Not the Bully Pulpit

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
October 17, 2004

Not the Bully Pulpit
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Luke 18:1-8

I’ve have preached from this pulpit for almost five years now.
That’s more than 200 sermons.
Some have worked well, others have not.
Quite often it is the sermon that I have the least confidence in that works best,
while the sermon that I feel good about falls flat.

I have found that preparing and preaching a sermon
is one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever done in my life.
It isn’t the public speaking aspect that I find intimidating.
It isn’t the labor that goes into writing effectively for the ear,
or the research that goes into unpacking a verse or text.

No, what is daunting is that each week God sends me
to stand before this pulpit to proclaim his word.
Let me say that again:
God sends me to stand before this pulpit
to proclaim his word.

When I stand here, I do not give you a personal opinion.
This is not a “bully pulpit” where I can stand up
and say whatever I feel like saying.
This is God’s pulpit, a sacred desk.

When I stand here, I do so with one thought, one mission, one goal, one aim:
to proclaim as faithfully and effectively as I can
the word that God has poured through me
as I have prepared the sermon.
I stand before this sacred desk to give witness and testimony
to the Word of the Lord;
to give life to the Gospel of Jesus Christ;
to help us all – myself included –
weave the living Word of God
into the very fabric of our lives.

Every minister who labors during the week to prepare a sermon
might look like he or she is working alone
sitting before a computer screen or scratching away on yellow pad.
But none of us is ever alone;
sermon preparation is always done in partnership with God.
And God is the senior partner.

Barbara Brown Taylor has written, “Every sermon is God’s creation.” (PL77)
God is with me from the moment I first sit down
to read through the texts assigned for a given Sunday.
God is with me as I read through different histories
and the commentaries that help me understand the texts.
He is with me as I sit at my computer
and my fingers begin to type,
words beginning to appear on the screen.
If I find myself writing easily, fluidly, the words flowing,
I have learned that I am probably not doing a good job discerning God’s word
or his will.
If it all comes too easily,
I’ve learned that I am probably not being attentive.
God’s word takes wrestling, it takes prayer, it takes discernment.
Writing the sermon takes me at least 10 hours, and usually more.
That’s just the writing alone.
That doesn’t include time spent reading, researching a point,
scraping the rust off my knowledge of Hebrew and Greek.
It doesn’t include time for prayer,
time for quiet, time for listening.

A sermon is not something I write to deliver at you.
It is something that God writes through me,
for all of us, including me.
A sermon is a way for us to encounter God,
a way for us to hear God’s voice to us,
a way for us to hear God’s praise and love for us;
a way for us to hear God’s concern for us;
It is also a way for us to hear of God’s distress with our waywardness
and his disappointment with our disobedience.

In a frenetic and cacophonous world,
a sermon may be the only quiet time some of us might have during the week
to listen for God’s word, and feel God’s presence.

God knows we all learn in different ways,
so God speaks to all of us in different ways.
It is why my sermons are as varied as they are.
Some of my sermons are historical,
others are narratives,
others are more prophetic.
Some focus inward, while others focus outward.
Some are caring, nurturing, and loving,
while others are more exhorting, insistent,
even demanding.

All my sermons are grounded in the biblical text.
The text shapes what kind of sermon I’ll preach.
A sermon based on God’s angry, prophetic words in Amos
will have a very different feeling to it
than a sermon based on God’s gentle words in the first letter of John.

God has a purpose with every sermon,
It is nothing less than transformation:
your transformation, and my transformation.
God expects a response to every sermon,
a positive response,
a response that moves each of us closer to Christ,
and a response that moves this unique congregation,
this Body of Christ, to more faithful discipleship as a group.

From time to time, some parishioners have reacted strongly to a sermon.
I have received angry comments, curt responses;
I’ve noticed that someone has walked out the back door in a huff
at the end of the service.
I find these reactions troubling for two very different reasons.
First, they are personally hurtful to me.
I work very hard to be a faithful pastor to every person in this congregation.
I work very hard to be faithful to God,
to be a good disciple in all that I do.
In everything I do, I try my best.
More important, however, than my feelings
is the fact that when a person reacts that way
it tells me that he or she profoundly misunderstands what a sermon is.

If, as we believe, a sermon is the word of God proclaimed,
If a sermon is truly a creation inspired and guided by God,
then a rejection of the sermon or any point in the sermon
is a rejection of God’s word.

Some sermons are designed to shake us up,
to stir us out of our complacency,
to open our minds,
to open our eyes and our hearts
to a new way of thinking,
a new way of seeing and hearing.

Sermons that do nothing more than reinforce our own views, our own feelings,
don’t lead to transformation in Christ.
No, we need at times to hear sermons that rattle us,
that shake us up, that leave us feeling uncomfortable.
Not all the time, perhaps not even most of the time,
but certainly from time to time.
Some sermons will be inspirational,
uplifting, soothing, and comforting messages.
We hear them and we float out the door feeling good.
But if every sermon followed that mould
I wouldn’t be a faithful minister;
I would be nothing more than a motivational speaker.

You know from your own Bible reading
that much of what God has to say to us
is often troubling, perplexing, and discomfiting.
So it stands to reason that faithful interpretations
have to be equally troubling, perplexing, and discomfiting.

It would be infinitely easier for me to write a simple inspirational homily,
a 15-minute message that conveys
“I’m okay and you’re okay.”
But the message of the gospel is,
as one preacher put it so beautifully,
“I am not okay and you are not okay,
but through the grace of Jesus Christ, that’s okay”.

I am not okay and you are not okay -
because none of us is perfect.
But God has said to us as eloquently and as lovingly as possible
through his son Jesus Christ, that it is okay.
But we cannot stop there.
No, God’s love for us is absolute and unconditional,
but he has told us clearly what he wants for us and want he wants from us:
he wants our complete transformation through discipleship.

None of us is perfect,
but we are called to seek perfection as we follow Jesus Christ.
None of us, not me, not you, none of us will achieve it.
but we must never stop striving,
never stop learning,
never stop growing.

Every Sunday, God sends me and 11,000 other preachers in Presbyterian Churches,
along with tens of thousands of preachers in churches of other denominations,
into pulpits to wrestle with God’s word to us.
I wrestle with it during the week,
so that we can then wrestle with it together
for 15 to 20 minutes on Sunday morning.
as we try to discern what God wants us to learn and
where God wants us to go.
So let’s wrestle with the text from Jeremiah,
let’s wrestle with it together and see what God is saying to you and to me.

First, we need some background:
Six hundred years before the birth of our Lord,
God had grown exasperated with his children.
The people of Israel had grown fat and happy,
they were successful, well to do,
and they were more concerned with material comforts
and goods than they were in being faithful children of God.
God called Jeremiah to be his prophet to warn the people
that they had better change their ways.
The people of Israel did not like Jeremiah’s message at all.
They initially dismissed Jeremiah as a troublemaker.
And then they did what we humans so often do
when we don’t like the message we are hearing,
they tried to kill the messenger.
Jeremiah’s words fell on closed ears, uninterested ears,
even hostile ears.
And so God led King Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army
into the land of Judah and Israel to lay waste the countryside.
The army destroyed the Temple, God’s home
and took the people into captivity in Babylon.

But God loved his children so much, that he wanted to forgive them,
wanted to re-establish his relationship with them,
even if they had not repented,
even if they had not learned anything from their 40-year “timeout”.

And so God established a new covenant with each of his children,
a covenant written not on stone,
but on the heart,
the law written on each person’s heart.
And God restored the children of Israel to their land
and then God did what God always does with us: he hoped.
He hoped we would respond to him, obey him, follow him.

But we humans have made a history of turning from God,
and so God sent his Son Jesus to walk the earth,
to teach, and heal, and to preach.
And Jesus taught and preached through parables,
through stories that seem to say one thing on the surface,
but quite often say something different when we dig into them.
The gospel lesson provides us with one of those parables.
This one seems easy to understand:
We should always keep praying, even when we get discouraged.
As Paul puts it in his letter to the church at Thessalonica:
we are to pray without ceasing.
The dilemma, of course, is that quite often when we pray
there is a long period of silence before we hear God’s response.
In fact, sometimes we don’t hear God’s response at all.

The parable suggests that if we just pray,
and perhaps even whine long enough,
we will wear God down and God will answer our prayer,
answer it just to scratch us of his list,
answer it in just the way we are asking.

But we know, don’t we, that while God always answers prayers,
he always answers prayers in his time,
and he always answers prayers in the way that is best for us
even if the answer is quite different from what we prayed for.
Fred Craddock suggests that God may be using the silence
to re-shape us into the vessel that will contain the response
that God has in mind.
We are the clay that God shapes and God is the potter.
But we resist God’s attempts to shape us.
We have decided that we like the shape we are,
we have decided that we’re okay.
In the silence, God reminds us that we are not okay,
that our shape is never perfect
and even more important, our shaping is never done.
In the silence, God reminds us that he is the one
to whom we should look for our shaping and re-shaping.
Only when we acknowledge that can we give Jesus any confidence
when he asks his question,
“when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Now, we made a slight change in the order of worship today
which you probably noticed:
We moved the Anthem to the Offertory.
We did this to give us more time in the service to focus on the word of the Lord:
the word of the Lord read through the biblical texts
and the word of the Lord preached,
the word proclaimed,
the word that God pours through me,
or any other preacher who stands here at this pulpit.

As you listen to sermons in the Sundays to come,
remember that you are listening to the word of God,
and that somewhere in every sermon is a call to you,
a call to me, a call to us:
a call to respond,
a call to act,
a call to be transformed.
As you listen to sermons that are proclaimed from this pulpit,
by me, or anyone else, listen for what God is saying to you,
and you alone, for every sermon is the word of the Lord.

Amen