Christ Calls Proclaimers Not Explainers

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Next month, I am offering a talk on preaching for an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Fleming Rutledge’s ordination. HERE are the details if you’d like to join us. To prepare, I have revisited some of the talks I delivered for the priests of the Anglican Church of Canada three years ago.

Below is the transcript of my first talk on the given topic, Grace and Healing.

You can listen to the audio delivery here.

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Gracious and merciful Father, we pray for the one who speaks and for all of us here who speak. Sunday to Sunday for you know that we are imperfect and that our sins are many. In your Son's name we pray…

It was homecoming morning in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999. A month into the fall semester of my fourth year at the University of Virginia, I had planned to skip the football game and I was holed up at an empty carol back in the stacks of old Alderman Library. I had a Bible on my desk for a class I was taking on the Gospel of John. had a couple of LSAT prep books I'd already started to dig dog ear and underline. At the library carrel on the other side of the bookcase was a tall, skinny African American man wearing large headphones and an orange Navy tracksuit. He was busy highlighting a biochemistry textbook and taking notes on colored index cards. I started working on some sample problems from the prep book when suddenly there was a guy leaning against the end of the bookcase with his feet crossed nonchalantly and a crinkly plastic-covered book in his hands.

“What are you working on?”

“Me? I'm studying for the LSAT,” I said.

He had a beard, a tan face, and dark hair that stuck out of a black knit hat on his head. He was wearing jeans that were ripped at the knees and a brown Henley shirt.

“You've got a lot of lawyers in your family already, don't you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Wait, how did you…”

“Don't freak out, Jason," he said.

And he pulled out a different book, Anthropology, from the top shelf when he flipped through it.

“You like that other class a lot, though, don't you?” He said, pointing at the HarperCollins Study Bible.

“Yeah, yeah, I really do,” I said. “But I like the other classes, too. It's hard, you know? Knowing what God wants you to do with your life.”

“I just want you to enjoy your life,” he said.

I looked around for my roommates who surely must be punking me, I thought.

“Don't do anything just to satisfy someone else's expectations and don't go down any path just to measure up to what the world defines as success. That's what I freed you from,” he said.

Then he pointed at the Bible and he said, “if you'll have the most fun doing that, then that's what you should do.”

And he slid the book back in the empty space on the bookshelf. He held out his arm to fist bump me and he said, “relax, man. You're going to have a grand time. Preach it.”

“Hold up, I said. Trying to find my voice. I didn't catch your name.”

He'd already disappeared behind the old heavy fire door at the end of the long row of stacks. Now after a few moments, I turned to the pre-med student on the other end of the bookcase, speaking up so as to be heard over his headphones.

I said, “did you catch that guy's name?”

“Nobody been here boss but you and me.”

Not long after I started the ordination process in the United Methodist Church, I learned not to tell that story.

Church bureaucrats, ironically enough, were the quickest to think I was crazy. And then asked if I saw counseling.

I begin with that story for two reasons. the first place, what good am I as a Wesleyan if I'm not going to show a room full of Anglicans how to give their testimony?

But most importantly, I wanted to illustrate why I have no doubts whatsoever that Jesus Christ is not dead. And indeed our living Lord has a word for you.

Contrary to the false notions both in and out of the church, Jesus did not die in order for God to forgive you. Anyone who works with the texts for a living like you all, anyone who does that knows that Jesus Christ arrives on the scene announcing the pardon of God.

We killed him for it.

It may have taken God a couple of days, nevertheless the word went to work, working what it said, like Christ commanding the corpse of Lazarus. On the third day, the Lord declared, Jesus, come out!

See, the empty tomb is God's stamp of approval on Jesus' preaching the forgiveness of sins. Easter asserts that the absolution is absolute. This word is what God wants done. This word is what God wants said. Not that God is forgiving in general, but that God forgives you.

You are just for Jesus' sake.

As a pastor, I know how easy it can be to proclaim this word to others, but to forget to remember that it also redounds to you too.

As Luther insisted, no one can self apply the promise of grace. Even preachers need what Luther called a local forgiveness person. Therefore, before I speak any more about the gospel, allow me to do it to you.

In the name of Jesus Christ, I declare unto you, all of you, every last one of you, the entire forgiveness of your sins. You are forgiven for failing to like, much less love your parishioner. You are forgiven for foolishly believing the efficacy of God's word or the coming of the kingdom hinges on you. And maybe that's an American problem. You are forgiven for all the ways you failed at leading through the pandemic, the grievances you harbor towards the stingy givers and the resentments you nurse over lifelong churchgoers who appear to care more about the carpet color than Jesus Christ. For the time and attention you've allowed ministry to steal away your spouses and your children. For the average Sunday attendance and online worship numbers you've fudged.

All of it.

All of it on account of Jesus Christ you are forgiven, for the pardon of God is for you.

If you've not had the right hot takes in the pulpit, if you've had no idea how to make the church relevant to the contemporary world, if you've spent far too long majoring in the minors, if you're going through the motions of ministry but your faith feels like a short bed or a narrow blanket, too little to give you rest, take it from me. I am speaking for God.

You are forgiven.

Now that I've given you the goods, I can turn to the theme suggested to me by your bishop, grace and healing. And by the way, can I just confess, it is wonderful to be around a bishop at whose jokes I don't have to laugh at.

John Wesley hated bishops.

As a preacher, I don't know how to approach a subject apart from a particular scriptural text. Fortunately, we are here because we know that that is a strength and not a weakness. Mark begins his gospel not with Jesus, the party panic savior, or Jesus, the temple tantrum thrower. Mark bolts out of the gate, neither with a cute baby Jesus in his golden fleece diapers or a lawgiver greater than Moses.

There is no pregnant. ontological line in Mark like, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” In the beginning of Mark, Jesus is primarily a healer. Only because this is Jesus, and Jesus insists on being Jesus, the theme in Mark is not so much grace and healing, so much as it is grace versus healing.

Healing is what first distinguishes Jesus in the gospel.

Healing is what draws the multitudes to Jesus. Healing is what sets Jesus apart from other sages and spiritual teachers. Across the various healing encounters in Mark and the other gospels, there is no particular pattern for how Jesus heals. Jesus does not appear to follow a consistent formula or method. Sometimes he spits in the dirt. Other times he long distance calls.

Mark presents Jesus simply as the healer and great physician. Jesus doesn't practice a rite of healing as though he were a shaman, but rather, Mark depicts Jesus himself as medicine. Healing simply happens to those who come close to Jesus. Healing is no more exceptional for Jesus than his ability to kneel at his disciples' feet or to laugh at their folly.

There's a single pattern across the gospel's healing narratives.

It's not how Jesus heals the sick, but how we respond to Jesus healing the sick.

You know the story.

Jesus is preaching in the home of Peter's mother-in-law, presumably to prevent her from preaching at Peter. The living room is so packed they've brought up folding chairs from the basement. The crowd is blocking the television screens. Even the entrance is obstructed. It is such a fire marshal's nightmare that four men who have come bearing their paralyzed friend on a stretcher find no other choice but to tear the shingles off the roof, up the sheathing, and pound a hole through the insulation and drywall in order to lower their friend down to the heel.

And Jesus may be the great physician, but he's clearly not covered by insurance. This doctor dispenses odd medicine. Mark reports that Jesus looks at the faith of the four stretcher bears, and he does not do what they have gone to all this trouble for him to do. He does not heal their friend. Like the sisters of Lazarus, the friends don’t get the result they sought.

The friends of the man on the mat believe it is a matter of life and death. But Jesus knows that it's a matter of death and life. Jesus looks at the man on the mat and declares, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

And because the word works what it says, the man died there on the mat.

Died in his sins.

Still, I imagine that the patient of the great physician received this as an unsettling non sequitur. Perhaps it's because I worry more often than I would like to admit that those upon whom I call at the hospital would prefer a doctor instead of a preacher but whenever I read Mark's account of the man on the mat, I am first struck with the thought that forgiveness is not the medicine this man needs.

He needs medicine!

Healing.

Quite understandably, the four friends simply want their friend to get up and walk. Instead, Jesus cast this poor guy's sins into what Thomas Cramner called God's satchel of oblivion— I get a point for the Cramner quote. Evidently, what afflicts the friend of the four is not paralysis, but what the homily of salvation calls the great infirmity of ourselves. That's another point. Of course, how interesting is a prescription or even a cure really when you have the creator of heaven and earth standing before you and addressing you as son and surprising you with your sins.

That is blasphemy. Absolutely.

The Begrudgers respond to this odd remedy with what Mark euphemistically characterizes as questioning in their hearts. I mean, if they were a fraction as faithful as they pretended, they should have shouted. Only God has jurisdiction over the forgiveness of sins because every sin is fundamentally a rejection of our finitude. But like fireworks on the 4th of July or what comes after foreplay, the miracle is not really the main event in Mark. The miracle is more like the declaration. By doing what only God can do, forgiving sins, sins against God, Jesus claims he is more than a carpenter from Nazareth.

In a poem written shortly before his death, Seamus Heaney answers the great physician's question by fixing upon neither absolution nor ambulation, but upon the gift of the four friends themselves.

Heaney writes:

“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks, but the ones who have known him all along and carry him in. Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deep locked in their backs. The stretcher handles slippery with sweat and no let up until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing. Be mindful of them as they stand and wait for the burn of the paid out ropes to cool, their slight lightheadedness and incredulity to pass those who had known him all along.”

And the title of Haney's poem is “Miracle.”

And speaking as someone afflicted with incurable cancer, I'm not about to contradict the assertion that a community of friends is a gift the living God gives to those who suffer. Nevertheless, I suffer more than terminal cancer just as you suffer more than you think besets you. More to the point, suffering brought me to the realization that when the prayer book confesses that there is no health in us, it laments an ailment which stretches far beyond the medical.

There is a mighty act of God more miraculous than friends. As accessories to the act, surely you all know it is no easy thing at all to say in the name of Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven.

It is no easy promise to proffer, especially for priests and pastors.

For you all come to learn the particular ways that people do not deserve this promise.

Not long before the bishop sent me to my present appointment, I went to the hospital to visit a parishioner (My bishop sends me places).

I went to visit this parishioner. He had had a massive stroke and his prospects appeared grim. Only months before his stroke, he had been found out by his wife and daughters. They had discovered a statement for a credit card they didn't know he carried. For years, it turned out, he'd been keeping and hiding a whole other family. Both women were with him when I arrived at the hospital room.

His wife and his other whatever.

“Princeton Theological Seminary didn't prepare me for this,” I thought as I stepped up to his bedside, at least we can dispense with the chit chat, I thought. He had tears falling from the corners of his eyes and onto the salty patches where earlier tears had dried. He struggled for what felt like a lifetime to get the word out through the wreckage between his brain and his mouth.

“Forgiveness,” he mumbled.

The word was almost unrecognizable. He was asking for forgiveness. For the forgiveness. Check this out. This guy had been a leader in the church, chair of the worship committee. He sang in the men's choir, and he dressed up as St. Nicholas for the children's sermon every Christmas Eve. And here it turned out he was near the top of the naughty list. Lying, cheating, making a mockery of the Lord. He had broken by my count a good third of the Ten Commandments.

The second time he asked for it, all he could get out was the “FFF….”

But I nodded and I told them that yes. I would give them the ab-solution.

Before I did so, I looked over at his wife, half expecting her to say to me, “Like hell you will.”

As if reading my mind, she said to me, “Well, go on. Get on with it. His girls love him too much to end up anywhere he won't be. If all that business you preach about the gospel is not true here, it's not true anywhere.”

I nodded and I stepped closer to his bedside. It felt like walking miles.

Nevertheless, I gave him an assurance he longed to hear far more than the doctors all clear.

“In the name of Christ, I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sins,” I said, “You are just for Jesus' sake.”

“Thank you,” both women said to me when I finished and turned to leave.

“Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven or stand up and take your mat and walk?”

I wonder.

Is it a rhetorical question?

After all, it is not easy at all to say when you know the specific ways the flock err and stray and follow too much the devices and desires of their own hearts. That's in your prayer book too. Credit number three.

In a former congregation, I knew a church member named Roger, a sharp, successful small town lawyer whose alcoholism and philandering had destroyed his first two marriages. And by the time I became his pastor, it was destroying him. I went to visit him in the hospital as he died slowly of liver failure. With each visit, his skin and his eyes assumed a more yellowed hue. After my final visit,

When his breathing had gotten shallow and his words confused, I knew I should stop by his best friend's house on the way back to the parsonage. I knocked on the screen door on Billy's back porch. I could hear a baseball game playing on the TV in the family room. Baseball's a game they play in America.

Billy and his girlfriend had had me over for dinner many times. So I wasn't surprised when he answered the door wearing a polo shirt that probably fit him sometime in the Carter administration. And below the waist, even tighter bikini briefs.

“Billy, I've just come from seeing Roger,” I said, “It's time.”

“You sure?”

He squeezed his eyes to fight back the tears, and he laid a bare paw grip on my shoulder to steady himself.

“You never know for sure,” I said, “but I prayed and offered him absolution. He yeah, it's time. He's definitely dying.”

And suddenly he gathered himself and he ran to get pants that were draped over the kitchen island stool.

“If he's going to be dead soon, then we've got to go to his office quick,” he said.

“His office,” I asked, “Why in the world do we need to get to his office?”

“You'll see,” he said.

“We'll be back in a jiffy, honey,” he hollered at his girlfriend, Mary.

Once we got to Roger's law office, Billy produced a key from the pocket of his pants, which also appeared designed for a fraction of the man's size. Inside, Billy dragged a heavy leather chair across the office floor. He stood up on the chair, reaching towards the ceiling, and he removed a water-stained tile. He felt around the insides of the space until he found it and then he pulled down a cardboard banker's box and he handed it to me.

“Look, Billy, I don't know that we should be doing this.”

“Shut up and take the damn box,” he said, “before I drop it.”

I looked inside the box, and suddenly I both understood and yet still didn't understand what we were doing there.

Inside the box, along with half a dozen liquor bottles, were photographs of Roger with women. The kinds of Polaroids I can't describe in a monastery. None of the women in them, I noticed, were his present wife.

“Prostitutes mostly,” Billy said, “His wife thought him different, but Roger, God bless him, he never could stop being a rascal.”

And Billy started to squeeze his eyes again against the tears and then he grabbed hold of me and cried into my hair. I was still holding the box of dirty pictures and bottles of booze.

And after an uncomfortable amount of time, I said, “Billy, what's the plan here? What are we going to do with this?”

“We're going to get it out of here so his wife never discovers it. That's what we're going to do," he said, “She thinks he put all of this behind him. We should remember, he should be remembered as the man who was forgiven, not the man who kept carrying.”

I looked down at the box and its sordid contents.

“I don't know,” I said, with not a little sanctimony in my voice. “I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. I mean, look at these. This is wrong.”

And just like that, Billy wasn't crying anymore. He narrowed his eyes and he raised his head back, angry or disappointed, and he said to me, “Do you just talk about sin and grace, preacher, or do you actually believe it?”

“I… no of course, I believe it.”

“Well good,” he said, “Because it seems to me we've got ourselves a sinner we can show some grace to before he dies. I'm gonna take this and put it away once for all.

That wasn't the only evidence we removed from his office that night, like custodians in the far country cleaning up after the prodigal who's gone home.

I didn't have time to debate the nuances of what the right thing to do was here, but clearing away the evidence of the dying Rogers sins, I felt like I was learning grace in practice.

“That's a lot of stuff,” I said, looking inside Billy's trunk.

“We've all got a lot of stuff,” he replied.

“Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven or stand up and take your mat?”

Is Jesus joking?

We killed him for the former, not the latter. Even now, safely ensconced outside the old age of sin and death, the world is so determined to clutch on to the comfort of merit and demerit that Jesus has no other choice but to conscript preachers to proclaim it.

Doctors performed their first heart transplant the same year the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper's album. Every day modern medicine finds it easier to say, “Get up, take your mat, and walk.”

But “Your sins are forgiven?!”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

She yelled at me in the narthex just before I learned that her soon-to-be ex-husband had been sitting on the other side of the sanctuary.

That was five Sundays ago.

To be nurse practitioners for the Great Physician is a hard labor, exactly because in a meritocracy such as ours, the gospel often functions as law.

Such a culture as ours hears the announcement of unconditional unmerited grace as threat, an accusation, an unjust judgment.

“For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command, yet you have never given me even a young goat so I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours comes, who has devoured the property with prostitutes, you killed a fatted calf!?”

What else can account for what frequently feels like a conspiracy of silence in the church where the gospel of grace is concerned? It is as though we are so afraid of making grace cheap that we have forgotten the crazy good news that it is free.

You are just, for Jesus' sake, gratis.

There's nothing more you need to do or undo, and anything you add to it invalidates it.

To muddle the gospel with the law, mixing it into a kind of gloss bowl, which is the most popular message in the United Methodist Church in America— to muddle the two is to turn the medicine, the free medicine, into an expensive, slow-acting poison.

The apostle Paul— point blank— calls it a ministry of death.

And yet we find it so tempting.

As Gerhard Forde writes:

“We need to take stock of the fact that while radical Paulinism is in itself open to both the church and the world because it announces a Christ who is the end of the law, the end of all particularities and hegemonies, it is no doubt for this very reason always homeless in this age, always suspect, always under attack, always pressured to compromise and sell its birthright for a mess of worldly pottage.”

Karl Barth notes that sola fide is really just another way of saying solus Christus, which leaves nothing else of you. In a culture of elder brothers and early risers and on time clock punchers at the vineyard, it is hard work to do this hard healing work.

To bear witness to this hard word is not easy nor without risk, for it goes against everything the Old Adam considers best and good.

We are justified in Christ alone, through faith alone, by grace alone, apart from the works of the law.

But sinners can only know this life-altering news by virtue of your work.

It's odd.

The only labor necessary to the gospel of grace is yours; you are an essential worker.

Justification is grasped through faith and faith, scripture insists, comes by hearing. Which is to say, faith comes by means of a preacher.

Put another way, the Father's heart wants the Son and all who belong to Him. And we become Christ's own through faith, and faith comes by hearing the promise. God chooses God's own through proclamation.

You are the only ones who can lead people to freedom through the proclamation of the healing promise. The only solution for God's absolute judgment is absolution.

Proclamation is the prescription that gives medicine because the gospel is a word in which Christ gives himself.

Preaching is how God elects the ungodly.

Preaching is how God applies predestination to a sinner.

Election names neither a past decision by God nor an act of God outside of time.

It is present tense. It is event. It is apocalyptic. It happens now, in and through people like you.

“This is my body broken for you.”

“This is my blood shed for you.”

“In the name of Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven.”

Election happens in history. Otherwise, word and table are superfluous. See, the pulpit and altar are not places. They are doings. Gospel is a word that gives Christ. Therefore, preaching is not simply any word about God. It is a particular word from God.

Christ calls proclaimers, not explainers.

Explanations do not cure what ails us. The idea that God is loving or forgiving in general, that's no medicine at all. It does no one any good to hear that God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son. Rather, the sin-sick patient needs to hear it first person in the present tense, God so loves you.

Todd, he gave his only son for you.

In the name of Jesus Christ, I declare to you, Todd, you are forgiven. Get up, walk, unbound and free.

See, the gospel is not a word about salvation.

The gospel is a word that does salvation.

It is a word in which God does God to the patient.

The only remedy for our sickness unto death is to forgive it. To actually absolve it. To take the risk of doing it. Without this doing, preaching has failed.

“Give them Christ,” John Wesley told the preachers he peeled off of your church.

Give them Christ.

God did not send a book.

God sent preachers.

I've only met a few of you, but this is not how I would arrange matters. Nonetheless, it is the way God has chosen to choose.

And we live in a time when it seems that Pelagius is all but canonized. We all want to change the world and flatter ourselves that we are up for the challenge. Yet it is the hard work of faith to believe that in proclamation, word and table, God is changing things in the most radical way imaginable, by killing and making alive.

“Behold, if anyone is in Christ, a new creation.”

See, ours is more than a helping profession.

You are the Lord's hit men and midwives. Yours is the only effort necessary for sinners to be healed by grace. You are the Lord's essential workers.

Given the importance of your task, perhaps you need to rest in the same promise with which you toil.

So here are the good news:

You have died and your life is hid now with Christ and God. Everything about your labor begins after that life altering fact. The life altering fact that you have already died the only death that matters. And no matter how bleak the future appears, the odds are ever in your favor. Ministry is a posthumous vocation. And the one who called you, and the one who killed you, and the one who made you Easter new, he's in jar.

You, preachers, are not called to carry the burden of the world on your back.

You don't even have to carry your congregation on a stretcher to Jesus. You only have to bring Christ to those who are sick and paralyzed in ways they do not even perceive. You only have to bring Christ to his patients. And though Christ was once fat and heavy, laid down with all of our sins, he is not a burden to bear at all. He is, in fact, light as a feather. He weighs no more than a word. Son, your sins are forgiven.

After Roger died. I stopped by later in the week to check on Billy in search of a free meal.

The baseball game was turned on when I arrived, but the house was quiet and devoid of any dinner smells wafting from the kitchen. He answered the screen door in a different polo shirt, but the same black bikini briefs.

“Where's Mary,” I asked. And he shook his head and he looked ready to cry again.

“She left me,” he said.

“She left you. Why in the world would she leave you?”

“She saw one of the pictures of some woman, you know. It must have fallen out of the box in my car. She thought the pictures were mine.”

“But didn't you tell her it wasn't yours? Didn't you explain to her that the photo was Roger's?”

“She didn't give me the chance,” he said, “She was gone before I got home, left a long note and won't answer my calls. I guess grace comes at a cost.”

Here's my point.

God is like Billy.

Minus the bikini briefs.

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