Truth Be Told: More Sermons for the Lectionary, Year B, Pentecost through Christ the King

Introduction

My primary motive in producing these compilations of sermons based on scripture readings from the Common Lectionary (Revised), like my initial preaching of the sermons themselves, has been to proclaim the gospel with faithful integrity. Although preaching is, strictly speaking, an activity that requires immediate communication between the preacher and the recipient, rather than perusing the words of the preacher days or weeks or years after they were first spoken, it is my hope and expectation that reading these sermons will, through the power of the Holy Spirit, prompt trusting and obedient response to God’s will culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

A secondary goal has been to provide a model for those whose commission and task is to preach to church congregations on a more or less regular basis in the context of the rhythms and occasions of life in a community of faith, demonstrating the possibilities for exploring the breadth of the Bible through the discipline of the lectionary. I suspect that other preachers will find, as I have, that the systematic homiletical progression through the weekly menu of Old Testament, epistle, and Gospel lections will provide welcome fodder for sensitive, prophetic, and relevant application to the issues of contemporary Christian discipleship in personal, congregational, community, and global living. Preaching has, since the days of Moses, been an urgent and indispensable task of people identified and set aside for leadership of communities of faith, and has generally been recognized as worthy of and requiring such leaders’ careful attention.

I was surprised and astonished, when called to serve as the organizing pastor of a new congregation, to overhear the discussion of another new church development pastor and a denominational executive regarding that other pastor’s attitude toward the role of preaching in his ministry. Responding to his complaint about the amount of time that sermon preparation was taking from what he considered to be the real job of church planting, the denominational executive said, Well, you can always get canned sermons from the Internet and not have to be bothered with all that. Regardless of the violation of his congregation members’ likely expectations about preaching out of and in response to their needs and struggles and hopes, providing access for the Holy Spirit into receptive minds and hearts, it all seemed a massive misunderstanding of the pastoral call on the part of the pastor and, even more disturbingly, on the part of the denominational supervisor. I had already noticed that, in the seminars and conferences I had attended focusing on new church development, there was seldom any mention of such tasks as preaching or pastoral care. Here was confirmation that such activities were considered by some to be distractions from establishing and enlarging communities of faith. I still wonder about visions of ordained pastoral ministry that seem to have no place for such activities as hospital or bereavement visitation, but rely entirely on uninstalled or in some cases non-ordained pastoral assistants to provide whatever ministry occurs in such crisis situations. Ordained ministers should not be the only people in a congregation who exercise ministries of compassion and service. But the appointed shepherd of the flock certainly should not neglect to perform such ministries her- or himself. At one church where I have attended several funerals and memorial services over the past few years, I have never known of the installed pastor conducting or participating in such a service, or making hospital or nursing home visits to sick or declining church members or their families. Among other issues, this must tend to render that pastor’s preaching less personally relevant and less an instrument available to the Holy Spirit in caring for the many people under the pastor’s charge.

On the threshold of ordination as a minister of word and sacrament, I was anxious about the ability to preach week after week. Although there were sermons that I wanted to preach, the prospect of having to preach was a daunting one, let alone on texts that were in any way assigned. In my own Presbyterian Church (USA), the use of a lectionary is strongly encouraged but not required; no one can dictate the texts to be used or the words to be spoken by any Presbyterian minister. There are general requirements in our constitution for attending, in the course of preaching, to the full range of scripture, with care to proclaim both testaments and the epistles as well as the four Gospels and the book of Acts in the New Testament. The Common Lectionary (Revised) is a useful and widely accepted method of doing so, and has the added benefits of planning ahead for preaching and coordination with church musicians and teachers and preparers of the liturgy. As I have commented elsewhere, the advantages include, for me, the knowledge that many Christians around the world are hearing the same readings from scripture each Lord’s Day and feast day and praying through their week with those words in mind and on their hearts—surely a promising opportunity for the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps it would be the case even without using a lectionary, but, throughout my career and in several different congregations, I have certainly found it to be true in the case of lectionary preaching, that the task of preparing and delivering sermons is much easier when it is a regular part of my week. I suspect this is largely a result of maintaining a work schedule and rhythm, but it has to do also with acknowledging and drawing on the thematic threads within the scriptures themselves in a theological and liturgical progression that both sustains and enhances the congregation’s spiritual journey and my own maturity in listening and responding to scripture. I find it much more difficult to settle down to the weekly task of sermon preparation when the routine has been interrupted for whatever reason, including vacations or seminars or conferences (necessary and welcome as they are). Perhaps embracing the preaching role as essential to pastoral ministry (and having that modeled and discussed in conferences and other training for church planters) would have benefited the new church development pastor who lamented such tasks as distractions from his real business, and likewise such activities as visiting the sick and the bereaved, and weaving, by worship leadership in funerals and memorial services, parishioners’ lives and their challenges into the whole life of the congregation and its common journey as it matures into a shared experience of God.

The sermons contained herein and those I have offered in my previous collections are not intended as canned material for preachers (although it may be useful to have such resources available, with appropriate and judicious modification, for the rare occasions when a personal or congregational crisis has simply prevented normal sermon preparation). Rather, I offer them as suggestive examples for preaching through the lectionary with suitable attention to the manner in which texts build upon or provide counterpoint to each other on any given feast day or Lord’s Day and from week to week. First and foremost, however, I hope that they will be welcomed and useful as a theologically faithful companion for laity and clergy alike in the deeply personal yet always common endeavor of grateful discipleship, obediently responsive to the Lordship of Jesus Christ who has claimed us in baptism and nurtured us at the table we share with him and with each other.

The Day of Pentecost

Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada

June 8, 2003

Acts 2:1–21

Romans 8:22–27

John 15:26–27; 16:4b–15

Spiritual Maturity

One of the things that marks any church as genuinely Christian is the unique authority it accords to the Bible. For a group of believers to be a part of the church of Jesus Christ has traditionally meant, virtually by definition, that it holds the Bible to be the uniquely authoritative written witness to Jesus Christ—that the Bible is not just a book among other books, but that there is no other writing of comparable authority in terms of testifying to God’s purpose for creation and will for our lives, in terms of revealing the fullness of God as Jesus revealed God’s fullness. The Bible is sufficient as written authority, we believe, because of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit at work in the people who wrote it and the people who compiled it and the people who passed it down through the ages and the people who read and study it today with expectant and believing minds and hearts. There is no other written testimony that is necessary or possible—we need no Book of Mormon, no Pearl of Great Price, no Science and Health. Even our own Presbyterian Book of Confessions is in no sense a volume two of the Bible, nor a supplement to it, nor even a guide to it, but simply a very human and very imperfect acknowledgment of what is already in the Bible, a set of confessional statements written in response to particular historic circumstances or threats against the faith.

But to say that the Bible is the sufficient testimony, the unique written witness to Jesus Christ who is the Word of God, is not to say that other information is not helpful to living a faithful life. To say that the Bible is not just a book among other books is not to say that other books, including books that have no conscious connection with Christian faith, are not important to the Christian, do not contain information that is relevant to the Christian. The discoveries and insights of natural and social sciences, the lessons of history as the realm in which the Holy Spirit is at work—these things are not alien to the testimony of scripture. These things are not irrelevant to the person who seeks to be faithful to God in Jesus Christ. These things are not superfluous to the goal of salvation and to the issues of obedience. Nor is there anything alien or irrelevant or superfluous about the church’s process of discussion and decision in the ongoing life of the people of God. The reason is, the scriptures themselves anticipate the growth of human knowledge, the scriptures themselves predict that there will be new and unprecedented moral issues to be addressed, the scriptures themselves do not claim to be the only source of data that Christians need in order to be faithful. I still have many things to say to you, Jesus explained to his disciples on the night before his death, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come (John 16:12–13). The age of the Holy Spirit will be the age of spiritual maturity for the followers of Christ—in fact, the followers of Christ could not come to spiritual maturity until the Holy Spirit was given to them and worked among them. And, at that point, the faithful Christian needs not only the Bible, but also the daily newspaper and the telephone book.

The book of Acts tells how the gift of the Spirit began turning old truths upside down, how the gift of the Spirit began tearing down old assumptions and discrediting old prejudices, how the gift of the Spirit gave the followers of Jesus new power and new boldness and new insight that propelled their witness and their ministry to Gentiles who were neither circumcised nor observed the Jewish dietary laws, that elevated women and even slaves to positions of authority and equality, that opened the fountains of compassion and the gates of salvation even to Roman soldiers and Ethiopian eunuchs. Who would have thought it? The discussions and debates that Acts reports are surely sanitized summaries of long and passionate battles that not only hammered out theology, but exposed and defeated pride and self-interest and bias and cowardice—battles that make today’s long and passionate churchly debates seem tame by comparison.

Every generation has a touch of generational narcissism about it—every generation assumes that no previous generation has overcome as many challenges, that no previous generation has been as intelligent. And every generation of the church is in danger of having a spiritual narcissism about it—every generation of the church is susceptible to a confident conviction that no previous generation has been so comprehending of God’s truth, that no previous generation has been so much in the crosshairs of God’s prophecies. For instance, we are not the first generation of Christians to wring our hands and predict the demise of the church if this or that choice is made. It happened in the first generation of Christians, who had no written New Testament to guide them—no Gospels, no book of Acts, no letters of Paul and others that came to be judged, over time, as worthy of being included in the Bible—and it has happened in every generation of Christians ever since. What the first generation of Christians had, and what every generation of Christians has had ever since, is the Holy Spirit, bringing to memory what Jesus said, opening eyes to new meanings of what Jesus said, prompting the church to new applications of what Jesus said as new needs emerged, prodding, cajoling, testing, obstructing when necessary, inspiring, emboldening, invigorating, chastising when necessary. And the story of the Spirit’s work among the first Christians and the long line of faithful people before them, as contained in the Bible, should be a clear indication of the work of the Holy Spirit, always powerful and sometimes surprising, in the church even today. The Bible remains our uniquely authoritative written witness to Jesus Christ, beside which we need no other. But that is not at all to say that the Holy Spirit quit working with the conclusion of the Bible, or that the Holy Spirit will do nothing new beyond the Bible to extend the reach of Christ’s mercy and Christ’s love.

So long as Jesus was with his disciples, they could rely upon him to settle all their difficulties and answer all their questions. If Jesus had remained with them, they never themselves would have had to mature in Christ-likeness and think deeply about what Jesus would want them to do in a particular situation. So long as Christ was with his disciples, they did not need to know about what they would face in the future in the way of opportunities or dangers. So long as Christ was with his disciples, they didn’t have to deliberate about the shape of their mission or the conduct of their ministry. That all changed when Jesus’ death drew near. Paradoxically, Jesus said, his departure from them would be to their advantage, because his absence from them—at least his physical absence—was the pre-condition of the Holy Spirit coming to them to be present with them to comfort them and encourage them and move them beyond what they thought was safe and expected, past what was already known and understood and experienced to the future that was unknown and things they did not yet understand and experiences that they had not yet had. Nothing less was at stake than whether Christianity would be just a footnote in a history book somewhere—a strange little sect with high ideals but limited imagination that never dared to venture beyond a handful of timid people in Palestine, and so died out with the first generation of Christ’s followers.

There are those people in the Presbyterian Church who deplore the General Assembly—our highest governing body—and its annual debates and deliberations and decisions. Sometimes the meetings can be quite contentious, and both observers and participants—usually those whose views did not win the day—denounce the whole proceeding as ungodly and devoid of spiritual meaning. Thankfully, the vast majority of commissioners who have actually participated in the presentations and the committee hearings and the votes return with enthusiasm for the whole procedure and convinced that it is one way the Holy Spirit is genuinely at work in the church. But there are always some who complain loudly about the entire experience and who predict, on the basis of their interpretation, that the end of the church is near and good riddance.

But even the most cursory look at the book of Acts makes it clear that, from the very beginning, the work of the Holy Spirit among the followers of Christ was neither antiseptic nor neat. The moment that the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples gathered together on the day of the Jewish feast of Pentecost, when they started speaking in every foreign language under the sun, the cynics accused them of being drunk! But Peter reminded the ridiculing onlookers of what was written in the prophecy of Joel: in the days, months, years, or centuries leading up to the completion of God’s redemption of the world, the Spirit would be poured out upon all flesh, and there would be testimony to God’s truth in new and surprising ways and there would be fresh visions of God’s will and there would be unprecedented dreams of what was possible if people were faithful, and those who had been disenfranchised from making decisions and participating in leadership—even slaves—would be qualified to speak God’s truth. And there would be no barriers of race or class or gender or nationality or any other condition when it came to salvation: Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Acts 2:21). And, in fact, the rest of the book of Acts shows just how all that began unfolding in the first generation of apostles, and how even women, even slaves, even Gentiles who were uncircumcised and ate unclean foods, even eunuchs, even former persecutors of the church, were not only welcomed and accepted into the full life and leadership of the church, but that that was in fact the reason God had brought the church into existence.

But the book of Acts also shows that those astounding things did not happen without a great deal of pain—like the groaning of a woman in childbirth—and those things did not happen without sometimes heated and even angry exchanges on the floors of councils—like what can sometimes happen at Presbytery or Synod or General Assembly—and those things did not happen without a lot of people thinking to themselves, What in the world is going on here, when everything I ever assumed and too often counted on is being turned upside down? Greeks and Romans being baptized? Women preaching the gospel and making decisions about the church? Black people, and brown and red and yellow, sitting alongside white people in the pew? The church reaching out to include the pariahs of this age, like Jesus reached out to lepers and prostitutes and tax-collectors in his time?

And to those who object, "Well, yes, we have to accept lepers and prostitutes and tax-collectors, maybe, because Jesus did, but no others, what did Jesus mean, then, when he spoke of what would happen after his death and resurrection and ascension?—Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12). And yet, it is often painful, it is frequently contentious, it sometimes means some turn away in disgust that the love and mercy of Jesus Christ are offered so indiscriminately to those whom we had always thought we were being virtuous by rejecting. We can almost hear, in between the lines of the stories in Acts, the objections of those to whom Peter reported that he had baptized Cornelius the Roman centurion, What? Have you gone totally mad?, and the objections of those to whom Ananias reported that he had ministered to Saul the persecutor of Christians, What? Are you absolutely insane?, and the objections of those to whom Paul reported that he had carried the gospel to the Gentiles and had even dined with them, What? How dare you defile yourself and the church!

"‘In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

in those days I will pour out my Spirit,

and they shall prophesy. . . .

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’"

(Acts

2

:

17–18

,

21

)

And, we will have become more mature in the Spirit.

The debates, the deliberations, the decisions, even when they are contentious—these are often the birth pangs of God’s new creation. All of creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God (Rom 8:19), Paul wrote in Romans. Those who objected to Jesus’ works of abundant love and boundless mercy killed him, but that only meant that the Holy Spirit was unleashed not just to continue, through the faithfulness of Jesus’ followers, what Jesus had been doing, but to expand it beyond every boundary, beyond every border, beyond every prejudice, beyond every assumption, even long after the Bible was completed, indeed, fulfilling its prophecies, through the faithful and courageous discipleship of generation upon generation of Christ’s followers.

The signs and wonders haven’t ended. The authority of the Bible, its promises and its truth, is steadfast and yet ever new. The love and mercy and salvation of Jesus Christ are widening and enlarging. The Holy Spirit is still at work.

Trinity Sunday

First Presbyterian Church, Dodge City, Kansas

May 29, 1994

Isaiah 6:1–8

Romans 8:12–17

John 3:1–17

A Vision of the King

It was the great fall festival of ingathering known as the Feast of Tabernacles, held at the turn of the Jewish new year—a celebration not only of the harvest, but of the Lord’s kingship over Israel. Pilgrims had been streaming up to Jerusalem toward the temple that Solomon had built to take part in the rituals commemorating the covenant God had made with David and his successors. But the rituals looked beyond every earthly ruler to the ruler of the universe—the Creator of heaven and earth and everything in it, judge of the nations, great Jehovah, the King of glory. The psalms of the pilgrims echoed through the streets of the great city:

Lift up your heads, O gates!

and be lifted up, O ancient doors!

that the King of glory may come in. (Ps

24

:

7

)

Your solemn