Maybe this sermon is more for me that it is for you, but I invite you to listen in as I talk about what Paul at the beginning of his first Corinthian letter calls “the foolishness of preaching.”

I want to start out this morning with three quotations about preaching.  They present very different pictures of sermons – which you might expect from the sources.  The first is from the apostle Paul, and the second from a book on preaching by two contemporary UU ministers, and the third is a quotation from well-known UU minister and writer Jack Mendelsohn.

Paul seems very clear and decisive about essential truth, and what is and is not good preaching.  Here is what he says in I Corinthians 15:

12. Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13. But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; 14.  if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. (from the Revised Standard Version)            

In Thematic Preaching,  Rev. Jane Rzepka, minister of the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship, and Rev. Ken Sawyer, long-time minister of the UU Church in Wayland, Massachusetts, say this (Rzepka, p. 2):

Not that long ago, preaching was widely regarded as an antiquated practiced, especially in some liberal traditions.  Writing in 1965, John T. Stewart noted, “Few general practitioners are left who find their chief satisfaction in the pulpit . . . . Members of the younger generation of pastors (that would have included me at the time) do not really enjoy preaching; they kiss it off as a quaint chore. 

Later in the same book is this quotation from Mendelsohn:

There is a special place for sermons in the midst of life’s babble that is not filled by other forms of communication, a place for the unique discourse which is both thoughtful and emotional, practiced within the context of worship, (relating) preacher and people to shared religious traditions, faiths, and meanings, that all might enlarge their understanding, experience broader sympathies, awaken slumbering hopes, explore new cosmic expanses, change their lives, and be moved to redemptive action (ibid, p.7)

I want to look at these three quotations from two different perspectives.  The first is what I now think is the appropriate place for preaching in the context of Unitarian Universalism today, and what I think you have a right to expect from me in the pulpit of this church.  The second will look at whether all of this has anything to do with the exhortations of Paul about preaching, about Easter, and about the resurrection? 

There is a sense, of course, in which Paul is right when he says that preaching is foolishness.  Think about it.  There is no way that I can stand up here and pretend that I know more than the collective knowledge and wisdom of the people in this room.  I dare say that in any congregation today, the people listening to a sermon know far more than the person delivering one.  What hubris it would be for anyone to stand up in front of any group and pretend otherwise. 

Nevertheless, Sunday after Sunday, there are people around this country, including many UUs, who insist that a major reason for them to gather in community this way is because of the sermon.  So what in the world is, or should be, this thing we call a sermon?

What a sermon is not – a least not from me:

A few months ago, a former member of this congregation wrote to the local newspaper about my sermon topic.  “This,” the writer said, “is why I no longer attend a church where someone tells me what to believe.”  And I want to say to all of you right here, right now, if you think that what I am trying to do in this pulpit is to tell you what to believe, then I am somehow totally missing the point with you, too.  I cannot, and do not wish to, tell you what to believe.

Preaching is not “shoulding” on people, what one blogger calls a “non-stop chorus of shoulds and oughts, how things should be.”  And today’s popular preachers?  “If one were to judge only in terms or results, then in spite of all this effort and centuries of work, the world does not seem to have become a place where everyone loves on another, where sin doesn’t happen, and where everyone loves God.  Preaching does not work,” he says.

The Encarta Dictionary does have a secondary definition of preaching here – “to give people advice on their morals or behavior in an irritatingly tedious or overbearing way.”

For me, when I preach, I do believe that I owe it to you to tell you what my truth is, but the purpose of preaching is not to tell you what the truth is or how to believe.  

What a sermon is, or should be:

I think Jack Mendelsohn hit it squarely on the head. 

Through “shared religious traditions, faiths and meanings,” he said, this unique form of communication ought to enable us all to “enlarge (our) understanding, experience broader sympathies, awaken slumbering hopes, explore new cosmic expanses, change (our) lives, and be moved to redemptive action.”

When do I feel that I have done my job as a preacher?  Let me suggest two short answers.  You have probably heard them before.  I hope that my preaching will:

1. Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable
2. Start a dialogue – perhaps many dialogues.

The first of these, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” is a quotation from about 100 years ago, and comes from a newspaperman, Finley Peter Dunne.  I know that hundreds of clergy want to claim that it originated with us, but I cannot find any source other than Dunne.  Nevertheless, it does apply to preaching.  When you come to worship in this church, if I can say something that will help you heal a wound or sorrow you bring here, or on the other hand make you rethink something that you were absolutely sure of, then I think I have done my job as a preacher. 

The second point is that I consider the sermon to be not the end of a discussion, but a beginning.  Last week I noted that the favorite UU television game show is “Jeopardy,” . . . because every answer has a question.  Ours is a faith of questions.  Questions keep us alive and searching for truth, looking for better answers, finding new and more effective ways to be in the world.  If the sermon ends the discussion, and everyone agrees or no one ever thinks about it again, then I have failed miserably.

This church has been amazingly supportive of me as your minister.  It makes my heart sing when one of you says to me, “wow, you really said what I have been thinking.”  I love that.  But, as you know, I love it even more, when someone says to me:

• Thanks for what you said.  I needed that today. . . . or  
• Wow! You gave me a lot to think about this morning . . . or
• I really need to talk about that with someone . . . or
• I’m going to go home and work on that.  Maybe we can talk about it some more. 

Occasionally, someone will come up to me and add something to the sermon and I think: “What did I say that made you think of that?  Many times, one of you will take something I have said, mill it over, and give it back to me in the form of a thought or a question that makes me think, too, that makes me grow.  And that I really appreciate.

What about Easter?

On previous Easter Sundays I have talked about the Rights of Spring, ancient resurrection myths; the Eastre that apparently comes from the name of the Teutonic Goddess of Fertility, Ostara; the resurrection story of the Sumerian God Tammuz; and the Roman worship of Attis and Cybele.  We have noted Easter’s similarity to a story that seems a combination of the Greek Goddesses Ishtar and Aphrodite.

What I’m coming to believe, however, is that the knowledge of all of these things, and the possibility of their connection to the myths of the New Testament Gospels, while good for our understanding, may become a convenient avoidance strategy.  Using ancient myths and stories to debunk the narratives of Mark is a nice, snobbishly intellectual way of refusing to confront the fact that, myth or not, history or not, true or not, the story of the life, death and resurrection of an obscure carpenter’s son from Nazareth is, without a doubt, one of the formative stories in the history of the world.  It is not going away, nor will it.  When we refuse to deal with Jesus and Easter, we risk alienating ourselves from a huge plurality of our fellow human beings – and that in turn risks our own humanity. 

I believe, therefore, as a UU, that I must deal effectively with Easter, as culture and as religious experience.  If we do not take it into our own understanding of what human life is all about, we increase the possibility that we will be completely ineffective in today’s complex political and social environment.  Do we have to be “Christians?”  No, at least not in the sense of the question heard in line at the Grocery store we don’t, particularly if it doesn’t work for us.  We may be on a religious journey that is not within the “Christian” framework, per se, but we do have to take the essence, the meaning. of Christianity into our lives and understandings.  We must be able to relate to Christians, to Christianity, and to Easter with love, or we will never be the messengers of acceptance, diversity and love to the world that we ought to be.  

I will touch on the Easter story only briefly this morning, but you know that I will return to it in the future. 

Most of you have a pretty good idea of where I stand on the Jesus stories.  I do not see any reason to believe, or not believe, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born.  I do not see any reason to believe that the only reason Jesus came to this earth was to die.  I believe that many of the Jesus stories that we have are myths or metaphors, and not necessarily scientific or historical fact.

In this sense, then, I do believe in resurrection, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.  Marcus Borg (Borg, p. 131) points out that the New Testament stories were written within a cultural context that did not equate resurrection with resuscitation.  No matter what you believe about the physical resurrection, it seems clear to me that Jesus did not simply come out of the grave in his pre-crucifixion body.  To misunderstand this is, I believe, to miss the point of the story. 

Did a dead man with nail holes in his feet and hands and a spear rip in his side actually get up and walk out of a grave?  I don’t know, but I don’t really think so.  More to the point, I don’t have to know in order to believe in the miracle of Resurrection. 

Sometimes we UUs are so concerned about facts that we totally miss truth.  The story of Easter is a hero’s story illustrating that death does not have the final victory – that we are not all destined to vanish when we die.   It is a story of restoration and renewal that says that no matter how bad things get, we do not have to live with the assumption that evil and death will triumph.

It is a story of the nature of our real world, of life.  It reminds us vividly each spring that new life arises out of death, that our world is a world of seasons and rhythms and hope.  It is a story that tells us very clearly that we will live on after we die, regardless of what our theology may be about “the next life.”.  We will continue to live in the lives of those we have influenced, for good or for ill.  We continue to live, as the Native Americans remind us, as long as someone remembers us. 

For me, there is no story that is better than the Easter story to tell me that I need not live and die in vain.  There is no story that does more to offset the natural negatives of life with a positive message.    There is no story that tells me better that I can build my life on love and hope and community and the search for peace and truth. 

That is why I can listen when Paul says that without the resurrection, our preaching is in vain.  For without the resurrection, abiding principles of my life -- faith, hope and love -- would have less meaning to me.  So, as a UU minister, I will continue to celebrate Easter.  It clearly says to me that in a world filled with death and destruction, in a world filled with hate and revenge, love and hope are far more important, far more sacred, and far more lasting.

Even for the most skeptical among us, may we set aside, at least for today, the doubts that may keep us from celebrating the truth of the Resurrection.  Hope is alive.  Call her reality, truth, nature or humanity, or God or Goddess by any other name – the spirit of life is stronger than the spirit of pain or death.  That is the message of Easter.  And that is worth preaching about. 

Shalom, and blessed be.

Sources cited:

The Meaning of Jesus: Two Versions by Marcus Borg, and N.T. Wright; Harper San Francisco, 2000.

Thematic Preaching” an Introduction, by Jane Rzepka & Ken Sawyer; St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001