This week I attended two lectures by Dr. Charles Marsh at the Virginia Theological Seminary’s Alumni Convocation. Dr. Marsh is a professor of religion at the University of Virginia. His topic for the lectures was reclaiming “The Social Gospel for the 21st Century.” His lectures were magnificent. The Social Gospel historically came out of the Progressive Era in our country, a time when theologians were seeking a biblical response to the consequences of rapid industrialization. The Social Gospel provided the theological grounding for ending child labor, limiting the workweek, establishing health & safety laws for workplaces, etc. It was largely successful. It presented a positive, hopeful approach claiming, and this is a broad generalization, that if the church appealed to the populace’s sense of justice and fairness based on Jesus’ teaching, then our human community could get pretty darn close to utopia. As we know from history, what we now call World War I ended such positive expectations for human community.

So the so-called Social Gospel became discredited as being unrealistic. And there was good reason to question its claims. It did not, as Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued it, take into sufficient account the power of our sinfulness and our human propensity to mess even good things up. But the criticisms of the Social Gospel never denied the prophetic claims Jesus’ teachings had on society’s injustices. Nor did they deny that the results of ending things like child labor weren’t a good outcome. Skip ahead 100 years, as Dr. Marsh did in his lectures, and we find ourselves going through a similar economic shift when the Church’s social witness to social injustice is still much needed. What Marsh contends is that this time a Social Gospel must be based on a deep acknowledgement of human sin. In doing so, we all could have a stronger empathy for those who suffer on the margins.

Marsh’s insight is important. If we come to acknowledge our own sinfulness, our own propensity to mess even good things up, then we’ll be more understanding of those who have made bad choices in their lives (or had bad choices made for them) and are now unemployed, stuck in low wage jobs, or don’t have the education to climb the economic ladder. We’ll be less inclined to blame them exclusively because we know our own sin only too well. Marsh referred to what was known as “the hanging sermon.” In previous generations, the night before a criminal was hanged, the entire town turned out for a religious service with the condemned person in the front row. This wasn’t an occasion to focus on the one condemned, per se, but an opportunity for everyone to become more aware of their own real sin before God, realizing as they looked at the condemned man that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

That’s just the tonic our culture needs as we face present social ills like growing income inequality. These days we have the tendency to group people into “good guys” and “bad guys” (with “our tribe” always part of the good guys). This gives us de facto permission to ascribe our status to our goodness while concluding that those on the margins deserve their fate because they lack such goodness. That’s bad theology. A healthy awareness of all human sinfulness, ours especially, can correct such theology. I propose we bring back “the hanging sermon” (the lethal injection sermon?). But would anyone attend?

+Scott

 

Preaching is a Dangerous Business (eCrozier #199)

“Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”
– Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow

Preaching is a dangerous business. For me, it’s a weekly wrestling match with myself. It requires that I be part poet, part theologian, and, although I hate to admit it, part circus barker. I must be bold enough to announce the greatest news ever told, while realizing that I’m only a sinner standing in the need of God’s grace just like everyone else.

As I preach, I try to find the right words, words that I’ve been thinking about and praying over for the past week. By sermon time all those words are jumbled together in my head. I think I know what all those words mean. During the week I’ve checked my thesaurus or dictionary more than once to make sure I have just the right words.

So I come to preach equipped with words. I deal them out to the congregation like a Vegas card dealer. But in the back of my mind I’m pretty sure I’m not playing with a full deck or that the deck may be stacked against me. All those words I threw together during the week come spewing out and as they leave my lips, they’re no longer mine. Every person there takes them in and makes something of them that’s entirely their own. As Paul Simon wrote: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” That’s why it’s a dangerous business: The chances of being misunderstood are legion.

When I look out from the pulpit on Sunday morning, some of the people I see are suffering through a troubled marriage or are recently unemployed. Still others are wondering how to deal with their suddenly out-of-control teenager or the grief of living alone now after 50 years of marriage. I’m supposed to have something profound to say to each of these people. They’re in church to hear someone say something true about the good news of the God who loves them. Through my words I’m called to help them make sense of their lives as they’re mediated through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

It is a fool’s errand. I must remember, however, that I’m one of the fools God has called to preach the Gospel. I must be foolish enough to believe that I have something important to say about the grace, mercy, and love of God in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, I should just sleep in most Sundays. I also must be foolish enough to preach all the while knowing that if I get it wrong, I might actually damage people’s relationship with God. St. John Chrysostom, one of the great preachers of the early church, ran from preaching for a long time out of a fear of just that. He figured his soul would be in danger if he did such damage. He was a wise man. It was a good while before he became foolish enough to set aside such wisdom and accept a call to the foolishness of preaching.

Yet when profound and true preaching actually occurs (and it does from time to time), Annie Dillard observes: “We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life jackets and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.” Sounds about right to me. Preaching, after all, is a dangerous business.

+Scott

 

In case you haven’t heard, this Sunday, October 7, is Pulpit Freedom Sunday, declared so by The Alliance Defending Freedom, which I discovered through an exhaustive investigation on the Internet (actually, I just googled it). The Alliance Defending Freedom claims that there’s no constitutional basis for a separation of church and state. That’s a fiction, they say, posed by those who have an “aggressively secular agenda.” These nefarious fiction-mongers “have persuaded many pastors and church leaders that their God-given right to freely worship, freely speak their faith, and freely assemble with other believers is at the mercy of bureaucrats” (presumably from the IRS). The purpose of Pulpit Freedom Sunday, as its leaders describe it, is to liberate preachers so that they will without fear openly endorse specific candidates or political parties.

This is creating a nonexistent crisis. I completely agree that it’s debatable whether or not the Constitution asserts a separation of church and state. The 1st Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So, reasonable and thoughtful people can debate whether there’s a so-called “wall of separation” in this amendment. Of course, the term “wall of separation” isn’t even in the Constitution. It comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to members of the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association in 1802.

But that’s not what The Alliance Defending Freedom is really concerned about. They’re creating a straw man. Today, any preacher is completely free to preach whatever he believes his faith calls him to preach. Our government, we must know, doesn’t stop preachers from preaching. Pulpit Freedom Sunday is stirring up people, out of their ignorance, to think that the awful government, led by aggressive secularists, will swoop in and arrest these martyr-preachers. Like with a lot of deliberate misdirection, we should follow the money.

The real issue is tax-exempt status. Yes, if a preacher endorses a particular candidate, then his church is in danger of losing tax-exempt status. If churches and other similar non-profit organizations want the benefit of not paying taxes, then they must refrain from political partisanship. But that doesn’t muzzle them as The Alliance Defending Freedom claims. All they have to do is give up their tax-exempt status. If these self-proclaimed “defenders of freedom” really felt as strongly as they do, then they’d gladly give up their tax-exempt benefit in order to make their partisan pronouncements. If they did that then I’d have respect for their conscience and conviction. But they won’t do that, because this isn’t really about religious freedom at all. It’s all about the money.

Preachers should preach on important political issues if, in their discernment, Jesus’ Gospel relates to those issues. And any preacher worth her/his salt can do that freely without telling people who to vote for. So, I say to preachers: Preach the Gospel and then trust Jesus’ disciples to vote their Gospel-inspired conscience. The Alliance Defending Freedom must think Jesus’ disciples are so infantile that they can’t discern for themselves. They’re the ones undermining the real religious freedom of disciples.

+Scott

 

eCrozier#06

Some reflections on preaching

Will Willimon, Methodist Bishop in Alabama and former Dean of Duke Chapel, use to refer to preaching as that time when the preacher speaks and his/her words then “go running naked down the aisle of the Church.” I think what Willimon meant was that once the words have left the preacher’s mouth, she/he can no longer be responsible for how those words are received and appropriated. A preacher could speak on grace and someone at the door after the liturgy would still say: “that was a very good sermon on realized eschatology.” That is what the listener heard. Such a disconnect is what every preacher experiences. It is one of the true givens of preaching in our parishes.

That, however, does not relieve us from the responsibility and task of careful sermon preparation and then doing our utmost to preach the Good News of God in Christ each Sunday. We should expect that of ourselves and one another. And, according to an article in The Times of London (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6993099.ece), it seems that the people in the pews expect it, too. Now I realize the context in the UK is different from our context here in Georgia, but the UK is even more secularized than our culture. And yet, 96% of churchgoers in the UK told researchers that they “look forward” to the sermon and 60% of them say “it gave them a sense of God’s love.”

Even in the digital age we still need those who practice the ancient art of standing up in a room of people and speaking to those people’s hearts and minds about God’s love in Christ. Such an art is quite simple, but it is never simplistic. If it is going to have any force, it must come from the heart of the preacher. Yet, if it is going to have any lasting impact, it cannot be only heart.

You and I have the privilege on a regular basis to have people’s ears. They are listening to what we have to say about God. The want to know that “there is a Balm in Gilead to make the sin-sick whole.” Let’s preach that with boldness and care.

+Scott