Mark 4: 26- 34
“Jesus did not speak to them except in parables ….
but he explained everything in private to his disciples.”
There seemed to be broad opinion, last Sunday, that sermons are a non-essential for Christian worship.
After all the centuries of reading the Bible, and wrestling with the text for public consumption, I wonder what would happen if all preachers fell silent? Would the sky fall down?
I’ve prepared and preached scores of sermons. Explorations of the Bible on various issues. Series on being the church. Probes in to science and spirituality. Over the years hey have been used in various places for discussion and paper planes. One lady said after a service that she liked the sermons sent out by the Synod each week. I erected a sign near the lectern – all my own work!
One time I was visiting a Lutheran church. A lay person was preaching and it soon became clear to me that he was reading someone else’s sermon. I was surprised that he wasn’t given freedom to work on his own witness.
On another occasion I met with a colleague who had received the message that sermons shouldn’t be much longer than 10 minutes. Ruefully she shared her experience of going to a congregation packed with adults under 40 and the sermon was well over 40 minutes. Why the difference in expectations?
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We agreed last Sunday that reading the Scriptures is a core activity of worship. Visit any denomination and you will hear the Bible being read, interpreted, used as a springboard by the preacher. It can be weird, and not very wonderful!
The Basis of Union (paragraph 5) puts it like this: “The Word of God upon whom salvation depends is to be heard and known from Scripture appropriated in the worshipping and witnessing life of the Church. The Uniting Church lays upon its members the serious duty of reading the Scriptures (and) commits its ministers to preach from these and administer the sacraments of Baptism & the Lord’s Supper as effective signs of the Gospel.”
That’s it – we should read the Bible seriously ( it doesn’t say literally) and ministers should preach – no time, or content or method is suggested.
We have no idea how Jesus preached. There is the occasion in the synagogue where he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah ( chapter 61) and what he said is brief – but his message caused much disturbance and anger leading to rage. He said, essentially his ministry was to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
His characteristic preaching was parables which take no more than a couple of minutes to tell. The best of them are told and retold over many generations.
Mark chapter 6 begins with the famous parable of the sower, and highlights “he taught them many things in parables..” Later in the same chapter it is interpreted as an allegory. But between parable and its interpretation is the very perplexing counsel to his disciples: To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but for those on the outside everything comes in parables …”
Wow! There is inside knowledge and outside perplexity – he even quotes from Isaiah to make this point and underscores that outsiders will not understand the Kingdom, or even glimpse it. There are those with inside, secret knowledge and those who look through a glass darkly. Some of early Christians became fascinated with the gnostic Jesus, as the Gospel of Thomas attests.
The gospel passage today also concerns the burden of Jesus’ message – the Kingdom of God. The first parable likens it to seed scattered in a field, mysteriously growing without further human intervention. It’s the mystery of life’s pregnant seed, which science knows much more these days. The second pictures a tiny mustard seed, and suggests (erroneously) that it will become “the greatest of all shrubs”.
Now, if you match it with the reading from Ezekiel ( and read all of chapter 17 for context) you will discover it an allegory about Israel. It draws the image of a tiny plant growing large enough to be a home for “every kind of bird”. A place of sanctuary, of shelter, of food and flourishing. It’s a take on what Isaiah calls the peaceable Kingdom when the lion shall lay down with the lamb.
But, so what?? What have these texts got to do with life today? Few address controversies of home ownership, marriage equality, global warming or any of the daily diet of social change and commentary!
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No matter how you bend it, shake it these passages don’t have any practical, daily living use – and the way Mark ends chapter 4 he makes it very clear that Jesus’ teaching was not obvious or self-evident. He certainly wasn’t running a religious campaign on the major issues of his day. He makes comment on divorce, for example because it was quite common. However the issues of same-sex attraction, transgender, and the possibility of civil unions, or legal marriages weren’t on his horizon, or that of the early Church.
Perhaps it can all come under the rubric of Paul’s advice “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become servants to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. That’s Jesus’ principle – and we have to work on the ethics of love. That’s the work of the Church – in the local congregation.
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We have this book of books – the Bible. It’s our sacred story, our Dreaming, our saga of faith & freedom. An amazing compendium of history and myth, poetry and prose, parables and proverbs told, and written by scribes over several centuries. Monash professor of English Lit., David Tacey, in a recent interview said for him the Bible started coming alive when he came to understand it as an immense poem.
That’s not really how I understand it , but I get his point. You’ve got to have a sense of the whole, the grandeur of the text – even when there are passages, books even that you don’t like. I’m not a Revelation kind of guy, but I love Ecclesiastes. I prefer the gospels over the histories of Samuel and Chronicles. Ezekiel sets me on edge (was he on drugs?), but Isaiah is powerful.
Paul, I love but he is often dense and hard to understand. I don’t know how to preach him – because it’s not my task to channel ancient ideas, but to keep on reminding you that the Bible has its own inherent power, the strange world of the Bible, if we allow its Story to enter us – an integral experience of worship.
You see, there’s problem. The way congregations are ‘trained’ to read the Bible is in little bites. The ecumenical lectionary is our predominant way – each week a portion is set for consideration. A piece from the Old Testament, an acceptable part of a Psalm, a slice of Paul’s letters and a gospel sample.
The compilers try to get a broad theme going, for example, consecutive readings from a Pauline letter for several weeks, or chunks from an Old Testament book. At times it strains to make connections between diverse readings – the times I pull out my hair :-)
The perplexity of preaching ( for me, at least) is that it is not a spiritual pill. You can’t take a dose of Ezekiel, mix it with a parable of Jesus, sprinkle on hymns and prayers and expect it to take effect.
Preaching isn’t doing the thinking, finding the answers for you – but continually stirring the gathered community with ideas and experiences, old and new, that the Spirit might make alive, breathing through the frailty of our own church bringing it to new life.
We have to do the hard work together of taking responsibility for our spiritual formation, our reading of the Scriptures with understanding – even if many perplexities and puzzles remain.
Do you remember last week one of the Readings was Paul advising about corporate worship for the Corinthians. It included the ancient advice that women should keep silent until they went home.
Afterwards one young woman told me her response. She heard Paul writing sarcastically about silencing women. It is very clear in his letters that he depended upon the close support of female apostles – many of them are named Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Julia and Lydia to name a handful. I doubt these leaders were silent!
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A problem for preaching is to think it’s about giving answers. Or giving advice on the way to live. Or unpacking ancient dogmas of the church. Whereas I think it is about taking opportunity to explore questions ( doubts and loves Richard Holloway calls them) of our vocation as the body of Christ gathered in this place.
I think the church could exist without preaching, but it couldn’t exist without the Scriptures. Immediately we then need to do the interpreting task – deep listening to text and tradition, provocative new takes and tantalising exploration.
This is why the UCA lays upon all its members the serious and joyful of getting inside the Story, and allowing the Story to get inside of us so that we might live questions of faith, hope and love in the way of Jesus
Rev David Carter
14th June 2015