Referencing Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna
Barna, Tyndale House, 2002/8
3
The Sermon: Protestantism’s most sacred cow (Pagan Christianity, chapter 4 title)
For a brief period of my life, I lived inside a thought
bubble. It was a thought bubble of my
own making. It was a kind of
‘imaginatarium’ where I kept my “pets” and attempted to create a model of a
church that I would most love to be part of; and one which I would lead down a path
of emulating the principles of the first apostles and the disciples they made –
a “new testament church” if you like.
I enrolled in some classes at theological college and I was
taken on as a student pastor in a rural parish church of two separate congregations. I had previously done two years of bible
college study and I had reasonable experience in street ‘preaching’ and
speaking in church meetings. To “top up”
my study, there were a few subjects the ‘theo college’ reckoned I need to do to
satisfy their requirements for ordination.
Despite my previous training and experience, for reasons I never quite
got, I was told I had to do some Preaching subjects. Once I got the drift of what the lecturer
wanted, it was, as they say, ‘a piece of cake’.
I drafted my ‘sermons’ (I hated calling them that) to serve two
purposes: for congregational instruction/teaching in my rural congregations;
and to satisfy the requirements of my college study units.
I said it was a brief period; within two years, my thought bubble
burst and I was flapping aimlessly through a space I never imagined I would
have to navigate, let alone populate.
But I had done so well in my preaching classes that the in-coming
Principal of my college asked me to consider teaching some of their preaching
classes. Of all the things I could teach
at theological college, teaching preaching was the last thing I wanted to
do. One of the reasons for the bubble
bursting was my rejection of the sermon as a valid and reasonable means of
building a ‘new testament church’. New
Testament churches didn’t seem to have sermons.
But it was what churches do.
It was fundamentally integral to church life; it was an absolutely fixed
feature of the order of worship; it was – and often still is – almost the
single most important thing a pastor does by which his tenure is measured and
judged.
Then I remembered a story in the new testament where apostle
Paul encountered Apollos. Apparently
Apollos was an excellent orator – preacher – sermoniser. Paul on the other hand made light of his
preaching ability and was generally self-effacing. And this is where I come back to Viola and
Barna (Pagan Christianity).
They start their next chapter with this quote from Paul:
And my speech and my preaching was not with
enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of man, but in the power
of God. (1 Corinthians 2:4-5)
Apollos was (by all accounts) a good preacher; he was
popular and he made quite a few disciples.
Paul, however, detected that something was missing in the lives of
Apollos’ disciples. A little earlier, Apollos
had been taken aside by Paul’s companions Aquila and Priscilla and they
“explained the way of God more fully” to him.
From that point, Apollos’ preaching was different. How different? Good different! Apollos had been acting like he was preaching
the gospel of Jesus but in fact was preaching a deficient gospel that Paul
described as preaching the baptism of John rather than the baptism of Jesus.
Now John, while truly being the forerunner and proclaimer of
Christ, was actually an old testament prophet; but he fully believed in
Jesus. John himself spoke of the coming
of Jesus and of the baptism of Jesus – by which all who participated would
receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, but John’s own message was “a baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). That’s old covenant baptism; that’s all
Apollos knew; consequently, that’s the only baptism he could honestly preach
and deliver. Apollos’ baptism (and
therefore his earlier preaching) was actually old covenant even though it
referenced Jesus. Paul was an absolute
master of sniffing out old covenant ingredients; and he made it his business to
correct that with new covenant teaching – for the sake of the hearers of the
message.
That makes his words to the Corinthians (above) so much more
pertinent and powerful.
Church as we know it, being largely an old covenant
institution and organisation, is Apollos on steroids and in turbo mode. I had lived in my thought bubble precisely
because of the reasons we have looked at up to this point in this blog series:
we are living in an old covenant fossilarium, refurbishing it to make it look,
sound, taste, smell and feel like new covenant.
And until church learns the Apollos lessons of “the way of God more
fully” a la Paul, Aquila and Priscilla, she cannot deliver on the promises she
is making about Jesus and his new life – simply because she hasn’t lived it
herself.
Central to that delusion is the sacred cow of the
sermon. Church has followed Apollos;
what and where is the tradition of Paul?
Viola and Barna suggest “The sermon is the bedrock of the
Protestant liturgy” (p. 85) and it has functioned as such for 500 years and
more.
They go on to raise a popular retort to the questioning of
the role and place of the sermon: “People preached all throughout the
Bible. Of course the sermon is
scriptural.” But those two sentences are
not linked logically or even sensibly.
The second sentence is spouted as if it is proved by the first; but
there is no necessary connection between the two thoughts.
Did people preach all throughout the bible? You can make that argument but it all depends
on what you call preaching. However, the
second sentence assumes that ‘the sermon’ was the method of ‘preaching’ and
that aint necessarily so. Viola and
Barna make that point well:
Granted, the Scriptures do record men and
women preaching. However, there is a
world of difference between the Spirit-inspired preaching and teaching
described in the bible and the contemporary sermon. The difference is virtually always overlooked
because we have been unwittingly conditioned to read our modern-day practices
back into the Scripture. (p, 86)
As they point out, the sermon has these features: It is a
regular occurrence; it is delivered by the same person; it is delivered to a
passive audience; it is a cultivated form of speech. (p. 87)
By comparison, the old testament prophets and priests
apparently did not make regular speeches to the gathered people of God. Neither did Jesus “preach a regular sermon to
the same audience. His preaching and
teaching took many different forms. And
he delivered His message to many different audiences.” (Pagan Christianity p. 87)]
So where did the christian sermon come from? Viola and Barna continue:
This raises a thorny question. If the first-century Christians were not
noted for their sermonizing, from whom did the postapostolic Christians pick it
up? The answer is telling: The Christian sermon was borrowed from the
pagan pool of Greek culture. (p. 89)
And despite its relative failure to change christians for
over 2000 years, the sermon became and remains not just standard practice but a
pastoral obligation. And why might that
be?
The principle reason relates to a matter raised in an
earlier post: religion. Religion as it is commonly known and practised is
largely made up of a collection of rites, icons and repetitive practices which
combine to pacify and satiate the soul of the participants. In most churches, attendees would feel dudded
or cheated if there was no sermon to evaluate and critique.
As Viola and Barna rightly point out, the ‘headwaters” of
the great sermon stream is the band of “wandering teachers called sophists”. Rhetoric is largely their invention; and,
like Apollos after them, they were great debaters and “masters of fine phrases”
as Viola and Barna say.
An essential part of this style of communication is that
what is preached, while being essentially true, does not have to be the lived
experience of the orator. Hence Apollos
could preach well a message/story of Jesus, but he could not pass on the living
truth of the new covenant story of Jesus – at least until Aquila and Priscilla
had filled in the gaps in his learning.
And the profound importance of this is drawn out in the
record of Acts 18&19. An important
new covenant principle is that you can’t give away to someone else what you do
not possess yourself. Apollos did not
possess either the truth or the experience of the baptism of Jesus. Consequently the disciples he made did not
either. In their own words following a
question from Paul, they were taught nothing of the Holy Spirit by Apollos –
Apollos couldn’t give away what he didn’t himself have. Paul was able to correct the fault, and when
he preached the Holy Spirit to them, they received it and were baptised into
Jesus and received the gift of the Holy Spirit.
When it come down to it, the sermon is about style, form and
information. On the other hand, the new
covenant message is about truth, heart communication and transformation. And the new testament knows three main ways
the new covenant message is articulated: the logos, the kerygma and the herald. The logos is the living word of God, Jesus and
the story of Jesus; the kerygma is the living appeal from one human to another
to be reconciled to God; and the herald is the runner with the message of
freedom, victory and peace.
The sermon is a thing, about a thing; the new covenant
message, in all three of its aspects, is a living person carrying and
delivering life and freedom.
Note to self: Remember, words can kill as
much as they can heal and bring life.
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