“How You Know When Your Work is Done” January 22, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10 & Mark 1:14-20 Stephens City UMC

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I. Bishop Will Willimon of Alabama is definitely into statistics and one interesting statistic he’s come up with is that approximately 50 million Americans will attend Christian worship services on Sunday.

A. That’s actually more people than will go to the movies over the weekend.

1. That surprised me given that the movie theater parking lot is always full and most church parking lots aren’t but I guess we have more church parking lots than theater parking lots.

B. Unlike me whose surprise is the number of automobiles in a church parking lot, Willimon’s surprise is that people come out in such numbers to hear a sermon.

1. There are other religions in the world that practice their faith by sitting quietly beside a stream or in front of a mountain and they meditate.

2. Other religions are really into ritual, some sort of act of individual piety that brings the worshipper closer to God.

3. But on Sunday morning Christians hope to draw nearer to God by listening to a speech.

C. Now a sermon is a speech and much more.

1. Today’s Gospel lesson clues us into the “much more” part.

2. Thanks to Mark, the Evangelist, we get our first real view of Jesus at work.

3. The way Mark tells it Jesus has been baptized, recognized by the Holy Spirit, affirmed by the Father and what does he do first thing?

4. He preaches.

5. Again, according to Mark Jesus is primarily a preacher of the Good News.

6. Jesus enters the world and what does he enter with?

7. He enters with words, good words, powerful words, life giving words.

8. He’s got stuff to say and he says it.

II. Now, since I am a preacher myself there’s something I noticed about all this and that is that Jesus’ sermons cause conflict.

A. Generally preachers don’t get to stay very long as the pastor of a congregation if their sermons upset people.

1. Experience teaches most of us preachers to be aware and concerned about this, but Jesus doesn’t appear to be the least bit concerned.

2. He just seems to go for it.

3. A college student figured this out when he went to a Bible study on Luke 4 which contains Jesus’ sermon in his hometown of Nazareth.

4. According to Luke things were going well at first as Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, but then it all went downhill.

5. He started to stir the pot about some big time changes like the release of the captives which is about overturning those in power and how he was the one to fulfill this complete restructuring of society when the congregation decided that they didn’t like his preaching and that their desired response was to kill the preacher.

6. The student listened to all this and held up his hand.

7. “Did you say this was Jesus’ first sermon? One might have thought that he would at least have waited until his second or third sermon to say things to so upset the congregation.”

B. I can remember Bishop Willimon when I took a class in advanced preaching under him at Duke while he was still on faculty prior to his election to the episcopacy describing how when he was the pastor of a church he had read a challenging text from the Bible and he had looked out at his people.

1. He could see that folks were tensing up and squirming in their seats.

2. The Bible verses made them uncomfortable as something was being demanded of them.

3. But that’s where the benefit of having a seminary trained pastor comes in because we can stand up and say “Settle down. Relax. Give me a few minutes and I’ll ease your mind. I can make this understandable for you so you won’t have to get worked up and you can still sleep well at night.”

4. Then away I go and if I can throw in a joke or two that lightens things up you’ll likely leave feeling happy and I’ll leave feeling that I did my job well because it is in my job description to comfort you.

5. Jesus didn’t always do that in his sermons.

C. Now there’s another conflict producing matter in Jesus’ preaching and that is that he gets political.

1. Unlike most of the television preachers of today Jesus doesn’t go on and on about personal happiness and your individual peace and security which of course are matters I like to preach about.

2. Instead of what I do Jesus came preaching about a new kingdom, a change in the governments of the world, a radical shift in power.

3. Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God had come.

4. Not that it was coming but that it had come.

5. One of his phrases was “The kingdom of God has drawn near.”

6. I doubt that you hear it in the same way people did 2,000 years ago.

7. You’ve heard that phrase so many times that it is second nature to you, but when Jesus first spoke it the effect would have been like me saying to you “Listen up everybody! Don’t think of yourself as a citizen of the United States. Don’t act like the U.S. Constitution is binding on you. There’s a new government and a new ruler, so let me tell you about God and His Kingdom. Listen up!”

8. Jesus had his revolutionary side.

D. Jesus wasn’t just conveying some information.

1. Rather, he was letting people know what he expected of them and that was a turning around of their lives, he wanted a radical response.

2. He wasn’t trying to get people to sign up for the Kingdom.

3. His wasn’t an enlistment campaign.

4. His offer wasn’t “Sign up for God’s Kingdom and I’ll give you a new car or a weekend at the beach.”

5. “Oh, please do this for me and I’ll do something nice for you.”

6. Nor was Jesus satisfied with just communicating some information.

7. He didn’t ask if people agreed with him.

8. His speech wasn’t like a lecture where he wondered if you were in concurrence with him and he’d be satisfied after the lecture with you pondering what he had shared.

9. Instead, he wanted people to decide that they needed to change and to live differently and to make the world different.

E. So that’s the test of us preachers because of Jesus.

1. The test of any preacher is not having people say to you at the door, “Preacher I have to tell that that was a beautiful sermon you just preached.”

2. Rather, like Will Willimon tried to teach us in seminary, we preachers have really passed the test when people come out the door and say “Preacher, I can’t wait to get out of here and put this into practice. I’m not only going to take these good words to heart, but also put them into my hands, my feet and live as if the Kingdom of God had drawn near.”

F. The reason that means that your sermon has passed the test is that the good news is not only spoken and announced, the fact is that it has to be enacted.

1. Good news is not only words; it is action; it is something that is done.

2. Willimon notes that it is grammatically awkward to say it, but we are meant to go, do good news.

3. And when you do good news you are preaching a powerful sermon, more powerful than anything I’ve ever preached.

G. And how will you know when you have completed doing good news.

1. Well, it’s like the story about the person who visited the studio of the famous Modern English sculpture Henry Moore and looked at a piece on which Moore was working.

2. The person asked Moore “Is it finished?”

3. Moore replied, “None of our work is finished until it is seen and responded to.”

4. When is your work finished as a disciple of Jesus Christ?

5. Your work is finished when all the world has seen and responded and not until then.