Psalm 130 & 1 Corinthians 2:1-16
21st September 2014
In his letter to the
Christians in Corinth Paul wrote, the “message about the cross” is “the power
of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). In other words,
the cross is forever “preaching,” that is, proclaiming something. The cross has
a message, a story for us, for the world. Paul, summoned by the Holy Spirit to
serve that message, saw himself as a proclaimer, a preacher, a prophet. “My
speech and my proclamation,” Paul explained, “were not with plausible words of
wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith
might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor. 2: 4-5). “And
we speak of this things,” Paul said, these divine things, “in words not taught
by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to
those who are spiritual” (1 Cor. 2:13). And so Paul was called to speak a word.
As is true for all preachers, his words carried and contained another word, a
different word. Not the Bible, but the
Word, the Word heard within the words
of scripture, the Message of God that can’t be confined by any text. And so Paul became a preacher.
You might wonder, as I
did as boy, how a preacher comes up with something to say week after week after
week. How does a preacher come up with
all those words? It was an important question for me to answer.
Twenty-four years ago, on
23rd September, I was ordained by Newark Presbytery at the First
Presbyterian Church of North Arlington, New Jersey. On that Sunday evening in 1990 I answered the
ordination questions, several feet from the font where I was baptized in 1964,
and then knelt for the laying on of hands.
How I got to that moment, how I continue to live from that moment, has
something to do with the question, how does a preacher come up with all those
words? How does one become a preacher?
When people ask me—Why
did you become a minister? —I get a little anxious. Not because I’m reluctant
to share my story, but because, like most things in life and most things pertaining
to the Holy Spirit, it’s complicated. The last time I shared my story here at
CPC was back in October 1999, right after I arrived from New Jersey. So here’s
my call story. It’s not a reflection on how my theology has changed in the past
twenty-four years or what I’ve discovered about the Church or myself or of God,
and not what I sense God calling me toward these days. These I’ll leave for
another time. Here’s how I felt called
to preach.
I was born and raised in
the Presbyterian Church. My father, Edward,
although a Protestant (his father’s family were part the Reformed Church in
Hungary), rarely went to church. My
mother, Grace, on the other hand, taught Sunday school for more than forty
years at First Church, North Arlington. When
she died in 1992 we calculated that she taught thousands over the years. She was my teacher, twice. I had perfect
attendance and still have the awards to prove it. My maternal grandmother was
an active member of that church, as were her parents. They arrived in Kearny and North Arlington
from Dundee, Scotland, in the early 1900s. Kearny was a point of entry for
thousands of Scots to the United States. Many were Presbyterian.
I loved going to church
as a boy. I had a lot of friends. I
loved my teachers. I have wonderful memories. I can remember the smell of paste
and glue in the Sunday school rooms, the taste of juice and cookies we enjoyed
after class each week, the smell of grape juice and bread on the mornings we
celebrated the Lord’s Supper, it filled the whole sanctuary. Have you ever noticed that wonderful smell in
our sanctuary on morning when Communion is served? Every June we had our Children’s Day service
and I was often asked to read scripture or offer a prayer or a given a message.
There were several older women in the church, many with Scots accents, who used
to say to me after these services, “Kenny, you’re going to be a minister
someday! You’re going to be a minister!”
I smiled politely but said to myself, “Never. I’m going to be a history
teacher.”
One
Communion Sunday I remember being in worship and watching the minister—the Rev.
Dr. Henry C. Kreutzer, the minister who baptized me—standing behind the Communion
Table wearing his black Geneva robe and white preaching tabs and saying, “People
will come from south and north, east and west to sit at table in the Kingdom of
God” (Luke 13:29). I was so awed by what
he said! What’s so special about a loaf
and a cup that people would travel far and wide to receive it? What was taking
place there? Where is this Kingdom of God?
It
was around age eleven or twelve that I started playing with the idea—or, more
correctly, the idea started playing with me—that maybe I would become a
minister. But there was one major
problem: I could never figure out how a
minister came up with so much to say Sunday after Sunday. I didn’t like to write and I couldn’t imagine
myself preparing a sermon every week. The thought was agony. What should I do?
We
had marvelous youth leaders at my church.
They were field education students from Princeton Theological Seminary and they left
quite an impression on me. Our seminarians often brought us down to the
seminary and I fell in love with the place. (Actually, I wanted to go to
Princeton Seminary before I felt
called to the ministry. I know. I was an odd child.) One Saturday in Princeton I visited the University
Store, which used to be on University Place, and remember buying a brown, spiral-bound
notebook, which read “Princeton” on the cover.[1] It was 1979. If I’m going to be a minister, I thought, I
better figure out how to write a sermon.
This notebook would contain my first sermons. So, after school I went home, looked through
my Bible, chose a passage of scripture, took out my notebook, and began to
write a sermon. Now, of course, I didn’t
know how to write a sermon! So I set out to write a sermon a day! (This was just lunacy.) After several tries I gave up. It was impossible, I thought. Too difficult.
I had nothing to say. So I gave up the idea of being a minister.
Several
years later, when I arrived at Rutgers College, something started to stir
within me again. Freshmen year was a challenge.
I registered for several history classes and an Introduction to Old
Testament class—I went to Sunday School, knew my Bible, that would be my “gut
class,” my easy A. Well, that class just
about killed me. It devastated me. It shattered my world. It shook me to the core. I went into a deep crisis of faith. I almost became
an atheist. I didn’t realize that I was a literalist when it came to reading
the Bible. I learned in class that
scholars—back in the early nineteenth century—argued that Moses did not write
the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). Moses could not have written these books
because Deuteronomy contains an account of his death! (See Deuteronomy 34:1-8.) Not one, but four authors were involved in its
formation, written over centuries.[2] I thought, “If I can’t take this part of the
Bible at its word, what about the rest of the Bible? Can it be trusted? Maybe I’m just fooling myself about this
faith stuff.” I got an A in the class
and so in the spring I took Introduction to New Testament. That class challenged me too, but then I got
another A. I started to like my religion
classes.
Then I took what I
thought was a very radical class, “Religion and Politics,” taught by Dr. Hiroshi
Obayashi. I didn’t think religion had
anything to do with politics. I was
obviously very naïve. We read a lot of Karl
Marx (1818-1883). Obayashi changed my
life when one day he asked, “How about taking the theology class next semester?”
It was the highest-level course offered by the religion department. I was a sophomore. I was flattered, registered for the class,
but, to be honest, I didn’t even know what theology was! That class changed my life. I became enthralled by the way ideas can
change and transform our lives and I discovered the sheer joy that comes with
serious, honest, thoughtful discussions about God. I had to read a book written by the Swiss
Reformed minister Karl Barth (1886-1968), The
Word of God and the Word of Man (1928).
That book made my brain hurt—but it taught me how to think theologically.
It was around that time
that I started to read the sermons of the German theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965).
Tillich served in the trenches of the First World War and later become one of
the great theologians of the twentieth century.
His sermons were so existential and honest and real, intellectual, they
wrestled with difficult questions of life and death and meaning, ultimate
things, all of which spoke to me at a very deep level—depths I didn’t even know
were there.
And then, one evening,
as I was reading one of Tillich’s sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundations,”
based on a text from Jeremiah that speaks to the role of the
prophet/preacher—I’ll never forget that moment—I felt something give way in me. By the time I finished reading the sermon I
wanted to preach.
Why?
Because I felt deep within me, for the first time, that I had something to say,
that there was something that needed to be said, to be shared, and, greater
still, there was something that I had
to say. I was compelled. I didn’t have a choice. There was this burden, this weight of
responsibility within me. I had a desire to talk about God and about what God
has done and is doing through Christ.
This was not a desire to say something about me, what I’ve done or
experienced. It had something to do with
me, of course, it was my experience, but it had more to do with God. What I sensed emerging within me was a voice—a voice that was mine and yet not mine.
It was then that I realized I had something to say. And I was beginning to sense how a minister
came up with all those words week after week.
It
was around this time that the minister at my home church—the Rev. Daniel J.
Weitner—invited me to preach on Reformation Sunday. This both frightened and
excited me at the same time. I worked on
that first “real” sermon for weeks. I poured my heart into it and gave it the
title “To Understand.”[3]
I
eventually graduated from Rutgers with a double major in history and religion—from
Rutgers, an extremely liberal, secular school.
I’m grateful for the faith-challenges I experienced in such a
context. I left Rutgers with my mind and
my heart on fire, with a definite call to preach. Then the journey continued—after one semester
at Yale Divinity School I transferred to Princeton Seminary, as a seminarian I
served several churches in Connecticut and New Jersey, received a fellowship at
graduation from Princeton that took me to Scotland, ordained to serve St.
Leonard’s Parish Church in St. Andrews, as an assistant minister, studied at
the University of St. Andrews, came back to the United States in 1991, I served
seven years at the First Presbyterian “Hilltop” Church in Mendham, NJ, called
to Catonsville in 1999, and eventually finished my PhD in 2002. The journey continues.
Since
that time back at Rutgers my voice has become stronger, more confident to say
what I alone can’t say, yet must say.
This is why preaching might be called, to borrow from Barth, “the
impossible possibility.” The voice is mine and yet it’s not mine. The message
comes through me and picks up some of my “me-ness,” but it’s not mine. It doesn’t belong to me, yet it comes through
me. We have this ministry “in clay
jars,” as Paul said, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary
power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor. 4:7). As Tillich said of the prophet, “No true
prophet has ever prophesied voluntarily,” that is, preached voluntarily. “It has been forced upon him by a Divine
Voice to which he has not been able to close his ears.”[4] There are times when I feel called to preach
a sermon that I don’t necessarily want to preach, but must. Every pastor
struggles with this tension. Every pastor knows what’s going to ruffle the
feathers of a congregation, she knows someone is going to get ticked off about something;
he knows there will be resistance and pushback. That’s what the gospel
does. Preachers are not called to say
what the church wants to hear, but what we sense, by grace, the church needs to
hear. As the old saying goes, the role
of the preacher is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Over
the years I’ve learned two things.
First, when we’re dealing with God, never
say never.
And, second, I now know how a minister comes up with all those
words.
Truth
is: It’s a bottomless well. And the Spirit,
who searches the depths of God, searches us and shows us what needs to be
said. For, “the Spirit searches
everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 1:11). To be honest, there is so much that needs to
be said. There is no way to exhaust the
message of the Divine Voice. There isn’t enough time to say all that needs to
be said. This is true for all of us. The Spirit shows all of us what needs to be said.
You,
too, have a voice. You have something to
say. This morning during adult education
we heard from our youth that participated in the Youth Service Opportunities Project
in New York City in June. They closed their
presentation with a group photo standing in front of a large poster with these
words printed on it, words from the Quaker George Fox (1624-1691). It read:
LET YOUR LIVES SPEAK!
Knowing
that we have something to say is critically important because there are things
only you can say, good news that only you can share, good news the world is
literally dying to hear. There are
people out there waiting to hear a word from the Lord—and you have no right to
withhold it from them. There are people waiting
to hear what only you can tell them about God’s love and grace. They need to hear it and they need to see it,
in you and me, from within your experience of God’s love.
For
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” (2 Cor. 5:19) as Paul said. Surely
of the most sublime verses of scripture and one of my favorite texts.
God
comes in Christ with love, forgiveness and grace.
God
comes in Christ to transform our lives with a New Creation.
God
comes in Christ to reconcile and to heal our lives,
our
families,
our
relationships,
our
communities.
God
comes in Christ to liberate us and set us free.
That, my friends, is the
good news.
That, my friends—that’ll
preach.
[1] Princeton TheologicalSeminary and Princeton University are separate institutions, although
historically related. Princeton University, originally called The College of
New Jersey, was charted in 1746 by Presbyterians to educate ministers, but
later expanded its mission beyond training clergy. Princeton Seminary was founded in 1812 by
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to educate and train ministers
to serve the expanding western frontier of the new nation. Today, there is a
strong bond between the two institutions. The Seminary commencement services
are held at the University Chapel.
[2] The four "authors" or traditions are known as J
(Yahwist), E (Elohist), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomist).
[3] The sermon was heavily
influenced by my reading of Barth’s The
Word of God and the Word of Man (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978).
[4] From Paul Tillich’s
sermon “The Shaking of the Foundations” in The
Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1948),
8.
.jpg)