Preaching with the Season of Creation — September 2016
A Season of Creation: While We Are Waiting, Yielded and Still
16th Sunday After Pentecost, Year C | Sept. 4, 2016
by the Rev. Dr. Sam Persons Parkes
Introduction
Friends,
I’d like to our guest writer for the month of September, The Rev. Dr. Sam Persons Parkes. I first met Dr. Parkes a year ago at the Academy of Homiletics. I was immediately impressed by his energy, creativity, and commitment to helping other preachers become better at their craft. As we have come to know one another better and to collaborate on projects, Sam has become a critical conversation partner, colleague in ministry, and good friend. As a local church pastor and an academically-trained homiletician, Sam is uniquely able to teach and write both as a pastor and for pastors. Sam has recently joined the Preaching Consultation Team that is working with me to develop a national strategic plan for improving preaching in The United Methodist Church. I know you will enjoy Sam’s unique teaching style and creative insights into the lectionary passages, especially the Old Testament readings, for September as he presents his series, “Preaching with the Season of Creation 2016.” – Dawn Chesser
Sam Persons Parkes is the pastor of Cloverdale UMC in Dothan, Alabama.Sam earned his M.Div. from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University and the Th.D. in homiletics from the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology.He has been a contributor to theAbingdon Preaching Annualand to the recentAbingdon Theological Companion to the Lectionary.Sam is serving in his 25th year under episcopal appointment in the United Methodist Church and is a clergy member of the Alabama-West Florida annual conference.He likes to spend his time cooking good food and then attempting to run it off.He is the father of two exceptional children who keep his academic fancies grounded in the concrete world.
Series Introduction
Hello, beautiful partners in gospel proclamation!I am delighted to provide some commentary for preaching during the Season of Creation, the September 2016 readings from the Revised Common Lectionary.
A couple of notices about my approach before I launch into the series.I am an avid Wilsonian.I studied for some years with Paul Scott Wilson in the University of Toronto and have been deeply shaped by his thought and practice.So the format of my sharing will unfold along the lines of his methodology.The best summation of Paul’s homiletics can be found in The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching (Abingdon: 1999). Let me highlight a couple of key concepts here that might help my commentaries make more sense.
For Wilson, a sermon should be (1) about God and God’s action in the world; and (2) more about the grace of God than about the judgment of God, although both attributes are important;
- The God described in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is a God who is not only present to the Creation, but active within it. The sermon does its best work when it focuses more on God’s action for and through humanity to overturn powers and principalities that seek to unmake and destroy us and our world.
- In preaching, God wants us to focus more on what God is doing (grace) than on what we listeners should, must or ought to do (i.e. judgment, or, as Wilson calls it, trouble).Yes, we are broken; yes, we are deeply at fault. And yet Christ died for us while we were still sinners!And our Christ longs to heal us by the good news so that we, too, can get caught up into the wonderful work of God.We trust that the Holy Spirit will empower us to act in response to our God-at-work.
Also, a sermon in the Wilsonian mode will be tightly unified to make one clear claim about God’s work.Six elements of sermon unity work together to make that claim.His famed acronym for remembering them is The Tiny Dog Now Is Mine:
The [Text]
The sermon ought to treat ONE central biblical text.Will other texts also be reflected in the sermon? Sure, they will. But holding all FOUR lectionary texts together in one sermon is usually too unwieldy, particularly in ordinary time when the readings are not chosen to work together but in lectio continua fashion.
Tiny [Theme]
The sermon ought to reflect ONE theme sentence. That sentence should have God as the subject and an active verb.You will see me deduce this in my commentaries by answering the question, “What is God doing in or behind this text?” God might be doing more than one thing.Each sermon should feature one thing. Save the rest for three years from now!
Dog [Doctrine]
The sermon ought to revolve around ONE classical doctrine.Some may not find this particularly helpful, but getting clear about the claim you are making about God can keep you from wandering all over the theological map.
Now [Need]
The sermon ought to meet ONE felt need.I mean this not in the sense that you have something they really need to hear, but that the sermon ought to meet a need that some listener in your congregation would identify for himself or herself.Otherwise, why bother? Often that need can be discovered by considering the problem that is the catalyst for God’s action in the text.
Is [Image]
The sermon ought to feature ONE controlling image that is connected in more than a superficial way to the theme sentence.Sometimes in my own preaching I’ve gotten so detail oriented in describing a scene that people had a hard time figuring out what was important for them to focus on.The central image of the sermon is often suggested by the biblical text or by a featured story from our day.Sometimes a repeated phrase can function as the image.
Mine [Mission]
The sermon ought to seek out some embodied response from people.What would we want ourselves and others to do as a result of this sermon and God’s action in the theme sentence?
[CC1]
These attributes may seem a little random at first glance, but I look forward to showing you how these ideas can function like spark plugs on the engine block of the biblical text to elicit a tightly focused sermon that reveals God’s creative work in our world and heals the brokenness of the creation to participate in that work.So get out your timing lights and let’s see how the Spirit might “tune us up!”
As we begin our four-week journey together, I offer this prayer for us fromsuggest that we read UMH877, “An Order for Morning Prayer.” God is continually creating, friends, and I am so glad she has bound us together for this part of our homiletical journey!Please feel free to contact me at with any questions or comments you may have.
[CC2]
WEEK 1: God shapes us to create justice with God.
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Robert Browning’s verse drama, Pippa Passes, includes the following oft-quoted poem:
THE year 's at the spring,
And day 's at the morn;
Morning 's at seven;
The hill-side 's dew-pearl'd;
The lark 's on the wing;
The snail 's on the thorn;
God 's in His heaven—
All 's right with the world!
The main character, Pippa, sings this song; she is a font of virtue, and she passes through various scenes, touching the lives of the other characters.Charmingly innocent, isn’t it? However, its irony is revealed when the rest of Browning’s play is read as the context: plotlines develop as characters try to justify murder and assassination, cruel practical jokes; and as one contemporary reviewer put it, “a careless audacity in treating of licentiousness, which in our eyes is highly reprehensible,” i.e., it was pretty racy.
Trouble in the Text: Judah’s Perpetual Problem
Judah was the land of “everything is fine.” The Zion theology so prevalent in the worship life of Judah’s capital had apparently lulled Judah from a sense of an assurance of God’s presence to a sense of entitlement to God’s protection and to some complacency. Just do a search on Zion in the Psalms and you’ll see this theology at work: picture after picture of a God who vows to love and defend the city, its temple, and its king.For instance, sample the beginning of Psalm 48 (NRSV):
Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain,
beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.
Within its citadels God has shown himself a sure defense.
Then the kings assembled, they came on together.
As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in panic, they took to flight;
So, as the Babylonian threat begins to rise, it appears that the little nation soothed itself with this reassurance – “God is in God’s temple and all is right with the world.”
However, the prophet can see the awful context: that the people and the leadership of Judah are not being faithful to Yahweh and to their part of the covenant.Strangers are being oppressed; the weakest in the culture are being denied justice; offerings are being made to other gods.And yet the people still count on God to protect Zion!
Jeremiah went to stand in the door of the temple to preach (Ch. 7) and said, “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’ … [Don’t] come and stand before [God] in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe! —only to go on doing all these abominations’” (vv. 4, 10). Yahweh is being taken for granted by a complacent people. When this happens, creativity is stifled and people cannot flourish equally in the covenant that God has struck with Judah.As long as God is in the temple and all is right, humanity can keep on shaping life to fit itself; we can sit behind the steering wheel and make of life what WE what to make it. That is why the steering wheel needs to yield to the potter’s wheel.
You see, there is a conversation in the prophetic literature about potters.Isaiah of Jerusalem way back in the eighth century sees the same sort of arrogance problem in the Jerusalem of his day:
“You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?
Shall the thing made say of its maker,
‘He did not make me’; (29:16, NRSV)
Some centuries later, not much has improved. Judah’s Yahweh is little more than a talisman set to bless their actions, which they would undertake at any rate.So God sends Jeremiah down to the potter’s house to see God’s response to this state of affairs.Yes, Lord, to AN ARTISAN! Potters are surely interested in beauty, yes, but primarily in utility. A pot might be decorative and beautiful, but pots are thrown to SERVE A PURPOSE.Unlike some other forms of art, the potter has an intention, a design, and a desire for the use of the pot in hand.Does the potter have to give a little sometimes in her design in order to work with this specific lump? Why, sure! Nevertheless, she has intention. So when the pot in her hand goes to pot, the potter reworks the plan, adapts to the new design, accepts a new way of thinking, and nothing is lost in the economy of God.
Please note that there is no question in Jeremiah’s oracle as to who is doing the creating and shaping.For Judah, the question is no longer which is potter and which is clay. Clearly, Yahweh is firmly in charge. Then comes the punch line, “Can’t I do this with you, nation? I have an intention for you! I might decide to take you down with my judgment, but then you start working with me!So I respond and change my design and work with you in a new way. Or you might swear your love and allegiance to me, and then turn your back.Well…I am a potter and the wheel is spinning.And I am not happy. But there is still time yet.”
Grace in the Text: God Will Create
Hear the good news in two parts! First, God’s methods are not immutable!Oh, my, we could get into a big messy argument about the nature of God here.But let me parse it this way.God’s commitments, God’s passions, God’s intentions do NOT change!God is always and ever creating possibilities for the most human flourishing; God is always shaping something better for the least, last, and lost; God’s covenant with the poor, those on the edges of the world WE have made, and who are forgotten or invisible. God’s covenant with these is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.God also is unchanging in her opposition to all who would thwart life and liberation.The only time God changes her intention is when we, in our own liberated will, decide that we WILL NOT work with our liberating God OR that we WILL turn from our self-satisfied, complacent, privileged religion and let God make us into the people that SHE designs, that SHE desires!
That’s part two of the gospel here: the clay is not passive.The clay has a covenant, a relationship.The clay has the opportunity to work with God’s design, to be shaped into something useful, to yield to Another’s design and desire! To discover its divine purpose and its most fruitful utility. In the economy of God, nothing is lost! In God’s bid to create a reign of justice and peace, God is willing to adapt, to rework, to start over, but to use what God has – US!
When the whole world was beginning to wonder what God’s steadfast love might mean in light of the Jewish ambivalence about God’s Word in Jesus, Paul offers, “But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?” In other words, let God be God. You be clay.God has made a promise and has a purpose, and God is utterly dedicated to that end.The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are clear reflections of that commitment beyond every obstacle.God will be God.We can be us.
Trouble in our World: We Don’t Like to Yield
God has a shape in mind for us! God is attempting to mold us and make us after God’s will.But, wow, I don’t know about you, but I have a terrible time waiting, yielded and still.Instead, I tend to want to be the shapER and not the shapEE, the creatOR and not the creatED.So much literature on leadership has come into our ecclesiology over the past thirty years.It’s no less popular now.And some of it is really helpful stuff in church life.But if we are not careful, we can wind up relegating God (and the Scriptures that open the story of God’s purposes and character to us) to the status of lump.God, we say with all of our business acumen, we will dig our fingers into you, shaping you with our strategies and insights, our sermon series, and demographic data.God, we may think in our sanctified imaginations, you shaped us and breathed into us the breath of life; now let us take the lead.We know our world and what success looks like.
Others of us who tend toward the classically liberal points on the theological spectrum also have some trouble letting go and letting God shape us.I am often so cocksure that I know all the causes and candidates that God would love! And of course, all those that God would condemn.You know what? I might be right.But if I am not careful, I can wind up using God as a talisman to bless all of my contributions and volunteer hours about which I may or may not have spent a moment in prayer, in study, or in Christian conference.
Whatever that is in our hands that we have named God that we are shaping according to OUR purpose? #nope#notgod#hubris #willtherealGodpleasestandup
Grace in our World: Yielding to God’s Creative Work
So, preachers, how can we invite the beautiful and the broken to yield? To let God shape them, their lives.How can we invite them to become more willing to allow God to hold o’er their being absolute sway? Here are a couple of ideas:
- To play up the trouble aspects of this passage, there are 1,000 ways to reveal how inflexible we often are as a church.Ask people to move to a different place in the worship space than is their norm.Use music styles that don’t reflect the congregation’s typical fare.And then have some discussion about how our preferences in worship and beyond often shape what Christianity means for us more than does God’s purpose for our lives.
- If there are Wesley-style covenant groups in your church, then most likely there are folks in them that have had to come to grips with what it means to let go of their own compulsions to shape life and yield to God’s defter hands.Often these groups have prayed, with joy, the “Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition” (UMH 607):).[CC3]
- Can your preaching, then, offer a story or two of grace? Tell the stories of those who have yielded their lives to be shaped as God would do it.Yes, the heroes and heroines of the faith (Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, etc.) provide easy access to such narratives.But I find that, as inspiring as they are, their stories are often distancing to the average pew sitter.Can you find stories of folks who, while not perfect, stand a bit closer to us and to our lives? Our folks will find it much easier to connect with them.
Here are favorite quotations that work for me on this theme:
“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together/Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Albrecht Schönherr, Diettrich Bonhoeffer Works [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996], 36)