This Week at the Center for Excellence in Preaching

Talk about your wheel within a wheel (and perhaps within yet another wheel at that).   As Robert Jenson has pointed out, Deuteronomy is the one part of the Bible that is itself presented as a sermon.   So when a pastor preaches on Deuteronomy, she is already doing a sermon based on another sermon.   But now inside this somewhat odd chunk carved out of Deuteronomy by the Revised Common Lectionary we get Moses talking inside his own sermon about other future sermons that might be delievered by whatever prophets God might raise up in Israel through whom to speak his truth.   So if preaching a sermon based on another sermon is a wheel within a wheel, then preaching on this part of Deuteronomy 18 adds one more layer to all that!

The premise of this text is easy enough to state and summarize.   Since direct communication with Almighty God had proven to be a knee-buckling, white-knuckle experience for the Israelites, God had for a very long time spoken through Moses.   But since Deuteronomy represents Moses’ swan-song sermon to Israel there on the Plains of Moab just before the people would finally enter the Promised Land, Moses takes care to assure the people that future prophets like himself would be raised up so that the communication pipeline between Yahweh and his covenant people would continue to be utilized.  The message would still flow in the post-Moses era.

Before he finishes delivering this piece of news, however, Moses takes care to remind the people—in case they did need a reminder, and their history across the last forty years would indicate that they did need the reminder!—that the job he had been doing in their midst all along had not been very easy.   It was a high stakes enterprise.  One false move, one manged reportage of the divine message, and the prophet would be in serious trouble.  (And let’s not even talk about the prophet who spoke on behalf of another god or religion altogether!)   

Maybe Moses was remembering—even as he spoke these words—his own failure at the rock some years ago.   God told him to speak to the rock, he whacked it with his staff instead, and even that little swtich-up of the divine message was enough to get Moses banished from the Promised Land for good.   Did Moses wince as he spoke the words contained in verse 19?  We’re not told but if an involuntary shudder went up and down his spine, you could hardly blame him.    But this may have been also Moses’ way of telling the people, “Don’t think that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can take my place.   Before presuming to take over being the mouthpiece for God, you’d better be more than a little certain you have been so called by God and even then be more than a little aware that one false syllable could land you in serious difficulty!”

But that’s about the sum total of this passage.    As a Lectionary selection, it might be difficult for many of us preachers to get a whole sermon out of this.   Still, it is a reminder of how vital and precious God’s Word is as well as what is at stake in getting that Word across to God’s people.   It is a wonder that any preacher even today yet dares to undertake this task.   I confess that although there are still times I get very nervous before preaching, the reasons underlying the nervousness are seldom what they should be (namely, a fear of messing up God’s message).   And across the many years when I occupied the same pulpit month after month and week after week, there were many Sundays when I did not experience a flutter of nerves at all.

In some ways that seems to be OK.   After all, God has made each of us now a Temple of God’s Holy Spirit.   What’s more, unlike in Moses’ day, we now have the great gift of having an inspired written record of God’s revelation to us and so although it remains fully possible to get things wrong in sermons, the guardrails are more firmly in place now (even as the community itself can call the preacher back to his senses in case a sermon seems clearly at variance with the written Word of God as found in the text).

Even so, preaching is a vital activity and if much has changed in the millennia since Moses spoke these words to Israel about how God would get his Word across in their day, much has remained the same, too.  God’s people need God’s Word and even if it is true that today they can read that Word for devotions all on their own, the task of preaching has not contracted in importance just because people all own their own copies of the Bible.  It remains a central task of the church and, in many places, remains also a vital component of the worship service as well.

And yet . . . it is finally a spoken word.    Very near the heart of the Christian experience is a person talking.   That’s how God got his Word across to Israel, too.   It did not necessarily make Israel the most attractive religion in the region!   Eugene Peterson commented somewhere that had he been alive around the time of ancient Israel and had been faced with a choice among the then-viable religious options in the Ancient Near East, he is not at all sure he would have been lured particularly toward the faith of Israel.  There were any number of spiritualities and religions around that were far more colorful, far more exciting, far more physically (if not sexually) engaging than the comparatively staid and stricture-laden religion of Yahweh.  Other religions had gods you could see and hold and touch.  Other religions located the divine in the cycles of nature that everyone could observe and participate in.  But Israel’s God could not even be depicted and was clearly completely separate from the physical forms of nature and the earth and the sky.

The situation is not that different today.  There are other faiths that are easier to follow—and sometimes more colorful and engaging to follow—than the Christian faith.  What’s more, some of those religions don’t carry a few millennia’ worth of historical baggage with them.  No one ever accuses New Age-like crystal gazers or Scientology devotees of fostering past pogroms and crusades.  Some of these other faiths also don’t call for sacrifice the way Christianity does and do not force one to the foot of a bloody cross that looks suspiciously to some like a sordid form of child abuse.

People today do have spiritual options and do encounter spiritual crosscurrents!  And if in ancient Israel the idea of God’s truth coming across through the simple use of an ordinary human voice looked a little less exciting than other religious options, really the same thing is true today.  Some years ago a denomination in Canada was facing the prospect of being bankrupted by some lawsuits.  It looked like the church would lose much or all of its property and assets in the process.  One day a reporter asked one of the pastors of that denomination what they were going to do in the face of such potentially huge losses.  But this pastor was thoughtful and deeply insightful when he replied, “In the end all we need is a little water, a little bread, a little wine, and someone to explain God’s truth.  If we have that, we will be fine and the church will go on.”

A little water, a little bread, a little wine, and a human voice.  As Deuteronomy 18 foreshadows for us, that’s all we need to live in and to receive God’s truth.  Such simple things face powerful spiritual competition, and we dare not give in to the current zeitgeist that tempts one to say that one form of spirituality is as good as the next, the main thing being that someone have some kind of spirituality going for him or her.  Instead we go on proclaiming God’s truth and reveling in the wonder of the simple ways by which, for 2,000 years, God has brought his Word to his people.

In the final Harry Potter movie that was released in the summer of 2011, there is a scene in which Harry meets up with the deceased former headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry, Albus Dumbledore.   At one point during their visionary conversation, Dumbledore quotes back to Harry a clever phrase he had once uttered.  He then says something to the effect, “I’ve always prided myself on being able to turn a phrase.   Words are, Harry, in my not-too-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.”   Dumbledore was reminding Harry of something we all know intuitively and that we all experience on nearly a daily basis: words are powerful.   They have the power to soothe as well as the power to wound.   Words create scars that remain far longer than even most physical scars last.   Even the disembodied words that come across in an email, in a text message, or on the phone can lift our hearts up into the sunlight of joy or plunge us into the darkness of despair.

God knows the power of words.  The Bible tells us he created the world through his Word.  And before that Bible is finished it is clear that we are also saved through a Word made flesh.  Preachers who traffic in words in order to communicate the one saving Word likewise know: words are our most inexhaustible source of, not magic, but of life-giving power!

Some modern expressions of the Christian faith seem vulnerable to a kind of moralism that focuses on the “do’s” and “do not’s” that are a part of a faithful response to God’s grace.  So it’s as if pastors sometimes want to leap right to what God wants people to do before contemplating who that God is and what God does. 

Yet that’s a bit like trying to build a durable house without first laying a solid foundation.  Just as a house that has no foundation is vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces, human character that the Spirit hasn’t constructed on the foundation of God’s character is very fragile.  Psalm 111 lays a solid foundation for the Christian life.  It grounds Christians’ faithful response to God’s grace in God’s faithful person, words and works.

This psalm is a 22-line acrostic poem in which each of its lines begins with a successive Hebrew letter of the alphabet.  This structure may be a kind of mnemonic device by which the psalmist tries to make it easier to memorize the psalm.  In that way it may be a bit like the classic acronym Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge that music teachers once used to teach students the line notes on the staff in the treble cleft.

However, Psalm 111 is no piece of fluff poetry that’s built on a memorable structure.  It is, instead, full-orbed in its theology, calling worshipers’ to join the poet in praising God for what God has done, does, is and says.  It insists that full-throated public praise is the most appropriate response to the majesty and glory of God.  So Psalm 111 is the kind of psalm that almost begs for something like the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir singing and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing as the psalmist recites it.

This psalm begins literally with a “Hallelu Yah,” an appropriate way to begin any communication.  The psalmist then proceeds to explain just why such a public burst of praise is so appropriate.  After all, as it reminds us, God’s works, the focus of this psalm, are completely praiseworthy.  They are “great,” “glorious,” “majestic” and unforgettable.  God’s works are “faithful” and “just.”

Yet some scholars suggest that all of the praiseworthy works of God that the psalmist describes here are either aspects or consequences of God’s one great work that is Israel’s exodus from Egyptian slavery.  If that’s true, God’s “redemption” of God’s people of which the psalmist speaks in verse 9 refers to God’s act of liberating the Hebrew slaves.  God’s “covenant” to which verses 5 and 9 refer would then recall the covenant God established with Israel at Mount Sinai.  The “food” God provides to those who fear the Lord would, in that understanding, refer to the manna with which God graciously fed Israel in the wilderness.  Verse 9’s recall of the gift of the “lands of other nations” would then refer to the land of promise.

Yet faithful teachers and preachers might also want to explore the manifestations of God’s glorious works in other contexts as well.  Certainly other things God has done and still does today are no less glorious and majestic than God’s activity during the Exodus.  So those who explore this psalm might ask what sorts of works of God’s hands are still faithful and just.  Clearly those who interpret Psalm 111 in the light of the New Testament can also hardly help but hear faint echoes of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yet the grace and compassion that God demonstrates in no small part through God’s majestic and glorious works summon a response from those whom God creates in God’s image.  That’s certainly true of the psalmist.  He vows to wholeheartedly extol the Lord in the “council of the upright” and “in the assembly.”  After all, praise has a public dimension.  It’s as if the psalmist simply can’t contain his praise as he contemplates God’s great works.

However, because God’s works are so great, they’re also worth “pondering.”  While scholars consider this a textually difficult phrase, it seems to suggest a kind of contemplative response.  In a world that’s increasingly fast-paced, those whom God has graciously redeemed look for ways to slow down enough to carefully reflect on what God has done, is doing and promises to do.  Psalm 111 provides, through the power of the Holy Spirit, a wonderful stimulus to such meditation.

Those who recognize the glory and majesty of God’s works then respond with “fear” and “obedience.”  God’s redeemed children don’t fear God in the way we fear environmental catastrophes, wild animals or terrible diseases.  Instead we seek to be open to the Spirit’s production in us of a kind of reverential trust in our gracious and compassionate God.  That trust, by the power of the Spirit, issues in a commitment to responding to God’s great work with faithful obedience.

A 2011 Gallup survey suggests that more than 90% of all Americans still claim to believe in God.  Evidence also, however, suggests that they’re deeply confused about this God in whom they claim they believe.  Some people seem to think of God largely as a toothless, benign grandparent-type who always gives and never asks.  Others perceive God to be a fiery tyrant who does nothing but ruin people’s fun.

Researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina looked carefully at American teenagers’ religious beliefs.  In a report entitled, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers, they conclude that most American young adults believe in something the researchers label, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

The researchers identified four pillars of such faith: 1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

Psalm 111 is a wonderful antidote for such confusion.  After all, the living God who creates, cares for and is redeeming the heavens, the earth and every created thing in them is its subject.  In fact, only the psalm’s very beginning and its end have people as the subject of a sentence.  The God whom the psalmist praises and to whom the psalmist devotes so much attention is far more personal and active than at least of our contemporaries seem to believe.

It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, the Jews of Capernaum went to the synagogue. Some of them went sleepily, others went with a great weariness following a busy week of work.  Still others trekked over in a rather irritable mood for who knows why--maybe it had been no more than that they were out of cream cheese back at the house and the bagel at breakfast that morning just wasn't as good without it.  In any event, something set them off and so they weren't in the best of moods as they approached synagogue. Still others arrived having bickered with their kids on the way over. "We're going to God's house, for pity sake! Shape up, you kids!"

It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, they went to synagogue.

From various paths, emerging from a variety of experiences in the week gone by, awash in a welter of differing emotions and mental states, they came. They came because, among other things, it was frankly their pious habit to do so. For as long as many of them could remember they had gone to synagogue on Sabbath morning. It was the thing to do. It was what was expected of you. You went to the synagogue, moved your way through the fairly staid and predictable liturgy, listened as the scribes read a portion of the Torah, sang a hallel doxology, and then you went home for the feast day meal at noon.

It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, they went to synagogue.

But on that particular morning, Jesus of Nazareth was there, and his presence would create a worship service no one would ever forget. This Jesus stood up as some kind of guest pastor that day. Few, if any, had ever heard of him before and once they looked into the bulletin and saw he was from Nazareth originally, not a few perhaps groaned inwardly. But then he started to teach and although he was no John the Baptist full of theatrics and arm-waving fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, there was something striking in the very way this Jesus spoke. It wasn't just that his ideas and vocabulary were fresh and innovative and it wasn't simply that he was a better orator than they at first guessed. Rather, there was something in the very presence of the man that made you want to sit up straighter. Even the teenagers, who had worked so hard at perfecting a bored-stiff look on their faces, couldn't help perking up, slouching a bit less and listening more closely than they'd care to admit.

This man had authority. He had a moral gravity, a weightiness and substance to him that people found difficult to explain. Somehow they sensed that this man and the message about God's kingdom he was talking about were one and the same thing. This man's impact had nothing to do with any seminary diplomas he had hanging on his wall. It did not stem from his once having been ordained and it wasn't just because he had clearly done his homework, had practiced his sermon, and so was able to preach without distracting stutters. No, this man was the very message he was proclaiming. They couldn't quite put their finger on it, but this man packed a wallop just by virtue of being there at all.

A few folks were starting to whisper their amazement even as others scrawled a furtive "Wow!" on the bulletin and then showed it to the person next to them. They were just starting to realize that something extraordinary was happening when suddenly and from the back pew a shriek went up. "What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?! Have you come to wipe us out already!? I know who you are, you are the Holy One of God!"

Well, this didn't happen every week in worship, either! "Be quiet!" Jesus commanded. And everyone there was glad he said it because it was on the tip of their tongues, too. You can't tolerate that kind of thing in church. The only thing for such an interruption is to tell the person to hush and then hope the ushers get over there fast to bring this sadly crazed person to the narthex. Everyone in the synagogue was thinking "Be quiet!" and so they were glad Jesus said it out loud on their mutual behalf.

But then Jesus said something that no one else had had in mind: "Come out of him!" And no sooner were those words out of Jesus' mouth and the man convulsed!   He shook like a leaf in a violent wind before shrieking one last time and then collapsing into a heap. But then the hapless fellow was better. The fire had gone out of his eyes and a look of calm came over him.

At that precise moment, however, he was the only calm-looking one in the whole place! Everyone else was scraping their jaws off the floor! This just didn't happen every week at church! By that late in the service on a typical Sabbath people's thoughts usually began to drift to other vital things, like will they get home on-time enough to keep the pot roast from drying out and is little Martin is behaving himself in worship center. But not today! No one's mind wandered, no one turned his thoughts to the mundane or the typical. They had encountered Jesus, and he was all they could talk about for a long time to come.

It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, they went to the Synagogue.

But on that particular day, by the time they returned home from the Synagogue, the people had the overwhelming sense they had been in the very presence of God in a way that was anything but typical.   But then, what they didn’t know, was that the very Son of God would be present that day, too.

The thing is, however, that we Christians go to church each week and we do know that the Son of God will be present via the Holy Spirit.   But do we expect that this living presence of Almighty God will shake us up, make us exclaim over the power in our midst?   We shouldn’t need to see the kind of razzle-dazzle the people of Capernaum saw that day nevertheless to know that we have encountered something wonderful.  Maybe we should even expect it.   Because when you gather for worship and Jesus is truly there, anything can happen but something life-giving will happen.   Every time. 

We should expect no less.

Why is it that even after Jesus does the eye-popping spectacle of causing an unclean spirit out of a man that the crowd’s first reaction still goes back to the teaching of Jesus?  True, they comment soon enough on the wonder that even the spirits obey whatever Jesus commands of them but that’s not the first thing they say, according to Mark’s reporting of the day.  The spirit comes out of the man with a loud shriek, the people fall back in amazement, but then they say not “What is this!?  This man commands demons!” but rather they say, “What is this!?  A new teaching with authority!”

It turns out there are some variant readings of this text that follow up the words “new teaching” with a hoti clause, the effect of which seems to be “What is this?  A new teaching because with authority even the spirits obey what he commands.”  Those are minority readings in the relevant manuscripts and so the way we read it in most Bibles today probably is the better reading.  But what is curious is that the variant readings seem to spell out a bit more explicitly what even the accepted text appears to imply; namely, the people saw a tight connection between the teachings Jesus had been giving them earlier (and that had come with an authority different from any teachers or scribes or rabbis they had ever before encountered) and the wonder of Jesus’ command over evil spirits.

Here is a linkage we may find a bit puzzling, in part because we may not tend to make such connections very often ourselves.  After all, if we caught wind of some wonder worker who was reputed to heal diseases or something, we’d go see this person not to hear his sermon but to watch his miracles.  And even if we had gone to hear someone teach but not expecting something eye-popping or startling to happen from that speaker, teacher, or preacher, if such a thing happened anyway, it’s hard to believe that once we got back home and started Facebooking or emailing our friends about what happened that we’d open our report with an outline of the sermon or lecture that had preceded the spectacle that sent us away in awe. 

That is to say, we would focus on the spectacle at the expense of—if not instead of—whatever other teaching the miracle-worker might also have to offer.  But maybe the crowd in Capernaum that day was wiser than we tend to be.  Somehow they were able to draw a straight line from the wonderful things Jesus had been saying in his earlier teaching with what he then went on to do when confronted with the spirit-possessed man.  Maybe it helped that the things about Jesus the crowd had begun to suspect earlier were confirmed by the rantings of the man when he identified Jesus as “the Holy One of God.”  If that really was Jesus’ identity, then the crowd began to understand a little of what that striking authority was they had picked up on even as Jesus had been teaching them earlier.

Because even while Jesus was talking—and well before he encountered this hapless man—they sensed a connection between Jesus and God that was different from any other human being or teacher they had encountered.  His being “the Holy One of God” helped them connect some dots.

As we’ve noted before in other sermon starter postings on Mark, this is one gospel where everything happens IMMEDIATELY as Mark peppers the early texts of this gospel with the Greek word euthus.  In fact, the first of 3 uses of that word in this text from Mark 1:21-28 is rather intriguing.  If we translated verse 21 literally, it would say, “And coming into Capernaum, immediately the Sabbath arrived and he taught in the synagogue.”  Mark is no doubt signaling a mere temporal linkage here but it almost sounds as though when Jesus shows up, the Sabbath follows him immediately as does the teaching that comes as a result.  Similarly in verse 23 no sooner had Jesus immediately arrived to teach on the Sabbath and immediately this spirit-possessed man crops up.  Later in verse 28 after Jesus had both taught the people and driven out the demon IMMEDIATELY his fame spread throughout the region.  This triplet of uses of euthus seems to have a sense far more interesting than some temporal sequencing along the lines of “First this happened and then this happened and then this happened . . . “  No, Mark seems to say that it is the very presence of Jesus himself that more or less causes or in some deep sense leads to these other things happening.  It all has a kind of holy inevitability, which is just what you’d expect when the Son of God is near!

A while ago I read a charming anecdote involving the great Pope John XXIII. One day the pontiff was having an audience with a group of people, one of whom was the mother of several children. At one point the pope said to this woman, "Would you please tell me the names of your children. I realize that anyone in this room could tell me their names, but something very special happens when a mother speaks the names of her own children."

I suspect we know what the pope meant.  And maybe it was something like this that the people sensed about Jesus.  Maybe this is what they meant when they said he had an authority others seemed to lack.   The teachers of the law were good at teaching about God. They drew off their book learning and seminary training, they employed their various gifts of oratory and enunciation. And good though they were at this, there always seemed to be a bit of a remove between a given scribe and the God he was talking about. But not so with Jesus. There was an intimacy to his knowledge about God. He spoke as though he had spent a long time personally being with God. Oddly enough, it almost seemed at times like he was speaking as God. Probably no one in Capernaum that day went quite so far as to conclude this was God in the flesh, but when this Jesus fellow talked about God, it was like hearing a mother intone the names of her own children--the love and the personal involvement Jesus had with his subject matter made it clear that this was not coming out of his head so much as his heart.