Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource: Year A Part 2

By Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is widely acclaimed as one of the top ten preachers in the
world. For each Sunday of the Christian year, Will provides just what
you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. This guide will stoke,
fund, and fuel your imagination while leaving plenty of room to insert
your own illustrations, make connections within your congregational
context, and speak the Word in your distinctive voice. Guidance from
Will Willimon is like sitting down with a trusted clergy friend and
asking, “What will you preach next Sunday?” Year A Part 2 is part of a
six-volume set that includes years A, B, and C (2 volumes per year) in
the Revised Common Lectionary. Part 1 includes the Pentecost through the end of the church year, Christ the King/Reign of Christ Sunday.

Each week of sermon resources includes:

1. Readings
2. Theme title
3. Introduction to the Readings
4. Encountering the Text
5. Proclaiming the Text
6. Relating the Text

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501847530

Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

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Introduction

For over three decades Pulpit Resource has been helping preachers prepare to preach. Now, in this volume, some of the most helpful resources have been brought together to help you faithfully preach your way through the second half (Pentecost and the season after) of Year A of the Common Lectionary. This Lectionary Sermon Resource doesn’t claim to be the sole resource needed for engaging, faithful biblical preaching, but it does give you, the pastor who preaches, accessible, easy-to-use help on your way to a sermon.

No sermon is a solo production. Every preacher relies on inherited models, mentors in the preacher’s past, commentaries on biblical texts by people who have given their lives to such study, comments received from members of the congregation, last week’s news headlines, and all the other ways that a sermon is communal. Using this resource is equivalent to sitting down with a trusted clergy friend over a cup of coffee and asking, What will you preach next Sunday?

In the sermons that follow, I give you just what you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. I hope that this Lectionary Sermon Resource stokes, funds, and fuels your imagination. Rarely do I give you a full sermon in the Proclamation section that can be preached verbatim. I’ve left plenty of room to insert your own illustrations, to make connections that work within your congregational context, and to speak the word in your distinctive voice. Sermons are occasional: God’s word spoken in a particular time and place to a particular people. Only you can speak God’s word in your distinctive voice to your distinctive context. All I try to do in this volume is to give you my insights and ideas related to a specific biblical text and then leave you free to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and your particular congregation.

From what pastors have told me, the value of this guide is its simplicity, its unvarying format. Every Sunday you are given the following sections: Theme (I still think the time-honored practice of using a theme sentence to begin sermon preparation is a good practice, enabling the sermon to have coherence and unity); Introduction to the readings (that can be used as preparation for listening to the texts read in corporate worship); and Prayer (because every sermon is a gift of the Holy Spirit). The sections Encountering the text (listening to the biblical text, engagement with its particular message, is the first essential step on the way to a faithful sermon), Proclaiming the text (my sketch of ideas and movements for developing what I hear in the assigned text), and Relating the text (copious illustrative material that helps the sermon hit home) are given on different Sundays.

I’m honored that you have invited me to be a partner in your preaching. It’s a demanding, challenging, joyful vocation to which God has called us. Let’s work together to make sure God’s word is offered in a lively, engaging way to God’s people. Onward in the great adventure of preaching!

—WILL WILLIMON

Day of Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

They’re Drunk!

Selected reading

Acts 2:1-21

Theme

The Holy Spirit descends on the church, cutting us loose, liberating our lives from the constrictions the world imposes upon us, setting us free, leading us toward God.

Introduction to the readings

Acts 2:1-21

When Jews from every nation on earth had gathered to celebrate Pentecost, a strange event occurs.

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

The gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of unity among believers, Paul tells the Corinthians.

John 20:19-23

Jesus appears to his disciples, breathes upon them, and thus gives them the Holy Spirit.

Prayer

Holy Spirit, come upon us. Enliven our dead religion. Shake our settled arrangements. Inflame us with new zeal for your justice. Shake us up. Set us free. Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.

Encountering the text

Luke conceives of the Spirit in Jesus primarily as the power behind Jesus’s proclamation of the gospel (4:18, 14-15), which power subsequently continues in his disciples (Luke 12:12).

People said of the prophet Hosea, the man of the spirit is mad (Hos 9:7). They said of the apostles at Pentecost, they are filled with new wine (Acts 2:3).

Throughout Acts, the Spirit is that which controls mission, which prods and drags the church, kicking and screaming, into new areas of ministry. The word spreads, through the power of the Spirit. On Pentecost, our history with the Spirit begins. Any time the church settles down with present arrangements, relents to the power of the status quo, the Spirit intrudes, liberates, sets us free with a liberty that is close to divine intoxication.

Proclaiming the text

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing the then current Neo-Charismatic Movement that was sweeping the churches. My friend was a fellow United Methodist pastor. We had met during doctoral work at Emory. As a fellow intellectual, someone quite thoughtful and astute, I wanted him to help me think through this strange outbreak of spiritual gifts and weird behavior called Charismatic. I was telling him how I, as a pastor, had struggled with an outbreak of Charismatic fervor in my own congregation—people speaking in tongues, attending faith-healing services, being filled with the Spirit. I found such behavior somewhat bizarre, particularly for Methodists.

As I was talking, I looked over at my friend. He had an odd look on his face. I said, "Wait a minute. You haven’t spoken in tongues, have you?"

He grinned sheepishly. Then he told me. It had been a busy week for him. So Saturday, bright and early, he went down to the church and sat down at his desk to write his sermon. While working on the sermon, he recalled, "I felt my head fall back. My tongue began to move. I heard strange, guttural sounds. Then, it was over. I felt a feeling of release, relief. Then I began to write. It wasn’t an unusual sermon, by the time I finished it. But I realized, I had experienced New Testament glossolalia, I had ‘spoken in tongues.’ I haven’t told anyone about it. I haven’t thought about it since. But I spoke in tongues."

I said to him, Promise me that you will never tell that story to anybody else. They’ll think you’re crazy. We’re Methodists, for heaven’s sake. You’re a Duke graduate!

Now, I do not know whether or not today’s Pentecost scripture from Acts is describing glossolalia, speaking in other tongues. There is some doubt that Luke, who wrote Acts, really knew what speaking in tongues was. Paul says this strange spiritual experience had happened many times to him. Yet I do know that Acts 2, Pentecost, is describing some weird, wonderful goings on. On the day of Pentecost, Jews from every nation on earth were gathered. The Holy Spirit descended, and they began to talk in strange ways, began to hear in strange ways. Upon hearing the Pentecostal commotion, a crowd gathered on the street outside, saying, Jesus’s people are drunk!

Peter came out and spoke to the crowd saying, We’re not drunk, giving the dubious defense, Why, it’s only about ten in the morning, how could we be drunk?

Now, what do we make of that?

To read Acts 2—where people get the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that empowered Jesus, transforming a gang of virtual strangers into church, releasing new powers within them, healing old divisions, giving them the ability to speak, to hear, so much so that folk, watching them emerge from church that Sunday said, They’re drunk!—is to read a story where we don’t seem to fit. When is the last time you have emerged from church so joyful, so out of control, cut loose, confused, or overheated that someone said of you, Look at those Christians, again, drunk!

No, when we get done on most Sundays, onlookers are more likely to say, Look at those Christians, they’re dead!

The Churching of America (Finke and Stark, Rutgers University Press, 1992) tells the story of the steady decline of mainline (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal) Protestantism in America. Religious vitality, say the authors, is related to cost, stigma, and sacrifice. Those churches that demand more of their members, place a greater social stigma on their members, and ask for more sacrifice do better than churches who demand less (pp. 237–71). There has been no significant decline in the amount of religious activity in North America for the past fifty years. The decline has been solely within mainline Protestantism (us), but the corresponding explosion has been solely within the younger and newer denominations like the Church of God and the Assemblies of God. With respectability, affluence, education, a professional clergy, comes decline.

It is tough for us to think about these matters around here, perhaps because we are (according to Finke and Stark) the instigators of mainline religious decline. Many of us, when faced with a story like that of Pentecost in Acts 2 or of our neighborhood Assemblies of God congregation, don’t think Holy Spirit. We are kneejerk conditioned to assume that what we have here is some sort of psychological problem or cultural backwardness. Freud characterized religion as neurosis, an intoxicant, childishness to be overcome; most of us, when it comes to dismissing faith, are Freudians.

Although all of us here agree with Freud’s 1927 attacks on spiritual engagement, unfortunately, these attacks have no empirical evidence to back them up. In every study I know about, psychological studies of deeply religious people find a positive, rather than a negative relationship between strong religious activity and mental health. In the revolution in Eastern Europe at the end of the last century, it is ironic that Marx dismissed religion as opiate of the masses, when it was the churches and religion that fueled the fires of revolt against the ruling communist elite. We now know what poor Marx did not: religion is not the opiate of the masses; it’s the amphetamines of the people (Finke and Stark, p. 251)!

Several studies show that there is no justification for relegating the born again or spiritually engaged folk to the uneducated masses. Among American college students, those who claim to be born again are slightly more likely to be in engineering or the natural and physical sciences than in the humanities. Secular parents beware: the sons and daughters of unchurched, secular parents are those most likely to experience a dramatic conversion to a cult or sect movement.

American secularity has not produced more atheistic people; it has produced more cults, more sects—in general, more religion, not less. Contemporary America does not resemble northern Europe (Sweden, England, and so on) as all academics said we would. We are closest, in our religiosity, to India or Africa. In fact, virtually none of the rest of the world resembles Sweden or England in their coldness to the fires of faith. Only people around universities, only people who write for newspapers, persist in the outmoded belief that religion is an outmoded vestige that we have at last overcome. William James (in Varieties of Religious Experience [Longman’s, 1905]) characterized religion as a white hot heat.

America remains heated up over faith.

All evidence to the contrary, we continue to sin against Pentecost, continue to attempt to explain away the disruptive descent of the Spirit. You know why: the Acts 2 threat that one Sunday we might all gather here in our bolted-down pews, with our smug reasonableness, our bourgeois respectability, only to be grabbed by our collective collar, shaken up, thrown into confusion, intoxicated, is not a suggestion we welcome. Most of us come here to be confirmed in what we think we already know, not to be dislodged, led by the Spirit into terra incognita we do not know.

But be careful. As you come to the table today, with hands open, maybe even minds open, be careful. The wind blows where it will (John 3:8), God’s Spirit will not be housebroken by us, and your soul might catch fire, even yet, even here.

I would hate to see nice, respectable people like you with mortgages go out of here drunk.

No, I wouldn’t.

Relating the text

We really ‘had church today’ is a familiar expression among African Americans following a Spirit-filled worship experience. . . . The genius of Black worship is its openness to the creative power of God that frees and enables people, regardless of denomination, ‘to turn themselves loose.’

—Melva Wilson Coster, African American Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993)

I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and feebleness. In short, whatever finds me bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

George Orwell, remembering his English public school that he hated, said, You were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible.

The philosopher, Hegel, saw the Spirit of God primarily in the great movements of history. Was this a way of taming the Spirit to Hegel’s bourgeois mentality? Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525) clearly saw the social-political implications of the Holy Spirit. Müntzer hoped to establish a theocracy where tyrants and churchly-faced persons are to be strangled! In our day, the political, communal implications of the Holy Spirit have been distinctly lacking from much thought on the subject.

In the Old Testament, stress upon the Spirit of God was a way of showing how different is the Spirit of God from our collective spirit. The prophets are clear that the false prophet generally predicts what the establishment wants to hear, whereas the true prophet is bound to a word which people do not always want to hear (see Jer 28:8-9). The Spirit breaks in unexpectedly and moves people to do extraordinary things. It reminds us that all present arrangements are conditional and temporary.

"What, then, does ‘Spirit’ mean? Tangible and yet intangible, invisible and yet powerful, as real as the air that is full of energy, the wind in the storm as important to life as the air we breathe—these images have all been used by ancient man to represent the ‘Spirit’ and the invisible activity of God. . . . It is the invisible power and strength of God that was creatively or destructively active, giving life or condemning to death, in the creation of the world and man in the history of salvation and especially that of Israel. The same Spirit has continued to be active in the Church, powerfully or gently seizing hold of men, transporting individuals or groups into ecstasy and frequently present in extraordinary phenomena, in great men and women. . . .

"The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, distinguished as the Holy Spirit from the unholy spirit of man and his world. In the New Testament sense, this Spirit is not, as it often has been in the history of comparative religions, a magical . . . mysteriously supernatural fluid with dynamic powers. . . . On the contrary, the Holy Spirit is none other than God Himself! He is God Himself in His closeness to man and the world as the one who seizes hold of man but cannot be seized, the one who gives but is not at man’s disposal, the one who creates life but also judges. . . . The Spirit is never my own potential, but always God’s power and gift. The Spirit is not an unholy spirit of man, a spirit of the age, a spirit of the church, a spirit of the church’s office . . . but always the Holy Spirit of God who blows where He will and who cannot be claimed as a justification of any absolute power."

—Hans Küng, Conflicts About the Holy Spirit (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 115–16

A rediscovery of the supernatural will be, above all, a regaining of openness in our perception of reality. . . . It will be an overcoming of triviality. In an openness to the signals of transcendence the true proportions of our experience are rediscovered. This is the comic relief of redemption; it makes it possible for us to laugh and to play.

—Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (New York: Penguin, 1970), p. 119

I was teaching a class at the Divinity School. The students were presenting case studies of memorable episodes in their ministry. A student presented a conversation that occurred while he was student pastor of a small North Carolina congregation. A woman in the church came to him and asked, What does the Methodist Church believe about speaking in tongues? The minister replied, Oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve gotten into that.

She replied that while she had not gotten into it, in her Wednesday Women’s Bible Group, during the prayer, her head had fallen back, her lips had moved, and some strange power had held her. She wondered what it meant.

Do you think you may still be going through grief over the death of your daughter? asked the Duke-educated pastor.

Sure, the woman said. Do you think this was due to grief?

Have you considered seeking professional help? persisted the pastor.

Well, that’s why I came to you, said the woman.

In other words, there can be only one explanation for such religious outburst—the woman must be nuts. He never assumed that what might be going on here was a reworking of Acts 2. There is only one explanation offered—Lady, you’re drunk!

Does the word religion stem from the same Latin word relegare, as in to relegate? Is religion a way that we relegate God to some forgotten corner and put him on the shelf?

Tom Long tells of teaching children in a confirmation class. It was a very small group, Tom says. In fact, there were only three young girls in the class. In one session, I was instructing them about the festivals and seasons of the Christian year, and when we came to the discussion of Pentecost, I asked them if they knew what Pentecost was. Since none of the three knew, I proceeded to inform them that Pentecost was ‘when the church was sitting in a group and the Holy Spirit landed on them like tongues of fire on their heads. Then they spoke the gospel in all the languages of the world.’ Two of the girls took this information in stride, but the third looked astonished, her eyes wide. I looked back at her, and finally she said, ‘Gosh, Reverend Long, we must have been absent that Sunday.’

—Thomas G. Long, Shepherds & Bathrobes (Lima, OH: C.S.S. Publishing, 1987), p. 15

Because I preach in a university chapel, and because you are probably American mainline Protestants, I expect that, if you were honest, upon hearing of the Spirit’s descent in Acts 2, you are like that little girl. I must have missed church that Sunday.

One Sunday, about seven years ago, I got a little carried away in a sermon, raised my voice, waved an arm. Someone seated in the fourth row, obviously a first-time visitor, got carried away and shouted out, Amen! Right on! Yes!

I said, Sounds as if someone doesn’t really want to be here in a mainline, first-class, respectable university chapel. Ushers, where are you?

Trinity Sunday First Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 1:1–2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Related to a God Named Trinity

Selected reading

Matthew 28:16-20

Theme

The Trinity is a statement about the specific, peculiar, unique nature of the God who has come to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is not some dry, incomprehensible, and irrelevant dogma of the church; it is that which attempts to talk about the wonder that is at the heart of our faith.

Introduction to the readings

Genesis 1:1–2:4a

In an overflowing of divine creativity, the world is created.

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, speaks of the love of God that comes to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Matthew 28:16-20

The risen Christ bids farewell to his disciples, promising to be with them until the end of the world, blessing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Prayer

Lord God, come to us in all your delightful difference and thick complexity. Come to us as Lover, Beloved, and the Loving. Come to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Save us from our futile attempts to try to tame your immensity, to worship you as less than you are. Enable us to grow up toward you rather than to try to shrink you down to our limits. Come to us, we pray, so that we might come to you as you are. Amen.

Encountering the text

I know, I know, our congregations don’t want doctrinal preaching, theologically heavy sermons, and lectures on church dogma. But do they need preaching that celebrates the grand convictions of the Christian faith?

It is a great pastoral gift for people to know the truth, the truth about God. Our doctrine is our church’s attempt to tell the truth about who God is and what God is doing among us.

Trinity Sunday is an invitation to us preachers to explore one of the great theological achievements of the Christian faith: the doctrine of the Trinity. We shall therefore throw caution to the wind and attempt an unashamedly doctrinal sermon on the Trinity. We shall thereby attempt to offer pastoral care to our congregations through the application of doctrine to their lives.

We shall lift up two basic ideas about the Trinity: (1) the Trinity is at the very center of our particular claims about the God who has met us in Jesus Christ; and (2) the Trinity is an affirmation that, at the heart of God, at the center of God’s Creation, is relationship.

Proclaiming the text

When I was a college chaplain, whenever the topic of religious differences on campus came up, there was always someone to say, Well, I’m Methodist, you’re Muslim, she’s Jewish, but after all, we all worship the same God, don’t we?

Eventually I found it necessary to answer no. As Christians we do not believe in some monistic, generic, vague, easily managed, and inoffensive god, we believe that God is Trinity. I suspect that some say, Christians and Muslims worship the same God, or some scholars speak of Jews, Muslims, and Christians as members of the Abrahamic faiths, transforming Jews and Christians into less offensive Judeo-Christians because they are desperate to unite a country with deep divisions. Long ago our government found that if you make God generic, private, and personal (in other words, the antithesis of Trinity) you are free to run the state as you please. Christians are those who believe that we haven’t said God until we’ve said Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As John Wesley put it in his sermon on the Trinity, these three are one.

I am going to try something risky this morning. I am going to try to preach Christian doctrine to you—the thickest, most challenging, and mysterious of all doctrines, the doctrine of the Trinity. I do so not only because this is Trinity Sunday but also because we are gathered together in the name of a specific, unique God whom we name as the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the greatest intellectual achievement of Christian theology. It is our talk about God. It is that which preserves Christian talk about God from sliding into that morass of trivial inconsequentiality some call spirituality—that is, a projection of our vaunting egos and narcissistic longings onto something called god. The Trinity is that which makes clear that whoever we mean with the name God, we’re not talking about us. Yet most important for us this morning, the Trinity is that which indicates the sort of lives we are called to live if we are to worship the true and living God rather than the host of false gods that vie for our attention.

A masterful interpreter of the Trinity, David Cunningham puts it this way: In the Trinity Christians attempt to account for the complex biblical testimony that (1) God remained all-powerful and transcendent, and yet (2) Jesus, who died and was raised by God, was somehow also God; moreover, (3) the Spirit, poured out on the Church, is also God, and yet (4) there is only one God (These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998], p. 23).

From the beginning of Christian thought, we have struggled to do justice to thinking about God as a trinity. Augustine, in his Confessions, suggests a thought experiment in which we acknowledge the way that we are thinking subjects: existence, knowledge, and will, all distinct but inseparable ways of being thinking selves. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our life together is a play upon the world stage in which God is simultaneously the author, the main actor, and the director. God writes the script, performs the play, and directs the play, bringing in a host of other actors whom God prompts to ensure the enactment of the drama (Hans Urs von Balthasar). God is the lover, the beloved, and the love (Augustine); God is the speaker, the argument, and the audience.

But I didn’t bring you down this path simply to talk abstractly about Christian theology. I want us to talk about the practical consequences of the Trinity. Charles Wesley sang in one of his hymns, You whom he ordained to be Transcripts of the Trinity. You and I are created by the Trinity to be transcripts of the Trinity. God is writing a message to the world upon us, speaking to the world of God’s inner being through our lives that are formed in the likeness of the Trinity. What does that mean for us?

You’ll be relieved to know that I don’t intend this morning to go into all the implications of our affirmation of the Trinity. Let me highlight just one: the Trinity stresses that God, all reality, is relational in nature. The European Enlightenment invented the idea of a person as isolated, inner, individual consciousness, detached from the world. We have now reclaimed (thank you sociology, psychology, history, and literature) the Trinitarian insight that personhood can’t be divorced from relation. (You are the body of Christ and parts of each other, 1 Cor 12:27, is the way Paul puts this relationality in the church.)

Modern Trinitarian thought tends to be fond of latching on to a word, used by Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor, to describe the inner life and the outer working of the Trinity as perichoresis. It means literally in the Greek to dance around. But it can also mean interpenetration (Latin, circumincession: coinherence) suggesting dynamic, intimate participation of the Three who are One. We are thus free to pray to any member of the Trinity, because these three are one.

The Trinity is complete, mutual, self-giving love. Christians define that slippery word love through the Trinity. Too often, in our culture, I love you can mean I love me and want to use you to love me even more. Too often, love is self-receiving rather than self-giving. Because we have met