Hilton Head Island, SC – December 14, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 6:1-9; Matthew 13:10-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed perceive but never see.’” – Matthew 13:14 (RSV)
Preaching Probings for a Non-Advent Advent
2. Preaching As Intentional Boat-Rocking
No preacher in the history of homiletics has been more greatly blessed by the quality of the minds in the congregations he has served than I. Purely by the grace of God, I have been associated with congregants, the majority of whom were eager and able thinkers. Through the past fifty years the most common comment about my preaching has been something on this order: “I didn’t necessarily agree with what you said, but you made me think.” Only people who can and do think would ever say, “You made me think.” Those who don’t think wouldn’t say that, because it would never occur to them to think to say it.
Allow me now to make a statement that is so true that it is a truism: Different preachers preach differently. Can anyone dispute that? Different preachers preach differently. As of December 28 I will have preached my final sermon as a “regular” preacher, meaning someone who preaches more or less every Sunday of every year. Thus in my final four sermons as your full-time pastor I am making some observations about preaching from half a century of having stood in the pulpit, attempting to proclaim the Word of God as best I understand it.
Some preachers are textual preachers. That is, they work from a particular biblical verse, and they go through it very carefully, explicating each word. Others are expository preachers, going through a longer biblical passage with the aim of explaining in detail what each sentence or idea means. Others are topical preachers, who address issues they think are important for parishioners to hear. I am mainly in that latter category of preachers. Many preachers are put off by topical preachers, but what can I say? Different preachers preach differently.
I have had a marked tendency through the years fairly often to choose sermon themes which I know will provoke spiritual, sociological, and ethical uneasiness among those who hear that particular kind of sermon. Thinking back over my ministry, this isn’t a tendency I followed only in later years. For better or worse --- and no doubt in some ways it was better and in other ways worse --- I have always been an intentional boat-rocker by means of some Sunday sermons.
For example, my first church was in northern Wisconsin. Four miles north of our town, Bayfield, at the very tip of the Bayfield Peninsula in Lake Superior, was the Red Cliff Indian Reservation. After living in Bayfield for a year or two, it became obvious to me that many of the members of our church didn’t treat the residents of Red Cliff the same way they treated one another. I preached a sermon about that, and I suspect not everyone was thrilled to hear it. But I thought it needed to be said. Next I was an assistant minister at the large and prestigious Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. The Boss, Elam Davies, always assiduously avoided talking about financial stewardship. It gave him the homiletic heebeejeebies. I, on the other hand, have always loved to do so, and I asked him if he would permit me to address that issue on a Sunday morning in the autumn, when people were asked to turn in pledge cards to the church. He was more than happy to let his brash assistant suggest that the affluent members of Fourth Church might consider considerably raising the percentage of their income they gave to the church, especially since the young upstart preacher that morning noted that he and his wife had the twelfth highest pledge in a congregation of 3000 members. It was unvarnished homiletic chutzpah, but if I remember correctly (which I might not), it resulted in a 12% increase in pledges for the next year. If you can’t motivate them, then shame them, says I.
When we lived in Morristown, New Jersey forty years ago, there was a massive power outage all over the Northeast. Some of you may recall that utterly astonishing episode. Into the evening and night of the first day of the outage (and it took a few days completely to fix it), there was widespread rioting and pillaging in the poorer neighborhoods and along some of the main commercial streets of New York City. The next Sunday I preached a sermon called What Happened When the Lights Went Out? I proposed to the upper middle class citizens of suburban New Jersey that when people who feel they are exploited encounter an unusual and unpredictable situation, they may wisely or unwisely seize on it to express their anger and outrage over their perceived mistreatment by the larger society. That happened all over the country after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in April of 1968. Such social unrest has occurred many times since then in our land, the most recent major example being Ferguson, Missouri, at the time that an unarmed Michael Brown was killed, and then again a couple of weeks ago when the grand jury returned a verdict that no charges could legally be brought against the policeman who killed him.
During the seventeen years that I was the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church here on the island, I preached a number of sermons about local political and social issues. A few of those sermons were reprinted in The Island Packet. Afterward the letters to the editor were always quite colorfully caustic. I published many of those sermons in a book of Hilton Head sermons called Whose Island Is This Anyway? The idea is that the entire earth belongs to God, and not to us. We are the stewards of this island, but not its owners. Some of those sermons angered the listeners, but at least some of them said, “I didn’t agree with you, but you made me think.”
The prophet Isaiah was a social swell who lived among the upper crust in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE. He was not as much of a squeaking wheel as his fellow prophets Amos or Jeremiah, but he was a ruckus-raiser nonetheless. God called him to be a prophet when he was standing in the temple in Jerusalem. God told Isaiah, “Say to this people: ‘Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.”
Frankly, that is a very confusing verse. Here is what I think it means, although I would not stake my life on it. I think it means that prophets are required by God to tell people what they don’t want to hear, and to try to make them listen to things which inevitably will disturb them. Some will listen but refuse to try to understand, and others will act as though they see the point, but they won’t allow themselves to agree. The prophet hopes they will hear and respond, but he should never bank on it. In fact, he probably can count on the fact that he will not be very popular. Nonetheless, that is his task in life, if he truly wants to serve God.
Prophets don’t predict the future. Instead they comment on the present. They don’t really describe what will happen; rather they tell what is happening. But the present is the mother of the future, and if the present is troubled, the future likely will also be troubled.
After Jesus had told a series of parables, his disciples asked him why he did that. They wondered why he didn’t state more clearly what he wanted to say, rather than to force his listeners to try to figure out what he meant. Jesus responded that those who understood what he was saying would be blessed in abundance, but those who didn’t get it didn’t get it because they refused to hear it. Then Jesus quoted Isaiah, in a slight alteration of what you heard earlier, “You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive.” The slight difference in wording would suggest that in Jesus’ time there was no officially authorized text for the Hebrew Bible. Jesus apparently was familiar with a different oral version than the one which eventually was translated into the Revised Standard Version.
Here is what I deduce from what Jesus told the disciples. If people don’t respond to the prophets, their job is to keep saying what they’ve always said anyway. Preaching thus often is intentional boat-rocking. It is not and cannot and must not be only that, but sometimes it must be that. So Jesus kept at it, and Isaiah kept at it, and Luther and Calvin and Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloan Coffin kept at it. And so does Francis I, blessed be he. You don’t quit. You cast the seed, said Jesus, and you hope it will take root someplace in someone’s heart and mind. That’s all you can do. It is the preacher’s greatest asset and also the greatest liability.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is one of the best and funniest movies ever. It is about an eclectic collection of British tourists who responded to an ad for a purportedly happy holiday in what turned out to be a wonderfully bizarre hostelry in a large, crowded, colorful Indian city. The cast of characters were a delightfully motley crew, led by the invincible Maggie Smith. Two of the other characters were a husband and wife. She was powerful and overbearing, and he was quiet and submissive. And while she was more dominant, he was more intelligent. At one point they had a small, brief dispute over something or other, and uncharacteristically, he expressed what he thought they should do. She shot back at him, “If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”
I have no doubt that many church folks would like to say to their preacher; “If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.” Fortunately (at least so the preachers think), it doesn’t work that way. Preachers say what they believe God wants them to say, and they let the chips fall where they may. But people don’t stand up in church and vociferously object.
However, is that really fair? Somebody gets up in a pulpit every Sunday, and says whatever is said, but no one is given the opportunity publically to protest. In The Chapel Without Walls, ordinarily we have a forum following the coffee time, and usually it is a discussion of what the sermon was about. So if someone wants to take issue with anything, that’s the prescribed time.
In political speeches, sometimes an organized opposition will respond vocally and loudly when a politician says something they don’t like. Occasionally they are so loud and boisterous that the speaker either is drowned out or refuses to continue because of the din.
I have had people walk out in the midst of a few of my most controversial sermons, but I’ve never had anyone stand up mid-sermon, strongly expressing an alternate opinion. I’ve never seen it done when I have been anywhere else listening to other preachers either. Perhaps it is an illustration of a widespread view of the inviolability of the pulpit, or perhaps it is generally believed it would be socially if not ecclesiastically inappropriate to interrupt the preacher, no matter how incorrect she or he is in what is being declared.
By the time one has been an ordained minister for fifty years, or it is hoped considerably sooner than that, he probably comes to some conclusions as to what, realistically, his strengths and weaknesses are. As far as I can discern, preaching has been my longest suit as a pastor. That at least has been the vocational hand of cards I have generally most enjoyed playing. There is nothing in the pastoral ministry I really disliked, except trying effectively to operate a computer in the last half of that half century. For me word-processing is one of the greatest inventions of the ever-imaginative intellect of the human race, but the rest of cybernetics is often a tool of the devil, especially when I innocently touch an errant key and the world collapses before my eyes.
Let me give you an analogy regarding preaching. If I were a baseball pitcher, I would suggest that symbolically, my best pitch by far is a fastball. Most of my sermons have consisted of that one pitch. Not a curveball, or a slider, or a change-up, or a knuckleball, but a fastball. Occasionally, however, I would try to throw a fast curveball. That was intended to result in a social/political/incendiary sermon, one intended not only to make people think, but to get them intentionally stirred up. And when such homilies were thrown toward the plate, either it was a strike-out, or else the pitcher was sharply knocked out of the park. When the boat is rocked and the cages are rattled, it is foolhardy to suppose nothing will happen.
I feel greatly blessed by God to have had the privilege of attempting to speak the word of God to Christian congregations for these past very happy fifty years. I readily admit I will miss writing a sermon each week, but I will not miss being tied down by having to write a sermon each week. However, as the availability of the four ministers in the co-pastorate is likely to work out, I probably still shall preach twenty or more Sundays each year. Shall I behave myself, or shall I rock boats? I never intentionally even contemplated rocking boats every Sunday, nor do I intend to do so in every sermon I shall preach from this pulpit from now on. But, just to keep my hand in the game, and to keep you on your toes, I might still attempt to throw a fast curveball which manages to get near the plate every now and then.
It truly has been a joy to have been the primary preacher for The Chapel Without Walls during the past eleven years. It seems impossible that much time can have passed that quickly! But, as they say, time flies when you’re having fun. It has certainly been fun, but much more than that, it is been both a genuine pleasure and a great privilege.
And, as Paul said, and as I have quoted him a few times lately, woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel, with all its healing, inspiring, and biting power.