Preventing Grace
It’s another gray Friday in Binghamton. The only antidote must be some takes about a sermon I listened to this week. And don’t worry, today I’ll change my privacy settings so that you can actually see my blog on facebook. And if you want something cheerier than what’s about to happen, here I am on the Persuasion Podcast lyricizing Holy Week. Hannah and Erin are so cool and also patient, letting me go on and on about my favorite week of the year.
And now on to our little treat—7 ways this sermon goes tragically wrong.
One
The preacher should never use himself as a good example, which he does twice in the course of this fairly rambling exposition of what it means to…the word he is looking for is ‘forgive’, though he never finds it.
The reason you shouldn’t use yourself as a good example is because you don’t want people to look to you or model their lives on you. You will fail, even when you’re trying to be good. And so, for every breath you expend in the pulpit, you want them to see Jesus, to love Jesus, to cling to Jesus, and most especially to seek forgiveness and help from Jesus.
Two
The preacher does not define or use biblical categories when grappling with each of his three biblical texts. He references verses in Romans, Galatians, and Matthew but not a single one is put in context nor exposited using the language and categories of scripture itself.
As you listen you’ll see that
‘not-perfect’ is used in place of sinner
‘jacked’ is used in place of sinning
‘baggage’ is used in place of a person condemned to hell for offending a holy God and
‘let it go’ is used in place of forgiveness
Three
The preacher describes Paul in Romans 7 as bemoaning the ordinary imperfections to which we all unhappily fall prey. We’re all forgetful, we’re all occasionally unkind, we all speak harshly when we shouldn’t. But we mean well. We’re all in the pot of imperfection together, and that can be frustrating. Paul understands, just like the preacher understands, because he’s not perfect either. He even raised his voice to his kids recently. We should remember this and not take offense at the imperfections of other people.
Unfortunately, this is not what Romans 7 is describing. We are not basically good. We offend God by our thoughts, words, and deeds and must be forgiven by the blood of Jesus or we will be separated from God for eternity. For those who cling to the work of Christ on the cross, the Holy Spirit is given as a guarantee of forgiveness and eternal life. That person then experiences the war between the old life of the condemned sinner and the new life of the forgiven child. This is a painful, rich, and at times terrible experience. It is not a trite, ‘don’t worry nobody is perfect’ experience.
Four
The preacher leaves behind one letter of Paul for another, Galatians, which he uses—out of context—to explain that you shouldn’t take offense when other people do bad things. If you are hurt by other people, which you inevitably will be, you might be carrying around a lot of ‘baggage’. That’s not the path to the good life, so just don’t pick up those bad things. Don’t take the offenses of other people personally. Remember that you do bad things too, and in this way, don’t pick up a lot of baggage that will make you even more unlikeable.
Of course it is true that you ought not take offense, this point is made in the scriptures all over the place. But sin is sin. When one person sins against another person, that sin has to be remediated, if possible, and forgiven, which is a painful and difficult process. It’s not just ‘baggage’, it is a kind of personal death for the sake of another person’s life.
Five
The preacher then jumps over to the parable of the Unmerciful Servant where he neglects to use the single crucial word that Jesus himself uses—forgiveness—but instead postulates that the Christian should just ‘let it go’. The servant had a debt that he could not pay and the king ‘let it go’. The servant turned around, then, and did not ‘let it go’ and this was very bad.
Whereas, when Jesus tells the story, the king had to absorb an impossibly huge debt in order to forgive the servant. The debt stands for sin, for the offense of the rebel human who does not obey a perfect God. The king did not just ‘let it go.’ He absorbed the cost of that debt in himself. That is the miracle of forgiveness. You have to take something appalling and intolerable into yourself so that the other person can go free. It comes at a high cost. It is not easily done. It is a terrifying proposition.
Six
By lightly skipping over these various texts and completely avoiding the whole question of sin, the preacher does not equip himself nor the congregation to deal with the dark-hearted depravity that is the property of being human and being human together. We are not ‘basically good trying to do our best.’ We need the terrible truth of the cross—that we do unspeakably evil things to each other, things that offend God, and that the only way out is for God himself to remove the filth of that awfulness, not just by innocent animals dying, which is itself an ugly and painful thought, but by God himself becoming human and dying.
Seven
The church in America isn’t so morally awesome right now that it can afford to breeze over the heart of the law and the gift of the gospel. Imagine going to church having suffered something terrible, or done something unspeakable, and leaving with the new and worse law—let it go—rather than being offered the mercy and grace of Christ.
Except that you don’t have to imagine it, you can hear it in sermons such as this in churches all across America. As we head into Holy Week, I’m going to implore God for faithful, true, rigorous preaching that offers the relief and mercy of forgiveness to a sinful and dying world.
Go check out more takes!
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