Fr Robert Hendrickson
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Dear Friends in Christ,
The passage above is from our Gospel reading today and is essential in our understanding of Christ’s ministry. This was his proclamation, in the synagogues, of his purpose.
It is always tempting to impose one’s own theological, moral, ideological, political, or other framework on what we hear in Scripture.
For example, for those of us preaching in Sacramental liturgical traditions like ours or the Orthodox or Roman Catholic, there’s always a bit of “this is like the Eucharist” that we often hear. It’s a natural turn to take what has evolved in one’s tradition and find its antecedents.
There are less helpful ways, I think, of doing this, as well.
One of the things I see are attempts to impose on the world of first century Judaism a whole set of contemporary values. So we’ll hear sermons on gender or class or race that imply lessons that would be quite foreign to early hearers of the Scriptures.
I hear this in other ways, too. I’ve heard sermons on abortion, homosexuality birth control, and more when I’ve sat there and thought, “How the heck did they get there from that?!”
Of course there are sermons on money, too, which are always the most popular!
In my first parish, the Rector and I were in the sacristy one day after a seminarian had preached, what I might term, an unfortunate sermon. I started to grumble a bit to the Rector about it.
He cut me off, and said “Let’s not do this on Sunday. Let’s sit with it. Every preacher brings what they have that day. We can do this on Monday.”
That has stuck with me and I try to hear each sermon in light of that. Can I sit with it? Can my judgment wait?
Of course we live in a rapid response culture in which we are all experts on everything immediately after something happens! So as the commentary and responses rolled in about the Bishop of Washington’s sermon at the National Prayer Service, the predictable patterns emerged. Everyone was suddenly a professor of homiletics!
I think, though, regardless of how one felt about that particular sermon, I’d offer the advice of my first Rector again. Let’s sit with it. When we hear a sermon that is provoking us in some way then it’s worth sitting with it. It’s worth hearing on its own terms.
Now, shortly after that Gospel passage, the outraged crowds would try to throw Jesus off a cliff! So it doesn’t seem like they sat with it for long.
But I think it’s worth letting discomfort be something we expect from preaching because the preacher’s task is to help us encounter Jesus in some way.
Their task is not education nor social commentary nor political pep talk. The task is to help people meet Jesus. That encounter with Christ will always surprise us and rarely be something that just affirms our preconceptions.
This is why Jesus says he did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword—and that sword is truth.
Not every sermon is one that is going to make us want to toss the preacher off a cliff. But when it does, it’s worth telling our soul, “Let’s not do this on Sunday. Let’s sit with it.”
And maybe in that space between our hearing and our judgment we will meet Jesus in some new way.
Yours in Christ,
—Fr Robert
