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"On Preaching" by Scott Hoezee
Reflections on Preaching from the Center for Excellence in Preaching.
Everybody is Whosoever (Posted on September 19, 2007)
Late last summer the New York Times featured an article in its weekly “Dining” section that was grimly startling to read. New York City is one of the premier dining destinations in the world and arguably the most celebrated culinary city in the United States. Most of the best chefs in the country have at least one restaurant in the Big Apple and not a few such top-flight chefs have their only restaurant there. New York boasts upwards of 20,000 restaurants but only a select few manage to snag the coveted one-, two, three-, or four-star rating from the New York Times (there are only about a half-dozen establishments, or about 0.05% of all restaurants, that have achieved four-star status). These higher end restaurants rake in millions of dollars (a head waiter at a four-star restaurant can easily make upwards of $100,000 a year in salary and tips) and are often so pricey as to ensure that only the wealthiest and most elite of diners will ever walk across their hallowed thresholds.
This latter fact is the one that made the recent “Dining” article so striking. According to chefs and others who spend most every day in restaurants, even the most expensive and elegant restaurants in the city are not immune to witnessing rude, lewd, and sad behavior borne of great drunkenness. Indeed, some of the behaviors reported in the article would be worthy of a frat house on a Friday night among undergraduates and so are most definitely not the kinds of spectacle one would expect to witness from adult men and women from the upper echelons of New York society. Even at Chef Thomas Keller’s culinary temple, Per Se, where dinner rings in at $250 per person (not including beverages), it is apparently not unusual to see the ultra-rich become so inebriated as to throw up things like Chef Keller’s “Sole de la Manche en Rouelle Pochee with Tokyo Turnip Buttons and Mignonnette Emulsion” right in the dining room. Other alcohol-induced spectacles in New York’s finest restaurants include loud arguments, off-key (and unsolicited) singing, sexual shenanigans under the tablecloth, and at least one incident at the Four Seasons Restaurant—which features a large fountain in the middle of the dining room—of several thirty-something women capping off their four-martini lunch by stripping down to their panties and taking a tipsy dip in the fountain.
As someone who is fond of fine dining and who has enjoyed a couple of memorable meals at a few of New York’s better restaurants, my first reaction is one of slack-jaw amazement. Why would anyone ruin an outstanding meal through overindulgence in wine and gin? Of course, a moral case could be made that it’s wasteful enough to spend $500 per couple for one dinner but to then also spew that dinner onto the restaurant’s Persian rug . . . well, it makes you wonder.
It reminds me of something I heard novelist Tom Wolfe say twenty years ago not long after the publication of his classic novel of the 1980s, The Bonfire of the Vanities. In researching this novel, Wolfe said he spent a lot of time on both the high end of New York and the low end. He spent time with investment bankers in $2,000 suits on Wall Street and with drug dealing gang-bangers in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. But according to Wolfe, about the only difference between high New York and low New York was the clothing. Beyond that, he discovered that both the bankers and the drug addicts had foul mouths, both spent all their days wondering how to get more money, both loved fancy cars, both tended to be deeply self-centered, both were forever angling for sex, and both tended to overindulge in whatever food or drink they could get their hands on. Small wonder, then, that a visitor to New York City could as well see a drunk passed out on the bathroom floor at the restaurant Jean Georges in Midtown Manhattan as in the bathroom of a Hardees in the Bronx.
But what does any of this have to do with preaching (I hear you asking)? Maybe nothing, maybe a great deal. However, sometimes we preachers assume that we need to tailor our sermons to a given audience in the belief that a suburban congregation of moderately to very well-to-do professionals has a different set of needs—and so requires a different kind of Word from the Lord—than would be the case for a more impoverished inner-city congregation or a rural congregation made up of mostly farmers and shopkeepers. And let’s admit that there are different needs across varying demographics and different socio-economic groups. Only a foolish pastor would ignore her context or not attempt to become as familiar as possible with the lives led by the rank-and-file members of her congregation.
It is possible, however, to exaggerate the differences among different groupings of people. It is possible to be deceived by the outer trappings of the well-to-do by assuming that their lives are as orderly as their nicely pressed suits and dresses, that their hearts are as manicured as their fingernails, that their overall attitudes toward life are as confident as the looks they wear on their nicely tanned faces. Similarly, it is possible to look at lower income families and draw wrong assumptions about their wants and needs based on how they are dressed or on what kind of house or apartment they call home.
The Times article reminds me that some of the neediest people around are the ones who seem to have it all even as those we deem “ less fortunate” sometimes have rich spiritual insights and resources. But I am also reminded that at the end of the day, all people struggle with the same sins, foibles, shortcomings, and gnawing sense of life’s emptiness. Folly is no respecter of class. Paris Hilton is as deplorable as the poorest crack addict in the country. The Wall Street tycoon whose wife makes a drunken spectacle of herself at a nice restaurant is as in need of salvation as some unemployed steel worker who swears loudly at his kids at Burger King (and who doesn’t seem to care who hears him).
When we preach the message of God’s grace unto salvation, we need to do our best to reveal how very relevant and vibrant that grace is to all who hear. Doing that does require a good sense of one’s own setting and the world from which the average parishioner comes. But as Fred Craddock recently pointed out in a powerful sermon, the New Testament is not kidding when it says “Whosoever will may come to the Lord.” As it turns out, “whosoever” is just what it sounds like: anybody and everybody. You can’t tell who “whosoever” is just by looking at the surface of their lives. “Whosoever-ness” does not disappear beneath the various veneers of high society and is not necessarily revealed just on account of someone’s lower station in life, either.
Good preaching offers gospel grace to whosoever will listen because it doesn’t really matter who you are or who you think you are or who you think you’ve become on account of your accomplishments or the impressive nature of your portfolio. Whosoever can be anybody.
Whosoever is anybody.
Those of us who preach do well to recall that and so preach accordingly, speaking God’s grace into their deepest needs and into their broken, empty hearts.