The Abingdon Preaching Annual 2003 (Abingdon Preaching Annual)

317 Pages·2002·1.18 MB·English

by  David N. Mosser

THE ABINGDON PREACHING
ANNUAL 2003
compiled and Edited by David N. Mosser
Assistant Editor Karen Dies
Abingdon Press
Nashville
Copyright Information
INTRODUCTION
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The book you hold is relevant to lectionary preaching. A lectionary is a standard
table of Scripture readings that may be used for worship or teaching in churches.
Although there are many designs for lectionaries, both formal and informal, this
book directs itself to the ecumenical 1992 Revised Common Lectionary. Can
others, say nonlectionary preachers, find the Abingdon Preaching Annual useful?
Certainly! The Annual includes prayers and calls to worship. It incorporates
benedictions and meditations for preachers. The Abingdon Preaching Annual
also consists of 156 sermons arranged by a lectionary template, but the
lectionary binds no one to it. The lectionary is merely a tool for preaching.
Why would preachers use the lectionary? Naturally, there are many reasons to
use the lectionary and here follow only a few. First, in a world of increasingly
biblical illiteracy, the lectionary gives a three-year tour through the most noted
passages. Second, it allows the laity to participate more fully in the preaching
event, in that they can study the Scripture prior to worship. Third, the lectionary
can aid in Christian education when all Sunday school classes are able to learn
about the same biblical text. Fourth, it encourages preachers to employ the
whole breadth of Scripture. Both Old and New Testaments receive
consideration—it also promotes preaching text that may not be from the
preacher’s favorite “hobby horse” texts. The lectionary is a tool to help people
learn, hear, and absorb what the Bible offers to modern people—life abundant.
I would like to offer a word of caution, however. Like many entities in life, a book
like The Abingdon Preaching Annual offers either a blessing or a curse. The
curse comes in the form of a temptation to use someone else’s work as our own.
In a hurried day when preachers can download the sermon du jour in five or
fewer minutes, it is tempting to delete our work in preaching. I once was startled
to open a neighboring church newsletter and find an article that I had written
plagiarized word for word. The only difference between the two articles was the
name signed at the conclusion. Many of the Abingdon Preaching Annual writers
are at the tops of their fields. Because this is so, I urge you not to let their fine
work tempt you to do less for your own unique congregation than God calls you
to do. Rather, my hope is that this book will provide a mental conversation on
biblical texts with the authors.
Most of us do not hear many other people preach, but we can see how others
might handle or preach the same topics on which we preach. This is the blessing
of a book like the Abingdon Preaching Annual. We can look at others’
approaches, exegesis, and application and check to see if it resonates with our
understanding of God’s word and our human experience. In this sense, I hope
and pray that this book will engage us as partners in the preaching dialogue that
we all need. After all, preaching is not simply a virtuoso performance by solitary
individuals. Rather, it is a community event shared by all those who gather to
worship the God in whom we all “live and move and have our being” (Acts
17:28).
The slogan of the Peace Corps speaks well to the enterprise of preaching: “The
toughest job you’ll ever love.” Preaching is hard work. It takes time and energy.
Preaching includes not only biblical study and an understanding of theology but
also a real grasp of the human condition. No preacher will succeed if he or she
does not understand both Scripture and the people for whom it is authoritative.
This is the work of preaching—bring God’s holy word and God’s holy people into
a conversation about faith and life and God in Christ. My hope is that this
Abingdon Preaching Annual will become a partner in your conversations about
Scripture, preaching, and your congregation. I hope this book is a work of love—
both in its gathering and in its broadcasting the good news of Jesus Christ.
David Mosser
SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS
TRANSFORMATION: THE NAME OF THE GAME
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Philippians 3:12—4:1; Romans 12:2
One of the nonliturgical days that many preachers face is what we may call
“Senior Sunday.” Many churches celebrate “Senior Sunday” to embrace,
recognize, and encourage students who move from one phase of life to another.
No longer children, these high school graduates will either move toward the
working world or continue education at an institution of higher or vocational
learning. Either way, our students leave the nest of home to venture into a wider
world. This sermon tries to acknowledge student achievements. We also want
them to remember that their church prays for them, loves them, and has high
hopes for their future.
This is Senior Sunday, and as a church, we want to wish you well, congratulate
you, and thank you for representing our church family so well. You are a class
that gives older folks hope about what we refer to as “the younger generation.”
But we want to do more than simply slap you on the back and congratulate you.
We want to bless you in the name of God. We want you to remember that as you
begin to move from your childhood homes and make your way into the world—as
students or workers or both—that you take part of us with you wherever you go.
In a sense, our own hopes go with you as you grow into and toward your own
hopes and aspirations.
A resourceful preacher on such a day as this might quickly turn to some biblical
passage or another to share various pieces of biblical wisdom. The Bible is full of
wisdom, and we stand and sit here as a people shaped and formed by this
collection of books we call the Bible. Therefore, looking to the Bible on a day like
today seems as natural to us as “checking a pay phone for forgotten coins.”
However, if you know your Bible, then you immediately sense that I have a
problem.
The problem is that the Bible in general, and Jesus in particular, have little by
way of wisdom to offer seventeen- and eighteen-year-old people. This problem of
lack of direction for today’s youth seems like a giant oversight on the part of
those who wrote the Bible. However, if we think about the problem for a moment,
the answer may have been under our noses all the time. In Jesus’ day, children
were children until the time of their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. These two Mitzvahs (one
for boys and one for girls) are synagogue ceremonies that mark both the end of
childhood and that young person’s entry into adult life. It happens in the life of a
Jewish youngster at the age of thirteen. A Protestant equivalent of this ceremony
is confirmation. At confirmation, we as a church recognize that those who were
children in the eyes of the church have now assumed an adult confession or
profession of faith. Do you see the answer to our problem? In Bible times, there
was really no such thing as a teenager. One was either a child or an adult. A
person was either pre-Mitzvah or post-Mitzvah, but there was no truly accurate
category in between.
We, however, have a category of age that stands between being an adult in the
fullest sense of our understanding and our understanding of what constitutes
being a child. As graduates you stand in that “twilight zone” between being a
child and being an adult. You are a child because there are many things that you
cannot legally do—yet! At the same time, each of you is reasonably mature, and
there are not many questions about it. So now what do we do? I think we want to
look at what reasonably mature people do as they wait to fully mature. “Who
might that include?” you may ask. The answer concerns each person in this
sanctuary. We are each on our way to becoming what God has created us to be.
None of us have arrived yet, and few of us want to get to the point that we stop
growing in wisdom or in grace. We all want to become better people, more
mature in our faith and in our relationships with other people, especially with
regard to people whom we care about deeply.
When speaking of maturing, Christians speak of transformation. In the church we
call this “Spiritual Formation”—being formed in and by the spirit of God. No
matter what your age, transformation of God’s people is the chief task of the
church. We are interested in the formation of individuals. The church is also
interested in the formation of congregations. Paul writes for us words that we all
live by if we are Christian. He writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the
will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). What
does this mean? It means simply that as living and breathing human beings we
are on a quest to find out who we are. It is a lifetime search, and no one worth his
or her salt ever finishes the quest.
Americans are “always on the way to someplace else,” writes Harper’s editor
Lewis H. Lapham.
If America is about nothing else, it is about the invention of the self.
Because we have little use for history, and because we refuse the
comforts of a society established on the blueprint of class privilege, we
find ourselves set adrift at birth in an existential void, inheriting nothing
except the obligation to construct a plausible self, to build a raft of
identity....
Who else is the American hero if not a wandering pilgrim who goes
forth on a perpetual quest? (Lewis H. Lapham, “Who and What Is
American?” Harper’s Magazine [January, 1992]: p. 46)
A sign of a healthy church or the sign of a healthy spiritual person is one who
takes Paul’s admonition or advice to heart—to “not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what
is the will of God.” Transformation or the quest for life’s meaning—this is the
name of the game. Transformation lets God change you into what God created
you to be. God takes the stuff of brain and heart and shapes a unique creature—
you. Walker Percy’s character out of his novel The Moviegoer [New York: Alfred
A Knopf, 1962, p. 13] had it right. This character said, “The search is what
anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life .
. . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not
to be onto something is to be in despair.” Thus, all of us have a choice: the quest
or the despair of a common and unreflective person. As your pastor, I wanted to
remind you of this choice. I also want to remind you that this choice is not
undertaken only on your high school graduation. Rather, it is a choice that you
will make over and over in your life. You sit in a sanctuary full of people who also
must make these decisions daily.
Naturally, we all have our ways of going on the quest. Some do it watching
television. Others quest for the meaning of life in video games or searching for
pleasure in even more questionable pursuits, such as overindulgence in alcohol
or drugs. But one way or another, we either quest or quit. At about eighteen, I
found my way into a quest for life’s meaning and the wisdom that I could find
therein by reading some pretty heavy stuff for a high school student. Given the
fact that television in my growing years consisted of only three networks—ABC,
NBC, and CBS—I had few alternatives to discover what was “out there.” So, I
read, and I read a lot. I read Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, and a host of other “pointy-headed” authors, as my friends called
them.
I am a Christian today because I searched and searched among the wisest and
most thought provoking people I could find to read. Finally, however, I came to
the awareness that what my little church had tried to teach me had a lot of merit.
My church had long before introduced me to a person named Jesus. By
thoroughly investigating what other profound thinkers had said about human life
and life’s meaning, I finally concluded that Jesus was wiser than all. Jesus had
plenty to teach me. Jesus taught me about what life means and how I might fit
into a community that said following Jesus was the most important and meaning-
filled thing I would ever do. They told me this when I was six, ten, and eighteen,
and I still believe the people who taught me and loved me.
To you seniors I want to say one thing: You will all be transformed. Each of you
will take your own path and make your own quest. But don’t forget that the
primary reason for the church and its message is simply to transform people from
mere biological creatures to something much more magnificent. As Psalms 8
puts it:
What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you
care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and
crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion
over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all
sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Psalms 8:4-8)
We, as your church, want you to be transformed. We want you transformed from
young people eager to discover yourselves and the world into individuals who
find yourselves in the everlasting and loving arms of the God we know most fully
in Jesus Christ. I want you to notice something interesting. Some of the most
important symbols of the Christian life are symbols of transformation—the
caterpillar into a butterfly and death into life. Jesus took a cross, the symbol of
shame and dishonor, and by his death and resurrection he transformed the cross
into a symbol of hope. May God take your life and make you a symbol that love is
superior to hate and that hope is greater than despair. These are the ends of the
quest that we hope and pray that you make. And remember we are all pulling for
you on every step of your quest. Amen. (David Mosser)
THE RITUAL OF THANKSGIVING
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Leviticus 7:11-15
This sermon was preached on All Saints Sunday near the conclusion of a
sermon series titled “A November Full of Thanksgiving.” The sermon series
examined thanksgiving comprehensively as a fundamental character trait of
Christians. These sermons also acknowledged that thanksgiving is regularly an
experience difficult to articulate for Christians. One aim of these sermons was to
facilitate a believer’s understanding that they are Chris-tian stewards over the
thanksgiving God gives them.
The day following an emotional memorial service for one of our congregation’s
most beloved members, I sat in a hotel lobby waiting for a taxi. While in that
lobby I listened to a young woman give the same polite, but decidedly routine,
speech to each and every customer checking out of the hotel.
“Yes, sir. Thank you for choosing our hotel. We thank you for your business and
hope the next time you return to our city you will choose to lodge with us. Thank
you for your decision to stay with us.”
The only problem with this particular “ritual of politeness” was that she delivered
this speech precisely and in a monotone voice. The young woman’s voice never
wavered from one customer to the next. I could only imagine some poor soul
being locked out of his room, appearing in the lobby in a bath robe or towel,
standing in front of the young woman and her giving the same speech.
This illustration is a bad example of ritual. No one ever intended the idea of ritual
to be words spoken by rote, without feeling or meaning. When you recite the
Pledge of Allegiance, do you repeat it without feeling and then say it has lost
meaning for you? I hope not. Anyone can turn our meaningful rituals into dry and
pointless sets of words and actions, but ritual has a deeper—and what I would
like to call a teaching—purpose. Ritual helps us pass along those meanings and
interpretations of our common life together that are bigger than the words we use
to explain them. This is why ritual is so important in the life of faith.
Ritual helps people act out their faith. Ritual tells others about the things we hold
dear, although most of us could not articulate why these things are so important
to us. Ritual is also important in the church realm, although many modern people
forsake it. They forsake ritual because they do not understand that for the past
two thousand years the church has tried to help people value life and faith in
ways that we can scarcely articulate. Prior to the existence of the church, Israel
too, celebrated the rituals of faith. Read our lesson from Leviticus:
This is the ritual of the sacrifice of the offering of well-being that one
may offer to the Lord. If you offer it for thanksgiving, you shall offer with
the thank offering unleavened cakes mixed with oil, unleavened wafers
spread with oil, and cakes of choice flour well soaked in oil. With your
thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being you shall bring your offering with
cakes of leavened bread. From this you shall offer one cake from each
offering, as a gift to the Lord; it shall belong to the priest who dashes the
blood of the offering of well-being. And the flesh of your thanksgiving
sacrifice of well-being shall be eaten on the day it is offered; you shall
not leave any of it until morning. (Leviticus 7:11-15)
For Israel, the ritual in worship was a way not only to celebrate the people’s faith
in God but also to teach Israel’s young to value the things that the community of
faith valued. Our Leviticus lesson concerns what we might call “the ritual of
peace offering.” Israel carries out this ritual in thanksgiving because although
they know that they ought to be thankful, thanksgiving is something we live less
than we know we should. Thanksgiving, for Christians especially, is a way of life.
Perhaps it is this attitude that makes Paul’s later statement so compelling: “See
that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another
and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances;
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:15-18).
Of course, people are not born thankful. Someone must teach us to be thankful,
just as someone must teach us how to pray. It was not some quirk of the Gospels
that one of Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught
his disciples” (Luke 11:1b). It is for this reason of good behavior and deportment
that concerned parents worry so much about their children’s manners,
politeness, and gratitude toward other people. These kinds of concerns bring
youngsters to school-like events such as a cotillion or another rite of passage
event. As you may know, a cotillion is designed to teach young people the
meaning of manners and etiquette.
Ritual helps people get into the groove of good habits. Leviticus—as deadly as it
may read to modern people—reminds the faithful that God values more than
mere words of praise and thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, rather, becomes a way of
life—a living response to God’s gift of bountiful life to God’s people.
All Saints Sunday provides the church—us—a ritual mode to remember those
persons who have lived among us. Those who showed us what it means to be
Christian. When we read the names and hear the chimes of our departed
brothers and sisters in faith, these rituals remind each of us of our own mortality.
We will all, sooner or later, have our own names read and chimed. Our worship
ritual reminds us what is important—although many of us could not put this
moment into words. What we remember is so much larger than our
understanding of it. Ritual is a practice to remind each of us that too often we
stand in the presence of greatness, yet we often forget it. Worst of all, we often
fail to recognize the simple greatness of other people.
When I was nine years old I walked across the street with my father to be with a
family who had just learned that their sixteen-year-old daughter died as a result
of heart surgery complications. I was too young to realize just how difficult that
walk across the street was for my father. He and the girl’s father were good
friends. In the midst of stunned and profound silence, one of the men in the living
room suggested, “Let’s pray.” As we bowed our heads, I remember thinking that I
had never seen a group of grown-ups so intensely sad and completely
powerless. Yet, in their own ritualized way, they turned toward God because God
was the source and the end of all that they were. Ritual helps us remember that
life’s most profound moments—both in joy and in grief—must finally and
completely be handed over to God.
Today we hand the lives of our saints over to God, but we keep their memory
alive in our worship and in our hearts. We celebrate the ritual of thanksgiving to
God because God has put these important people into our lives and given us a
memory of them that never fades. We are thankful to God because that is our
proper response. I only pray that through our ritual of thanksgiving we can
remember that God really does give us gifts of people who make living life worth
the while. Amen. (David Mosser)