Listening With Authority

"Listening With Authority"
Mark 1:21-28


It happened after the worship service, as everyone was filing out, and shaking hands with the preacher.  After shaking hands, a little girl handed the preacher 50 cents.
"Here," she said.  "This is for you."
"Why thank you, young lady," the preacher replied.  "And why is it that I get this gift of your 50 cents?"
"I just thought you needed the money," the girl said.  "My parents keep saying you're the poorest preacher we've had at this church."

Or there's the story about the woman whose husband was the usher on Sunday morning.  During the worship service, she was sitting frantically wondering if she had turned the burner off from under the skillet she used to cook breakfast.  So she wrote a note to her husband and passed it to him by way of one of the other ushers.  But that usher, thinking it was a note for the preacher, hurried down the aisle and laid it on the pulpit.  Stopping abruptly in the middle of his sermon, the befuddled preacher opened the note and read, "Please go home and turn off the gas."

Probably one of the most anxiety producing tasks of the ministry is preaching.  The expectations are enormous.  My seminary preaching classes in general, and the preaching professor in particular were awful.  I can't remember a thing I learned.  It wasn't that I thought I knew it all.  I knew nothing.  I knew I knew nothing.  That's why I needed that preaching class to be really good.  I was eager and expectant to learn.  I felt like I had so far to go in becoming comfortable with preaching, but that professor and his classes took me backwards instead of forward.

So, after seminary, and once in a church of my own, I started taking every seminar I could find on preaching.  I read hundreds and hundreds of pages of books and articles about the art of preaching.  I wanted to preach well.  I didn't ever want to be told to go home and turn off the gas.

It seemed like every book and every article I've read on preaching has some paragraph or section about, "speaking with authority."  Speaking with authority without being authoritarian.  Speaking with authority in terms of knowing the Bible as God's word.  Speaking with authority in a persuasive tone of voice--demonstrating in your voice that you are a person of internal conviction.  Speaking with authority as a person of integrity--that is, letting a genuine character be seen in the pulpit.

Other books and articles were about how to bridge the gap between speaker and listener.  Such as being relevant.  That the preacher is to some how make the time and words of Jesus make sense in our day and time.  Or that the preacher should learn good communication skills that really "sell."

In one such book, Marketing the Church: What They Never Taught You about Church Growth, by George Barna, this whole idea of selling Jesus was first and foremost in the preaching section.

Jesus Christ was a communications specialist.  He communicated His message in diverse ways, and with results that would be a credit to modern advertising and marketing agencies.  Notice the Lord's approach: He identified His target audience, determined their need, and delivered His message directly...He promoted His product in the most efficient way possible: by communicating with the 'hot prospects.'  He...offered his product at a price that is within the grasp of every consumer...

I began to get confused about what preaching really was.  Is that all there is to it: being in touch with, and understanding the human condition, taking advantage of that knowledge, and then marketing a product aimed at taking care of that need?  Is that what preaching was?  Is preaching only the sum total of the preacher's technique?

In another book, The Church Confident, by Leander Keck, he wrote about how the protestant church is in trouble.  And the reason it's in trouble is because of the kind of preachers and preaching in the church in our time.  It was Keck's assessment that Protestant preachers needed to be more confident in what we have to say, to assert, ever more skillfully and confidently, pretty much what's already been said.

All of that began to bother me because it put all the responsibility on the preacher to communicate God's word.  If you folks in the pew don't get it, don't understand it, or are bored with it, then it's the preacher's fault.  The deck seems to be stacked against the preacher in terms of expectations when you all come into the sanctuary on Sunday morning.

The possibility that you may leave this sanctuary saying, "I just didn't get anything out of that this morning (worship, the sermon, etc.)," is spoken more as a commentary on the preacher/worship leader than it saying anything about the worshipper/listener.  Ever since the Reformation, the sermon was put as the central item in the worship service, taking the place of the Lord's Supper.

          Since then the sermon has been treated as a speech, or a nice talk.  But that is basically one way communication.  Because of that, the weight of communicating is on the preacher.  "What is he or she going to say this morning?" is the question on more people's minds rather than, "How well am I going to listen this morning, so I connect with God and God's message?"

When I was Pastor up in Colby, I would sometimes also preach over in Hoxie.  In the Hoxie church, one of the members was Gloria Neuenchwander.  She was five feet tall, and shrinking and widening in her later years.  In that tiny powerhouse of a woman was quite a punch.  She was extremely active in the presbytery, and a kick in the pants kind of lady.  At one time, the Hoxie church was having trouble with their preacher.  She and I were talking and she said, "Every Sunday morning I drink a cup of coffee before worship so I can stay awake for the sermon.  And almost every Sunday I go home saying to myself, 'That was a waste of a good cup of coffee.'"

I know listening to sermons is hard some times.  And there are so many negative connotations associated with preaching.  "Don't preach at me!" an angry teenager may shout at her parents.  "I don't need your sermonizing!" a wife may say to her lecturing husband.

There seems to be a natural resistance to sermons and preaching.  None of us likes to be told what to do.  If someone comes at us in a preacherly manner with a fix-it plan for our lives, we naturally resist.  When you hear someone "get up on their soap box" or climb into their "bully pulpit" you start tuning out and turning off.  Other thoughts go through your mind, like:
What do I need at the grocery store?
What's the schedule this week and how am I going to take care of this or that?
What's my work load look like for the coming week, and how can I make it a better week this week than last week?
I wish I brought the Sunday ads from the paper to go through during this dog of a sermon.
I hope he doesn't go long so the roast doesn't burn.

This must have been the reaction of the people to the Scribes in Jesus' day.  The reaction to Jesus was that he taught, as The Message Bible has it, with the "ring of authority."  Evidently the Scribes didn't have that ring.  Evidently a lot of what the Scribes taught had to do with time worn messages that were handed down from generation to generation.  Not much different or new there.

One 98 year old woman was given the chance to have an operation that would restore much of her lost hearing.  She refused.  When her grandchildren asked her why, the nearly 100 year old grandma said, "I've heard enough."  Maybe that's what the people in Jesus' day thought:  they'd heard enough of the same old, same old.

So what was different with Jesus?  How does a ring of authority come across in preaching and teaching?  I think authority has most to do with connections, and being connected.  When J.B. Phillips was working on his translation of the New Testament, during WWII, he was overwhelmed by the Bible's pulse and power.  Phillips wrote, "I feel like an electrician, working with wiring while the power is still on."

That's what authority is--being connected to something of power.  Jesus had that kind of authority because he was thoroughly connected to God.  We, the church, receive that kind of authority when we are thoroughly connected to Christ.  Preachers preach with authority when they are likewise connected to Christ.  But worshippers are worshipping and listening with authority when they are similarly connected with the Holy Spirit.  The word of Christ, spoken by the connected preacher, then connects with the Holy Spirited listener, and something powerful happens.  But you need both preacher and listener for God to make that connection.

In discussing her novel, The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker explained that a woman in the novel falls in love with a man because she sees him as a "giant ear."  Walker went on to remark that although people may think they are falling in love because of sexual attraction or some other force, "really what we're looking for is someone to be able to hear us."  When we feel we've been heard, then the connection is made.

I think I understand my responsibility as preacher.  As I paid more attention to how Jesus preached and taught, I began to see that he didn't take all the responsibility on himself.  He gave a lot of responsibility to the listeners.  Maybe that's why the people were always a bit taken by surprise.

I think Jesus' assumption, in preaching, is understanding that there are some things you, as the listeners, have to discover on your own.  Jesus allowed his listeners to accept that responsibility.

The Scribes were into spoon feeding their listeners.  That's what a lot of people want.  Don't make me think; just give me the answers.  Instead, Jesus gave people questions without the answer.  Even when people came to him with their questions, and they expected to be spoon fed an answer, Jesus instead gave them another question--usually the question they should have asked.

Scribes were into control, not allowing people to stray from orthodox and status quo interpretations.  As I mentioned earlier, the Scribes taught traditional messages, that hadn't changed for centuries.  Jesus had something new.  As he said, "You don't put new wine into old skins."

The Scribes put laws and tradition in people's hands and said, "Obey, or else."  Jesus put truth in people's hands and then let go.  Instead of trying to tightly control what he preached, there was trust in God on Jesus' part that a person who listens can personally and on their own, discover relevance and the power of God's truth.  Jesus put that in people's hands and then said, "Now it's your move."

Instead of spoon feeding dogma and the law like the Scribes, Jesus just gave the people the spoon.  I think that's what good listening is--listening with authority, or listening with a spoon:  When you are handed the spoon, you take it.  And then learn what it is you have by using it.  The preacher is, at best, a spoon-giver.  The preacher can give you a few instructions about it, but you must ultimately be the one to use it.  You have to listen well, and then dig in.

Jesus spoke with authority, yes.  Jesus had the connection with God, yes.  But the people wouldn't have caught it if they didn't listen with authority.  Even Jesus couldn't make the people listen.  He could give them the spoon.  But digging in--listening with authority--was up to them.