Preaching to myself - or to you?
As most of you know, I am rapidly approaching the date on which I was ordained into the Christian ministry fifty years ago. The actual date was December 19, 1964. On Sunday, December 28, 2014, there will be a special service and acknowledgement of that event, and also of my official retirement as the regular preacher in The Chapel Without Walls. As of January 1, 2015, The Chapel will inaugurate a four-person co-pastorate, and I will be one of the four ministers, each of whom will preach ten to twenty sermons per year from now on into the foreseeable future.
Today I want to focus on my thoughts and observations regarding a ministry of more-or-less full time preaching for half a century. For five of those years I was an assistant minister on a large-church staff of four preachers, and I preached probably an average of 18 to 20 times per year. For the next 27 years I was the pastor or interim pastor of five large churches with three or four preachers on each of those church staffs, and then I preached about 42 times per year. But for the first three years of my ministry, the last year of my interim pastorates, and the past eleven years as the pastor of The Chapel Without Walls, I preached an average of 46 to 48 times a year.
All that having been explained, I decided to calculate how many sermons in total I have preached in the last fifty years. I came up with a rough figure a few short of 2000 sermons, including occasions when I preached sermons here and there other than on Sunday mornings. If I were John McCreight, I would be able to tell you exactly how many I had preached, and exactly where I preached them, because John has a record listing every single one of his homiletic assignments in his sixty years of preaching, and every other pastoral occasion at which he officiated. He is a statistical phenomenon. I don’t have such a list, but I still have about a dozen dusty boxes into which are stuffed the manuscripts of all 2000 sermons. One of these days I might thrust them into a recycle bin somewhere, but likely not very soon. Why I don’t do that I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they represent the equivalent of forty or fifty average-sized books, and it somehow seems self-obliterating to obliterate them.
From the time I preached my first sermon as a high school student in Christ Presbyterian Church of Madison, Wisconsin (my home congregation growing up), I have written out every word of every sermon I ever preached. I might alter what I wrote a little bit during the delivery of some of those sermons on the spur of the moment, but not much.
So the real issue I am addressing here is this: In that fifty-year span of sermons, to whom was I preaching: to the parishioners, or to me? To myself, or to you?
I have not made a concentrated study of this, nor shall I, but I have no doubt that both the content and the underlying theology of my sermons has changed quite substantially over the past half century. Who I was in 1964 was very different from who I am in 2014. Some of what I believed back then is not the same as what I believe now. Not a single one of you is able to verify that, because none of you has been inflicted with my homiletic harangues over all of the past fifty years. Therefore if you want confirmation of what I just said, you’ll have to take my word for it.
The style of my preaching is basically the same, but the content, especially the theology contained therein, has changed markedly. In a word, I am much more liberal now than I was when I started out. I realize it will come as quite a shock to many of you to learn that I am a liberal, but I am. And nobody is better able to perceive that evolution than I.
For all fifty of my years as a parson, I have been a pastoral minister. That is, I have served only as a pastor or assistant pastor in five different congregations, and as interim pastor in four other congregations. I have greatly enjoyed and benefitted from knowing many of the people of those churches. I estimate that over the past half century I have been pastorally associated with perhaps 25,000 individuals, counting all adults and children who were part of those churches, whether as actual members or as regular or irregular visitors.
But as much as I was blessed to have had all those personal contacts, it was the writing and preaching of sermons which I believe was my “longest suit” as a minister, although obviously I could be wrong in my assessment. You are better judges of that than I. I readily identify with what Paul said in I Corinthians 9:16: “If I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” In any case, I especially have loved the challenge and discipline of sitting down nearly every week to write a sermon. More than anything else, it has perpetuated the steady flow of my vocational juices through all the years, and I have never once tired of it. I could, and perhaps shall, continue to do it for the rest of my life --- although that rosy scenario could change overnight due to health issues or other unforeseen circumstances.
For my first 39 years as a preacher, I assumed I was writing sermons for the people who were forced to listen to them. But since the beginning of The Chapel Without Walls eleven years ago, and particularly as time has gone on in this congregation, I have wondered to myself, “Self,” said I, “are you preaching mainly to the parishioners, or are you preaching to yourself?” In other words, am I trying to assist others on what, or perhaps how, to believe, or am I trying to assist myself in that process?
The Ethics Seminar is an organization which had held seven or eight meetings a year for the past several years. It is one of my community associations which I most enjoy, and from which I derive the greatest benefit. Last Wednesday we had an outstanding lecture by David Kelly, who has been a member of the Ethics Seminar for a few years. It was one of the most brilliant lectures I have ever heard. David is a retired professor of ethics, and especially medical ethics, from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. His lecture title four days ago was Ethics and Divine Revelation: Does God Tell Us What to Do? I had the privilege of moderating the meeting, and fielding questions from the audience.
Dr. Kelly explained how different people across the spectrum of ethical or theological issues perceive things differently. He reluctantly divided the spectrum on conservative/liberal grounds, but only reluctantly. In the discussion after the lecture, one of the members of the group suggested that literalist/”interpretationist” might be a better distinction. He liked that suggestion, and so do I. It is a more precise distinction. David gave many stellar observations about how conservatives and liberals, or literalists and interpretationists, understand issues such as racism, sexism, nuclear warfare, capital punishment, abortion, same-sex marriage, and so on.
Someone asked him about a particular matter, and unfortunately I can’t recall specifically what it was. But the question was this: Did Dr. Kelly still believe in such-and-such, whatever it was. He said --- and I quote him --- “I don’t know, but I hope so.” When he was a young man, he said, he was convinced of far more things than he is convinced of now.
That is a growing conviction that I have had during the past twenty years or so, but particularly during the past five or ten years. What I once knew for certain I now know only tentatively. Do I know all the things I thought I once knew, or do I only believe them? And if I merely believe them, do I only hope they are true? Until David Kelly said what he said, I would likely have posed this sermon somewhat differently. He is about my age, and I deduced from his conclusions that many geezers become not more but less certain of things which once were unshakable convictions in their minds and hearts.
So: Am I preaching to myself, or to you? Am I trying to convince all of us, myself included, or only you, since I am supposed to be already convinced of every single thing I have ever said?
In order to try to find an answer to my own self-imposed question, I want for us to consider an episode from the life of a young preacher. This man had been preaching for merely a few months. Perhaps some people thought of him, as we might say, as still wet behind the ears. He had gone off from his home town to do his preaching, but he came back to preach in the congregation in which he had grown up. I, incidentally, never did that. After I preached a couple of “youth sermons” in the Christ Presbyterian Church, as I recall I never went back there as a preacher. (Only by rummaging through my first dusty box of sermons could I verify that, but I’m quite certain my memory is correct on that.)
After Jesus had been testing his wings as a fledgling preacher, he went back to Nazareth to preach in his home synagogue. He was given the prophecy of Isaiah from which to read. Why I don’t know; it doesn’t say. But we may infer that because that happened, Jesus decided to preach from a particular text in Isaiah, Chapter 61, verses 18 and 19. It reads, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Then Jesus sat down to preach, as rabbis in the first century always did. “Today,” he began, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” At that some of the Nazarenes were delighted. “He’s one of our own!” they emoted. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” A very interesting observation, that. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Fifty years ago I would have said, “No, Jesus was not Joseph’s son; he was God’s Son, via the virgin birth of Mary; he was Mary’s son.” But that was then, and this is now, and now I see that differently. Maybe Luke himself saw it differently, for it was Luke in the first two chapters of his Gospel who clearly stated that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. Now, only two chapters later, he puts this question in the mouths of some of the Nazarenes, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Maybe Luke also had some ambivalence about that.
In response to that question, Jesus made a peculiar statement: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself; what we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here also in your own country.’” If you performed some miracles elsewhere, Jesus, let’s see you do your stuff among your own kinfolk and neighbors. Anticipating what they were thinking, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own country.” And at that the Nazarenes were instantly incensed, so much so that they rushed Jesus up to the top of the mountain above Nazareth, and threatened to throw him off a cliff. I have been to Nazareth many times, and I’ve seen that mountain, but not the cliff. It is very steep. Even throwing someone down the side of the mountain could kill the person. Luke didn’t tell everything in this episode, surely, but he told enough to let us know that Jesus’ first sermon in his home synagogue was also his last sermon in his home synagogue. The “old” folks at home wanted no more of him. He was gone.
As I reflect on my half-century ministry, I realize that I have been a preacher more than sixteen times longer than Jesus was a preacher. Geezer preachers see things differently from fledgling preachers. In saying that, I want you to understand very clearly that I am not comparing myself to Jesus. Please do not misinterpret what I am trying to say. I am merely suggesting that the young man Jesus behaved differently than an older Jesus, and especially an old Jesus, likely would have behaved had he gone back home to preach to the people among whom he had grown up. Young people often know things that older people admit they no longer know but hope are eternally true. The young tend to be certain; the old tend to be more tentative. Age does that.
A friend sent me a clipping from I think but I am not certain either The Times of London or The New York Times. It was written by Julia Baird, who is a contributor of opinion pieces to the – I am certain – Times, either of London or New York. She also is an author, and a television presenter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She entitled her piece Doubt as a Sign of Faith. She began by saying, “Certainty is so often overrated. This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.” Then she noted that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, admitted that sometimes he wonders if God is really there. That innocent musing provoked a firestorm of controversy in England and beyond.
Then Ms. Baird wrote some wonderful and thoughtful words: “Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief.” She ended her outstanding editorial with these words: “The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that ‘the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’” Julia Baird’s last words are these: “Of that at least we can be certain. I’m pretty sure, anyway.”
A woman named Marilyn McIntyre was asked, along with everyone else in her congregation, to express their spiritual biography in six words. She pondered for a few moments, and her six words sprang quickly into her mind. “Eat the manna. More will come.”
Do you remember the story of God providing manna to feed the people of Israel when they were with Moses in the Sinai Desert for forty years? It fell each night from heaven, and it had to be consumed that day, or otherwise it would spoil, except for Thursday night, when they got two days’ worth of manna, which would carry them through Shabbat, the Sabbath, when no work was to be done. Eat the manna. More will come.
Sermons are maybe a latter-day form of manna. If so, perhaps they are meant to be mentally and spiritually consumed when first heard, or otherwise they will spoil. But you may be certain of this: more will come. More will come. More will come. And woe to me if I do not try, as best I can, to preach the Gospel.