Sermon, Sunday, July 13, 2008

“How to Listen to a Sermon”
Matthew 13:1-9; Isaiah 55:1-3; 8-13
July 13, 2008

In 1996, a Baylor University study identified the 12 most effective preachers according to 341 professors, religious editors and preachers. The list received national attention when Newsweek reported the results. I have heard every one of the 12 preachers--not all of them in person but some over media. I would have to agree, these are truly effective preachers. But I wonder how instructive the list is. What do we really accomplish in naming effective preachers? The announcement from Baylor said that the study reflects their commitment to "preparing ministry students." So, naming effective preachers was meant to be exemplary for those who preach. However, effective communication depends as much on the receiver of communication as it does on the sender of communication. Put any one of these twelve preachers alone in a sanctuary reciting their sermon, and I’d say they are practicing not preaching. Sermons are delivered in the context of a worshipping community of faith. At our highest density, there are 34 sermons listeners to every preacher—there are probably more. But since there are overwhelmingly more sermon-listeners than sermon preachers, it makes more sense to name the 12 most effective sermon listeners and offer their habits as examples for the rest of us. Since it’s not really logical to do that, we might content ourselves in considering “How to Listen to a Sermon.”

The primary task of a sermon listener is to listen for the Word of God. I want to exchange meanings with you. If I were to ask “what is the sermon” the definition I think a number of us would give is that the sermon is a message delivered by a preacher during worship. A sermon entitled, “How to Listen to a Sermon” would be arrogant and self-serving if the preacher preaching it believed that people needed to listen to him or her. I’d like to replace that definition of sermon with this one: the sermon is the time dedicated in worship for the whole church to listen for the word of God. What then is the preacher doing? If it is the time dedicated in striving to hear God speak, why doesn’t the congregation just sit in silent anticipation of a word to come from God? Good question—there are actually some traditions that do just that--no preacher just a congregation sitting silently waiting for a word from God. That’s good and we ought to respect that tradition. We have a lot to learn from Quakers. But we’re not like that because we believe that the preacher can assist the congregation in hearing God’s word. We’re also a tradition that has fiercely resisted the notion that the preacher is going to get it exactly right on any consistent basis. We have said it is each believer’s responsibility to strive after God’s word. The best sermon listeners are not the people who can leave the sanctuary and recite the sermon word for word. That would be freakish actually. The most effective sermon listeners are those who can listen past the words that are spoken to the Word that is spoken which belongs not to the preacher but to God.

Sometimes, though very rarely, the word of God comes directly through the sermon. This has happened one time in my life. You’ve probably heard me say that Ephesians 2:10 got me through the 8th grade alive. Let me tell you the story behind that comment. In eighth grade, my church was in transition. We had been dealing with a serious moral failure at church. I and my peers wrestled with our disappointment and sense of betrayal. On top of that, my seventh grade year was filled with the normal amount of adolescent trauma—nothing serious but nothing really pleasant either. Our church had a Jr. High retreat—it was cold. I had to go late. I didn’t really want to be there. I had a bad attitude. And the speaker began talking about Ephesians 2:10. “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, to do good works which God has prepared in advance for us to do.” And the preacher said that the word for workmanship in Greek is poema—from which we get the word poem. Then he said, “You are God’s poem, God’s work of art, God’s masterpiece.” And when he said, “You are God’s masterpiece” he looked directly at me. I sensed in that moment that he was speaking God’s word directly for me. But that is the only time where I felt that the sermon was the word of God for me directly—and I may have been the only one in the room who felt that. It doesn’t happen often. A church who believes that their preacher regularly and directly speaks God’s word is bound to fall victim to manipulation, coercion and the sort of evil that has dogged the church since our earliest days.

The best we can normally hope for is that the word of God will come alongside the sermon--Or more truthfully that the sermon comes alongside the word of God. The sermon can assist the congregation in hearing God speak but does not convey the message directly. The analogy that I’ve been playing with this week is that of rain. It’s a risky analogy right now because we have friends and family members living in flooded areas where more rain is not welcomed. But in this part of the world, rain is almost always welcomed. In fact, in this part of the world, the rain could rain out a visit from the President, Billy Graham and Nolan Ryan all on the same day and people around here would shrug it off saying, “Well we needed the rain.” Jesus used the analogy of the word of God as seeds that must fall on good soil. In my analogy, I want to suggest that the word of God is the rain—actually that’s not my analogy its Isaiah’s “As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth . . . so is my word that goes out from my mouth: it will not return to me empty.” (Isaiah 55:10).

Let’s imagine that our souls need to be rained on by the word of God in order to survive. Now, let me suggest that the preacher’s role in this little analogy is that of the weathercaster. The weathercaster comes on and says, “To the best of my knowledge, using the tools I have available to me, here’s where I think the rain is.” The weathercaster doesn’t generate the weather any more than the preacher generates the word of God. And the weathercaster can’t cause the rain to fall on you any more than the preacher can cause the word of God to land in your life. If your response is to sit there and passively listen to the weather report you will not get rained on. Not even if the weathercaster tells you that there’s rain right over your house. Unless you make the minimum effort to get up off the pew (I mean couch) and go out into rain, you will be protected from the word of God (I mean rain) by the structure you’ve built around you.

Let’s stick with this analogy a little longer. Let’s say that you recognize that your soul desperately needs the rain/word of God. And the weathercaster/preacher says, “I believe the word of God/rain is there.” What do you do? You get in your car, turn on the radio to the weathercaster and start moving in the direction he said the rain would be. And something happens, you begin to watch the horizon and you look at where the clouds are and you say, “You know, the weathercaster said there was going to be rain over here but, I think the rain may be over there.” And so you make a few turns and you go to that place where you sense the rain might be and you discover that you were right. That’s the discernment that takes place when we participate together in seeking God’s word rather than assuming that the preacher is either always right or hardly every right. The preacher is a member of the community of faith neither privileged with the complete sense of God’s word nor completely incapable of assisting the congregation in finding it. But, it takes a congregation working as a congregation—people taking the risk to move toward the rain--to receive the word of God.

Every now and then people say to me, “I’m sorry but my mind wandered during your sermon.” I want to say, “it’s not my sermon it’s our sermon. But more to the point, where did your mind wander?” Because it’s possible that your mind wanders because you’re having a Walter Mitty moment and just daydreaming about what you could have been and would have been. If that’s where your mind wanders, then—fine—consider yourself chastised. But, I believe in God’s Spirit and believe that your mind could wander to that place where God’s can actually pour out rain on you. Maybe your mind wanders to a need that you read about in the newspaper or saw on TV and your wondering why the preacher doesn’t talk about our response to that need. Maybe that’s not the failure of the preacher but the success of the God’s spirit revealing to you the call that God has on your life. Maybe your mind wanders to a relationship that has been ruptured and needs to be repaired. Maybe your mind wanders to a decision that you need to submit to God’s guidance. Maybe your mind wanders because as you gaze at the horizon you see that the rain you are meant to receive is actually falling somewhere else. I’m like anyone else. I love people to say that they liked the sermon when the sermon is done. But what really excites me are those rare moments when people come to me and say, “Andy, I know this isn’t what you said but what the message made me think of was . . . .” When I hear that, I get the feeling that the word of God might be falling on good soil and the rain may be watering the earth and producing the food of life.

But the analogy begins to break down doesn’t it. How does one get into the car of the soul and drive toward the rain. What can we do to put ourselves in the position to hear God’s word? It begins, I believe by making a decision, about how God communicates to us. Both of our texts speak about “God’s Word”--God’s word as a water, God’s word as a bag a seeds that fall into different contexts. Those are metaphors for the content of God’s revelation to us. But what does that mean in our lived experience? Some say that God communicates through creation—through nature. I agree. Some say that God communicates through relationships—particularly the relationships we have in church. I think that’s important also. But, our faith as a church consistently says that God most fully communicated to us through God’s Son—Jesus Christ. His incarnation, teachings, actions, death, burial, resurrection, commissioning of the church and ascension are the fullest disclosure of God we have. It is the disclosure we claim as Christians. Further, we believe that God revealed God’s self to us in the covenant relationship God had with Israel. The principal witness we have to these acts of revelation is scripture—which we sometimes refer to as the Word of God. I do not believe that scripture is so much the word of God as it becomes the word of God whenever we allow it to be reflected and absorbed in our lives. Mark Powell said it best, I think, when he said, “There is something almost blasphemous about calling a book that lies unopened on a coffee table, ‘the Word of God.’ According to scripture itself, God’s Word is an active, dynamic force that never returns void but accomplishes that for which it is sent (Isa. 55:11). The Word of God cleanses, heals, creates, judges, and saves but it does not sit on coffee tables. A better formulation than saying, The Bible is the Word of God, would be to say, The Bible becomes the Word of God in those who receive it” (What is Narrative Criticism, p. 98).

Sermons then ought to consist of scripture interpretation. It’s what makes this sermon ironic because typically a sermon examines a particular text and I’ve not said much about the texts we’ve chosen this morning. If the sermon is the time for the church as a congregation to listen for God’s word then the whole congregation ought to be involved in the interpretation of scripture. I encourage you therefore to examine the texts that serve as the basis for the sermon. You can attend adult Bible study on Sunday nights where generally we study the sermon reading for the next week. You can do that at home whenever you get your newsletter and see the text that has been identified. Generally speaking, the second reading on any given Sunday is our focus text. At minimum, you can come into the sanctuary and before the service begins you can read and reflect on the text. By actively engaging our own study and reflection on scripture we travel past the beaten road, pull the weeds, and deepen the soil so that God’s word can land and receive water, take root and give life.

Sometimes the word of God comes directly through the sermon. But that doesn’t happen often and I would warn you against ever believing that any preacher ever delivers God’s Word directly on any consistent basis. Sometimes, hopefully this occurs with greater frequency, the sermon comes alongside the Word of God and is an aid in the congregation’s appropriation of God’s word. But finally, and this must be said--Sometimes the word of God comes against the sermon. Sometimes what the preacher is saying is so antithetical to what God desires us to appropriate that the word of God actually negates what the preacher says. This is not to say that we get to deny the holiness, godliness of every sermon that we disagree with. But every sermon gets something wrong and some sermons get everything wrong. In those moments keep in mind that the most effective sermon listeners are not those who critique the sermon or criticize the preacher but those who listen for God. Listen, therefore, for what God might want to communicate to us in the time we allocate to sermon. It feels like rain.