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"On Preaching" by Scott Hoezee
Reflections on Preaching from the Center for Excellence in Preaching.
Signs of the Times? (Posted on March 19, 2009)
(Note: This article appears in the March 2009 edition of Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought, and is used by permission. To view more articles from this magazine, visit the website: http://www.rca.org/Page.aspx?pid=3605)
"Sodomy Is a Crime Against God and Nature."
So declares a church sign that my wife drives past each morning on her way to work. Now I know what you’re thinking: criticizing church signs is hackneyed and is anyway a little like the proverbial "shooting fish in a barrel." To some these signs are just the height of religious silliness, hardly worthy of serious concern much less serious commentary.
Even given the fact that few people expect much from the average church sign, there is something about that one my wife has been driving past that causes a wave of sadness and frustration to wash through my soul. And perhaps part of the reason is because this particular church is perched just inside one of the most economically depressed counties in the already hard-pressed state of Michigan. Unemployment in this county is pushing well past the statewide average of nearly 11%, reaching sickening levels in the 15% and higher range. The county is filled with people who have watched long-held and long-cherished jobs get shipped to Mexico even as most of the county’s small towns feature an increasing number of shuttered shops and restaurants along with the abandoned dreams that each such closed business represents.
I have been a preacher for nearly twenty years, but across the last three years I have focused on the preaching craft in a more intense way since I now help to teach preaching classes and so have regular occasion to speak with students and my faculty colleagues on the nature of the preaching craft. Among the many lively topics that crop up in homiletical conversations are questions concerning just what it is the church is supposed to preach. On the most basic level we in the Reformed camp are quick to say that we preach the biblical text. At the core of every good sermon is a well-exegeted biblical text. Karl Barth went so far as to say that a sermon must be nothing but the text all over again, and so woe betide the preacher who gets in the way of that text by larding up a sermon with clever introductions, illustrations, or conclusions. Most people don’t go quite that far but, nevertheless, at its core preaching is about proclaiming the Word of God.
But it’s not only that. Many contend that every sermon is finally about proclaiming the gospel. Even Old Testament texts—where the name of Jesus is never mentioned—need to connect with the gospel. We preach Christ from even the Old Testament. And no matter what our text, what distinguishes preaching from a Bible lecture or a classroom presentation is that in the end the sermon needs to point people to all the hope, joy, and grace that just is "Christ clothed with the gospel" in ways that change lives.
Preaching is not just about imparting biblical information. Also, preaching is not supposed to be about doling out "How To" advice. Preachers are not supposed to resemble Dr. Phil in telling people how to put their lives back together through this or that course of action. Preaching is not supposed to encourage people in thinking they can build their own stairway to heaven, getting closer to paradise inch by inch through good moral living and hard work. Of course, if there is one thing we know about church signs it is that they do have an unhappy tendency to bolster just this anti-gospel, moralistic, self-help frame of mind..
Years ago in a lecture that railed against moralistic preaching, William Willimon mentioned passing a church sign around the time of Mother’s Day that said "Virtues Are Learned at Mother’s Knee, Vices at Some Other Joint." As Willimon said, that may be clever but his main concern was that some poor fool was going to drive past this church and conclude that that was the gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. And it is not. Nor are guilt-inducing signs such as "Seven Days without Prayer Make One Weak" or the happy-clappy signs that seem to forget that Christians follow a crucified Savior such as "Put on a Happy Faith!" or "We’re Too Blessed to Be Depressed."
None of that is the gospel. None of that radiates the grace of God in Christ. None of that tells hapless, helpless, despairing souls that there is hope to be had in this sad world—a hope that declares that it’s all been accomplished for you, that true Life is a gift. And if ever there was a time when people need to hear a strong proclamation of hope and joy, it is now. The U.S. may have just elected a president who campaigned on the theme of hope more overtly than anyone in history but the fact is that hope seems in short supply. As I type this, CNN just published a story on its website about what CNN discovered when asking people to complete the sentence, "The economy makes me feel . . ." The responses included: Defeated. Annoyed. Afraid. Confused. Fearful. Desperate.
All of which brings me back to that church situated just inside that sad, sad county thirty minutes from my home. What is it that makes anyone who bears the name of Christ think that what the church is mostly about is being a beacon of damning, judgmental news? When did the Good News that just is the gospel become a license to scream out Bad News to all who pass by a place that bears the sign of the cross? Compared to this congregation’s screed against gays, even those self-help church signs start to look almost saintly.
It’s an open question, I suppose, whether any given sign is a window onto a congregation’s collective soul. But when I look around at the sad, unhappy, uncertain, and frightened faces of my fellow Michiganders during these stressful and uncertain times—and when I reflect on the state of people’s lives in the county where that church is located—I conclude that a sign that screams bad news of judgment is so tone deaf to the times in which we live and (worse) to the very acoustics of the gospel as to stem, quite possibly, from the devil himself. After all, who else has a bigger stake in making the Good News of the gospel look so sour and so bad?
C.S. Lewis would not be surprised. In one of his many brilliant pieces in The Screwtape Letters, the senior demon Screwtape is advising his underling demon, Wormwood, on how best to lure a Christian bit by bit from the true core of the faith. At one point Screwtape suggests that nothing succeeds so well as encouraging a Christian slowly but surely to see the church as an "us" that defines itself primarily by being better than "them." Make a Christian get quietly self-congratulatory on being a Christian, on being on the righteous inside of things, and you may succeed in ruining the church. "Teach him . . . to adopt an air of amusement at the things unbelievers say. Some theories he may meet in modern Christian circles may here prove helpful; theories, I mean, that place the hope of society in some inner ring of ‘clerks,’ some trained minority of theocrats . . . [T]he great thing is to make Christianity a mystery religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates" (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Macmillan, 1961, p. 113).
When we define ourselves by what we are not instead of what by grace we have become in Christ; when finger wagging defines our proclamation to the world instead of trembling fingers that point to the wonder of the cross, that is when we start to lob bad, damning news into the faces of genuinely hurting and despairing people and not even notice the dread irony of what we’re doing.
"Christ clothed with the gospel." Put that on your church sign and see what happens.