Well nigh now over a year ago, Matt began preaching through I Corinthians. He had hemmed and hawed for many weeks, as we were closing in on the end of Mark, trying to make up his mind about where to go next. I kept saying I Corinthians. Maybe I’m crazy but I like the strident astringency of Paul’s horror as he writes to this church. It’s like he can’t believe what he’s hearing, and the words just fall out of his pen in lucid and perfect sarcasm. I haven’t been disappointed. Just as Matt’s preaching through Mark was the most perfect restoration of my faith in Jesus after the decimation of that particular book by our New Testament professor in seminary, the reassembling of the person of Jesus into a whole being once again, the taking of all the shattered elements of his personality and putting them back together–should I keep going or is that enough?–so I Corinthians, under Matt’s careful and painstaking study, has been a re-centering of my understanding of the Word of God, of the scriptures as a whole. I’ve been able to go back and forth between the Old Testament and the New, between the scripture and the culture, between my own past and my present, and see the threads of understanding twine themselves together into coherency.
On the other hand, it’s been a tough job to carry forward. The study has been immense, for Matt, and having to stake out a position on stuff we’re not supposed to talk about has been stressful. Church discipline, marriage and sexuality, tongues and prophecy, and finally, should women speak at all–he’s had to land somewhere. But not just anywhere, he’s had to be able to stand up and say that he believes what he’s saying to be really in the text.
I think this is why preaching is not the central love of the church in the west any more. For one thing, it’s hard to do well. If you want to dig into a section of scripture, and know what it means, to dig in and see its guts and then pan out and see its place in the whole, you are setting out a difficult program for yourself. You can’t just waltz in, glance over it, glance over it again, pick up a news paper, glance through the religion section, jot down some notes, flip through your book of joke openers and trust that the job is done. I’m pretty sure this is what this means, you might be tempted to mutter as you head out on the endless round of hospital visits. Being a pastor is hard. The needs of the people rise up like a great heavy cloud that goes with you everywhere. There is always more you should have done. There is always someone you forgot to call, or someone who made it out of the hospital before you got there, or someone who is about to do something evil and foolish. Often the thing that gets pushed to Friday is the sermon, because all the other real demands shove in and take its place.
But if the sermon gets pushed to Friday, you are left with not enough time, truly. You won’t have enough time to get deep in to a couple of verses and really know, be really sure, what they are about. And I would argue that while all the other stuff is important, the most essential task of the pastor is to know what the text says and to relay that meaning, as fully as possible, to his church. If you have visited your people in the hospital but then had time only to throw together the sermon, your people are going to feed on you and not on the word of God. More importantly, what if you are wrong? What if you didn’t study and you were wrong? If you are wrong they can’t feed on the word either, because it wasn’t true. The terror of being wrong drives Matt forward every single week. He does not want to stand up in front of everyone and not be sure, completely sure, that what he is saying is true and really there.
Which brings me to this Sunday’s sermon, just passed, which should have been the least favorite of any woman ever. “I do not permit” says an insensitive and culturally obtuse Paul, “women to speak in all the churches.” I commend the sermon to you (which I am sorry to say I can’t find, but as soon as I do I will link it here and at the top–in the meantime, here is his excellent talk on sex, marriage and singleness). I listened to it, the sermon, twice, once at 8 o’clock, out of obedience to my husband, who wants to know if what he wrote was what I heard, and then again at 10:30. The first time I sat in the back, listening and re-glueing tiny flags together for geography work in Sunday school. The second time I sat still, my bible open, heart splayed open, desperately grateful for the sufficiency of Jesus who comes and does what I am not able to do.
Because it’s not just that you have to get the text right. It’s that you have to get it completely. The sermon has to be about the gospel, the work of Jesus to rescue us from sin, the call to repent of sin and turn to him to be forgiven. If that proclamation–the gospel articulated in and through the guts of a particular text–is launched out there into a particular room and heard by particular people, the gates of hell have to scramble to confuse and ruin it. They do, they run around all week and try, but they don’t have enough power. But if the sermon has been three puppies and a poem and Jesus loves you, or even three poems and only a picture of a puppy and Jesus wants you to be happy, the gates of hell have only to hang wide open. There isn’t any difficult work for them that the preacher himself hasn’t supplied.
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