Monday, June 28, 2010
July 4th Sermon
If you're looking for a sermon for July 4th, here's one I'll be preaching at FBC Tryon, NC. Just click on the graphic to the left.
Monday, June 21, 2010
A Modest Plea for Bible Reading
From time to time people who know of my appreciation for C. S. Lewis will ask me if I’ve read some recent book about Lewis. I always say the same thing: “No. I don’t read books about C. S. Lewis; I read Lewis.” There is this idea afoot that secondary literature (writings about other writings) is somehow as good as, or even perhaps more valuable than, primary literature (the writings themselves). And so, as a result people read biographies or “studies” of C. S. Lewis, thereby intending to understand his “thought,” rather than going straight to the “horse's mouth,” so to speak, and reading Lewis’s own writings themselves. “You’ll learn more Plato from the ‘experts’ than by reading the Symposium; you’ll learn more Homer from the textbook on ancient Greek literature than by reading the Odyssey.” I don’t much think so.
I’m sure some of it is merely the result of feelings of inadequacy. “How could I possibly know as much as the experts about Homer or Plato or Lewis?” Some, no doubt, is the result of indolence. It’s easier to let the experts do the hard work and boil it all down to a few “scholarly paragraphs” which can then be lifted and dropped in an appropriate context as if I had done the work myself.
But nowhere is this tendency more pervasive and insidious than in reading the Bible. Years ago, I was teaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, and I had gone home to South Florida for a holiday. While I was there, at church one Sunday someone came up to me and, knowing that I was a seminary professor, asked what I thought about Experiencing God (a “Bible study” course popular in the churches at the time). I said: “I don’t have an opinion; I haven’t read it.” The person looked shocked and said: “What do you mean you haven’t read it? Why, I thought that’s what you’d be teaching in the seminary!” Said I, “No, we still teach the Bible in the seminary.”
I’m constantly amazed at the lengths to which Christians will go to avoid reading the Bible, preferring just about any “study” or “exposition” or “inspirational writing” to the Bible. You go to a “Bible study” these days and there is precious little reading or study of the Bible itself going on at all! They’re studying Rick Warren or Beth Moore or whoever is perceived to be “trendy” or “relevant” at the moment. I observe that many, appropriately enough, don’t even call them “Bible studies” anymore. “I’m attending a Beth Moore study.” Precisely. Again, in my judgment the causes are the same: inadequacy and indolence. Some feel inadequate to move into a collection of writings composed in a world and a culture so vastly different from our own, so they look to the “experts” (credentialed or self-styled) to negotiate the distance for them. Others just don’t want to work that hard.
But the real tragedy is that the Bible, when given a chance, is not nearly so inscrutable as many seem to think. If one would just sit down and read a Gospel from beginning to end as one would any other story, the plot, the characters, the setting, and the message come through with surprising clarity. Even Paul’s letters, which Peter said were “difficult to understand” (2 Peter 3:14-16), nonetheless speak with striking relevance across cultures and through centuries when given a chance to speak for themselves.
And so, here’s a novel idea! Why not, at your next Bible study, actually study the Bible, rather than books about the Bible? Leave the “experts” and the “inspirational speakers” standing out in the hall and instead invite Matthew and Paul and John and Luke to your Bible study. Just read the Bible and see if it doesn’t make more sense than all those books about the Bible that are trying to “explain” it to you. I dare you!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Bird in the Grill
My late teacher, affectionately known as Dr. George, never tired of telling stories about his grandsons, Ben and Luke. They were the joy of his life. And among the stories he liked to tell was this one.
When Ben was about four and Luke two, their parents were returning from a trip with the boys when, during the drive home, a bird flew out in front of the car and the car hit it, killing it. They did not know it at the time, but the bird got stuck in the car grill. When they arrived home, they found the bird stuck in the grill, and Ben, being a sensitive and soft-hearted sort, was grief-stricken at the sight of the bird. He insisted that they had to bury the bird and have a funeral for him right on the spot.
So his dad went into the garage, got a shovel, and dug a grave for the bird in the backyard. Ben very respectfully took the lifeless little bird and placed its body in the hole, and then slowly filled the hole with dirt mounding it over the grave. When he finished, with tears in his eyes, he patted the mound of dirt and began to pray: “Dear God,” he said, “We’re sorry we killed this bird. We didn’t mean to; he just flew right into the car. He was a good bird, and I know he’s in heaven with you. Amen.”
When he finished, his dad asked little Luke if he wanted to say anything, and Luke thought for a minute, patted the ground, and said: “And that’s that.”
For some people, that is precisely what life is – just a series of events and circumstances through which we live, good or bad, and then when it is over, “That’s that.” We’re like a bird in the grill, a victim of dumb luck or bad judgment; but mercifully it comes to an end and “that’s that.”
Of course, when put that way, no one wants to believe that about themselves, but they live as though it were true. They either slog through life without ever having a serious thought about anything, meeting life as it races at them as just a series of meaningless events, or else they try to live a “happy little life” in which life is good, the kids are safe, the job secure, the marriage uneventful if not fulfilling, and the test results came back “normal.” But sooner or later both kinds of people will “hit the wall,” and when they do, no one…no one wants to believe that “that’s that.”
Tommy, a CPA who lived his life as though it were “one big party,” called me when he lay on his deathbed terrified that despite how he had lived his life “that most certainly was not that.”
“I want to be okay when I meet my maker,” he told me. “Is it too late to make it right?” Death is the great simplifier. There was precious little chitchat between us that day. Tommy didn’t have time for chitchat. He had work to do, and he wanted me to get to it. He needed to make his peace with God. We talked, Tommy and I, about dying, about faith, about life and death and resurrection. We talked about the fact that we’re all terminal. The mortality rate is 100%. Tommy just had the advantage of having a more precise “delivery date” than most. We talked, and then we prayed, and Tommy opened himself up in faith to God. And on that day, February 1, 2006, Tommy professed faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior of his life and claimed his promise of eternal life on the other side of the grave. And so, I baptized him. He was much too sick to do what we Baptists usually do. We dunk you, you know. And so, I improvised. We Baptists can do that. His wife brought me a chalice of water to serve as a makeshift baptistry. I looked at Tommy and said: “Tommy, do you now openly and publicly, in the presence of God and in the company of fellow believers, profess your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.” And he looked at me with level gaze and said: “I do.” And I dipped my finger in the water, raised my right hand heavenward, and said: “As a confession of your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, I baptize you my brother in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Sprit,” and I made a watery cruciform on his pale, weak forehead.
Less than a week later they gathered, his family and friends, to say “goodbye” to Tommy. They remembered the Tommy I never knew – happy-go-lucky Tommy, fun-loving Tommy, not-a-serious-bone-in-his-body Tommy. “Life was one big party for Tommy,” they said. But when I saw Tommy, “the party was over” and he desperately wanted to know, needed to know, had to know, that “that was most certainly not that!”
We all have a date with the dirt. What it means to be Christian is to live on this side of the dirt as though you will live on that side of the dirt, and as if “that is most certainly not that.”
Sunday, June 6, 2010
God and Government (Luke 20:20-26)*
*This sermon is doing "double duty." It was prepared both to preach on July 4th of this year (which happens to be a Sunday), as well as serving as a "sample sermon" for a preaching workshop I am conducting for the Greater Cleveland County Baptist Association on June 7, 2010).
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Why I Use the Lectionary
When I teach preaching I always encourage my students to use the Common Lectionary (in one of its many variations) in planning their preaching schedules. Being a Baptist and, therefore, firmly ensconced within the free church tradition, my predilection for a worship instrument that constrains the preacher may require, in the minds of some, an explanation.
First, a word about preaching in general. I often get questions from preachers about which “kind” of preaching I prefer. I presume they mean by that one of the many monikers used to distinguish various types of contemporary preaching, such as expository, narrative, inductive, confessional, etc. However, these tend to focus more on the form than the content of preaching, the “vehicle” rather than the “freight.” Irrespective of the style one employs, if one’s preaching at the end of the day is not, in its truest sense, “biblical,” then one is not preaching; one is merely giving a speech. What distinguishes a sermon from a speech is the biblical text and the way it is employed in the sermon.
By my way of thinking, therefore, there are only two approaches to preaching: topical or textual. Either you start with a topic and then choose a text that "supports" what you've already decided you're going to say anyway; or you start with a text and then let the text dictate your topic. I do the latter for reasons that should be obvious, with a moment's reflection. But let me state them nonetheless.
There are five reasons, chiefly, why I use the Lectionary when planning my own preaching.
- The Lectionary alleviates the preacher’s perpetual pressure of wondering what to preach on Sunday. It’s comforting and reassuring to know on Monday that my text for Sunday is already selected and waiting for me. I need only settle in for my weekly journey into and out of the text listening for a word from God to share with His people.
- “To Lectionary or Not To Lectionary” is not the question anyway. Every preacher will utilize some sort of lectionary. The only choice is whether to use a lectionary of one’s own devising, or one which the church has shaped and honed for centuries. I often tell my preaching students: “Just look through your sermon file for the past ten years, and you’ll discover the shape of your lectionary.” I prefer to use the one which the church, in its collective wisdom, has fashioned through centuries of experience with corporate worship.
- The Lectionary forces me to preach the whole Bible, and not just the parts I happen to like. That is to say, the Lectionary is based on the entire canon of the Scriptures, and not on some truncated, eviscerated canon comprised exclusively of my “pet passages.” On more than one occasion, I have climbed into the pulpit and begun my sermon with the words: “I would not have preached this sermon today had the Lectionary not made me.”
- The Lectionary is based on the Christian calendar and the church year. I like that. Of course, that’s not the only option for the preacher. There are multiple “calendars” all vying to dictate the preacher’s choices. For example, culture’s calendar will tell you that last Sunday was “Memorial Sunday” rather than “Trinity Sunday.” The denomination also has its “calendar” and will, if you let it, dictate what you call a given Sunday and what you preach – “Right to Life Sunday” or “Religious Liberty Sunday” or “Denominational Headquarters Needs a New Roof Sunday.” Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the point. The church calendar, on the other hand, is based on the Gospel (now, there’s a novel idea!) so that over the course of the year the preacher preaches the Gospel Story from Christ’s Coming (Advent) to Christ’s Coming (Christ the King Sunday). I like that.
- The Lectionary provides a larger perspective when, on occasion, a sermon seems mordant or harsh. When people tell me that the message of a particular sermon seemed to them harsh or difficult or judgmental, I typically remind them: “Please remember that this is but one word from God in an ongoing conversation. I have preached other words; I will preach other words. But this is one word which the church, in its wisdom, thought we needed to hear. Be patient. Judgment this week, grace the next. It is the way of things with the God of this Book. Besides, I do not attempt to preach all of the Christian faith in every single sermon, for which we shall both be grateful.”
To be sure, the Lectionary isn’t failsafe or foolproof. There are some Sundays when I scratch my head and ask: “Why did they pick these texts?” And there are some preachers for whom even having a text in advance is no necessary advantage! But that said, using the Lectionary helps me keep my preaching biblical so that even when I mess up, I mess up about much more important issues than I would if left to my own devices or choices.