2004 Festival of Homiletics

Washington, DC

 

THE MIND BEHIND THE MESSAGE

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge

 

 

But how are they to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men and women preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.                                                                                     ¾Romans 10:14-17

 

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A question: What is the overarching ethical quandary facing America right now?

 

As I don’t need to tell you, this is not a question related solely to us. In view of America’s unprecedented dominance in the world, America’s quandary is a matter of utmost consequence for the entire globe.

 

And so: here’s a proposal. The greatest challenge for America today is to learn and to practice the right use of power.

 

Abraham Lincoln was one of the most profound thinkers ever to occupy a position as a head of state (it is often noted that he could never be elected today). Here is something he said: “Nearly all men can stand adversity; but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”[1] We might say the same about the character of nations.

 

The theme of power lies at the very heart of the Christian gospel, but for some reason we in the mainline churches have strayed away from it. We hear constantly of God as loving, God as compassionate, God as welcoming and inclusive and embracing, but very little about God as powerful. That is my experience in two decades of travel around the mainline denominations. Yet almost every page of Scripture presents God as powerful. If I am correct in my observation that we are avoiding or ignoring this theme, why is that? Isn’t it possible that in avoiding it we are closing ourselves off from one of the central dilemmas of our existence?

 

All human beings are drawn to power, and it begins very early. My grandson, age 7, told me that of all the characters in The Lord of the Rings, Legolas was his favorite. Why is that? I asked. The answer was instantaneous. “Because he never misses a shot.” If you allow yourself to notice this attraction to power, it becomes almost embarrassingly obvious. I have just been visiting Scotland, so I’ve been reading  some history. Naturally I wanted to know about the famous Highland clans. When I read that the MacDonalds were the most powerful clan, I immediately wanted to know more about the MacDonalds. This reflex was so blatant that I had to laugh at myself. We are so drawn to power that if we are not powerful ourselves, the next best thing is knowing who is more powerful than whom.

 

I had another related experience in Edinburgh when I went to the new Museum of Scotland. It’s one of the best museums I’ve ever seen, but the exhibits have been designed with a very specific mind-set that I found startling. The interpretive material is all about power. In the displays of early jewelry, for example, the accompanying texts do not point out the beauty of the objects or the skill of the craftsmen. Instead, they describe the importance of the articles as symbols of power, status, dominance over others. This theme predominates throughout the museum. It is one of the most striking example of the current trends in scholarship that I have yet seen. Power is indeed a subject of universal fascination and importance, because the use or abuse of it is the factor which determines human relationships for good or ill.

 

Power is at the heart of the Biblical narrative. The Lord God brought Israel up out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders (Deuteronomy 26:8). He descended on Mount Sinai in fire and smoke, and the whole mountain quaked greatly (Exodus 19:18). The Psalms are filled with imagery of God’s thunderous might; indeed, the people of Israel are warned against the error of those who did not keep in mind his power (Psalm 78:42)

 

It is precisely because God is powerful that the Christian gospel is so extraordinary. In the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the message is plain for those who would hear it: the Lord of Creation divested himself of his divine power and came voluntarily into the world to submit to an extreme form of prolonged human abuse. As St. Paul writes, He was in the form of God but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave [doulos], and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-7). That is what God the Son did with his power. It is the most scandalous, most contradictory of all stories ever to be set at the heart of a religious faith, yet in spite of its perversity it remains the supreme sign of all that God has done for us, and it is in this sign that we discover the mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2:16). Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God emptied himself and became obedient even to death on a cross.

 

But none of that would be remembered if there had been no Resurrection. It can’t be said too often: if God had not raised Jesus from the dead we would never have known that such a person existed. We do not know the name of any other crucified victim; they were men of low status in the first place, and crucifixion was a method guaranteed to exterminate them as though they had never been. It would be hard to overemphasize the deliberateness of this obliteration.. By way of contrast, when William Wallace (Braveheart), the Scottish hero, was hung, drawn and quartered by the English, his head was put on a pike afterwards. This is hideous, make no mistake. But the point to notice is that his brutal death was anything but anonymous.¾it made him more famous, more legendary, more heroic than ever. Crucifixion had the opposite effect. The victims simply disappeared, without names, without histories, without a second thought. Without the Resurrection, therefore, not only would there be no Christian faith, there would be no record of Jesus at all. .The Resurrection, however, was not God’s way of preserving Jesus for posterity as though he were a hero or a martyr. He was not raised into legend and myth. He was raised into the eternal life of God, from which he had come¾and what’s even more important for you and me, in a very real sense Jesus was raised from the grave directly into the verbal testimony of the apostolic witnesses. About that, Rudolf Bultmann was right.

 

So what we preach about the Resurrection in the last analysis depends upon what we preach about God. Paul’s way of saying that the Resurrection of Christ is entirely outside human possibility is this statement in Romans 4: God is the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (4:17). This is not a story about human religious insights that the preacher somewhat tentatively shares with her congregation. This is a story about the mighty acts of the living God or it is a prodigious fraud.

 

Listen to these words about God from the Epistle to the Ephesians, which speaks of the immeasurable greatness of[God’s] power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead (Ephesians 2:20-21). This passage is explicitly focused on the active agency of God. If the Christian story is not founded in the power of; then the Crucifixion is nothing more than a tragic mistake. The factor that makes Christianity unique is the astonishing contrast between the power of God and the Cross of Christ. The power of God which was displayed in the Creation, in the Exodus, in the exorcisms and miracles of Jesus and climactically in the Resurrection is set over against the utter abnegation of power displayed in the Passion and Crucifixion.

 

Yet, having said this, we must immediately modify it. In the Cross of Christ, we do not see powerlessness. To see it that way is to miss the whole point. What we see in the Cross is not powerlessness. We see revolution. What we see in the Cross is an alternative mode of power. That’s why Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King will be enshrined in history for ever. Inevitably, there is already a move to debunk Mandela, and he’s not even dead yet. He will rise above all the debunkers, just as Dr. King has. Whatever their human frailties may have been, they tower over human history because they were in touch with an alternative mode of power.

 

Now listen up, preachers. Preaching is about power. Preaching is about the power of the Word of God. Preaching arises out of the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the grave. That truth is being withheld from us. Everybody is telling us that old-fashioned preaching is dead in the water, that we have to get down out of the pulpit and roam around dispensing sound bites. Every day I read about some new bag of tricks; just last Sunday The New York Times had two stories, one on “cool” Christianity, the other about the newest Bibles that come packaged like teenage advice magazines. OK, fine, but at the same time we are being told that no one wants to listen to traditional sermons any more. Are you threatened by this? are you persuaded by this? Where do we turn for guidance?

 

Today I propose that we listen again to the tenth chapter of Romans.

 

This passage seems to be about preaching. How are they to believe [in God]...without a preacher? And how can men and women preach unless they are sent? Notice that “are sent.” Whenever you read that, you know that God is standing behind that verb “send.” I remember a conversation decades ago with an African-American man in my home town of Franklin, Virginia. He told me in the most matter-of-fact way that he was going to become a preacher. But that is not the way he put it. His exact words were “I’ve been called to preach.” I know now that this is a traditional formulation, but it was new to me at the time and as you can see, I have not forgotten it. The words “called to preach” convey the sense of the One who does the calling, the One who does the sending. The Romans passage is based on this conviction. God calls preachers. God sends preachers to proclaim the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

 

But there is much more in this text. Paul continues, Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.[2]

 

Well, you may say, that doesn’t convey much of anything; it sounds circular¾faith comes by hearing and hearing comes from preaching and preaching comes from faith and it all goes round and round. But if we look more closely we will discover something explosive. Think again about this declaration:

 

So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching [or word] of Christ. (RSV and NRSV)

 

Here is an example of how a translation really, really matters to us (we’re mostly preachers here, so I’m assuming a bit more tolerance of this sort of thing). Everything depends on one crucial phrase. I am a great lover of the King James Version, but here’s an example of how it needed to be improved. The KJV says “Faith cometh by hearing.” The NIV also has “faith comes by hearing.” 99 out of a hundred will understand this to mean that the emphasis is on our human response to the preaching of the gospel. Most people hearing that sentence today are going to hear it saying that our receptive listening results in faith. The emphasis is shifted from God’s initiative to our inner disposition. This in turn will lead to preacherly exhortations to have more faith, or to work harder at having faith, and consequently to much worrying about not having a sufficient amount of faith, or an acceptable quality of faith.

 

So if we translate the Greek[3] as “hearing,” with the human being as the acting subject doing the listening and having the faith, we’ll never get this right. I’m not going to drag in the actual Hebrew and Greek here; you can look it up when you get home[4] ¾but for once, the New English Bible, of all things, has it right: Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our message?” and Paul goes on, We conclude that faith is awakened by the message, and the message that awakens [faith] comes through the word [preaching] of Christ.[5]

 

So Paul is saying that the message itself is the powerful agency that creates faith. If the translation is “hearing” (NIV), then the emphasis is on the human capacity or choice. But if the translation is “message,” meaning God’s revelatory and performative Word, then all the emphasis is transferred to God’s action, not ours. This is the message, the evangel, understood as victorious power.

 

Once again I think of the African-American church. In the white mainline churches, we say, “Who is preaching today?” But in many black churches, it is customary to say, “Who is bringing the message today?” Do you see the difference? When the word “message” is used in this way, it conveys the Biblical sense that the message itself comes with power. Last year I had the honor of preaching from the pulpit that Will Willimon usually occupies. I will never forget the hotel employee who came to my room to fix a broken light. He was obviously a member of one of those Bible churches. When he learned that I was going to preach at the Duke Chapel the next day, unhesitatingly he said, “The Good Lord bless you and give you the strength to deliver the message.” I wish someone would say that to me every time I preached.

 

The performative power of the message: that is the point. This does not make the preacher incidental. We have the greatest calling on earth, for it is God’s declared purpose that the message should be delivered through human vessels. What we need is a greater confidence in the message itself to call forth the results God intends, even if that result is sometimes well-hidden from those of us who labor in the pulpit. There is blessed relief in knowing this.

 

But now what does this have to do with America and the use of power? As you can readily see, I am trying to fit the events of the last few weeks to a sermon title that I was required to give many months ago. The fit may not be as smooth as I would like. Yet over some twenty-nine years of preaching I have learned that the Word of God is so large and so commanding that it is already out there ahead of whatever situation we may find ourselves in. I am thinking now of the nature of the message that we preach, the content of the gospel that was first delivered to the apostles and then down through the generations to us. The content of that gospel is power, the power of a God who piled up the waters of the Red Sea on the right and on the left, the power of a God who sent down fire upon the altar on Mount Carmel, the power of a God who showed Zechariah how he would split the Mount of Olives in two, and on that day...the Lord will be one and his name one (Zechariah 14:9). And listen to this: this is also the God who spoke to Elijah not in the earthquake, not in the wind, not in the fire but in “the still small voice of calm.” Such is his greatness that he is able to take whatever shape he wills, and is able to hide himself when he wills.

 

But¾and here is the climactic point¾this God of might, majesty, dominion and power has come to us not only in human form but in the form of a slave, one who submitted to a slave’s death. In that singular unrepeatable event at Golgotha, we are connected to the heart of our God who, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, endured the Cross and despised the shame (12:2) making himself the perfect sacrifice for human sin.

 

We have heard a lot about shame these last three weeks. For me, the worst of all the pictures was the one of the naked man cowering in panic as the dogs growl at him. What are the factors here? The man is being degraded in very specific ways.. The use of dogs implies that the prisoner is no longer really human but has been reduced to the level of an animal. Women are probably watching, a coldly calculated form of humiliation. And all the onlookers can see that the man is terrified, so that he is robbed of every semblance of dignity, of manliness, of self-possession. And nakedness also is a calculated tactic; just as nakedness was regarded with particular horror by the Israelites of the Old Testament, so it is with Muslims. But not only with Muslims. The one thing that not even Mel Gibson dared to show was the nakedness of our Lord and the crude sexual mockery that he undoubtedly endured.[6].

 

I heard a senator from Georgia on the Don Imus program.[7] He said that he was tired of all the “hand-wringing” about the prisoners. He recalled being embarrassed when, as a new Marine he had to strip in front of others, so what’s the big deal? Besides, he said, we didn’t kill those prisoners. Well, actually, some prisoners have died in American and British custody, but let us set that aside for the moment. We cannot control the fanatics who slice off heads and make videos with appalling, almost inconceivable barbarity. What we can control is our own attitudes and actions as Americans, and specifically as American Christians. We are one of the most churchgoing populations in the world, and the armed forces are full of Christian believers, yet we do not seem to be presenting the mind of Christ to the world. I have been present for worship services all over this country for the past two years and I have heard many, many prayers for our troops and almost none for our enemies. If we were obeying our Lord’s command to pray for our enemies, perhaps it would have penetrated more people’s consciousness and there would have been more Christian commanders in Iraq who would have put limits on the proceedings. Perhaps.

 

We must recognize that there is not one among us who can say for sure what we would do in a similar situation. Here is what one social scientist said: “People have a natural need to express dominance but few of us ever get the opportunity. There is often a wild rush and the person perpetrating the act gets a high. People who do this sort of thing would normally be reasonably civilised. You can’t dismiss them as psychopaths. They are like you and me.”[8]

 

That, fellow sinners, is why Christ died. It was for you and me, reasonable civilized, godly people that we are. There is no limit to what might happen when a mob mentality takes over the godly. That is part of what we see in the crowd scenes at the Crucifixion. It isn’t about Jews. It is about all humanity. “‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.”

 

I do not see an Abraham Lincoln on the horizon. But I do see you. I see gathered before me men and women who have been “called to preach.” The message itself is your strength. The message of Jesus Christ, the mind behind the message, is that the God who is able to destroy the cosmos as easily as he brought it into being is determined to do no such thing. His purpose for each one of his creatures has been proven it to the last agonized breath of the crucified One. His identification with us is total. The gift of his message to you is inexhaustible. The way is laid before you. “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!” ... We conclude that faith is awakened by the message, and the message that awakens [faith] comes through the preaching of Christ.

 

Trusting then to the promise of the living Lord, we commend ourselves and our poor labors to the one who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21).