Hilton Head Island, SC – May 15, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Romans 10:1-9; 10-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? – Romans 10:14 (RSV)
Before we think about how the portion from Paul’s letter to the Romans applies to us today, let us first see how it applied to the people to whom and about whom Paul was writing. The first Christians, including Paul, were virtually all Jews, but most Jews who heard the Christian Gospel nevertheless rejected Christ. When that happened, the early Church decided that Peter would become the apostle to the Jews and that Paul would become the apostle to the Gentiles. The word “apostle” means “one who is sent.” The first-century Church concluded Peter would do better being sent to the Jews, because he was not so cocky or caustic, and Paul would be better suited to be sent to the Gentiles, because most of the Jewish Christians probably didn’t think a mission to Gentiles mattered much anyway. Christianity in those days was essentially perceived as a Jewish sect, by both the Jewish Christians and the non-Christian Jews, and not a new religion.
Paul willingly and skillfully accepted his assignment. As a result, much to everyone’s surprise, by the end of the first century, Christianity eventually became almost completely a Gentile religious movement. Still, Paul fretted about most of his fellow Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Chapters 9 through 11 of Paul’s letter to the Romans are a pastor’s inner conflict over what seemed to be the failure of an extremely important mission to the Jews, even if he was not a major part of it.
Paul had a habit of answering questions with other questions. There is an unexplained situation behind the whole series of questions of which our sermon text is a part. To Paul’s way of thinking, the situation was this: the Jews had not accepted Jesus as the Messiah. But why? Because they didn’t believe in him. And why didn’t they believe in him? Because they hadn’t heard about him. And how could they hear about him if there was no preacher? And how could there be a preacher unless God sent them one? But hadn’t God sent anyone? And if He did, why hadn’t the Jews understood?
There are some implied answers to all of these questions. The main reason the Jews did not accept Jesus was not they had not heard about Jesus, or that they had not been exposed to preaching about Jesus, but rather they had rejected what they had heard. God had clearly made His appeal to the Jews through various preachers to the Jews, especially Peter, but the Jews had not responded affirmatively to the plea.
That is the first century context. Now – what is the twenty-first century application?
Let us listen again to the text. “But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14) People cannot call upon Christ of they haven’t believed in him, Paul said, and they can’t believe in him if they haven’t heard about him, and they can’t hear about him if there are no Christian preachers.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You say to yourself, “This must be a preacher’s plot. Paul made up this whole argument, and now we’re being taken in, because it means we should listen more carefully to the preachers.” I admit, if any clergyperson had said, “Paul, why don’t you put in a plug for the preaching profession,” they couldn’t be happier with the results than Romans 10:14. This passage is the preachers’ blue ribbon, our raison d’etre, the sanctuary to which we retreat when we begin to wonder if our calling is worthwhile. The only question is this: is it true?
Let’s face it. There are many other ways of learning about God and Jesus Christ than just sermons. People can read the Bible or other books, they can attend classes or lectures, they can participate in discussion groups. Through these and other methods, they can hear about God and learn about Him. Then why have sermons? Why go through this exercise once a week, fifty-two weeks a year?
A few weeks ago I went through a lengthy time-consuming reading exercise. For some time I had stored eight file boxes of fifty-seven years of my sermons in the garage of some Chapel members. I have preached regularly from 1965 to the present, and the boxes were in their garage because we don’t have enough storage space in our small storage closet to contain those eight heavy boxes. But the kind sermon-keepers have sold their condo, and I needed somewhere else to store this lifetime’s homiletic efforts. Fortunately I found it in the garage of other Chapel members.
Before I moved the sermons, however, I went through all of them with a particular purpose in mind. I intend to send some sermons and Old Philosopher essays to a religious publishing house in hopes that they might publish a few of these few thousand sermons and essays. It was a fascinating and deflating mental exercise which took many hours to sort through all those sermons, but I think I finally decided on which ones and which essays I want to send in my proposal to the editor. The proposed title of my tome would be something like this: “You Make Me Think”: The Evolution of a Provocateur Preacher. I doubt that anything will come of it, but I’m semi-retired, and what else do I have to do in my spare time? In any case, “You make me think” is by far the most common comment I have heard regarding my preaching in more than half a century of having done it. For me, that is the highest compliment I could ever receive.
But let us return to where we were before I led you on that brief detour regarding my homiletical compilation. It now becomes necessary to make a distinction between a sermon and any other means of communication about God. Not everyone would agree with the following statement, whether they are a layperson or a clergyperson. But to me it is the distinctive feature of a sermon. A sermon is a means of oral communication about God and/or Jesus Christ and their relationship with humanity that derives its authority from divine inspiration. That is quite a mouthful, so let me repeat it. A sermon is a means of oral communication about God and/or Jesus Christ and their relationship with humanity that derives its authority from divine inspiration.
The key phrase in this definition is the one which says that the sermon gets its authority from divine inspiration. Speeches can be inspirational, and they even can be inspired by God, but that isn’t the foundation from which a speech is made. However, if a preacher delivers a sermon and it has the ring of truth in it, it is true because God is authoritative, and His truth is understood through the preacher. By no means is that the only way God’s truth can be known, but for most church-attending Christians, it is one of the main means.
Nevertheless the sermon isn’t authoritative because the preacher is authoritative. The great nineteenth-century preacher Phillips Brooks said that preaching is God’s truth mediated through human personality. I think he meant that inevitably the personality of preachers is seen through what they preach, but the truth comes through who the preachers are and not because of who they are. It is God speaking through sermons that makes sermons “the word of God,” if indeed that is what listeners perceived sermons to be.
There is a problem here, however, and I hope you are immediately aware of it. What if preachers say something which is not so, which by implication means that God did not inspire it to be said? Or are we to assume that the preacher is always right? Let me strongly warn you against that assumption. The preacher is not always right. At times every preacher has misspoken, and has distorted the truth. Any preacher or any parishioner who denies that is dangerously deluded. Therefore it behooves the worshiper to listen very carefully to the sermon, and it certainly behooves the preacher carefully to think through what is preached. There is always the possibility for error, even serious error, in which case the words of preachers do not become the word of God.
Nevertheless, the preacher is called by God to proclaim the word of God. “How can men preach unless they are sent?” Paul asked. Apparently God sets aside certain people to preach. Why He chooses whom He chooses only He knows, if that in fact is the way the process works. Not infrequently, many congregations become mystified by that process themselves, if that really is the process. “How did we end up with this person?” they ask. Whatever the reasons, preachers have as the primary part of their vocation to preach God’s word to their people. To do so requires more than mere speaking skills or mental ability or biblical awareness or spirituality. And it necessitates more than merely sincerity. Often Christian people will accept bad preaching because the minister is sincere. What on earth does sincerity have to do with it? You can (and often do) find sincerity in complete nincompoops. Sincerity may also be associated with Basset hounds, Bolsheviks, and ballet dancers. It should be hoped that preachers are sincere, but sincerity does not produce preachers. Nor do the speaking, mental, biblical, or spiritual abilities which we have mentioned. They help, but none of them is the key ingredient. Only a calling, a vocation, counts.
But this presents the same problem from a different angle. How can you tell if someone really is called, which means how can you know whether someone is truly speaking God’s word? You have to listen, and you must do so very attentively. There are two parts to preaching. Only half of it involves speaking. The other half, which is equally important, and is numerically far more important, involves careful listening on the part of the congregation to what is spoken. One person preaches, but lots of people listen. They don’t just hear; they must listen. You can hear a preacher reaching some part of your mind, or more accurately, both sides of your head, but your thoughts can be a million miles away. You must not only hear, but listen. It’s no good for the preacher alone to be inspired; you need to be inspired as well.
All of us should critically evaluate sermons. Just because they are preached does not make them effective. And yet the word of God can come to us through the worst of sermons and the worst of preachers.
James Stewart was one of the most renowned preachers in the whole of Scotland, which itself is renowned for preachers. He was a famous professor at Edinburgh University, and the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
James Stewart was asked to preach from the pulpit of a small rural church in the county of Argyll in western Scotland. For sixty years an elderly pastor named Malcolm MacDonald had spent his entire ministry in that wee kirk. He had married and baptized and buried three generations of his people, and no pastor was ever loved more than he. As a preacher, Mr. MacDonald left much to be desired, but because he was so esteemed by his people, he was thought by them to be a prince among prophets.
After the service was finished in which Dr. Stewart preached, an elderly man asked an elderly lady what she thought of the sermon. “Och well,” said Mrs. McGregor, “he’s fair preacher, right enough, but he canna hold a candle to our Mr. MacDonald!”
You see, preachers are instruments in God’s hands. They are persons, and yet, through God’s guidance, they can become divine instruments. And God uses preachers in mysterious ways.
The Rev. Mr. Malcolm MacDonald would be a total mystery to anyone who heard him only once, but to those who heard him for decades, he became, for them, one of the most powerful preachers in the whole land.
In the past generation, sermons have fallen out of vogue. Perhaps they deserve it. There has been de-emphasis on preaching, both in the seminaries and in the Church at large. Some people think sermons are passe’. They say they want worship to be entertaining. For a time people wanted dance in worship, or recordings, or guitars or dramas or colored slides on huge screens depicting beautiful scenes or people or animals. There may be a place for all of those things in public worship, but not as a substitute, especially as regular substitute, for preaching. An old aphorism says, “He who marries the spirit of the times will soon find himself a widower.” To some extent, the Church has bought into the current philosophy of dumbing down both worship and sermons, and it is now experiencing the price paid for that decision. People come to church for many reasons, but if there is not something of value in the sermon, if the word is not preached and the flock know they have not been fed, then they may try to go it alone without the Church, and it is possible that they may starve to death.
For many Christians, though not for everyone or for all varieties of Christians, sermons are the primary means of Christian nurture over the long haul. It may be a conscious or a subconscious process. Some people are incredible at remembering sermons. I confess I am not one of them. I have been greatly influenced by all the preachers I have heard throughout my life, but the influence is more general than it is specific. The one exception to that is Dr. Elam Davies, the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, In my homiletics class at McCormick Seminary, and in my five years as an assistant minister at Fourth Church and listening to that outstanding man preach, he shaped my preaching more than anyone else, except, I trust, God.
I can hardly remember what, specifically, I preached last Sunday (although I remember I didn’t preach last Sunday), let alone what The Boss preached over fifty years ago from the lofty pulpit of that beautiful, great Gothic church. Yet as I look back on my life, I am sure that subconsciously, sermons have done more than any other factor, including three solid years of theological education and the singing of many hundreds of hymns many scores of times, to solidify my life and my thought as a Christian. I am grateful to God that throughout my childhood and teenage years, and especially during my seminary training and my five years at Fourth Church in Chicago, I was exposed to excellence in preaching.
The Sermon: A means of communication about God and His relationship with humanity that derives its authority from divine inspiration.
“But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?”