proclamation — Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-13 and Luke 4:14-21
preached on July 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As we celebrate Independence Day tomorrow, there are many official proclamations floating around. Elected officials at every level use holidays like this one to affirm their support for the American experiment, claim that they are following in the line of our forebears, often more faithfully than their opponents, and remember the contributions of the military in getting us through the last 240 years as a nation.

“The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind,” from the banners of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church on the Green.

But today we turn to a different kind of proclamation in the church: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.” These are the words of the first Great End of the Church, one of a series of six statements of the mission and purpose of the church first adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in North America in 1910 and lifted up with greater understanding and purpose over the last thirty years or so as we have lived into our identity as a reunited denomination after the reunion of the northern and southern branches of Presbyterians in 1983 following over 120 years of separation. We will spend the next few weeks looking at these Great Ends of the Church, celebrating the gifts that these words bring us as we live together in this congregation and beyond and looking afresh at the mission of God that these words call us to do as we live these words out in our life together.

Proclamation is an integral part of what we do as God’s people. In our Presbyterian tradition, we have lifted this proclamation up with particular importance. Each Sunday, our worship is centered around the proclamation of the word, usually (but not always) in a sermon like what you are hearing now. This time of proclamation is so important that we place it right in the middle, recognizing that everything that we do in worship leads up to or follows from this point. Even so, the sermon is only the beginning of our proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind—we proclaim the gospel in our everyday words and deeds, showing God’s love, mercy, and peace as we live in God’s world and act with kindness and grace toward all creation.

But what is this gospel that we proclaim? What exactly is the gospel, the “good news” that we can offer the world? What is the salvation that we lift up for the world to embrace? Our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke gives us some helpful insights into a biblical and faithful understanding of these questions. In this reading, we hear about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, about the first chance he had to proclaim his ministry in his hometown. After making his way through the other nearby towns, he arrived back home in Nazareth and “went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.” When Jesus stood up to read, he found this passage in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and used it to proclaim what he understood as the core of his message. Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson paraphrases those words from Isaiah that Jesus quoted this way:

God’s Spirit is on me;
[God has] chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
sent me to announce pardon to prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

This was a radical proclamation. The world was not all that favorable to such a message, after all. Such a day of peace, justice, and blessing stood in stark contrast to the carefully constructed way of Rome that insisted on putting the poor in their place and increasing the oppression of the oppressed. You’d have to be crazy to live in such a way. Everyone knew that Rome would quickly suppress any attempts to claim real power and control for anyone other than the emperor.

But even after this radical threat to the superiority of the emperor through a recognition that there was something greater than the way of Rome, Jesus kept on going. After reading these words, he began his interpretation of them with an even more radical claim:

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Not only would God send God’s Spirit upon someone, sometime, that person was Jesus himself, and that time was then and there. This made Jesus’ proclamation all the more astounding. Luke continues the story after our reading today, indicating that Jesus’ words so bothered the people of his hometown that they chased him to the edge of a cliff!

But the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind is equally challenging for us today. Our world is not particularly interested in hearing good news for the poor, release for the captives, or freedom for the oppressed. More often than not, the systems and structures of our world are set up to shut down such news, to suppress this good news by claiming that it is a bad thing to name the powers that are destroying us, to insist that we should keep our focus on the spiritual life and not worry about its implications on everything else. We lift up the voices of hate and hurt, the continual rush of violence all around the world, and the little acts of oppression that make their way insidiously into our lives. Anyone who speaks up to offer “good news” today that goes beyond hope for something in a world still yet to come is so very unlikely to be heard above the din of the world.

Even so, as God’s church, we are still called to offer “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind,” not because our words themselves will bring the salvation that we so desperately need, not because we expect or even demand a positive response to what we share, but because the world may need nothing more than simply to hear the good news of this gospel, this hope that there is something more beyond the uncertainty of our weary world, this promise that God has not forgotten us and is not done with us yet.

The church has traditionally called this work of proclamation “evangelism.” Evangelism can be a difficult word for many of us. For some, it conjures up images of forced conversations with strangers, bad street preaching, and even threats of eternal damnation. I know plenty of people who have ended up in the Presbyterian church because they don’t want to be a part of such things!

But the evangelism that comes in this proclamation for today is not so much about these things as it is about living out our faith in our everyday lives, about making it clear to all those we meet along the way that we carry good news and live it as best we know how. We let our words and actions bear witness to the saving love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We recognize that the wonder of this gift is so great that we cannot hold it in or keep it just for ourselves. And we are so filled with the gratitude and joy that emerge from the depth of grace that we have received that we must invite others to join us on this journey of thanksgiving and hope.

In the midst of our broken and fearful world, we offer good news as we proclaim with boldness the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.

In our world filled with so much need, we can join our words and actions with Jesus to “bring good news to the poor… 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.” And in a world so filled with the glory of God, we can join with heaven’s song of alleluia so that we are united in love and witness to God each and every day.

May God so strengthen us as we offer this proclamation of this gospel for today, that our world might know the wonder and joy that we share together here so that it can join in this song of grace and hope. Thanks be to God! Amen.

a sermon on Jonah 3:1-10 and Acts 20:7-12
preached on August 2, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

In our wanderings through the parts of the worship service this summer, we’ve finally made it to the center of everything about Presbyterian worship: the sermon. If you look at our bulletin each Sunday, you will see headings that show us that everything has something to do with “the Word:” gathering around the Word, proclaiming the Word, responding to the Word, sealing the Word in baptism and communion, and bearing and following the Word into the world. Since worship stands at the center of all that we do as a community of faith and the Word stands at the center of our worship, the Word of God is very much at the center of everything that defines us as God’s people. So as we think about all the various parts of our worship each week, it seems very important to spend some time thinking and talking about the sermon—but it does seem a little bit strange to have a sermon about sermons!

All this isn’t quite as surprising if we remember that the Bible itself describes a number of sermons as it tells the story of God’s life with God’s people. A lot of these sermons show up in the New Testament. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known sermon of all time, though I wonder if people have ever really heard what it says, because we very often end up doing exactly what Jesus says we should not in it! Before any of Jesus’ sermons, though, let alone the Sermon on the Mount, John the Baptist offered his own words of proclamation, calling the people to repent and prepare the way for one who was coming to open a new and different way. The book of Acts contains a number of sermons by Peter, Paul, and the other early apostles of the church, and it seems reasonable to think of the epistles of Paul and others as written sermons intended for oral proclamation when they were read to the communities that received them.

But even before this time, the Old Testament prophets and others also delivered messages that are quite reasonably also considered sermons. Much of the book of Deuteronomy is cast as a farewell message—a sermon—from Moses to the Israelites as they prepared to journey without him into the promised land. The message of many of the prophets in calling God’s people back to God’s ways is very much like what might be shared in a sermon today. And even God seems to offer Job a bit of a sermon at the end of the story of Job’s encounter of trial and testing at God’s hand.

But even with all these interesting sermons in the Bible, it is hard to forget the two stories of sermons that we heard this morning once we have heard. First, we hear of the prophet Jonah, who so famously avoided God’s call to preach a word of repentance in the great Gentile city of Nineveh and ended up spending three days in the belly of a big fish, and then was astonished when the city actually listened to his message and changed their ways! In a day and age when the audience for sermons seems to be shrinking a bit, when fewer people in our country make their ways to a pew on Sunday mornings to hear the Word proclaimed, when sermons seem to be getting shorter and their content less notable, it is good to know that at least a few people over the years have listened and taken what we preachers offer seriously! And our second story today from the book of Acts is a little-known but very surprising story about the consequences of falling asleep during the sermon! Even in the early church it seems like preachers tended to drone on a little longer than they should have and leave their hearers to nod off, though the primary lesson here seems to be, “don’t sit in an open window if you’re sleepy during the sermon!”

But these two stories mostly provide a jumping-off point for us to think about why it is important to take time out each week as we gather to hear God’s Word proclaimed in our life together. After all, wouldn’t it be good enough if we just read the Bible each week and endured a little less commentary from people like me? Can’t we get everything we need to respond to God’s Word in faith, hope, and love simply by reciting a portion of these ancient words? Wouldn’t it work just as well to finish worship ten or fifteen minutes earlier and give me three or six or eight hours of my time back during the week to just make things a little simpler and let our readings, songs, and prayers speak for themselves? The consensus of the church over the centuries has been that such simple reading is not enough—we need someone to proclaim the Word of God to us and help us connect it to our lives in this world.

From its very roots in the work of John Calvin, our Reformed tradition has made it clear that the true church is first and foremost marked by the proclamation of the Word. In our tradition, from its earliest days in Switzerland and Scotland, the first mark of the true and faithful church has been the true preaching of the Word of God. As it is well-put in our most recent revisions of this nearly 500-year-old statement,

The Church is faithful to the mission of Christ as it proclaims and hears the Word of God, responding to the promise of God’s new creation in Christ, and inviting all people to participate in that new creation. (Book of Order F-1.0303)

And so the proclamation of the Word still stands as central to our faith and life together.

So what exactly is this Word that we hear proclaimed each week? The great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth helped us to see that there are actually three different meanings of the phrase “Word of God.” First, Barth reminded us that the gospel of John identifies the Word of God as Jesus Christ, the “Word made flesh,” as John describes, “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death,” as Barth and others put it in the Theological Declaration of Barmen (Book of Confessions, 8.11).

Then, we know the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit as we read and hear and seek to understand the words of scripture. Scripture is the Word of God shared with us in our human words, inspired and revealed by God to point us to Jesus Christ. Our reading of scripture relies upon prayer and discernment, grounded in the prayer for illumination that asks for God to light our way as we read together, so that we might see the wonder and grace of Jesus Christ in these words.

And the Word of God finally and perhaps most surprisingly comes in the sermon itself, where the Holy Spirit is at work in these most human words to help us to hear and understand and believe and act in our lives and our world, where the words of mouths like mine are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit to become the Word of God in and for this day and age.

So in our worship, the sermon offers us the proclamation of God’s Word in and for this time and place. Sometimes it will include the call to repentance that Jonah so reluctantly yet effectively offered to the people of Nineveh, and occasionally it needs to go on a little longer than might be comfortable for all of us, as it did with Paul in Acts, though I certainly hope that no one gets hurt along the way! But what I think really and truly matters about the sermon in worship is that it is always only the beginning of our proclamation. We do not hear God’s Word and leave what we have learned within these walls. Instead, we go forth from our time of hearing and sharing in this place to live out this divine Word in our lives. We act differently as we encounter others along the way, joining in the work that God is already doing in our world to bring transformation, renewal, peace, hope, and love to reality. And we continue the proclamation of the Word begun here as we live in justice, peace, and reconciliation with all creation.

So as we hear God’s Word proclaimed here this week and every week, may the Holy Spirit send us out to live and proclaim it in our lives so that all the world might know the fullness of God’s glory in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Proclamation for Today

A Sermon About Sermons