One reason the modern world ignores our preaching is because it rarely hears anything from us it cannot hear from Dear Abby or Leo Buscaglia.
— William Willimon
A Christian fraternity and sorority group wanted me to talk on being a Christian on Duke’s campus.
“For starters,” I said, “I expect that by this weekend some of you will be in bed with somebody you’re not married to, maybe with somebody in this group. What could I say to you tonight to give you the resources to refuse to do that?”
They got mad. Some of them said, “Wait. We’re a Christian group. How dare you say something like that!”
“You look normal to me,” I replied, “and I know the statistics, that few college students remain virgins any longer. I’m not doing this to attack you; I’m a preacher, and I’m supposed to be giving you what you need to live a Christian life.”
After the group calmed down, one student said, “But why do preachers always act like sex is the biggest sin in the world?”
“That’s a good question,” I said. “Sounds like you know your Bible, because sex isn’t the biggest problem according to the Bible. Still, we assume that if we can just get you to say no to this, a relatively little thing, there’s no telling where we could go from here.”
We live and minister in a culture that scoffs, gets riled, or worse, patronizes with polite interest the truths we preach. An important role of today’s pastor is preaching truth to a disinclined world, to unbelievers who don’t take us seriously, to nominal Christians who don’t want to “overdo religion.” How do we convince such people that there is something better, deeper, more significant they can give their lives to?
It’s in the Fine Print
Let me begin with a caution: let’s not start feeling sorry for ourselves, as if our current, increasingly pagan situation is all that new.
It would be fun, I think, to ask the writer of Acts, “What do you think about the modern disinterest in the gospel?”
Luke probably would say, “Has anybody physically beat you for preaching the gospel? That’s the response we got.”
Luke, of course, has amazing confidence in the power of the Word, despite the hardships; his story is one of the Word leaping over boundaries. Some, in fact, have accused Luke of homiletical triumphalism: “Preaching makes things happen! Look at Peter — he preached, and a couple thousand people showed up for baptism.”
But triumphalism? Stephen preaches a few verses later, and they beat the stuffing out of him. Christian communicators can hope for baptisms, but we have to recognize the “beatings” that also may come our way. Our modern dilemma is not new: preachers throughout Christian History have struggled with delivering the Good News to an indifferent and sometimes hostile world. It’s always been listed in the fine print of the Christian preacher’s job description.
It’s been a long time, though, since I’ve had the tar beaten out of me for the gospel (or since I’ve had two thousand seek baptism!). More typically I’ve gotten the Gentile response in Acts: scoffing or patronizing disinterest. It’s like Agrippa or Felix, who say things like, “My, we haven’t heard anything this interesting in a long time. We ought to get together and talk about this again. Of course, everything is relative, and we don’t believe one way or the other …”
I think Luke might say to us, “What you’re reading as modern disinterest is just the good old pagan response to the gospel. Resistance is nothing new.”
The response we get, however, isn’t the issue. The issue is to bear apostolic witness, regardless of how hard it is.
My friend Stanley Hauerwas and I were speaking at a gathering of Methodist ministers. During the following question-and-answer time, one of them stood up and said, “I preached on racial justice in my church, and things went from bad to worse. My children were mocked at school. And the congregation called the bishop and complained about my sermons. Then my wife was fired from her job. As a result we had to move; I was assigned to a church in another city.”
My heart went out to this poor brother. But Hauerwas’s heart didn’t. “God is a nasty employer,” said Hauerwas, with a shrug of his shoulders. “He’s a big God, not a fake. And that’s what it’s like to work for a real God. Does anybody else have anything to say?” No one whined after that.
When we signed on to work for God, we signed on for the baptisms as well as the beatings. We should expect nothing less than the reaction the apostles got: opposition or just plain befuddlement.
From the Bottom Up
Let’s admit it: one reason the modern world ignores our preaching is because it rarely hears anything from us it cannot hear from Dear Abby or Leo Buscaglia. I’ve met people who’ve given up on us because we’re so bland. I rarely hear that people leave our churches because we’re too involved in social activism, too liberal, or too conservative. I do, though, hear a lot of people confess, “I’m bored. I never hear anything interesting. The sermon is so drearily predictable.”
Many are indifferent to our message because we’ve often softened it, tried to make it palatable to modern ears. People don’t want that; instead, living as they do in a relativistic, lost culture, they desperately yearn for a moral compass.
One day I was in a sociology class to talk on marriage. Divorce came up, and I was saying, “Well, here are the words of Jesus, and there’s been a debate within the church over their interpretation.” I was trying to leave room for the many nuances.
Suddenly a student broke in and said, “This is just the kind of mealy-mouthed crap the clergy is saying these days: ‘Divorce is not right, but on the other hand it may be okay.'”
Other students pitched in, “Yeah, yeah. You tell him!”
After class I pulled the student aside and asked about his response. I was surprised when he said, “Well, my old man left us for his secretary when I was 16.” We spent the next two hours talking about that.
The cultural flotsam of the sixties looks different when you’re looking at it from the bottom up. Divorce isn’t seen as “an exciting new option for personal freedom” but as abandonment by one of the parents.
For many people, the teachings of the Bible are radically novel ideas. I was talking to a young woman on Duke’s campus who’d been working with Habitat for Humanity in Americus, Georgia. She mentioned her astonishment at their discipline: “One thing about that group — you can’t have sex down there with other people.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, they kick people out for that. They said they’ve found that sex among group members destroys community. They have too many important things that need to be done for people to be messing up everything by sleeping together.”
It was a new insight for her. She was intrigued that people thought something more important than sex.
Even many who’ve grown up in church have been utterly unscathed by Christian morality.
I once asked a Duke student if he intends to have sex before marriage, and he said, “Yeah. Why not?”
“You grew up in a church, and you don’t think anything is wrong with that?” I asked.
“I never heard that anything was wrong with it,” he said. “What do you mean?” He was utterly naive, though he had grown up in a Christian church.
People are ripe for a voice that gives them something worth living and dying for.
Engaging Truths
At the same time, we mustn’t ever kid ourselves about people’s motives for showing up in worship.
I asked one student who’d been ushering several Sundays, “How do you like chapel?”
“I like it,” he said.
“What do you think about the preaching?”
“Well, I like that, too.”
“What do you like about it?”
“I just, ah, like it.”
I kept pressing him for specifics. Finally he said, “Look, Dr. Willimon, I’ll be honest with you. I come to chapel to meet women.”
“Thank you,” I said. “This has done me good. In case I should ever become presumptuous, I will remember this conversation.”
I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that people come to church for a host of reasons — most of them bad, theologically. Though ultimately they are searching for meaning in their lives, we shouldn’t naively assume people are hanging on our every word. If we’re going to try to reach the disinclined, we’re going to have to preach in a way that engages their attention.
In the book Stanley Hauerwas and I wrote together, Preaching to Strangers, Hauerwas remarks that one of my sermons was marvelously entertaining. I took that as a great compliment; boredom is not a virtue. I don’t mind entertaining, as long as I’m faithful to the text.
When I was in high school, my sister gave me a book entitled, Public Speaking as Your Listeners Like It, which impacts my preaching to this day. Its main point was the ho-hum rule: assume your listeners are never interested in what you’re interested in. The book recommended picturing the listener as a guy who’s been dragged there by his wife and doesn’t like the looks of you. He thinks he knows more than you do and is incessantly looking at his watch.
Your job: to convince him your subject is the most important thing he will hear the rest of his life.
The ho-hum rule doesn’t mean I eschew less palatable subjects. Just because my listeners could care less about the Jebusites doesn’t mean I don’t preach on the Jebusites. My task as a preacher is to convince them that they really do care about the Jebusites. To do this requires us to use an array of communication techniques to get them to care.
One way I do this is by being controversial. I intentionally assault the congregation with the gospel so they’ll huddle together for protection.
One Sunday before Christmas, a guest preacher didn’t show up because of icy weather, so I preached a spur-of-the-moment sermon on John the Baptist. In the sermon I said, “Imagine putting John the Baptist on a Christmas card and saying, ‘Our thoughts for you at this special time of year are best expressed by the one who said, “You brood of vipers! Who told you to flee from the wrath to come?” Merry Christmas.'”
People kept telling me afterward what a great sermon I’d preached. I thought the sermon was a little harsh as I looked back at it. So I spent the rest of that week asking people, “Why was that a good sermon?”
They said, “You were right, and we’re ready for some honesty about our condition.”
Another way to engage people is to speak frankly and strongly about issues people face.
In one sermon on discipleship, I said, “Look, our capitalistic economy would love to keep you having sex all the time. They’d love to sell you blue jeans and perfume; this is the way they anesthetize you. They want to convince you there’s nothing more significant in life than orgasm.
“They want to convince you this is what adults do, that this is the most important part of your humanity. It makes a whole lot of difference in the way you look, how you dress, and the kind of glances you give. They want you to believe that. And you have been converted into that beautifully.
“But it’s a lie,” I said. “I hate to break the news to you: sex is not all that great. It’s all right. I know what you’re thinking: you think I’m saying this because I’m forty. But I’ve been doing it a lot longer than any of you have — and I say it’s not that big a deal. You’re about as good at it now as you’ll ever get. And you can’t get saved doing it.”
“Isn’t it funny how the Bible hardly ever mentions sex?” I concluded. “Jesus didn’t want to talk about sex; he wanted to talk about discipleship. Jesus is only interested in sex as it relates to discipleship. If it keeps you from being a faithful disciple, it’s a big deal. Otherwise, have a good time.”
A student once said to me, “This morning’s message was a typical Willimon sermon. You went in, you hit them in the gut, and you left.” I have a dual purpose in being controversial and frank: the message of the Bible is controversial and frank, and such preaching engages people.
The Serious Role of Humor
Another way I engage the listener is through humor. Listeners are vulnerable to humor. One of my more delightful vocations in life is demonstrating how wonderfully funny and ironic the gospel is.
Jesus tells an ironic parable in which he compares a banquet to the kingdom of God. In Luke’s account, a man throws a party and sends invitations to those lucky enough to receive them. Nobody shows up, however. The man gets ticked off and then invites the local riffraff, who have no where to go on a Saturday night.
Then he essentially says, “Oh heck, we’ve cooked all this food. Go on out and bring in anybody. Bring in the good and the bad. You brought in these nice crippled people. Go bring in anybody.”
Jesus’ point: the kingdom of God is a party we wouldn’t be caught dead attending. It’s a ridiculous, humorous parable that sets up the listener for its punch line: we spend our whole lives avoiding certain people only to wake up and find that, in the kingdom, they’re the people we have to eat next to for eternity. I find that story wonderfully entertaining and funny but also biting. Its humor sets up the listener for the hard truth.
Martin Luther King once preached a sermon in which he recalled being stabbed by a deranged woman. He mentioned that, after the stabbing, the newspapers reported that a doctor had said, “If Dr. King had sneezed he would have died.” A little white girl from Connecticut, he says, later wrote him a letter saying, “Dear Dr. King, I’m real glad you didn’t sneeze.”
So King says, “If I’d sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Birmingham.” Then, “Well, if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize.” He goes on and on, listing the places he wouldn’t have been if he had sneezed. His wry humor invigorated the sermon, so that the congregation responded, shouting Amens and laughing with him.
Vitality Set Loose
Ultimately the only thing keeping me at delivering God’s outrageous truths to the disinclined is that I’m convinced this Christian stuff is true. What ought to cause me to lie awake at night is not that somebody found me boring or my message outdated but whether I’ve been faithful to my appointed calling to preach the Word.
And one reason I continue to think this stuff is true is what happens as a result of preaching it. At Duke, it’s like I’m in a laboratory, and all the ministerial variables are stripped away until only preaching is being tested. I’ve seen time and again that preaching can take the unbeliever into belief, and the nonchalant believer into deeper commitment.
Several years ago Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, preached at Duke Chapel. He gave his radical Sojourners pitch, and two days later a Duke freshman told me, “Dr. Willimon, I want to thank you for bringing that man down here. I went back to my dorm, and I called my parents and told them I wanted my name removed from the rolls of the church I grew up in.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “Why would you do something like that? I don’t want angry calls from your mother.”
“I grew up in that church — a Christian all that time,” he replied, “and nobody ever spoke about Jesus and the poor. I did what Wallis said: I looked through my Bible, and it’s unbelievable how much it says about the poor and the rich, and about God’s love.”
This kid was bubbling about how he was going to spend his Christmas break working for Habitat for Humanity.
It’s beautiful to see that kind of vitality let loose.
Sometimes even the disinclined are radically transformed by the power of the gospel’s truth. Scary, isn’t it?
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
