A Good Sermon

Pictured above is the Rt. Rev. Lorna Hood, Moderator of the Church of Scotland.  The Scottish Kirk, as it is known, is arguably the mother church of most Presbyterian denominations worldwide, including the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Much of it is thanks to the ministry of Scottish Reformation leader John Knox, who was known to be an incisive and dynamic preacher.  Moderators of the General Assembly are chosen at the beginning of the convocation of the General Assembly, usually the highest ecclesiastical authority in Presbyterian churches, comprised of delegates sent by presbyteries.  The Moderator moderates and officiates over votes, etc.  Upon the conclusion of the Assembly, the Moderators serve as the "titular head" of the denomination, if you will, until the next General Assembly.  They do not possess the authority to change doctrinal positions and are expected to speak on behalf of the entire denomination whenever in their capacities as Moderators.  In Scotland, the Moderators serve one-year terms; in the United States, the Moderators serve two.  At the next General Assembly, the outgoing Moderator opens the assembly as his/her last responsibility.

My post today does not pertain to presbyterian politics, but to preaching.  Now I don't claim to be Jonathan Edwards - or, for you racist types, "the Asian Jonathan Edwards" - but I do get irritated with sub-par preaching. (Note: I'm not implicating the Moderators for sub-par preaching... they actually are very good at this.)  This is not a matter of "I can do better than that."  No - this assumes that you are the standard to which preaching should aspire to, and the pulpit is not big enough for people who are grossly obese with their own ideas of homiletical grandeur.  This is an issue of whether preaching gets at its purpose.

I've always considered preaching to be a two-sided coin, with one side expositing the Scriptures and drawing from it the message that the Holy Spirit desires to convey (note: Holy Spirit, not you), and the other side imposing its implications upon the listening congregation (note: that includes the preacher).  Now, this is easier said than done.  There are many preachers who enjoy dwelling on the exegesis.  And that's fine and all at, maybe, your local seminary or a university church (e.g. Harvard University's Memorial Church), and your audience is a group of professors who will live in the Ivory Tower, devoid of any real interaction with the world at large.

When I was studying math, we had to do many problem sets.  For me, I'd usually have scratch paper where I'd scribble a bunch of equations in hopes of it making sense and, when it does, I'd rewrite it in a orderly fashion on the paper I will submit to the professor.  The professor will not see my scratch paper - even though it contains the sum of my wrestlings with the problem - but s/he will know what I've done by reading what I've submitted. In the same way, exegesis is the scratch paper.  You don't present your exegesis in your sermon, unless your audience is full of biblical scholars.  But at the same time, what you preach should suggest clearly that you've done your homework.

When preachers dwell on the exegesis with implication as a footnote, the sermon becomes really an academic presentation, and is usually a second-rate academic presentation, since you can't get too technical.  Yet, preachers should not dwell only on the implication without digging deep into the Scriptures.  The biblical text is not a footnote to the implication.  This problem has, so far as I can tell, been a problem with activist congregations, be it Evangelical or progressive.  It's easy to just rush into why you should protest against injustice, why you should boycott Wal*Mart, why you should write to your Senator against gay marriage, etc.  But this assumes we know the substance of the injustice.

Consider, for example, a sermon I've heard where the preacher railed against the banks who have made subprime loans.  Now, I'm not a big fan of those banks, but if we investigate closely, we find that the banks were "owned" by shareholders, and these shareholders include hedge funds, investment banks, or funds tied to retirement accounts or other organizational investment accounts (e.g. Presbyterian Church Investments and Loans Corporation).  It may well be that among those who hold shares in those big banks were the very people who railed against the banks.  Now, who should we really rail against for the Great Recession?  The banks were trying to meet the bottom line (of course, with faulty econometric assumptions... should we blame the mathematical economists?), and these organizational investment accounts probably expect the banks to outperform.  Thus, the preachable material here is not the big banks, but a culture where the bottom line has been divorced from ethical concerns.  And the implication impinges on every participant of a capitalistic economy.  Railing against the banks only applies to the CEOs, none of whom attend your church.

I'm sick and tired of these half-baked sermons.  I want good, rich, biblical sermons that really grab us by our lappels in a rude way to shake us out of our spiritual complacency.  I want preaching that makes it such that the only people who want to go to church are the people who need Jesus, and don't just want him for bourgeois purposes.  I want preachers to grow some courage and offend their own sensibilities and that of their parishioners with the difficult truth of the gospel.  If you think this is about condemning homosexuality, you've missed the mark.  It's easy to condemn homosexuality, abortion, poverty in Africa, when it's a distant issue. Let me make it even starker.

I want sermons railing against anyone who lives in the suburbs and live without the possibility of a gang attack in their neighborhoods.

I want sermons railing against anyone who is respected because s/he has a Ph.D. or is earning one.

I want sermons railing against anyone whose first priorities is to their families.

I want sermons railing against anyone who walks past a homeless person without talking to him/her for at least 10 minutes.

I want sermons railing against anyone whose bank account has over $50,000.

I want sermons railing against citizens of any country where their army can kill people at a distance and they have the privilege of not hearing about it on the news if they so choose.

Yes - I'm implicating myself in all of this.  Oh, and by the way, all of the above have biblical support.  But nobody said being a Christian was easy.  If that were the case, the rich young man would not have walked away, prompting Jesus to say, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle."  I want sermons that expose me as a hypocrite.  I want sermons that reveal that to exist in this world is to always wrestle with the fact that sin is an existential reality; sin is an epistemological reality; sin is a systemic reality; and sin can easily masquerade as obvious, incontrovertible truth.  I want sermons that trouble the waters of living in this world so that our only salvation is the Jesus who lives among the least in our society.  I want sermons that make it so that we must walk to the South Side or to the Bronx to see Jesus. And I want them because when we read the Scriptures, the truth of Jesus's subalternity slams at our face and pushes us towards an existential crisis that requires a commitment to get off the fence and choose Mammon or Jesus.

All I want is a good sermon.