does is remind us that we all also have a role, a ministry, in the divine economy. It’s not a role rooted in the “oughts,” it’s not about doing what we think we “should” do. It’s about realizing that, if we have indeed been loved in that extravagant way that God loves us all, isn’t there an opportunity for us to exercise that same love in return? Preaching is something of a nudge to encourage us to find our ministry. For our own good, as well as for the good of the world.
Years ago, the great twentieth-century Methodist theologian Albert Outler was asked, as he approached his own death, what he might have done differently if he had the chance to do things over again. And he said, “I wouldn’t say, ‘You’ve got to love.’ I would say, ‘You get to love.’” That, too, is part of what preaching reminds us: we get to love.
One of the challenges of preaching is that it nudges us to manifest the love of God in all the various dimensions of human life. It reminds us, first, that the divine love we’re called to share is irreducibly personal. It invites us to love our families, our neighbors, our fellow church people. Preaching calls us, beckons us, to do what is, in some circumstances, enormously difficult—to love those to whom we are closest.
Preaching, though, also alerts us to the unavoidable truth that that same love inevitably reaches into what we generally think of as the public sphere. It won’t surprise you to know that this can sometimes be contentious. And because of the potential divisiveness, it is the conviction of some people that public issues don’t belong in the pulpit. ‘Keep politics out of the church,’ goes the refrain.
And I get this instinct, I really do. Why would we bring up issues that are likely to divide the congregation and that may make some members fume? Why bring up matters that may induce friction?
The best answer I can give to that is this: because Jesus cares about every dimension of human life. No one would object if I said from the pulpit that, even if it’s difficult it would be good for us to be nice to our neighbors and to treat other church people with love and respect. We all share the conviction that the way we treat those close to us matters deeply. If we’re mean to our family and friends, something crucial has been missed. Nobody would argue that. It’s obvious to all of us. Be nice. Care for each other. That seems central to a life of faith.
If we then say, though, that there’s something inadequate about a public policy that foments violence or that doesn’t honor those who are poor or that violates the integrity of those who are thought to be different or that runs roughshod over this planetary home on which we live—if we call any of that out, the complaint so often comes back that that’s now engaging in partisan politics. The question we can’t avoid, though, is: if Jesus cared how we are with each other one-on-one, wouldn’t Jesus also care how we treat people in a larger, more systemic way? In what spiritual world would it make sense to say: Jesus cared about human behavior up to a point, as long as you’re in a one-on-one encounter, as long as you’re talking about family or close friends or neighbors, but once you move beyond that, Jesus no longer cares? In what possible way could it make sense to talk about God and Jesus that way, as though the circle of care is only extremely narrow?
Now this is not to say the church should be engaged in partisan politics. We’re not here to advocate for a Republican or Democratic party platform. As did the biblical prophets, though, we are here to call attention to ways in which systems knowingly or unknowingly institutionalize inequity and pain. In what ways could it be unfaithful to say, as the United Church of Christ has over the years: a system of enslaving people of color is wrong; a system in which women are not given equal opportunity is wrong; a system in which people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer are held back is wrong?
If Jesus cares for individuals, Jesus certainly cares for the whole, as well. And it falls to us as Jesus’ people to be part of righting those systemic wrongs. As painful as that may seem, and as divisive as things sometimes seem to get, I don’t see any other faithful conclusion. When school shootings proliferate, when January 6 happens, when drag shows in Chesterland and Chardon spawn vitriol, when antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred thrive, when unconscionable lies demonize and dehumanize legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH—when these things happen, what is the church to do? What is the preacher to do? Ignore it all and say simply, “Our job is only to ask people to be nice to people in the same room”? No. Because justice is the way love works itself out in public.
I’ve touched this morning on some of the dimensions of preaching that I find compelling: it’s fundamentally about God, not scripture; it’s also true that scripture is a primary window on God; preaching is, at its root, a pointing to God; it is always about grace; it never resorts to the word “must”; it’s about the opportunity to love, not the obligation to love; and it’s about the public manifestation of love, which is justice.
Every week preaching attempts to do these things. It reminds us of what we may so easily have forgotten. It connects us again to holy love. And it invites us to love more fully. David Greenhaw, former president of the UCC’s Eden Theological Seminary, tells this story about a United Methodist minister who served as a chaplain in a children’s home. “There was an adolescent girl at the home who was just unapproachable. The minister couldn’t get through to her. During the regular evening devotions, the young girl would stand defiantly at the back of the room, with her arms crossed in front of her, and never utter a word. At the end of two years of ministry in that setting, the minister could count a variety of successes with young people at the home, but not with this girl. She remained unapproachable and defiant. On the evening the minister announced she would be leaving to take another appointment, this young girl stepped forward from the back of the room, unfolded her arms, and said, ‘You can’t do that. If you are gone, who will remind us?’”
That’s what we pastors do: we remind you, and we remind ourselves, of God’s undying grace. It has been my sublime privilege over these last twenty years to be a reminder in this marvelous church. There is nothing I would rather have been doing. And after I retire, Betsy and an interim pastor and then a settled pastor, as well as guests and staff, will continue to do that with you, and to do it in new ways. May God continue to let that reminding ministry thrive. For it is God’s good pleasure to shower this church, and indeed all of us, with that undying love, and to invite that love forth from us in our own unique ways. This whole endeavor of attending to and articulating this amazing grace is, in truth, as today’s psalm puts it, “sweeter than honey” (19:10). Thanks be to God!