“The Weaver-God, He Weaves”

Jesus, the Friend of Pharisees All of God’s People Say: “What the F@...

“The Weaver-God, He Weaves”

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Romans 10.9-15

Hi Friends,

My therapist (a Catholic) recently quipped, “I never knew ministry entailed so much travel and ecumenical projects.”

Well…

The second year and second cohort of the Lily Endowment-funded Iowa Preachers Project kicked off Monday night at Luther Memorial Church on the Des Moines campus of Grandview University. I want to add that I’m incredibly excited to add two friends to the leadership of this new cohort, Chenda Innis Lee and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Here is my sermon for the opening service— it was (more than) good to lead worship with Chenda again. I’m excited to get to know e-friends and spouses of former cohort members this go-around. And, a la Top Chef, I keep hoping Ken Sundet Jones will manufacture an appearance of the Season One cast.

Okay, here’s the sermon:

Jack Graham is the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, a prominent Southern Baptist congregation in Plano, Texas. He served two terms as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention at the beginning of the century. I was unaware of Graham until a friend forwarded me an exhortation that the pastor issued in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk— well before any details were known about his assailant.

Jack Graham had tweeted:

“To all the preachers out there: this Sunday is an opportunity to speak to our congregations regarding the many questions they have regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the extreme violence in our culture. This is an opportunity to bring a message of hope and to strengthen our resolve and voice in our communities. Run to this battle, and don’t shy away for goodness sake. Do not be silent.”

I mention Graham’s missive not to besmirch the dead nor to trouble his grieving wife and children. I definitely do not wish to entangle myself in the ongoing hagiography of Charlie Kirk’s career. I call attention to Jack Graham’s exhortation because I think his summons for public proclaimers of the gospel to lean into such a tense, tightrope political moment underscores what the apostle Paul calls the foolishness of preaching.

Preaching is foolish not merely because the word of the cross is a scandal.Preaching is foolish because there is no such thing as a sermon.Preaching is folly because there is never a single, discrete sermon that is delivered by a herald and heard by every listener.

No doubt, the word I would have heard Jack Graham hand over on Sunday at Prestonwood Baptist Church and the word you would have heard from him and the word my black friends might have heard from him would all have been different sermons. At the very least, they would not have been the same sermon. Preaching is foolish because there is no such thing as a sermon.

Two Sundays ago, a young transgender worshipper came up to me at the coffee pot in the fellowship hall, laid their hand on my shoulder and let out long exhale.

“Thank you for your sermon,” they said, “You encouraged me to forgive my family, who doesn’t understand me, and to lean into my call to ministry.”

“Your call to ministry?” I asked, “Did you just walk in here from some other church? My sermon was about suffering and sovereignty. The blind man and Romans 8. I didn’t preach about transgenderism or God’s call at all.”

They laughed like I was joking, “Well, that’s what I heard Jesus say to me.”

Don’t tell the Lily Endowment, but you know this to be true.

There is no such thing as a sermon.

The theologian Robert Jenson says the way that scripture exercises authority in the church is by the preacher struggling to say what the scripture says, struggling in such a way that the gathered can hear it as God’s word for them. But actually preaching is even more difficult than wrestling to say what the scripture says because, even without the Bible complicating the exercise, human communication is a fraught endeavor. What I intend to convey with my words and what you receive in my words are, at best, tangentially related— don’t believe me, just ask my wife. The sermon I deliver is not necessarily the sermon you hear. And the sermon you hear is certainly not the sermon everyone else hears. Often what a listener loves in a preached word is not anything I uttered. Even more common, the part of the proclamation that triggers a person— I seen this happen with Chenda— is not in the sermon at all.

Whenever a parishioner mentions a sermon of mine, I have trouble recalling it— exactly we’re remembering two different sermons.

There is no such thing as a sermon.

Every pulpit is like a playground where children play the telephone game. Every Sunday there are as many sermons venturing forth from the preacher’s lips as there are pairs of ears in the room. In fact, now that I’ve been seeing a therapist for over a year, I know there are even more sermons than pairs of ears because preacher and hearer alike bring our multiple selves— complete strangers, even— to the sermonic encounter.

This is just the way sermons work.

And you would be right to wonder if they work, you would be right to worry that this messy mode of exchange is indeed hopeless folly— a self-justifying delusion— if you limited your focus exclusively to these assigned verses from the Epistle to the Romans:

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says…For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”

Paul’s logic chain sounds straightforward. But more and more, I have come to the conviction that we read not the scriptures but Bible passages— pericopes—and that, by reading it in such piecemeal fashion, we do not actually read the scriptures, certainly not with the discerning attention they demand. This is why, I believe, the plain reading of a passage is almost always wrong.

For example:

A few weeks ago I was reading the Bible (just for fun). It’s a good book; you ought to check it out. I was reading the Book of Genesis, from beginning to end, like I would a novel— I’ve read The World According to Garp at least eight times. Now, I have been a workaday preacher for twenty-five years. I have preached on the Binding of Isaac at least half a dozen times. But because I only read the passage which narrates it, I never before noticed how, after we see Isaac on the altar, never again in Abraham’s life does Isaac speak to his father. Their final exchange is when Abraham is standing over his child with a knife in his hand. Isaac disappears from the remainder of Abraham’s story. Genesis reports that Abraham then leaves Moriah and returns to Beersheba. Meanwhile— in the very next scene of story— his wife Sarah dies in Hebron, in the land of Canaan.

Not in Beersheba!

And later, as Abraham dies, he orders his servant to find a wife for his son. Again, Abraham must summon his servant because Isaac never came home from Moriah. Isaac, we learn when he meets Rebecca, has been living in his dead mother’s tent. Abraham’s story ends with Isaac and Ishmael reunited at the grave of their dead father.

Ram in the thicket or not, this is not a happy story!

But I had never noticed it before because I had only been reading passages.

Likewise, if you abstract these verses in the Letter to the Romans, lifting them out of their larger context in chapters nine through eleven, you will hear Paul making a claim about preaching that is contrary to what he in fact concludes.

As you all know, Paul wrestles in these chapters of his epistle with the grace of Gentile inclusion into the covenant and the mystery of Israel’s disobedience. Paul is attempting to reckon with this dialectic in light of the God who does not— cannot— break his promises. In verses nine through fifteen of this passage, Paul appears to make matters quite plain. How are you saved? You confess, you believe, you're forgiven, and you're saved. But how can you confess what you do not know? How can you believe what you have not heard? Get thee to a preacher!

Faith comes from what is heard.

What is heard comes through the word of Christ.

And the Word clothes himself on the lips of a herald.

Now, if we stop at verse fifteen, it sounds like the apostle Paul is making you all indispensable workers on behalf of my eternal salvation (talk about Law!). But such a takeaway is as misleading as supposing that Isaac went camping with Abraham the weekend after they went to Moriah.

Notice Paul’s next question:

“But I ask, have they not heard? For their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Again I ask, did Israel not understand? Moses says, I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation. With a foolish nation, I will make you angry. Then Isaiah is bold to say, I have been found by those who did not seek me.”

The plain reading of the passage appears to suggest that saving faith comes from what is heard and what is heard comes from the word of Christ and the word of Christ is dependent on you. But if you read further, you realize that Paul’s entire argument (about confessing and believing, being sent and preaching the gospel) is that God does not work that way!

God sent preachers to Israel, Paul writes. Israel heard those preachers. And they did not believe. Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah announces, those who were not even seeking the LORD found him. This surprising shift builds to the first verse of chapter eleven, “I ask then, has God rejected his people?”

“By no means!”

It’s not surprising that we zero in on passages. Paul’s argument here in Romans is dense with citations and its logic is difficult to trace. Nonetheless the claim is bracingly straightforward. Paul is insisting that God calls Israel out of all the nations of the earth because he loves the Gentiles. Israel’s unfaithfulness is precisely what leads to the salvation of the Gentiles, and the inclusion of the Gentiles is counterintuitively what leads to the salvation of Israel.

In case you’re bad at arithmetic, that adds up to everybody.

Again—

Israel’s failure to hear and confess and believe the preachers sent to them is nevertheless how God brings about their salvation.

This is freaking good news for preachers! God is up to surpassingly more than your feeble attempts to proclaim a wild promise about a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly.

The Triune God is making himself findable to those not even seeking after him; simultaneously, he is busy not rejecting those who reject him.

In other words, preaching has permission to be foolish.

Every sermon can contain multitudes.

What I proclaim and what you hear can share but the slightest resemblance.

Because the stakes are actually quite low.

He’s already borne your sins in his body on the tree.

“He’s got the rest in hand!” Paul says.

God's salvation does not ride on your perfection in ministry. No doubt, our listeners would appreciate more compelling preaching, but the gospel truth is that we are all free to be ordinary preachers. As my friend Sarah Hinlicky Wilson told our cohort last spring, sermons have permission to be forgettable. If you are faithful and obedient, struggling to say what the scriptures say, then the Lord can take that work and bring goodness into the lives of your hearers. But if you step into the pulpit flat-footed and fail miserably, God is able to use that too— no, Paul’s point is that God will use that too. Your performance changes only the way you participate in his work. It does not change the fact that God is working all things together for the Good that is our destiny in him.

Just as much as prayer, preaching is your participation in Providence.

As Robert Jenson writes, when we pray, we do nothing less than ask God to listen to our advice about how the world should go.” So then, when we preach nothing less is happening than that God is working in our speaking to make the world the way it should go. When we preach, God is working in our speaking to rectify the world; that’s why we should take this foolish endeavor with utmost seriousness.

Preaching is your participation in Providence.

If you trust that claim, it will not necessarily make your sermons more compelling. But if you do not trust that claim, it will make your sermons, worse than boring. It will make them, of all things, the most to be pitied.

Preaching is not God joining your work; it’s you being swept into his.

As Ishmael says in Moby Dick, “The weaver-god, he weaves.”

He weaves even using you.

God does not participate in your sermon. Your sermon participates in his Providence. Everything God has ever done with Israel has been out of love for the Gentiles, Paul says, and everything he has done among the Gentiles has been out of love for Israel. In the same way, everything God is doing in your life is because he loves the people around you—and everything he is doing in their lives is because he loves you. Always, in everything, God is at work from every side, on every level, weaving all things together toward his purpose for the world.

Even if you’re lonely and have lost your preaching voice.

Even if your church is up your butt for not giving them enough meat

Even if you’re struggling to pastor as you need pastoring yourself for the loved ones you’ve lost, for the marriage you’re nursing, for the new call you hate or the call you quit or the call you still have not found.

Even if you can barely come up for air much less preach, juggling kids or wrangling bi-vocational ministry or learning how to co-pastor with a spouse.

Even if you fail, Christ Jesus is not going to fail.

Even if you fumble, the LORD is at work from every side to turn it to good.

Even if you’re just coasting in your calling, God is nevertheless at work in everything, always, from every side and on every level, to bring his mercy to all.

This is good news!

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” Paul promises.

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?”

Answer: The Living God.

“And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?”

Answer: Christ is risen indeed.

“And how are they supposed to hear without someone preaching?”

Answer: I don’t know; God has this in hand.

As some of you know, I’m typically a storyteller when I preach.

I work hard to hone an illustration so my precise point will not be missed.

But if what Paul promises is true, then you can take the sermon from here.