Transcript

I'm not going to read the gospel lesson. I'm going to read the epistle lesson. The epistle for today, or rather for the first Sunday of the Lenten season, is Romans 10. It actually begins in verse 8. It goes through verse 13. I will read, beginning at verse 5, the electionary people slipped up. If a student were to come to me and say, Prof, I'm going to spend three months this summer sharpening my exegetical skills. I mean, fat chance of this, but. And I'd like for you to select a passage of scripture on which I could work this summer. I would like for it to be, he would say, she would say, thick enough, dense enough, complex enough to occupy me for the three months. I would like for it to give opportunity for the full range of biblical methods, be a challenge to all the faculties of scholarship. But I wouldn't want it to be esoteric or something at the margin of our faith, but at the center, theologically, be important. But I don't want this exercise to be purely academic. I would like for it to bear fruit in preaching and teaching in the church. As I got up off the floor, I say to the student, Romans 10, 5 through 13, Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, the person who does these things will live by them. But the righteousness that comes from faith says, do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven, that is, to bring Christ down, or who will descend into the abyss, that is, to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart. That is the word of faith which we preach. Because if you confess with your lips Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. What an extraordinary passage. It's a good example of how the scripture is made. Paul focuses on Moses. He uses Leviticus 18, he uses Deuteronomy 30. But the striking thing about it is Moses is presented in the book of Exodus as giving the law to Israel at Sinai. But there is in the Old Testament a book called Deuteronomy which is a second giving, a second telling, a retelling of the law. But in Deuteronomy Moses says, Moses said, Moses said, Moses said, even though the book comes from the eighth, seventh century, long after Moses is dead, after there's a monarchy, there are kings, there are problems, there are prophets, there's great difficulty, political and religious. What does Moses say to us today? Moses said that to them then. What does Moses say to us today? And so the marvelous book of Deuteronomy is a sermon or a series of sermons from Moses. What would Moses say to us in this new situation? Isn't that marvelous? That's the way scripture is built. And then that is translated into Greek for other people, we call it the Septuagint. And then Paul takes it from there and gives it a Christian interpretation. For instance, Moses at the end of his sermon says to the people of Israel, now don't complain and say this word is too difficult. Don't say who's going to go up in heaven and bring it down. Who's going to say who's going to cross the sea and bring it to us? The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. The word of faith Paul says. Now that's the way scripture is built. Exodus, Deuteronomy, Septuagint, Paul, and then we do our preaching to continue that living witness to the word. It is layered in that way. What is scripture? It's the interpretation of scripture. Not only that, but this would be for this student, this brilliant student who asked the question. This would be also an exercise on how do you read scripture? Because everybody knows just a flat it is written is not enough. There's scripture and then there's scripture and then there's scripture that interpret scripture and all of that. Notice what Paul says. Moses writes concerning the righteousness according to the law, but the righteousness according to faith says, do you see the difference in the verbs? Moses writes fixed permanent on the stone in the book. There it is. But the righteousness according to faith says it's a word released available accessible in the air for everyone to hear. For after all, this is what Paul is wanting to talk about, that the same God is rich to all who call upon God. There is no distinction anywhere in the world. No distinction male, female, race, color, anything else. The same word is available to everyone and how can it be more available than for it to come off the page and into the air and be a word that's preached. Christ is available through the preaching of the word. That's what he's talking about. But I made this up about the student. I keep wishing. I've only been teaching 28 years. It's going to happen. It'll happen. I do have students ask questions about the summer activity. I had one the other day. He said, I think I may get a chance to preach my home church this summer prof. Good. He said, you got any ideas? Well, I do get questions. I had one the other day. My friends in our going this summer, we're going white water rafting. You suppose we could get any credit? We could write a paper when we get back. I do get questions, but not this question. And even though I haven't gotten the question, I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the marvelous achievement of Paul in this passage. He takes those words of Moses in Deuteronomy 30. The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart and locks in on that word that is available to everybody. Now, what was important in the early church, and I still think it's important, is that if the word is released in the air for everybody anywhere to hear it, if you want it to be accessible, available, portable, anywhere, anytime, anybody, what you want to do is frame it in a very clear, concise way so that you can just take it with you. Distill it. Boil off all the water and just have a stain in the bottom of the cup and then preach that stain. That's the whole thing. Give it to me in a nutshell. What's the whole thing? Paul said, here's the whole thing. Here is the whole thing. And he takes Moses' words, mouth and heart, and frames a little four-line poem, a little quatrain, a little what we call in our classes, chiasmus. It's a A, B, B, A. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, believe in your heart, God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved, for with the heart one believes and is justified with the mouth one confesses, and so is saved. Mouth, heart, heart, mouth. We can remember that. You can take it. You can wake up in the middle of the night. You can say it. You can go anywhere in the world. You can say it. That's the whole thing right there. Easy to remember, highly portable, distill, succinct, and on target. That's the boiled down truth of the whole thing. Now, in the early church, that kind of exercise was extremely important. It's not original with the church. People have done that, time and memorial, in oral cultures where people didn't have books, couldn't look up things, no libraries. Things were transmitted in memorable ways. We call them maxims, proverbs, sayings. Every culture has them. Bad marriages can beget good children. The one who can't dance thinks the band can't play. When smashing idols, save the pedestals. They'll be used again. We just have those sayings, marvelous sayings. If you are bitter in your heart, sugar on your lips won't help. The world is full of those. Just distill in a crisp way. What is the sum of the matter? Now, James does it. James is the best example we have of early Christian wisdom, and just read the book of James time and time and time again. Be doers of the word and not hear his only. Faith without works is dead. Resist the devil. He'll run from you. Draw near to God. God will draw near to you. Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights with whom there's no variation nor shadow due to change. Crisp, crisp, clear. Any questions? That's it. It's a marvelous exercise. We find them in the pastoral letters. We call faithful sayings. Faithful sayings. Faithful is the saying. The whole thing distilled. Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptance. Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I'm the chief. That's the heart of the matter. Jesus, according to the gospels, was a master of the one-liner. About 110, 115 one-liners from Jesus. Here it is. Zing. You strain gnats and swallow camels. That's fairly clear. You remember that all your life. It's easier for a camel to go through the albinatal than for a rich man to get into heaven. Any questions? No, we got that one. Isn't that a marvelous thing to just package it that way? And you can remember it. You don't even have to put it on a piece of paper. I know something to say. That's it. Don't cast your pearls before swine. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Position. Heal yourself. If they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it's dry? It's a marvelous exercise. Paul did it. The different thing about Paul's doing it is that he wanted to make sure in every one of these little poetic proverbial sayings, there was the gospel. It wasn't just advice. It was the gospel. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord. Believe in your heart. Got raised in from the dead, you'll be saved. For with the heart one believes for righteousness, with the mouth confession is made to salvation. Little four line poem. That's the whole of the matter. He loved to do it. The one who knew no sin became sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He loved to do it. Remember the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was rich, became poor, that by his poverty, we might be rich. The whole thing right there. And if you're in prison, as he often was, you had the word. If you're out in a frontier situation, you had the word. You had something on the lips in the mouth, you could say and generate and sustain the faith that saved. In order to be interested in this exercise, however, one has to be convinced of the importance of words. And I think that's our rub. They're such a glut of words. They're just so many words. Words, words, words. I remember when I first started teaching preaching in the late sixties, one of the students said to me, I don't think it was original, but the student said, listening to sermons is like being stoned with popcorn. I mean, you know, there's nothing, no damage done, nothing happens. Thinking you're going to change the world by words is like thinking that you're going to break down a stone wall by throwing a light bulb against it. What is a word anyway? It's vibrations across the ear. I can say to you, peace, quiver, God. Even Jesus said, the word, the word of God is like a seed. It falls on the path, birds come, get it? How vulnerable, how fragile, how subject to everything. And yet we're to give that much attention to these words. Because Jesus said, you will be forgiven of every sin, every sin. You will be forgiven of every sin, except one. If you speak against the Holy Spirit, do you mean to tell me that the unpardonable sin, the sin that lies beyond the reach of God's grace is committed with the lips? Yeah. Yeah. For Jesus said in that same chapter, chapter 12 of Matthew, for by your words you'll be justified and by your words you'll be condemned and you will be held accountable for every lazy, unemployed, empty, vain word you speak. Yeah. And I become aware of how important the words are. Every once in a while it comes back. I remember reading years ago a book about that marvelous Native American chief of the Nez Perce, Joseph, Chief Joseph. Around the turn of the century, when all the generation of Chief Joseph passing away, a reporter from the East went out to the Northwest among the Nez Perce and located some chiefs who had lived and worked and fought with and had loved Chief Joseph. And the reporter from the newspaper went in and sat down in this little simple dwelling and said, well, Chief, I understand you knew Joseph. Yes. Well, tell me, tell me something about Joseph. And the chief said, perhaps if you come next week, well, I come from the East, I can, if you come next week, perhaps. So the next week, the reporter is there and in comes the chief, dressed in his chief regalia with headdress and with the markings with the bracelets and the necklaces and stood. And the reporter sitting there saying, why are you dressed like that? And the chief said, you asked me to say words about Joseph? Once in a while, you get a sense of it. I remember when my mother died, she had been invalid in my sister's home six years. And my sister had that strange, ambiguous, painful, beautiful experience of taking care of her mother, who was now her child. And my mother died. And it was extremely, extremely hard on my sister. And I was in the home and trying to talk with her. And she was in the kitchen trying to do the dishes. And she didn't want to do the dishes, but everybody brings in all that food, you know, with a little tape on the bottom of the bowl says, bring me my bowl back and all of that. And she's trying to take care of the food nobody wants and the dishes that she has to return. And she's standing at the sink and she's crying and she sits down. And I said to her, a little line from Emily Dickinson, this is a time for sweeping up the heart and putting love away. And she said, yeah, that's it. And she went to the sink and did the dishes. What happened? That's it. Have you had the experience of just having words just pile up around you and then somebody says the right word? That's it. It's okay. Fat Tuesday is over. The time of abundance is over. And now we're into the lean and chastened days of Lent. I would like for you to imagine that the days of many words much speaking over, not a lot of words, now lean and chastened vocabulary. In fact, I remember in Genesis 11 before the time of the Tower of Babel and there were many words in confusion of languages and everybody was just talking all the time. The writer says in those days on the earth, there were few words, few words. What a time to live. There were just few words. Just imagine that among those few words, you got one sentence. This is your sentence. You get one sentence. You get one line. This is Lent. I would like to ask you to reduce all your words, all your words, piles of words, mountains of words to one saying, what would it be? You're a preacher. You're going to be a preacher in some sense of that word. And you're told you have one sentence. What would it be? I remember when the book, oh, this is a long time ago, the book of a song of Bernadette came out. It's about a Catholic girl who claimed to have had this miraculous experience. And the book, the song of Bernadette was written by a Jew, Franz Werfel. And people were saying, who's going to believe that miracle story of that peasant girl anyway, especially if it's written by a Jew? And so he prefaced his book with this. For the one willing to believe, final proof isn't necessary. For the one unwilling to believe final proof is never enough. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Just wouldn't language really be something if you just had one sentence? Just one sentence. Maybe even just one word. When I was at Yale as a fellow some years ago, we were living down in Guilford on the water at St. Jim's Head. And I would go into Yale each day. And during the night, at this particular time, there came a heavy, heavy snow, very deep snow. But I had to go, I had appointments with some faculty members. And I made my way out of the snow and into my transportation. And during the morning, then Nettie got out with the shovel and began to work on the snow to clear the driveway. She just about had it all cleared when the snow plow came down the road. And with its big blade, it scraped up four or five feet of snow onto our driveway. And she stood there and leaned on the shovel and said one word. I had never heard her say this word. We had at that time been married 25 years. And she's a woman of beatitudes and good things. And she looked at that plow going down the road. And she looked at the pile of snow and she said, and she's been forgiven for this. She said, damn. Snow melted for three miles all around. 911 went berserk. Sirens were going off. Church bells were ringing. It was a very unusual thing. Why? Because if you never say a word, then when you say it, some of you people use four letter words all the time. That's why they don't mean anything. I mean, reduce it to just its lint. You're going to have one sentence. Karl Barth, my what sentence is, shelves and shelves and shelves. Church dDgmatics. Some of you have intended to read some of that. Book and book. And when he was on tour, somebody said, Professor Barth, would you would you reduce it to a sentence for us? He said, Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so. And they came to Jesus and they said, Jesus, we have so many rules. We have over 1500 just on Sabbath keeping. Could you just ball it down to just one, the main one? And he said, yeah. You should love the Lord. You're gone with all your mind, your heart, your soul, your strength, but there's a second close and your neighbor is yourself. It's like that. You got one sentence for lint. One sentence. What's it going to be? I know what some of you say. For God so loved the world. That'll be your sentence. Some of you, if I know you're right, will say my sentence is this. May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep sentinel watch at the door of your heart. That's a good one. I know one person in this room will say this, my sentence is this. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. There's a couple here have already decided on theirs and they didn't even know what this was about. But their circumstance, their family circumstance has made them say, our lint and sentence is this. Nothing is impossible with God. Do you have your sentence? You don't have to have it now. This is important. But get one today and pass it along. And when you say it to somebody, let it be clear of all the words in the world. This is my sentence. Paul has offered you one. That's a good one. I have not, however, decided to take Paul's. I've decided on my lint and sentence. But as some of you might guess, it was given to me by Luke. This is my lint and sentence. God is kind to the ungrateful and to the selfish.