There’s a Lake
Wobegon-kind-of-story of a pastor who preached his Sunday morning sermon as he
did every week, got down from the pulpit, led the rest of the service, shook
hands with his parishioners, and then went home only to discover that over the
course of the week, much to his surprise, the members from the congregation
started doing the things he preached that they should do. He preached about
evangelism, so one of the flock went out and started knocking doors in their
town telling people about Jesus. The pastor personally thought this was a
little pushy, but it did seem to be the gist of what he was talking about. He
preached about helping the poor, so one of the flock bought a meal for a local
family, and then charged it to the church. So at least he was in the spirit of what the pastor had said even
if the practice was somewhat lacking. The pastor preached about how Jesus comes
before family and friends, and several members of the church reported back that
they took his advice and had kicked their adult children to the curb, who were
really just playing video games in their basement, anyway, most of the time.
At first the pastor rather liked this new congregation of
people who listened to him, but as the week wore on and new report after new
report reached his ears of congregation members doing outrageous things in
pursuit of the ideal he was preaching, he gradually became overwhelmed. So, he
got up in the pulpit the next Sunday and begged the people “Please, go back to
not listening to me!” he said. Because everybody had taken his advice and
things had gotten very complicated. And nobody was taking his advice in the way
he imagined they should be doing it. He had expected things to go one way, and
it had gone quite another. In the end, he concluded that it was much better when
the pastor’s preaching didn’t change a thing.
This is what it is to be a prophet. 99% of the time
people will not listen; they will not change; and then 1% of the time they will
change and it will be in exactly the way you did not anticipate. The prophets
have very little success when it comes to changing peoples’ hearts. Isaiah, in
our reading today, famously bemoans this fact, telling God, "What shall I
cry? All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The
grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.” The quotation marks here, in the NRSV at least,
are in the wrong place. Hebrew doesn’t have quotation marks, which means that
every translation is just guessing who is saying what, but this passage makes
the most sense to me when it’s connected as one question. “What shall I preach?
People are grass… they don’t listen… they aren’t consistent… even when they
try, they fail. Preaching sucks.”
This is Isaiah’s excuse not to be a prophet, and there
are days I can relate. The people, he
argues, do not listen to preaching, so why bother?
Now, I’m not so pessimistic. I think people do listen,
and some people do change because of preaching. Most often this happens
gradually—like water dripping on rock—but I do think it happens. The bigger
issue is that preaching feels like just another voice in a cacophony of
opinionated bloviators. Everybody has an opinion. Is preaching just another of
these?
It’s easy to think this way as I look out of a landscape
that is gradually fading away in its commitment to faith. Pastors preach about
the news and it sounds a lot like something you could hear on Fox News or CNN.
Pastors preach on the Bible with little relation to our lives and it feels like
they’ve never left their office filled with dusty, leatherbound books. The
buzzword of our times is “relevant.” Is what we’re talking about relevant? Does
it make a difference in our lives? The grass withers, the flower fades. People
are like grass.
You know what bad preaching looks like? It’s preaching
that doesn’t convict us. It’s a message that is so banal and pointless that we
might as well give back the last ten or twenty or sixty minutes of our lives.
Real preaching should change us—not how the pastor wants; that’s the easy way
out—the pastor doesn’t always know what’s best. Believe me, I’m the pastor! </irony>
But instead real preaching penetrates our hearts with the still small voice of
God that is real and active and alive in our lives. Real preaching tears loose
the kingdom of God. I, being human, will only be an obstacle to real preaching.
You, being human, and being comfortable with things generally how they are,
will be less-than-receptive to real preaching. But the kind of God we’re
talking about, the kind of God who comes down to earth in all its messiness—and,
in case we didn’t get the memo of how messy it can get, he came down and was
born in a barn filled with what barns are filled with, which is animal poo and
bad smells and just enough straw to make you feel comfortable that perhaps you
are actually standing on the ground. This God. This God speaks to us all the
time. Are you listening?
Isaiah
says “No.”
I
know the ones who aren’t listening, because they’re the ones always talking.
Whenever something tragic or newsworthy or politically-motivated hits the
public consciousness—like what happened in San Bernardino this week, for
example—there are tons of people who have their opinions ready to broadcast
before most people even know what happened. These people can’t listen because
their own voices are too loud. Whenever any of us rush to broadcast our own
preconceived opinions before listening for the silent voice of God in the mix
of things terrible and wonderful, and beautiful and awful, we demonstrate where
our trust really lies. Our trust lies in ourselves.
The
people are grass. The grass withers. The flower fades.
What
actually lasts? What actually outlasts me?
God’s
response to Isaiah is verse 8. This is obscured from our translation, again,
because of the quotation marks, but this is what God says back: “The grass
withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.”
This
is the siren call of the Reformation. People emblazoned these words on statues
and on bands around their arms, universities put this on plaques and to this
day the cross in front of Luther Seminary has the letters carved into stone:
VDMA. This stands for the Latin: “Verbum Domini Manet in aeternum.” “The Word of
God will stand forever.”
At
first glance this feels like a shell of a promise—like why just the word of
God? Why is it so good news that God’s word
lasts forever? It feels like worshiping the Bible or something. But that’s
because—like with so many things—we talk before we listen, and if we listen we
hear in this phrase, “The Word of God will stand forever,” echoes that
reverberate in the opening of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word and
the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The Word of God stands forever,
because God’s Word is Jesus. A word that God speaks to the world, and when God
speaks God creates. He sent his Son, Jesus, the Word-incarnate, so when the
grass withers and the flower fades we stand on the Word of God—not just the
Bible, not just the preached word of prophets and pastors and flawed folks like
me—but the word-made-flesh in Jesus Christ, whom we await this advent season.
Prepare a way, says Isaiah, level the road in the
wilderness, because something is coming. Something that will move mountains.
Something, the only thing really, that will stand strong forever. The only
assurance we have that when our opinions dry up and we fail to live up to the
standard of perfection set before us there is something that will give our
little lives purpose. We are grass. The grass withers. The flower fades. But
the Word of God will stand forever.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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