Sermons from the Pulpit
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 9 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Ezekiel 2:1-7; II Corinthians 12:1-10; Mark 6:1-13When he spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet. . . . .
They shall know that there has been a prophet among them.
-Ezekiel 2:2,5
They shall know that there has been a prophet among them even if they pay no attention to what the prophet says! As a preacher I find this a very attractive concept. For that matter it should be attractive to anyone who has something to say and wonders if anybody is listening.
It calls into question the entire premise of good old Dale Carnegie, who was practically the original motivational speaker and the author of the classic How To Win Friends and Influence People. His book has grown over the years into an American cultural icon, and it practically defines what we mean by success. But here we have the Bible telling us that you can be a successful communicator even if you make enemies and turn people off. That's for me!
You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear; for they are a rebellious house. They are impudent and stubborn. Do you think it's possible that there might be impudence, stubbornness and rebellion in this house? Are you kidding? In New Hampshire? In a Congregational Church? The question answers itself.
The readings for today, all three of them, are about failure. You know what failure is. It's when things don't work. You jump in the car, shut the door, belt yourself in and turn the key in the ignition, and the starter grunts briefly, then mocks you with pure still silence. That's failure. You may have messed up. You may not have messed up. It matters not.
The Rev. Dr. George Buttrick of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, later Preacher to the University at Harvard, was one of the immortal giants of the golden age of American Protestant preaching. One Sunday even he gave a sermon that he could tell from the git-go it was falling flat as a pancake. Afterwards, as he stood at the door and shook hands, nobody said anything nice about it, not even some totally insincere compliment, until finally the last woman out the door said, "Thank you, Dr. Buttrick, for your sermon." And he answered, "I appreciate that, but it was too long." And she smiled and replied, "No, it just seemed long."
Impudent, stubborn and rebellious, that's what they are, and they may hear you or refuse to hear you, but they will know that there has been a prophet among them. Music to my ears.
But I am not saying all this to console tedious preachers, nor to enlist your sympathy for them. Flat sermons are only one form of failure, and these Scriptures speak to failure in all its forms. So the only people who are allowed to snooze through today's sermon are those of you who are truly strangers to the experience of failure.
Failure is when you try doing something that you hope will make a difference, and it either makes no discernible difference at all, or worse yet, it has the opposite of the effect you intended. You deliver and present what you think is a fragrant, lovely rose, and everybody receives a thorn - everybody including you.
So I am here to say a word of consolation and of challenge to all of us who fail, and it is this: It's not about us! It's about God. When God shaped us from the clay and put us on the earth and breathed the breath of life into us and set us free, God's purpose was not for us to waste our time and energy over trivia like the difference between success and failure. God's purpose was, and is still, for us to love and serve God by living all our days in gratitude, trust, and joy. You can see that this is a word of consolation. I trust you can also see that it is a word of challenge.
It certainly challenges me, at least, since I am the foremost of sinners, I am a towering titan of a sinner, when it comes to the foremost sin of this age, which is of course the idolatrous worship of the bottom line. In every endeavor of life I am obsessed with the payoff, the earnings-to-investment ratio, the body count, the feedback, the yield, the score, the rankings and the results. And in this I'm only the typical product and citizen of a civilization to which nothing is so alien as the notion that everything we are and everything we do is not about us, but is literally for God's sake alone.
They will know that there has been a prophet among them. Well, who's a prophet? The word prophet comes from two Greek words and it means: One who speaks forth. Or if you will, one who is outspoken. Who tells it like it is. Surely you don't think that this is an occupational specialty requiring special gifts or training, which therefore applies only to a peculiar few of us while the rest of us are excused from it because we all have our various other special abilities and callings! Truth-telling is not like practicing medicine or teaching or carpentry: if it is appropriate or possible for any of us, it is equally appropriate and possible for all.
So we can't separate prophets from people, because all people are able to prophesy. Nor can we separate speaking from doing, because all speaking is doing. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword and cutting to the heart of things, and language is the most godlike thing about human beings, although it is not always a benign thing. For better or for worse, we shape and control things by the words we use for them, by the names we give them. Words act, and the converse is also true: Deeds speak. They speak volumes.
They will know that there has been a prophet among them even if they don't pay attention to what the prophet says and does, even if the prophet's endeavors make no difference to them. How then can they possibly know there has been a prophet among them? That's a good question, and I've been pondering it, since that's what you pay us to do, and I think the answer is: They will know there has been a prophet among them because the prophet speaks and acts authentically, faithfully, truthfully, from out of an inner integrity and peace, and God has given them, God has given us all, the ability to recognize that when they meet it - to recognize it whether or not we like it or accept it.
And you could say, therefore, that success consists of touching that God-given faculty of recognition in the people around you, even if your dealings with them are by any other measure a total failure. Or alternatively, you could say, as I prefer to say, that the whole language of success and failure is inappropriate and inconsistent with the language of faith, and the real goal is not to achieve success or to avoid failure but to live authentically, and authenticity means doing whatever you do and saying whatever you say and being whatever you are for God's sake, God's alone, regardless of the consequences.
Regardless is not heedless. Consequences do happen, and they do matter. The crucifixion is no mere bump in the road, and all of us get to bear the cross. But consequences don't drive us if we live by faith. Faith - that is trust, not belief or agreement - makes it possible to leave the consequences in God's hands - impossible not to leave them in God's hands!
So, for example, I can be a prophetic preacher. All I need to do is to stop thinking and speaking and acting as if my food, shelter, and self-esteem depended on my good relations with you, and show forth through my whole being that everything important to me really depends on God. That's what Paul means by the strength in his weakness. It's what Jesus means when he tells his disciples to go from place to place without any attempt at self-sufficiency and to shake off their feet the dust of any community that disregards them. And it's what God means when he tells Ezekiel he is a prophet even if nobody can stand to listen to him.
Some people go over the top with this, and decide that strife and misery are the only convincing proof of authentic, prophetic doing and speaking. The Danish existentialist philosopher and general all-around Christian misanthropist Søren Kierkegaard once said that the test of a good sermon is not that you heard it, enjoyed it and went home to Sunday dinner afterwards, but that you heard it and were too sick at heart to eat anything afterwards. This is excessive. I personally do not want to take away your appetite.
On the other hand, neither do I want to lend my support and God's to your habit, which is my habit too, of praying as if everything depended on God while living as if nothing did. The Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutierrez once said that if we were being honest as we pray, we would change the Lord's Prayer to say, "Our father, who art in heaven, please stay there."
I think the best way for us to think about it is to think of those disciples whom Jesus sent out into the countryside and town two by two. He told them to take no provision, but to depend on God and on God's presence in those whom they met to take care of their needs. But with or without provisions, they were mediocre messengers at best. They are no exemplars of authentic living. They have not shown themselves to be prophets. They are stubborn, self-serving, and consistently unclear on the concept of who and what Jesus is. They have no hope of ministering effectively to anyone except insofar as God acts in and through them in spite of everything we know about them from reading Mark's Gospel.
So let's not worry about the quality and quantity of our faith, our courage, our experience, our prayerfulness, our sincerity, our anything. That's worshiping ourselves. Let's worship God, as we say at the beginning of every service. Let's pray that God may make us instruments of God's peace and grace, thorns, weaknesses and all, commonplace and undistinguished as we are.
Jesus himself was commonplace and undistinguished. The people of his home town were absolutely right about that. What they needed to see, and what we need to see too, is that ordinary creatures are precisely God's chosen medium for redeeming the world.
Amen