William H. Willimon - "The Faith Gap" (March 19, 2000)
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| - | Let us pray the prayer for illumination. | 0:06 |
| Open our hearts | 0:11 | |
| and minds, oh God, | 0:13 | |
| - | and minds, oh God, | |
| - | By the power | 0:14 |
| - | By the power | |
| - | Of your holy spirit | 0:15 |
| - | Of your holy spirit | |
| - | So that his word | 0:17 |
| - | So that his word | |
| - | Is read and proclaimed, | 0:18 |
| - | Is read and proclaimed, | |
| - | We may hear your message | 0:20 |
| - | We may hear your message | |
| - | To us this season of Lent. | 0:22 |
| - | To us this season of Lent. | |
| - | Amen. | 0:25 |
| - | Amen. | |
| - | The first reading is from the Book of Romans, | 0:28 |
| the 4th Chapter. | 0:31 | |
| For the promise that he would inherit the world | 0:34 | |
| did not come to Abraham or to his descendants | 0:37 | |
| through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. | 0:41 | |
| If it is the adherence of the law who are to be the heirs, | 0:48 | |
| faith is null and the promise is void, | 0:52 | |
| for the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, | 0:58 | |
| neither is there violation. | 1:03 | |
| For this reason, it depends on faith in order | 1:07 | |
| that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed | 1:12 | |
| to all his descendants, not only to the adherence | 1:17 | |
| of the law, but also to those who share | 1:22 | |
| the faith of Abraham, for he is the father | 1:26 | |
| of all of us. | 1:31 | |
| As it is written, I have made you the father | 1:33 | |
| of many nations. | 1:36 | |
| In the presence of the God in whom he believed | 1:38 | |
| who gives life to the dead and calls into existence | 1:42 | |
| the things that do not exist, | 1:48 | |
| hoping against hope, he believed that he would become | 1:52 | |
| the father of many nations according to what was said, | 1:57 | |
| so numerous shall your descendants be. | 2:03 | |
| He did not weaken in faith when he considered | 2:07 | |
| his own body, which was already as good as dead, | 2:10 | |
| for he was about 100 years old, | 2:16 | |
| or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. | 2:19 | |
| No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, | 2:24 | |
| but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, | 2:31 | |
| being fully convinced that God was able to do | 2:36 | |
| what God had promised. | 2:42 | |
| Therefore, his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. | 2:45 | |
| Now the words, it was reckoned to him, were written | 2:52 | |
| not for his sake alone, but for ours also. | 2:56 | |
| It will be reckoned to us who believe in him | 3:02 | |
| who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, | 3:06 | |
| who was handed over to death for our trespasses | 3:12 | |
| and was raised for our justification. | 3:17 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 3:24 | |
| - | Thanks be to God. | 3:27 |
| - | The second reading is from the Gospel | 3:31 |
| according to St. Mark, the 8th Chapter. | 3:33 | |
| Then he began to teach them that the son of man | 3:40 | |
| must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, | 3:43 | |
| the chief priests and the scribes and to be killed | 3:50 | |
| and after three days, rise again. | 3:55 | |
| He said all this quite openly and Peter took him aside | 3:59 | |
| and began to rebuke him, but turning and looking | 4:05 | |
| at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, | 4:09 | |
| "Get behind me Satan, for you are setting your mind | 4:14 | |
| "not on divine things, but on human things." | 4:19 | |
| He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, | 4:26 | |
| "If any want to become my followers, let them deny | 4:31 | |
| "themselves and take up their cross and follow me, | 4:36 | |
| "for those who want to save their life will lose it | 4:44 | |
| "and those who will lose their life for my sake | 4:50 | |
| "and for the sake of the Gospel will save it, | 4:55 | |
| "for what will it profit them to gain the whole world | 5:01 | |
| "and forfeit their life? | 5:06 | |
| "Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? | 5:09 | |
| "Those who are ashamed of me and of my words | 5:16 | |
| "in this adulterous and sinful generation, | 5:20 | |
| "of them the son of man will also be ashamed | 5:25 | |
| "when he comes in the glory of his father | 5:31 | |
| "with the holy angels." | 5:34 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 5:38 | |
| - | Thanks be to the Lord. | 5:40 |
| - | Pop psychotherapist Scott Peck says that one of the main | 5:49 |
| reasons why we need other people is that other people | 5:56 | |
| provide what Peck calls friction. | 6:01 | |
| The solitary person has no one to rub up against, | 6:06 | |
| therefore no one there to smooth out rough edges | 6:10 | |
| of the personality, no one to promote the warmth, | 6:15 | |
| the energy, the creativity that comes from rubbing | 6:19 | |
| up against others. | 6:22 | |
| People give us friction, and I'm hoping that maybe | 6:25 | |
| that's one reason why you come to church, | 6:30 | |
| not just to rub up against other people | 6:34 | |
| because we discourage that here among the undergraduates, | 6:36 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 6:40 | |
| particularly in church, | ||
| but to rub up against the word of God. | 6:44 | |
| Church is a place not where we snuggle up close to God, | 6:50 | |
| but where in being met by God, we get friction | 6:58 | |
| and in those moments, we realize that there is a distance | 7:05 | |
| between us and God. | 7:12 | |
| That's not what I was taught in seminary about preaching. | 7:15 | |
| There, somebody told us the preachers stand in the pulpit | 7:19 | |
| with a Bible in one hand and today's newspaper in the other. | 7:23 | |
| In 20 minutes, the preacher seeks to narrow that gap, | 7:26 | |
| that great gap between our fresh, new, modern world | 7:30 | |
| and the ancient world of Scripture. | 7:35 | |
| We moderns tend to think that way. | 7:40 | |
| We characterize the distance between us and the Bible | 7:44 | |
| as one of time, of a great gap of history. | 7:48 | |
| That's the way modern people think. | 7:53 | |
| We are privileged to live at the very summit | 7:56 | |
| of human development, namely Durham and there, | 7:59 | |
| from these serene heights we look down on everybody | 8:03 | |
| who got here before us. | 8:06 | |
| Is our problem with God just a matter of time, | 8:09 | |
| a gap of history, years between us and God? | 8:13 | |
| Now a Scripture like today's Gospel that makes you think | 8:20 | |
| the gap is just, it's simply because of who God is | 8:25 | |
| and who we are, to be brought on a Sunday | 8:30 | |
| into the presence of a living God is sometimes to be made | 8:36 | |
| aware of the gap between us and God | 8:41 | |
| that has little to do with 2,000 years, | 8:46 | |
| the gap, the distance is because we're unaccustomed | 8:51 | |
| to living with a free, sovereign God. | 8:58 | |
| We preachers, often in the interest of a kind of misguided | 9:04 | |
| evangelism, are forever guilty of inappropriately | 9:09 | |
| attempting to bridge that gap, to domesticate the Gospel, | 9:13 | |
| to housebreak God, to produce a Gospel which is honey | 9:19 | |
| to make the world's solutions go down a bit easier | 9:23 | |
| rather than salt, rather than light. | 9:27 | |
| Poor old church, they sometimes say. | 9:32 | |
| You're just so out of date, out of touch. | 9:36 | |
| You need to get the Gospel down to something | 9:39 | |
| that anybody can just walk in here off the street and get, | 9:41 | |
| something you can put on a bumper sticker, | 9:44 | |
| a slogan that can be put on a church billboard | 9:47 | |
| out on the front lawn. | 9:51 | |
| Years ago, Raoul Howl interviewed laypeople | 9:53 | |
| and probed your ideas about preaching | 9:58 | |
| and Howl's most frequent lay complaint in sermons | 10:01 | |
| was that sermons were just too long on analysis, | 10:10 | |
| too short on solutions. | 10:13 | |
| Tell me what I now need to do. | 10:17 | |
| 20 minutes or so, I want a resolution of life's conflicts, | 10:20 | |
| answers to questions, solutions. | 10:24 | |
| True, the Gospel can be the answer to some of our deepest | 10:29 | |
| questions, solution to pressing problems, | 10:32 | |
| yet before it's an answer, it's a question. | 10:38 | |
| The question if this be God in the presence of this Jew | 10:41 | |
| from Nazareth, well then who are we? | 10:47 | |
| How then ought we to live? | 10:53 | |
| Too often popular American evangelism presents the Gospel | 10:57 | |
| as the solution to all our problems, the resolution | 11:02 | |
| of all conflict, a technique for making nice people | 11:06 | |
| just a bit nicer, successful people even more successful. | 11:12 | |
| My life was on drugs, I was a mess, I was addicted | 11:18 | |
| to various, I ate high cholesterol snacks. | 11:22 | |
| Then I found Jesus and everything got fixed. | 11:26 | |
| But there are these wonderful moments in Scripture | 11:34 | |
| when Jesus appears downright uninterested | 11:39 | |
| in getting close to us, in meeting or needs. | 11:43 | |
| He seems more interested in increasing the distance | 11:49 | |
| between himself and us. | 11:53 | |
| At times, when he seems more interested in widening the gap | 11:57 | |
| between us and God rather than bridging the gap, | 12:01 | |
| like today's Gospel. | 12:08 | |
| By now in Mark's Gospel, Jesus' disciples have been with him | 12:11 | |
| for some time and maybe they think they've sort of gotten | 12:14 | |
| the hang of what he's about, they kinda got him down | 12:18 | |
| fairly well and then right there at that point, | 12:22 | |
| Mark says Jesus began to teach them | 12:28 | |
| the son of man must undergo great suffering and be rejected | 12:32 | |
| and be killed. | 12:39 | |
| The shock is great. | 12:42 | |
| Is this any way for a Messiah to act? | 12:45 | |
| Peter took Jesus aside and Peter urged Jesus | 12:48 | |
| to stop talking like that. | 12:50 | |
| Such talk will cause people to have negative thoughts. | 12:52 | |
| They might get depressed. | 12:56 | |
| How do you expect us to attract people to a movement | 12:57 | |
| that's headed in that direction? | 13:00 | |
| Jesus rebukes Peter, Peter's rebuke with well, if anybody | 13:06 | |
| wants to become my follower, then he ought to deny himself | 13:14 | |
| and take up his cross and follow, for those who want | 13:19 | |
| to save their life will lose it and those who lose | 13:23 | |
| their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel | 13:29 | |
| will save it. | 13:34 | |
| Strange kind of talk. | 13:38 | |
| No doubt there were many that day who were following Jesus | 13:42 | |
| precisely because they thought that by following | 13:48 | |
| that they would save their lives, they would make | 13:51 | |
| their lives more rewarding and fulfilling, | 13:54 | |
| and now these tough words from Jesus. | 13:58 | |
| Mark doesn't say it, but you kinda wonder if maybe | 14:01 | |
| the crowds got smaller that day. | 14:06 | |
| After this conflicted teaching, the crowds around Jesus | 14:10 | |
| got smaller as the gap between us and Jesus got greater. | 14:13 | |
| And I tell ya, as a preacher, this is hard | 14:21 | |
| 'cause I think I probably got in my head the notion | 14:25 | |
| that my job as a preacher was to take Jesus | 14:28 | |
| when he is most difficult and distant | 14:32 | |
| and work it up in such a way that you sit there | 14:36 | |
| hearing my sermon and you say to yourself | 14:40 | |
| well, that's kinda what I've always thought. | 14:45 | |
| Yeah, that makes sense to me. | 14:48 | |
| Yeah, got it, yeah, okay. | 14:50 | |
| Yerard Abling once said, "Theology is necessary | 14:52 | |
| "in order to make preaching as difficult as it should be." | 14:58 | |
| Whenever preaching gets easy, a kind of over-simplification | 15:04 | |
| of the Gospel, rules for better living, proverbial wisdom | 15:07 | |
| with a dash of pop psychology, | 15:12 | |
| Leo Buscaglia dressed up like Jesus. | 15:15 | |
| Well then, theology comes along | 15:18 | |
| and it pushes preaching toward petulancy. | 15:20 | |
| What Abling claims for theology can be true | 15:25 | |
| for us in Sunday worship. | 15:29 | |
| To rub up against the Bible is often a reminder | 15:33 | |
| that well, we don't own God. | 15:37 | |
| Scripture keeps making Jesus available to us | 15:42 | |
| and at the same time, keeps Jesus at some distance from us | 15:45 | |
| in order that that space between us and the throne of God | 15:53 | |
| might be kept free and untamed and threatening, | 15:57 | |
| and thereby demanding and thereby, life giving. | 16:03 | |
| Poor disciples in Mark. | 16:09 | |
| They've been following Jesus, they've been listening | 16:11 | |
| to every word and here toward the end, | 16:13 | |
| they don't have the foggiest notion of where he's going | 16:17 | |
| or what he's up to. | 16:21 | |
| Poor us. | 16:24 | |
| Second Sunday of Lent. | 16:26 | |
| Yeah, that in order to get close to Jesus. | 16:28 | |
| But then we get Scripture and we sense a growing gap | 16:32 | |
| between us and the Lord. | 16:35 | |
| Well, we've come here to get things kind of fixed, | 16:39 | |
| to get our lives and hear Jesus speak | 16:43 | |
| of losing our lives, of taking up a cross and following. | 16:47 | |
| Things can get rough walking up such a narrow path. | 16:55 | |
| Richard Hayes and I are teaching a class together | 17:02 | |
| in the seminary and the other day, Hayes noted | 17:05 | |
| that the common lectionary, that table of Scripture | 17:08 | |
| that we get our lessons from here each Sunday, | 17:11 | |
| that in the lectionary, if you have a Scripture lesson | 17:15 | |
| and you're reading along in the Scripture lesson | 17:20 | |
| and suddenly there's a break in verses | 17:22 | |
| and there's a gap of a few verses, then you pick up | 17:24 | |
| some other verses, check out those verses | 17:26 | |
| that got discarded in the lectionary and invariably, | 17:29 | |
| says Hayes, you'll find that in some way or another, | 17:34 | |
| they are verses of judgment, they are verses | 17:37 | |
| when God gets wrathful and judgmental, | 17:40 | |
| and those are the kind of verses | 17:50 | |
| it's sometimes hard to take. | 17:51 | |
| That way, Hayes says, if you can just eliminate | 17:56 | |
| a few of those verses, you can make Jesus over | 17:58 | |
| in anything you please. | 18:02 | |
| We can lessen the gap, we can remake Jesus | 18:04 | |
| until he looks just like us. | 18:08 | |
| As Malcolm Muggeridge said, "Genesis says God said, | 18:11 | |
| "'Let us make man through our own image,' and down | 18:16 | |
| "through history, man has been attempted to return | 18:21 | |
| "the favor to God, remaking God in our image." | 18:24 | |
| But those wonderful, delicious moments when Jesus rebukes, | 18:31 | |
| stands against us, judges, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" | 18:36 | |
| Jesus says to his own disciples. | 18:42 | |
| Such moments, we realize that Jesus, though he is God | 18:47 | |
| with us, he's still at some distance from us. | 18:52 | |
| He resists us, patiently, firmly teaches us. | 18:58 | |
| He is determined to have us on God's terms | 19:05 | |
| rather than acquiesce to our terms | 19:09 | |
| and one of the great adventures being a Christian | 19:15 | |
| is to get to follow that God. | 19:20 | |
| I think I told some of you who accosted me at the front door | 19:26 | |
| at the end of the service after I'd preached | 19:31 | |
| this sermon on forgiveness. | 19:34 | |
| "Do you mean to tell me," that's what she said | 19:39 | |
| to me back in the narthex, "Do you mean to tell me | 19:41 | |
| "that God expects me to forgive my abusive husband | 19:43 | |
| "who made my life hell for 10 years till I finally | 19:47 | |
| "got up the nerve to walk out on him? | 19:49 | |
| "I'm supposed to forgive him?" | 19:51 | |
| And I was thinking, "Now I remember why we don't preach | 19:55 | |
| "on that subject that often here." | 19:58 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 19:59 | |
| And immediately moved in to my homiletical defensive | 20:01 | |
| posture and said, "Look, we've only got 20 minutes. | 20:05 | |
| "I can't qualify all this the way it needs to be. | 20:09 | |
| "Spouse abuse is a terrible evil and I, I, I, | 20:11 | |
| but, I, I, I. | 20:14 | |
| "He did say 70 times seven and that's a lot | 20:16 | |
| "of forgiveness, and he did say forgive your enemies. | 20:18 | |
| "I can't think of a bigger enemy than your ex-husband | 20:22 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 20:24 | |
| "and I don't know | ||
| "that I would say this, but I do believe Jesus, | 20:27 | |
| "it sounds like something he might say." | 20:30 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 20:35 | |
| She drew herself up to her full height and said, | 20:37 | |
| "Good, just checking. | 20:40 | |
| "Thank you!" | 20:41 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 20:43 | |
| And I thought to myself, now who ordained me to protect | 20:45 | |
| her from Jesus? | 20:49 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 20:50 | |
| Who gave me the right to say I'm sorry, | 20:52 | |
| when you got called for baptism, I guess God made a mistake. | 20:56 | |
| You look just as deceitful and cowardly as I am. | 20:59 | |
| I guess no, these demands of course don't apply to you. | 21:03 | |
| You're off the hook. | 21:07 | |
| You ought to demand that Scripture is read | 21:11 | |
| and that the word is preached in such a way | 21:16 | |
| that we restore the dignity to your baptism, | 21:19 | |
| that while you may have just thought that being a disciple | 21:25 | |
| of Jesus was just a matter of bringing out the best in you | 21:29 | |
| and little minor, moral tinkering to make you | 21:33 | |
| even nicer, in moments like, say wait a minute, | 21:36 | |
| Jesus is walking down a narrow road here | 21:40 | |
| that everybody doesn't want to go. | 21:45 | |
| This thing is bigger than I first imagined. | 21:48 | |
| If you don't want that kind of risk, | 21:53 | |
| then just, it would be good to be here, somewhere else. | 21:56 | |
| Get the consolations of pop psychology or wherever | 22:02 | |
| you can get it to help your life | 22:05 | |
| be a little less miserable, or you can stick | 22:08 | |
| with Jesus and be part of the adventure. | 22:12 | |
| This is some journey we're on with Jesus. | 22:18 | |
| In just a few weeks, this Lenten journey | 22:24 | |
| with Jesus will be over. | 22:27 | |
| We're gonna see where this path finally leads. | 22:30 | |
| The cost of the trip is going to be made painfully | 22:34 | |
| apparent for all to see as everybody gets a good view | 22:38 | |
| as he is lifted up, lifted up on a cross | 22:43 | |
| and we gathered with him toward the end | 22:52 | |
| at a meal, a meal of Jesus and his best friends. | 22:54 | |
| The table, a place of warm conviviality and socialization, | 23:00 | |
| and it was there at the table that he took a piece of bread | 23:08 | |
| and he took hold of a cup and he said, "This is my body, | 23:11 | |
| "broken for you. | 23:20 | |
| "This is my blood, poured out for you." | 23:22 | |
| And in moments like that, we realize this journey | 23:31 | |
| with Jesus can get rough, and yet it is a journey | 23:35 | |
| that leads to life everlasting. | 23:42 | |
| Amen. | 23:46 |
