The Most Important Piece
How to Listen to a Sermon, prt. 3
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
January 30, 2011
Today I’m going to wrap up our brief series on how to listen to a sermon. I want to start by summarizing what we have covered so far. In part one we dealt with the issue of receptivity. Jesus said that the reason he spoke in parables was to nudge people toward receptive insight. So more important than what is being said is your receptivity to it. Last week in part two I dealt with the idea of mystery – how this thing is so much bigger than any of us, how we are all constantly in a state of flux in terms of the specific content of our beliefs and capacities to understand anyway, so God better be in here. God better be making something happen in you, because if this thing depends on whether you agree with everything I’m saying, you’re in big trouble, and so am I. So there’s mystery – this unseen presence of God, the Spirit, hovering over the surface of the water of our lives.
I want to conclude today by looking at the single most important part of hearing a sermon, and that part is you. After all, I am not speaking into a vacuum. Preaching is only fun, it’s only interesting, when there is a human audience. Basketball is played in front of basketball fans. Biology lectures are delivered in front of biology students. Sales training events are done for salespeople. And sermons are preached, hopefully, for spiritually interested, receptive people. You are the critical point of engagement with what is being said in this room every week. Without you, there IS no sermon. Without you, there is only a blog post, or an essay, or an article. Without you, the words never come off the page and move directly into human ears, and hopefully beyond ears into hearts and minds and lives.
But the ears are yours, and so are the hearts, and so are the minds, and so are the lives. So how are you preparing your ears, and your heart, and your mind for our time together each week? I can tell you what my sermon prep time looks like every week. What does your sermon prep time look like? If a sermon is a bottle of wine, what are you doing with the wine every week? Are you a guzzler, or a savoror? See, wine can either connect you to life and to romance and love, or it can get you hammered. It can do both quite well, and it depends entirely on how you approach it. Whether you guzzle it or savor it, it will taste basically the same, but it will have very different effects on you and will be a very different experience.
Most sermon-listeners are guzzlers. They get up late on Sunday morning and are in chaos as they get ready for church. They might even argue with their spouse and kids. They get in here at the last minute and because they are late, they are frustrated to find that they have to sit closer to the front than usual because there’s a line to get into the last couple of rows. They make a note to themselves that you have to get here early in order to get the worst seats in the house. (People in the back rows, don’t feel uncomfortable – I’m being facetious obviously!) They kind of slog through worship time, sit there agreeing and disagreeing during the sermon (and either loving the pastor or finding the pastor offensive, depending on which it is), get their sermon notes after service, hang out with friends for a while, and then it’s out the door and back home. Guzzlers.
What would it look like to savor a sermon? It would begin with what we talked about last week – that we believe that God is at work, that God’s Spirit is moving and seeking to make a connection with us at every moment. A sermon is 30 minutes a week where we have an opportunity to be genuinely and intentionally open to this in a very focused way. So savoring a sermon on Sunday would begin during the week. Getting stuff done during the week so Sunday could truly be a day of rest. Countering the hecticness of Sunday morning by anticipating and preparing during the week for its challenges, and intentionally clearing one’s schedule for the day. Savoring the Sunday sermon would then involve getting to bed at a reasonable time on Saturday evening. If you don’t do this, you will probably sleep in too late on Sunday and either end up skipping church altogether, or getting up late and dealing with all the ensuing chaos. So you get to bed at a decent time. Now I’m gonna throw you a big curveball, you ready? Since you are the most important piece in this puzzle, and since you have prepared yourself all week not simply for this 30 minute sermon but for the entire Sabbath day, and since you have gotten to bed on time and you now wake feeling rested, what do you do in the morning? Do you get up and start jamming Lady Gaga while you get ready for church? Do you try to get a few more nails pounded on that project you’re doing outside before you leave? Or do you set this day apart? Because what 1) you could do is prepare your mind and heart for what God wants to do in church that morning. 2) You could maintain a quietness in your home (if possible). 3) You could spend a few moments in prayer . Better yet, in my opinion, spend ten or twenty minutes in silent prayer, just cultivating quiet in your own heart. In other words, you begin to get yourself ready to listen! You get into a listening frame of mind. You connect to God.
Now if you have followed this basic approach (which most people don’t), you come to church in a different place mentally and emotionally and spiritually. You’re ready to do business with God, ready not to just guzzle down whatever you are given, but to savor it, to let it work on you and take its time.
What I have just suggested is an awesome idea. And it is extremely difficult. American’s don’t slow down for nothin’. Consequently, even the most well-intentioned sermon-hearers are hearing through a fog of busyness-as-usual. Don’t think this doesn’t affect what you hear, and whether you hear at all. You are the most important piece of this sermon-hearing puzzle, so how are you preparing yourself to receive what is given, to hear what is said, to respond to God’s subtle movements in you? When you sit down each week to hear a sermon, have you found the place of stillness so God’s word can simply sink in? Or are you a moving target, bustling around so furiously in your own mind and heart that you’ll be lucky if any of the words even find a place to land?
So this begins with preparation. As your pastor, I would love to know that many of you are waking up and praying for me, that I would step out of the way and just allow God to work. I would love to know that you are praying that I would experience in my own mind and heart the peace that you yourself have cultivated that morning, as I pray my own peace for you. I would love to know that as I speak you are breathing prayers of blessing on my words and into my life, and on your brothers and sisters sitting here with you, even as I have done the same with you as I have prepared and as I am speaking to you. When we are doing this together, we are participating together in the sermon and in the service. So I’m asking you – if you have been guzzling the sermons and services down, will you stop guzzling and start sipping? Will you stop treating Sunday morning like it’s any other day and consecrate this day to God in your heart? If you do not, the day will be like any other day, and then we cannot complain when sermons and church services have no power. If you DO, the day will be different because you have set it aside and consecrated it, and you will reap the benefit of doing so. What are you doing every week in your own life right now that helps you shift gears from your hectic, busy life into the quiet rest of the Sabbath day?
The last thing I want to cover in this series on Listening to a Sermon is your tolerance for fear. I really believe that if you have a low tolerance for fear, and/or if you are unwilling to move through your fear instead of ducking for cover behind it, you are going to be severely limited in the spiritual life. You will be limited in what you can allow yourself to hear and ultimately understand. People with an extremely low tolerance for fear are probably already afraid. “Oh no, what does this mean?” But fear is an essential part of the spiritual experience. If you rarely experience spiritual fear, you are probably not growing much.
Adam and Eve, Abram, Hagar, Isaac, Mary, Gideon, the disciples huddled in the boat, shepherds in the New Testament – do a search someday not just on how many times in the Bible that people are afraid of armies, or circumstances, but how many times people are afraid of God. My gosh how we have watered this down. We say, “Fear of God in the Bible simply means healthy respect.” That may sometimes be the meaning, but I think the Bible is abundantly clear that terror comes with the territory. God is other. God is different. God is powerful. God is unpredictable. God is mysterious. Human beings need sameness and routine and predictability – those are things we use to ensure our safety and when we encounter a being in whom these qualities are lacking, at least in ways we can identify and understand them, the natural result is fear. God tells Mary not to fear and says, “By the way, I know you’re 13 years old and a virgin, but you’ll become pregnant with my son.” God tells Gideon, “don’t fear. By the way, I know you’re just grinding grain on your farm, but I’m sending you into battle and I only want you to take 300 people against their army of 150,000.” God says to Adam and Eve, “I was looking for you, where were you?” And Adam says, “We were hiding from you because we were afraid,” because he knows he has done something wrong and his conscience is bothering him. God says to Moses, “go tell the king of Egypt to release the Hebrew slaves, and do not fear because I will be with you.” God says to Jeremiah, “Don’t tell me you’re only a child. You will go wherever I tell you to go and do whatever I tell you to do.” Over and over and over again God appears to people and over and over and over again they are frightened – scared half out of their minds, because you never know when God shows up what you are going to be asked to do, or what it’s going to cost. I would say fear is almost a litmus test for whether or not you are walking with God. If you do not regularly find yourself in places that cause you a little bit of fear, if you do not regularly find that your faith is growing and changing in ways that cause you a bit of uncertainty and fear, then you are probably using God to avoid God. You are using God to bring you safety and security without doing what is always required to experience real safety and security which is to let go of the trapeze bar, and free fall through the air for a while until you are caught in the arms of God. That is when you find rest and peace, but rest and peace always come after a time of freefall – after you have let go, after you have been brought to the edge of all you know and believe and understand, and you don’t know what is coming next but you clearly know you are being asked to jump. And you think, “What does this mean about my faith? About my God? About my church? About my closest relationships? About my theology? What’s going to happen to my job? My house? My money? My attachment to this town or that country? My need for safety and security? My need to think of myself as independent and strong and self-sufficient?” Jesus said to Peter:
John 21:18 (NIV)
18 I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go."
You cannot follow God and maintain an iron grip on your own life. God calls you to lose your life. Jesus asks you to die. Human beings are afraid of death, and that means that if you’re not encountering on your faith journey times where you are terrified; times when you’re going to have to be in free fall for a while, then you are not giving anything up, you are not dying.
How does this relate to hearing a sermon? Because a good sermon will help you die. A good sermon will inspire you to let go of things you ultimately cannot hold onto anyway. That’s why the sermon is not primarily about the preacher, it’s about whether or not the listener is ready to die, and whether or not they welcome instructions on how to do that dying.
2 Corinthians 4:10-11 (NIV)
10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.
If you come to listen to a sermon with the mistaken idea that a sermon is about helping you augment your regular life with cool spiritual stuff to make it less painful, or more peaceful, you’re in for a world of hurt, because a good sermon will not be aimed at helping you do those things. A good sermon will show you that your life as you know it is on the way out, and will point you toward the life that is on the way in. A good sermon will help you see the falseness that is in this world and in your life, and will help you see the truth, and will challenge you to make your home in what you have found. That means a good sermon will challenge you to reject the falseness that is in the world and in your life. And remember – much of that falseness you have come to love very dearly, and you feel certain you cannot live without. So when you are asked to give it up, you will sometimes feel angry. You will sometimes feel offended. You will sometimes feel extremely afraid. But if you are receptive – if you are looking for the truth and committed to following it, you will feel alongside of your fear, an excitement beginning to grow. You will find yourself drawn to what is being said, even though it scares you. You will find yourself increasingly thinking on it, and moved to act on it. You won’t totally understand what this is, but it is God.
Philippians 2:13 (NIV)
13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
You will feel and admit your fear, but you will not hide behind it. Rather, you will take that fear back to God, and allow God to say to you what God always, always says when he calls you to move into what is next: “Do not fear. For I will be with you.” God said this to Mary, and Mary felt her fear, and then let go, went into freefall, saying, “Let it be unto me this day as you have said.” God said this to Gideon, and Gideon felt his fear, and then let go. He went into freefall, painted his face and rode out to battle. God said this to Peter, and Peter felt his fear and then let go. He went into freefall, stepping out of the boat and walking to Jesus on the water. And each of them found that God was right – God was with them. And as it turns out, they were never in free fall to begin with, but were held at every moment, but they couldn’t know it until they let go. Neither can you.
A good sermon will nudge you to let go, to move into what will always initially feel like freefall where you can learn that you are held, that God is waiting, that you cannot move into your future until you let go of your past. That’s why you are the most important piece of the puzzle. That’s why this preaching thing is up to you. That’s why it’s not about me. And that’s why it is my task to preach in such a way that it is about God, your task to respond in such a way that it is about God, and why, when we have prepared and listened properly and allowed it to be not about us but about God, we will all hear God saying, “Wait and see what I will do with even one person who is willing.” Will you be that person?
