Don’t Forget the Mystery
How to Listen to a Sermon, prt. 2
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
January 23, 2011
Nice to be back with you this week. Of course two weeks ago we watched a preview for Financial Peace University, and last week I was out of town with my daughter Brittany. We spent the weekend in Rock Island, IL checking out Augustana College. Brit did a few scholarship interviews there, we toured the campus, and just generally had a fantastic weekend together. I know I will always be so grateful to have had that opportunity.
So three Sundays ago I began a new series that I want to continue today. It’s called How to Listen to a Sermon. This series is based on the fact that although people have heard hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of sermons in their lives, almost no one has ever heard a sermon about how to listen to a sermon. And this is in spite of the fact that you will not find any Jr. high or high school or college or graduate course that does not begin by going over the syllabus – a document that covers not the class content but how the content will be learned. The syllabus tells students how they will be learning what they will be learning. Lectures, quizzes, tests, online activities, real world experiments, self-study – whatever.
Yet you can leave church every Sunday confident that you will not actually be expected to have learned anything. There will be no test and no quiz. No one will ask to look over your notes. Expectations will be, what? NOTHING. There are no expectations of any kind. You not only show up and listen, free of any expectation that you should be learning anything, but then you get to go out to lunch afterwards and have a discussion about whether or not the teacher even knows anything. :-) But let’s be fair and balanced. After all, why should you assume the teacher really does know anything? If you take a science class, it’s safe to assume the teacher has studied science. If you take an astronomy or math class, it’s safe to assume the teachers have studied astronomy or math. But if you show up every week to listen to somebody preach, what exactly is safe to assume?
That the “teacher” has a degree in theology? Hmmm...I don’t have a degree in theology. That the teacher has studied theology? Hmmm...what kinds of places count as serious study? Does an online theological school count? Does it need to be in one’s own religion? How about one’s own denomination? What if the teacher is from one’s own religion and denomination, but has drastically different political beliefs than you do? Are they still a credible source of spiritual guidance and knowledge and information? What counts as credible? Oh yeah, that’s what we were talking about. If they are in your religion, and your denomination, and if they share reasonably similar political ideas, does this mean you can count on them to be right 100% of the time? How about about 80%? How about 50%? And how do you know which 50%?
In general, it is safe to say we expect our math teachers to know Math, our English teachers to know English, our chemistry teachers to know Chemistry, and our Psychology teachers to know Psychology but as a general rule, we do not expect our spiritual teachers to know God. Why is that? Because only someone who knows math can show you what it means to know math, only someone who knows English can show you what it means to know English, only someone who knows Chemistry can show you what it means to know Chemistry, only someone who knows Psychology can show you what it means to know Psychology, and only someone who knows God can show you what it means to know God. But there are state boards to tell you whether you know math, and whether you know English and Chemistry and Psychology, but who tells you whether you know God? And how do they know?
Do you see how much ambiguity is in here? And yet, every week, millions of people sit in churches as if all of this is perfectly clear, assuming that whoever is standing in front of them knows God, gets it, and has something to say that is somehow indispensable to their personal well-being and relationship with God, yet whatever that thing is we won’t usually even be able to remember all the way through lunch time and by the time Monday morning comes we couldn’t recall what the sermon was about at gunpoint. So does it matter or not? Is it critical or not? Is this coming in to church and teaching and being taught, this preaching and hearing sermons thing, is this really important, or is it a waste of time?
The answer, my friends, is that that is up you. What we are doing here can either be hugely important, and worth scheduling your week around, or it can be the biggest waste of time in your entire week, and which one it is depends only very little upon me as a speaker, and very greatly upon you as a hearer. Now most everything I’m saying in this brief series will be about you as a hearer, but I want to just talk very briefly for a moment about me as a speaker.
Some of you know how I got here. Some of you know why I became a pastor. Some of you know me personally and you are in some kind of position to decide whether and to what extent my heart is even in the right place. A small handful of you really know my heart, have received anguished emails from me, sat across the dinner table from me and heard my fears and my struggles and my doubts, and the things that keep me awake at night. But most of you haven’t. Most of you are taking on faith that I’m even worth listening to. Many people keep listening mostly because you haven’t yet heard me say enough things that meet your definition of insane that you have decided to throw in the towel. Perhaps some of you have considered deeply a couple of things I have said and you have seen how much difference it has made in your life and so you feel like you keep coming back for more because you believe that on some important level I know what I’m talking about. I like to think there are some people who occasionally sense some kind of mystery behind and beyond whatever I am talking about and come not for me but to be part of whatever that mystery is. But the fact remains that in this church as in most, the average person doesn’t really know whether the pastor belongs there or not, whether he knows God or not. The average person is taking on faith not only God and the reality of God, but that the person standing in front of them is actually qualified to be standing there talking about it, and is maybe somehow in some small way representing God as God actually is. That’s a lot to take on faith, don’t you think? Besides, what does it mean to be “qualified” to be up here anyway? The ordination process, which is this external system that is supposed to assure that preachers are “qualified” is letting a spam get through the door and, I daresay, is keeping a lot of good men and women from saying real things about God. Real stuff about God, after all, rarely fits comfortably into anyone’s ordination system or theological system.
Listen, folks, let me level with you. I’m now on page 9 of my notes and by this point, what I’m hoping is that you’re so seriously confused about what this preaching thing is all about, and what is the point of it all, that you’re starting to wonder why you come and sit here and listen every week. That’s my goal.
Let’s face it – this is simply a ridiculous environment in which to learn. It doesn’t meet the barest standards for what a good learning environment looks like. And yet here we are. And my friends, I submit to you that the environment during a sermon DOESN’T HAVE to meet those standards, because something totally different is going on here. Something that goes beyond knowledge and information and experience and expertise and qualifications and theology and rightness and wrongness and skill and politics and ideology and techniques. Something, indeed, that is not even about me as a speaker, not even about whether I am saying true things or false things. Now don’t get too hung up on that, I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as true and false, or that there’s not a time to be concerned about that. I’m just saying that we oftentimes act like the sermon is ABOUT rightness and wrongness, that it is about me giving information and you receiving it – but it’s about so much more than that. I’m going to only ask you to consider one main scripture this morning. Here it is:
2 Corinthians 4:7 (NIV)
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
Now to understand this scripture, and to really get the point of it, you have to bring your receptivity. You have to bring your spiritual eyes. If you do not bring your spiritual eyes, you will interpret this verse this way:
2 Corinthians 4:7 (NIV)
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. What we must do is crack open the jars of clay, to get at the treasure that is hidden away inside.
That’s how we’ll see it, unspiritually. There’s the treasure – the message of God – and there’s the jar of clay – our weakness and brokenness – and we have to get past the weakness and brokenness to get through to the treasure inside. But that is not the message of the gospel. That understanding doesn’t include mystery at all. But the gospel is fundamentally a mystery! The gospel is not that the treasure comes disguised as the jar, it’s that the treasure IS the jar! The gospel is not that that the powerful king comes disguised as a helpless child, the gospel is that the king IS a child. The gospel is not that the master comes disguised as a servant. The gospel is that in the master IS a servant. The gospel is not that we must labor to pull up all the weeds from the garden of our lives, the gospel is that the weeds are inextricably bound up in life and that we cannot – in this life – ever hope to be without either of them. The gospel is not that Jesus was 50% God and 50% man. The gospel is that Jesus was 100% God and 100% man – that flesh and spirit are in fact inseparable. The love and the grace and the power of God come THROUGH the weak vessel that is your life. The un-mysterious version is get rid of the jar so you can get to the message . The mysterious version is that when you get rid of the jar, you get rid of the message, just like Jesus made clear that when you pull up weeds, you also pull up the wheat!
The mystery is, the truth is, that in order to ever come to see the treasure, you must embrace the clay, you must hold it, you must consider it, you must ponder it, you must know, in fact, that you yourself are the jar of clay that contains the treasure!
1 Corinthians 6:19 (NIV)
19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;...
Now what does this mean about how we listen to a sermon? What it means is that mystery is where we begin. You do not listen to a sermon simply to weed out the falsehood so that you can discover the truth inside. Your whole life is a mixture of truth and falsehood! Some of your greatest gifts are also your darkest curses. God has given me the gift of words, but the dark side of this is that I can be too pushy and too forceful. God has given me the gift of expansive knowledge of ideas, but the dark side of this is that I get depressed and discouraged too easily. These are curses that are weaved in and through my gifts and it is as I learn that God is present as equally in the dark sides of my gifts as he is in the bright sides that I will learn to carry in my body the mystery of God – that I will increasingly realize, in my body – the treasure that always comes in the clay!
So you mozy into a church on Sunday morning and the sermon begins, and instead of getting out your intellectual highlighter and marking a T for truth next to each True statement and an F for False next to each false statement, you pay attention to what God is doing in you. Are you angry about something? Where’d that come from? What does God want you to know? Where do you need to encounter the darkness in yourself? Sure, maybe you disagreed, but why the anger? Why can other people’s words and opinions control you in this way? That is where God is, that is where the kind of truth that MATTERS is to be found. You can spend your whole life thinking that what really matters is whether or not someone else believes strongly enough in Biblical inerrancy, and completely miss the truth that God wants you to know not only about himself but about yourself. You can spend your whole life thinking that what really matters is whether or not some pastor or teacher believes that the story of Jonah was a story that happened literally, exactly as reported in the Bible, and in believing this you can completely miss the truth that you are Jonah – that God wants to deal with you in your moments of weakness and fear. Believe what you want to about the former, but if you miss the point of the latter, what difference does it make?
See, we’re so messed up about this sermon business. As I have already established, this is not an environment where any self-respecting learner would regularly go to be taught – it’s not even clear what we’re doing here! We often don’t know anything about the teacher, there are few agreed-upon standards for how to decide if the teacher is qualified to teach, whether or not we learn anything is never even measured, and we’ll probably forget most of what we heard by lunch time. Yet we believe God is at work.
The problem is that we are divided about this. We have not clearly faced the fact that from a non-spiritual perspective this whole sermon thing is ridiculous. And because we haven’t faced that, we come in here prepared to agree and disagree and judge and evaluate it just like we do everything else, but if we judged the sermon process by every other standard we apply to a learning environment, we wouldn’t bother listening to sermons to begin with. So we’re divided about what we’re doing here.
We’ll tell you we’re here to learn, and we’ll tell you we’re here to do our learning from God. But then we’ll sit and listen largely with non-spiritual ears, see with non-spiritual eyes, and evaluate with non-spiritual minds. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Listen, here’s the bottom line. On any given week I preach to you stuff that I couldn’t have preached to you just months earlier because I didn’t understand or believe the same things at that time. So if you’re sitting there agreeing and disagreeing, you have to realize that one year from now I myself will not believe exactly what I’m saying to you now in the way that I’m saying it. So whatever you might be upset with me now for not believing, I might well believe a year from now. And much of what you might congratulate me for believing right now, I might no longer believe a year from now. So then we end up with this ridiculous reality that you could disagree with me and be mad at me today for something I say, which I will change my mind and come to agree with you on a year from now. Only by then, you yourself will have grown in your own understanding of things and you could then find yourself mad at me for believing the very thing you were mad at me for disbelieving just a year ago.
It’s just absurd, the way we congregations so often play this game with this huge elephant in room, acting as if there is some kind of completely objective set of things we’re all supposed to believe in exactly the same way, to exactly the same extent, and use the same kinds of words to describe them so that we can all feel like we completely understand one another at all times. Short of that we distrust what God is doing in someone else’s life, or we wonder if that person really knows God, or whatever.
No, that will not do. It doesn’t even make sense. This whole thing is about mystery. To hear God’s voice, we must listen in the same way God speaks. If you’re listening to a sermon primarily looking for what is right and wrong, but God is trying to speak to you deep truths about who you are, you’re going to miss him!
Psalm 139:15-16 (NIV)
15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
It’s all mystery, from beginning to end – the mystery of the Spirit of God mixing and mingling with the human spirit – the treasure in jars of clay! That mixing is always happening, and it always calls you to something, demands a response from you, is always seeking to transform you in some deep and powerful way. That is what we are seeking when we come and worship together, when we hear sermons together, when we are learning together – how is God meeting me and mixing with me now, how am I being called onward and upward into the mystery of who God is and who I am in God? In a few minutes we’re going to take communion together. Comm-union. It is our common union that we celebrate in communion – union with one another, in God! That is mystery!
So we must come receptively, ready to hear. We must rid ourselves of the notion that we are here primarily to bask in what we know, or even learn some new fact, and we must be open to the reality that we are here to participate in something that, thank God, we do not even come close to grasping. The jars of clay come to celebrate the treasure that is in us. Amen, so be it, and blessed be the name of the Lord.
