Tell us Plainly
a sermon based on John 10:22-30 by Rev. Thomas Hall
Each Sunday an interesting phenomenon
occurs. We’ve all observed it. People are leaving their pews and shuffling single
file through the narthex and out to their cars. The minister stands by the door like a bus
driver having safely landed another tour group home from the casinos. She’s shaking
hands and smiling. Then it happens. "Great sermon, Pastor!" Like Mark Twain, we
clergy-types can live a week on such a delicacy. "I’ve never thought about
__________ quite like that." So God has once again confirmed the Word if not with
signs and wonders, at least by compliment. I knew it! Someone out there was
listening. Never mind that an inside view of the cognitive process might have revealed
laundry lists of activities to tackle come noon. But, for the moment, we feel good about
our craft of preaching.
Most of us clergy truly are what we need to be in the parish-we are pastoral. We take
our preaching seriously. We take the entire work of ministry seriously. We want to help
folks move ahead in their faith; we want wholeness in family and soul; we want our
congregational members out and active in the community as salt and light.
What we eschew (a strong biblical word from the KJV) are grace-inhibiting remarks about
our sermons. "That sure was a long one!" "Your sermon really confused
me." "I didn’t get where you were going." Ouch. Or, "That was a
fine sermon on the second coming," when in fact you had just delivered your magnum
opus on forgiveness. (Tim LaHaye is so helpful.)
At the heart of our disdain for such blunt negativisms is often a larger disdain for
conflict within the parish. We prefer not to envision ourselves in the pulpit like
Condoleezza Rice, who, for two and a half hours, fielded questions-many of them hostile-
from the congressional committee that is investigating the 9/11 tragedy, trying to see if
someone in the Administration dropped the ball and could have prevented those tragic
events.
We’re no Condoleezza Rice types. We’re pastors who want to be appreciated and
loved and understood. So we need every once in awhile to return to the stories of the
gospels to see the variety of ways that Jesus responded to the after-church crowd leaving
the pews. Notice, for example what happens in the gospel lesson for this Sunday.
Like a scene out of Silence of the Lambs where a dangerous person lurks unseen,
leering at his victim through night-vision goggles, we can imagine eyes following a
man’s movement through a huge stone hall lined with magnificent columns. There’s
always a window of opportunity-and so they grab their chance and step out of the shadows
of the columns. Closing ranks their group form a Stonehenge circle with the man now in the
center, surrounded by hostility.
"Okay, so how long do you intend to keep us in the dark, Jesus?" They want an
closed answer to their closed question: "Tell us plainly," they demand of him,
"are you-or are you not-the Messiah?" Apparently, Jesus has been a bit vague in
his sermons lately. They think they’ve got what he’s preached, but yet they
haven’t heard Jesus put it in plain English Aramaic. What’s
wrong with that question? The leaders just want a clear, unambiguous yes or no from Jesus.
Who can blame them? What’s the harm in that?
You’d think that Jesus would put it out plain for them. Spell out what they
obviously had missed in the second point of his sermon. Yet, did you observe Jesus’
response to their question? "I told you, but you don’t believe," he begins
and then he launches into what must have seemed to them like gibberish. In a few short
words, he speaks of the works he does as "proof" of his oneness with the
Father-"Actions speak louder than words," he tells them, "so believe in me
because of the signs." In stark contrast, Jesus launches into greater detail
about those who, unlike his questioners, have believed in him: they are like sheep to him
and he as a shepherd to them. "The Father gave them to me and no one can pull them
away from me. The Father and I are one."
Certainly beneath the interview is an agenda that keeps Jesus’ answers vague: the
leaders want clear evidence to use against him, to do him in. Yet, remarkably he has
spoken much more eloquent sermons without words while they’ve been in the pews,
quills poised to write down the yes or no answer. That’s the problem in the story. A
far greater sermon has been preached before their eyes-the healing of a blind man-which
preaches the sermon of spiritual blindness and how Jesus can heal our resistance to truth.
Yet, they seek an easy answer. One that they can take back to the rest-"See, right
here? Here’s the exact statement he made-says he’s Messiah."
Our lives are lived on both sides of this story. Sometimes we are the leaders who
demand a close-ended, quick, clear answer to a question that defies easy answers. This
week I spent several hours with a young man who framed his life as a seeker. It was the
easy answer that caused him as a high school student to reject God for nearly ten years.
He was at a church camp on the final night at a fire-side service. A nearby camper threw a
Styrofoam cup into the fire.
"Hey, you shouldn’t do that-that damages the ozone," my friend said.
"Well, who cares?" the other kid retorted, "I believe that God will just
fix it." That was not a helpful answer for this seeker. He left camp that summer and
his faith thinking that if Christians had such easy answers, he would never be comfortable
as a Christian. A simplistic answer meant to quiet a hungering seeker, nearly killed his
faith. {continue}
