Too much of our homiletical energy is spent reducing the gospel to a bumper sticker or acting as if it’s easy to understand.
— William Willimon
In January of 1991, as the country was in the throes of the Gulf crisis with Iraq, I attended a large church for Sunday worship. During the service, the preacher gave a children’s sermon.
“Boys and girls,” the preacher said after the kids had scrambled to the front of the sanctuary, “what is today?”
Silence. Finally some freshly scrubbed ruffian blurted, “Sunday, January 6.”
“Goooood,” replied the preacher. “But today is more than that. In the church calendar, today is Epiphany. Can you say the word Epiphany?“
A noisy chorus of “Epiphany” reverberated throughout the sanctuary in thirty-part disharmony.
“The word means ‘manifestation’ or ‘revelation,'” the preacher continued. “And even though you may never have heard of Epiphany, I bet everybody has heard of a favorite Epiphany story, the story of the wise men. How many of you know that story?”
Again, a commotion broke out indicating they had.
“The star revealed to these wise men, or Magi, that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Matthew begins his Gospel by saying these Magi were the first to come to see the baby Jesus. The Epiphany question for today is, ‘Where did the Magi come from?'”
“From the East?” a child said.
“Gooood,” the preacher replied. “They came from the East. But where did they come from in the East? Yes, Persia. Persia is the biblical way of talking about the East. Persia was east of the Holy Land. Now where is Persia on this map, boys and girls?”
“Uh, Iran?”
“Yes, Iran. But that’s not all of Persia,” replied the persistent pastor.
“Iraq?”
“Gooood, Iraq,” he said. “And Baghdad was sort of the capital of Persia. So today, Epiphany, is the day the church gets together and says, ‘Thank you, God, for sending us three Iraqis, who saw the baby Jesus before us Bible-believing people did.’ Now you can all go back to your seats to be with your parents.”
As the children filed back to their seats, the congregation fumbled for their seat belts. A simple children’s story had broadsided the entire congregation with the transnational claim of the gospel, throwing their American experience into a larger picture, where God is the Lord of all.
Too often we preachers, in our attempt to be relevant, do the exact opposite of this presumptuous preacher: we begin with the world of the listener instead of the peculiar truths of Scripture — what I call experienced-based or inductive preaching. We begin our Sunday preparation by saying essentially, “What is my audience interested in?” We assume our task is simply to awaken in our audience those basic human impulses we arrive on the scene with.
One of my friends, a biblical scholar, mentioned to me that too many sermons he hears address no one in particular, much less those who are baptized. His comment prodded me to think about what preaching to the baptized might mean, and I’ve come to at least three conclusions.
Translation Problems
To preach to the baptized means, first, that we must do business with this text, the Scripture, before we can go to other texts. I’m not free to put the gospel through a psychological or a political sieve. I’m not free to translate the gospel into, say, the reigning philosophy of the day.
How many of us have started a Sunday morning sermon by saying to our audience something like, “Have you ever been depressed? Well, the Bible speaks to our depression, and if you’ll turn to this morning’s text, we’ll discover what God’s Word has to say about our problem.”
The week leading up to that week’s sermon, we probably ransacked our brains to find a current need of our congregation, and then we rummaged around the Bible to find something helpful to speak to that aspect of human experience.
This is the problem with much of modern preaching: it starts with gut-level human experience, namely our therapeutically saturated culture, and then attempts to work backward to the Bible.
I returned to pastoral ministry after having taught for several years, and I experienced this pull. I was surprised, for instance, by how much of a pastor’s time is spent with depressed people. There seems to be an epidemic of depression.
Not long after returning to parish life, I received a phone call from a depressed woman. “Pastor, can you come over this morning? I’m not doing very well today. I’m feeling sort of down and blue. Are you busy?”
I told her I’d drop by that afternoon and pray with her in the hopes I might encourage her. Then I returned to the Jeremiah commentary I was reading, which would, it turned out, help me a great deal. The passage under discussion concerned Jeremiah’s calling Israel to grieve for their sins. Only by grieving, said the commentator, could Israel begin to let go of the mundane status quo and gain a fresh vision from God of what their world could be about. The vision would come only after the tears.
By the time I drove to that woman’s house, I had a different mode of pastoral care to offer her. Instead of addressing her depression with therapeutic answers, I said, “Forgive me. I’ve been treating you as if you were sick or something. I know you’re depressed, but that’s good. A lot of people think this town is a great place to live. But you’re an intelligent, creative person, and you realize intuitively there’s a sickness here — people are too materialistic and too self-occupied. You’re depressed about it. You are waiting in your $300,000 home —”
“$350,000,” she interrupted.
“— in your $350,000 home, waiting for your husband to come home on Friday and make your day. I know your husband — he’s not capable of that! No human being is. The good news is that you know you need more, and you’re in grief. That’s a good start. We can work with this. We couldn’t work with you when you were happy.”
Who taught me to name what is happening to her as “depression”? We did not get that word from the Bible. I cannot make any connection between the “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” of the Psalms and what we call psychological depression. I believe she was not experiencing depression but a form of spiritual despair.
I’m called to teach a new language, a different way of naming the pain, and everything hinges on how we name that pain. We should name that pain in the way the Bible names it.
George Lindbeck of Yale University says Americans have been conditioned to think of religion as an innate, inborn trait, and that different religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity, are different ways of expressing this innate, pan-human phenomenon. But the way each religion speaks about its deity and doctrines, says Lindbeck, is much different, so much so that one quickly discovers that Christians and Buddhists, for example, speak of two very different gods. The way they describe their allegiances indicates a much different relationship and hence two distinct deities.
In the same way, theology of the Bible and that of our therapeutically drenched culture are not easily transferable. Too much is lost in the translation. The preacher’s first question, then, is not “What are my listeners’ concerns?” but “What does the gospel say?”
Speaking the Language
One of the best compliments I’ve received was after an Easter sermon in which I’d said, “Easter is not about the return of the robin in spring or blooming crocuses or butterflies coming out of their cocoons or any of that pagan drivel. It’s about a body that somehow got loose. The gospel accounts strain to describe what happened, but don’t make any mistake about it, they’re trying to describe something unearthly: death working backward.
“So I can’t talk about ‘the eternal rebirth of hope’ or ‘Jesus living on in our hearts.’ We’re talking about a dead Jew, crucified, who came back to harass us. And it scares the heck out of us!”
A student came up to me and said, “Thank you for helping me articulate what I don’t believe.” By explaining what the Resurrection truly means to Christians, I had confirmed his unbelief. At least he took my preaching, and the gospel, seriously.
That’s the second characteristic of preaching to the baptized — giving biblical definitions priority.
In Acts 17, Paul speaks to the people of Athens, bringing the gospel into collision with their ideas. He calls them religious, but what they don’t know is that it’s not really a compliment. Then he makes a joke about their never seeing an idol they couldn’t worship. Before long he’s telling them about the God they don’t know and bringing up the Resurrection, for which he gets the typical Gentile response of mockery and polite, philosophical interest.
I see here an invitation and a warning to preachers who want to contextualize the gospel. The invitation is to start where the people are, but the warning is to recognize our limited ability to adapt the gospel. Eventually the gospel is about something for which there is no precedent — the Resurrection — and we can only testify to it. The truth claims of Christianity are not easily validated externally. They’re a matter of faith.
By giving biblical definitions priority in our messages, we’re communicating that to be in the church means to enter a new epistemology. Epistemology is simply a fancy word for the questions “How do we know what we know? How do we get our information about the world?” The baptized derive their epistemology from the Bible. Christian speech — baptism, redemption, sin — is not psychological speech — depression, codependency, addiction. In fact, the Bible claims that we cannot even fully hear what the preacher is saying unless we’re born again.
To understand fully Christian speech requires a radical transformation, a detoxification, a born-again conversion — however you wish to speak of it. Someone who comes on board with Jesus is someone who’s empowered, washed, cleaned up, dead and buried, raised, adopted — the images are all baptismal.
French isn’t learned by reading a French novel in an English translation. You have to take French; you have to learn the verbs. There’s no way around the pain of learning the declensions and conjugations. The baptized, then, will need to be steeped in the language of their conversion. This is the job of the Christian preacher.
Making an Assault
Being baptized means to stand under the Word, to be willing to be transformed. If I join the Rotary Club, I’m handed a lapel pin, a membership card, and given a handshake. But if I join the church, the pastor throws me into the water, half-drowns me, brings me up, and then calls me “Brother.” Baptism, which is nothing short of strange, is supposed to create a new people who look at the world quite differently than before.
Third, then, to preach to the baptized means to allow Scripture to transform people. The Bible doesn’t want to speak to the modern world; the Bible wants to create a world that would not have been there without the speaking of the Bible.
We pastors have spent far too much of our homiletical energy reducing the gospel to a bumper sticker or acting as if it’s easy to understand. Instead, we ought to remind people how very difficult it is. In fact, we’re called to assault the prevailing norms with the gospel. And in the process of hearing the gospel, God’s new community begins to take shape.
I sometimes say, “All right, folks, just for this morning, let’s all trust this Word from God more than we trust our feelings or our experience. The gospel isn’t trying to explore your experience but to engender a new experience. It’s trying to take you someplace you’ve never been. Let’s see where that takes us.”
In one sense, Sunday morning is a game with one important rule: this ancient, confusing, assaulting, and wonderfully challenging book — the Bible — knows more about truth than we do. After I’ve preached a sermon, I’ve had people say to me, “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve never heard anything like that before.”
The pastoral-homiletical response should be “Hey, don’t complain to me. I’m not the one who called you forth to be baptized. It’s out of my hands. You’re the one who wanted to be baptized. These aren’t my stories. This stuff is not original with me. But it is for the baptized.
“To me you look like an average American, but since you’re baptized, evidently Jesus has a great deal of faith in your ability to hear this sort of stuff.”
If someone complains, “Well now, how am I supposed to run a hardware store on the basis of that?” we should say, “I don’t know. That’s not my problem. My baptismal priority, bestowed to me through ordination, is to explain the gospel to you. Your baptismal priority is to live those truths in the world as Jesus’ priests.”
During the Gulf crisis, my associate one Sunday morning prayed for the Iraqi soldiers and their families. A woman complained about the prayer.
“The prayer?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” she said. “I think it’s just so important for us to stand behind the president.”
“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “We’re Christians. Jesus has commanded us to pray for our enemies. I know it doesn’t come easy, so that’s why we work at it for an hour or so on Sunday morning. We hope eventually we’ll get good at it. But this is nonnegotiable; that’s the way Christians are commanded to pray.”
Our people arrive to be baptized with all of their advanced degrees and sophistication. But that needs to get stripped off, washed away. Martin Luther said that we never get too old or too smart to die. Every day we’re asked to die, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus. Christians, says Luther, are those who jump out of bed every morning and say, “Good morning, Jesus. Continue to put me to death.”
Our preaching must enable our listeners to die, continuing that baptismal work done at their baptism, so new creatures might continue to be raised, week after week.
The Imperial Gospel
A good question to ask at the end of any sermon is “Would they have killed Jesus for this?” Not all of my sermons stand up to that question; the death of Jesus would seem incomprehensible over some of the bland stuff I’ve preached. People would be more apt to make Jesus president of a university or a speaker for a weekend conference. If I don’t watch myself, I can reduce Christianity to merely being a good person, someone who is gung ho for society.
People had good reason to crucify Jesus. They recognized in him a threat to the world as it was constituted, and he continues to be a threat. I love Jesus for being outrageous. I want my preaching to say, “What did you think we were talking about here — Santa Claus? Hey, this is God we’re talking about, a real God, not some projection of your ego.”
One Duke student was telling me he was losing his faith. I asked him, “What is the faith you’re losing?”
“I don’t believe in the Virgin Birth anymore.”
“So what? You’re a sexually active college student,” I replied. “You don’t believe in virginity, period! You’re 19 years old; there’s a lot you don’t know yet. Why don’t you just wait awhile to see how your doctrine works out.”
Then he asked a good question: “Why do you have to swallow stuff like this to be a Christian?”
“Well,” I said, “when we get you to believe these easy things, then you’re ready for the tougher demands of Christianity: how to live this faith, turning the other cheek, letting go of your Duke degree and all the power it’s going to give you. We start with the Virgin Birth because it’s simple. Then we’ll work you up to the tough stuff, like making Jesus Lord of your life.”
Sidestepping the intrusive, imperialistic claims of the gospel is not an option if we intend to preach to the baptized. We are not free to exchange gospel foolishness for the wisdom of this world. As Christian preachers preaching to Christian people, we’re obligated to preach Christian truths.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
