3 before Lent 2007. Preaching - Tales of God
Preached at St Peter’s Chaplaincy
Luke 5.1-11
An important ecumenical church was setting about the serious business of choosing 3 new pastors.
The appointment panel asked the RC candidates for the post to say Mass. The best one got the job.
The panel asked the Free church candidates to preach a sermon. The best one….
And then, for the Anglican candidates… to organise a jumble sale.
The moral of the story, told to me by a Methodist minister, is never ask Anglicans to preach. Hmm.
Now, I find myself with the bizarre thought that, had Jesus been one of the candidates at that church,
they wouldn’t have dared ask him to organise a jumble sale – for fear he’d have overturned all the tables.
So would they have asked him to celebrate the last supper again…?
Or would they have asked him to preach, just like he used to do?
Just like he used to do…..
Jesus stepped into one of the boats, ‘the one belonging to Simon,
And asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and addressed the crowds…’
I wonder whether you are the sort of people that have sermon survival techniques?
Do you have hidden supplies of sweets?
Do you pass the time reading the smallest details of news on the pew sheet?
Or finding your favourite hymn in the hymnbook?
Or counting the windows, the chairs, the stains on the carpet.
Checking for damp patches in the roof. Or staring at the floor….
Or guessing how long the preacher will go on for?…..
And what are you hoping for today?
The crowd strained to hear what Jesus was saying as the wind blew away his words
So he stood up and raised his voice.
I guess you know that there are 2 common words for this bit of the service.
The one often used in catholic churches is ‘homily’.
The word homily originally meant a lecture or talk explaining what the Bible passages were about.
The more familiar word is ‘sermon’, coming from the French word ‘sermonner’ meaning to tell off.
A chance for the pastor to tell the people off for whatever wayward behaviour you’ve been up to during the past week.
In English, the word ‘sermon’ has many negative overtones: to sermonise, to preach, to correct, to exhort, to put people right.
To show you the error of your ways….
In the past, the sermon would often be an hour or two in length and take a day or two to write.
And to this very day Anglican canon law states that if there be no minister to preach the word of God then it is the duty of the churchwardens to read from the Book of Homilies. (Each sermon 25 pages long, but seeming longer) which, according to a law passed in the reign of the first queen Elisabeth, should be found in every parish church.
Sermons have changed their form and meaning over time.
When John Wesley was training his ministers, they were told to break open the word of God
so that men may apply it to their lives and be nourished.
While, when Baptist preachers were being trained, they were told to shout loudly if their argument was weak at any point.
A device still used by some evangelists to this day….
But all of this begs the question, for the modern preacher, of what one is supposed to do in this curious space called sermon.
Do people come to church expecting to be morally admonished – or just bored?
Should the preacher seek to offer some serious teaching in the 5 or 10 minutes before people starting reaching their attention span?
Is it an opportunity to convince or to convert the listener?
Should I have visual aids, or ask you to stand up and be involved in some cringe-worthy way?
Would it be a good idea at this point to break up into small groups and discuss the Bible readings
to work out a chaplaincy strategy for evangelism……..?
We do not know what Jesus said that day beside the Lake of Genessaret;
his words have blown away on the winds of time….
But after he’d finished and the crowd took his message excitedly home for supper,
Jesus asked the men to row out into deeper water….
Now Simon and his men were exhausted after a long night’s fishless fishing but… ‘if you say so, Lord.’
And what happened next shocked them to the core and changed their lives for ever…
The unthinkable happened.
My theory is that the sermon is the place in the normally very familiar service when the unthinkable might just happen.
When the congregation – you – might just be persuaded to step outside the memorised words and actions of the liturgy
and think the unthinkable. To think new thoughts and contemplate the possibility of being other than they are.
But, since they never want to do this, the preacher has to be cunning-creative and have a touch of the poetic.
in order to get under people’s skin, to make them itch mentally
and, in scratching their heads and hearts,
open up a chink in the armour of their religious routine.
To use their imaginations which, they always have trouble realising, is the part of their nature which comes closest to God’s.
The part of our nature which comes closest to God’s. Imagine that!
Imagine that!… thought Simon. And everyone who saw it.
Suddenly their nets were full. Bursting apart. Stretched to breaking point – just like their minds.
Years of fishermen’s yarns pulled into holes
by the biggest, tallest, weirdest fisherman’s story of them all…..
Familiar reliable reality overturned by the utterly unexpected.
Words simply failed them, but they were hooked.
Preaching – like hooking people with a good yarn – is all about opening up a space for poetry in a world flattened by prose.
A time-aside from daily speech, where nothing is normal because everything is possible;
a risky place, precarious; ……. a place for the unexpected;
a liminal place into another world
where words and meanings tumble around each other and refuse to make just one sense….
A place for pondering,
A place for catching just a movement beneath the waves, a glimpse of a fish, a flash of the hand of the divine
as it moves among us, bestirring us, surprising us, recreating us…..
A place for hearing echoes of a strangely familiar voice recalling us to some half-forgotten-remembered purpose
to explore our deepest desires and to speak out and to share whatever little we know, what little faith we think we have…….
A place for nurturing;
for testing out those unbelievable fishermen’s tales and tasting those extravagant kingdom recipes
passed down to us in the stories of the God who in Jesus fed thousands……
A place for believing
and for allowing the spark of the divine to rekindle in us
a flame and a passion and a longing to proclaim the stern justice and ever gratuitous love of God in a needy world….
A space for answering YES! again and again and again in the silence of our hearts
And for realising that, despite the worst we can offer, God really is there for us… Always and forever, and forever and forever....
While the others struggled with the unexpected bonus of a mighty catch,
mentally counting already the extra coins at the fish market,
Simon Peter knelt down….. and was afraid…………..
A space had opened up in the fabric of his world and, through it, he saw into another place.
Into another reality, more clear, more real than anything he’d known before.
A place where prosaic prose is banished and truth is brought to speech in strange new words
Singing us into life
Rhyming us into being
Coupling us with new ways of living
Reeling us in, with baited breath,
and guiding us to experience novelty, newness, aliveness, incarnation, resurrection…
Teaching us how to know, and how to utter, Easter.
And this is the task to which each of us is called…….
For, just as fishermen must tell tales of those that got away,
tales of unbelievable trials and ‘herring-do’,
just so we Christians, named from Christ himself,
must tell tales of the God ‘who gives life to the dead, and who calls into being things that do not exist.’
Jesus raised Simon to his feet. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘From now on…’
Don’t be afraid, for from now on we can all know what happened next.
For what happened next….. can happen now.
Just learn how to hear the call
and then how to answer YES! again and again and again in the silence of your hearts
And how to realise that, despite the worst we can offer, God really is there for us… Always and forever, and forever and forever....