Christ’s New Address: Sermons for the Lectionary, Year C, Pentecost through Christ the King

By Bruce L. Taylor

Christ's New Address completes a six-volume series of sermons by Bruce Taylor based on the Common Lectionary (Revised). Together, they provide a theologically rich, sacramentally reflective, ecumenically compatible, and biblically centered collection of proclamations for Sundays and major feast days. An appendix to this volume offers a sermon preached as a departure from the lectionary following the tornado that devastated Norman, Oklahoma, when the author was serving as a pastor in Ponca City. His sermons bear strong evidence of his commitment to Christian unity and dedication to the church's heritage as well as his conviction of its contemporary relevance through corporate witness and individual discipleship. Included in this compilation for the second half of the church year, featuring Gospel readings from Luke, are several story sermons that illustrate the use of this form of preaching within the lectionary framework. Christ's New Address is offered for use by preachers and devotional readers alike, who will find it an engaging invitation to the beauty of sacramental worship and the comfort and challenge of the scripture passages that are commended for Christian worship in the lectionary cycle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Nov 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666726824

Bruce L. Taylor

Bruce L. Taylor is a retired Presbyterian Church (USA) minister and attorney and lives in the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. He graduated from Northwestern University (BA), the University of Denver (JD), the Iliff School of Theology (MDiv), and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (PhD), and has served congregations in Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, Nevada, and Oklahoma. He remains active in congregational and denominational life and has published six previous Wipf and Stock titles.

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Introduction

This volume concludes a homiletical journey through the three-year cycle of the Common Lectionary (Revised) with sermons for the latter half of Year C, which features the Gospel of Luke. As each of the canonical Gospels is shaped by its own perspectives and emphases regarding the teachings, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus, sermons that seek faithfully to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and the companion lectionary passages from the Hebrew scriptures, Book of Acts, and the New Testament epistles will echo and be influenced by the peculiarities of the Gospel being expounded. The preacher and congregation participate in a joint exercise of appropriating the long Christian tradition of attending to the revered testimony of scripture and weaving their own life as a faith community into the ongoing story of God and God’s people. In the process, the original horizon of scriptural witness is broadened and lengthened to include the experience of later generations, including our own, within the orbit of the Bible’s survey and concern.

Alone among the canonical Gospels, Luke begins with a description of the process by which the book came to be. Whether the Theophilus to whom it is addressed was a specific individual or a generic term for the believers whom the writer anticipated would read and hear his words, his explanation of seeking out and weighing the testimony of witnesses to the words and events he chose to include in his Gospel dispels any notion that the scriptures somehow dropped out of heaven. And regardless of the possibility that the writer’s motive was perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of a single reader, the book quickly came to be cherished by a community of believers, and then came to be shared by other congregations of Christ’s followers as they discovered its value for their own lives of faith and witness.

One of the identifying characteristics of the Gospel of Luke (and the book of Acts, its second volume, if you will) is a strong interest in the Holy Spirit. Scholars, expositors, and laity alike have noted that the Spirit is spoken of in Luke more than any of the other three Gospels in the scriptural canon. In addition, it appears more than twice that often in the Acts of the Apostles. It may be that interest in the Holy Spirit in the early church, as evidenced in such frequency, prompted the author of both books to project that emphasis back into the Gospel narrative. Whatever the reason, Luke’s lively interest in the Spirit brings into special prominence the entire subject of inspiration, and we may judge that the author’s attention to the work of the Spirit must have reflected or been occasioned by his own Christian community’s experience of the Spirit active in its midst.

In his useful and cogent book, The Inspiration of Scripture: Problems and Proposals, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia Professor of Biblical Interpretation and former Executive Secretary of the Society of Biblical Literature Paul J. Achtemeier advanced the view that appreciation for the community of faith out of which the scripture grew and for which it was written is central to understanding the entire phenomenon of its inspiration.

It is precisely the traditions of the community that provide the context within which [the] Scriptures are produced.

. . .

The spokesman for God draws on the faith and traditions of the community to which the Word of God is to be spoken. We will form the clearest picture of the originators of Scripture if we understand them not as individuals who have gotten their message independently of any other cultural or social forces—as outsiders, as it were, come to say something totally new to a group as strange to the originator as he to them—but rather as members of a community which draws the meaning of its existence from the traditions that the spokesmen are also employing to understand and communicate God’s message to those people. Spokesmen and Scripture are thus intimately involved in the life and in the tradition-based self-understanding of that community.

Much of what we have in Scripture is the written sedimentation of the historic experiences of that community, and the resulting understanding of itself and its meaning within God’s plan.

. . .

Scripture and community develop together, and cannot be understood apart from each other.¹

The Bible was not imposed on the covenant community. Scripture grew out of the community of faith, memorializing and responding to its faith. As regards the community composed of the followers of Jesus and acknowledging him as the Son of God, the Messiah promised by the prophets in the written testimony they had inherited,

church and Scripture are joint effects of the working out of the event of Christ. The close tie between community and Scripture has a most important consequence for our thinking about the inspiration of that Scripture. It is this: if Scripture is to be understood as inspired, then that inspiration will have to be understood equally in terms of the community that produced those Scriptures. Inspiration, in short, occurs within the community of faith, and must be located at least as much within that community as it is within an individual author.²

Nor is that process of inspiration as a community event unique to the Christian church and to New Testament times. It was just as much at work in the development, authentication, and adoption of what the very first Christians (and Jesus himself) regarded as scripture—the collection of texts commonly referred to in the church as the Old Testament. The scriptures were not inspired because they were composed by writers who were inspired. The authors were using and sometimes reworking material that had been transmitted over generations within their communities, and some of which had been adopted from other communities when judged to be expressive of the truth of God as the adopting community experienced it.

Those traditions, shaped by the community which existed for God’s purposes and by [God’s] providence, shared in divine inspiration from their inception. Inspiration is therefore to be located as much in the community of faith, out of whose experience traditions were formulated and reformulated, as in the process of giving final shape to the Biblical books.

. . . T

he composition of Scripture is not so much the point of inspiration as it is the culmination of the process by means of which the community sought to express its understanding of its own history with God.³

Scripture cannot be rightly understood if separated from the cradle of its development and the venue of its hearing—the community of faith which recognizes, acknowledges, and reads itself into the story of God’s people and which understands itself in light of the events to which the Bible gives witness. Parenthetically, this understanding of inspiration renders faithless any attempt to transform the Bible into an encyclopedia of biology or geology or any other subject irrelevant to its purpose of witnessing to the community’s identity as the people of God. And the extent to which traditions carry out their task of representing to the community the activity it must pursue and the shape it must assume in the light of the originating act of God is the extent to which they are inspired.⁴ The process through which the Bible came to be far separates the church’s doctrine of inspiration from any pious assertions of inerrancy or infallibility that the Bible does not claim for itself.

From the earliest writings that Jews and Christians regard as scripture, the process of inspiration has included the working and reworking of traditional materials to address in relevant ways faithful to those traditions of faith the new situations in which the community of faith has found itself. Thus, the writers of the particular Gospels cooperated with the Spirit by sometimes using the same words of Jesus in different scenes within their narratives. Just so, the modern preacher may find it relevant to incorporate Jesus's words into sermons, words with which Jesus purportedly addressed particular situations in his own life and ministry, in addressing contemporary events and challenges in church and society. The modern preacher—at least someone whose intention is not simply to entertain or focus attention on her- or himself—is a part of the continuing inspired enterprise of finding the truth of God in Jesus Christ and, within the life and experience of the community of faith, proclaiming that truth in ways that are faithful to the tradition and meaningful for discerning and prompting a faithful response to God’s purpose in contemporary circumstances that the ancient compilers and editors of the tradition could not have imagined. The process of inspiration that includes the sober and conscientious preparation and presentation of a sermon in corporate worship on the Lord’s Day and other occasions is not alien to the work of the Holy Spirit in the long history of development and preservation and transmission of the Bible, and in fact should be understood as an integral part of a phenomenon which has not yet concluded and will not be complete until history’s culmination.⁵

Luke discerned the Spirit at work in bold and exciting new ways in the life, ministry, and resurrection presence of Jesus Christ within the church, bursting old wineskins and erasing old boundaries. The same Holy Spirit, the living and vivifying presence of Christ, is at work in the church today, in innumerable communities of faith, seeking to root the covenant people in the traditions testified to by scripture so that those very traditions may be extended to the full limits of faithful response to the living Word, obediently embracing the world in love and mercy. The faithful preaching of the word, and the faithful hearing of the word proclaimed, are part and parcel of the continuing story of inspiration as the Bible understands and models it.

1

. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture,

114

–

15

.

2

. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture,

116

.

3

. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture,

117

.

4

. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture,

125

.

5

. Achtemeier explained that new situations and the new interpretations of tradition they elicited are understood by Scripture to be further evidence of the care and providence of the living God. If Israel and the church find the presence of God’s Spirit in the primal event of their existence, and in the traditions that event summoned forth, they also find that presence in the new situations confronting them, and seek to follow the guidance of that Spirit in their reinterpretations of their traditions. It is for that reason that the dynamic nature of the traditions contained in our Biblical writings point to their inspiration, and must be acknowledged as playing a role in any attempt to understand the inspiration of Scripture (Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture,

131)

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The Day of Pentecost

Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada

June 3, 2001

Acts 2:1–21

Romans 8:14–17

John 14:8–17, 25–27

The Spirit Comes to Old First

Not much ever seemed to change at Old First. Actually, that’s why some members continued to drive in from the suburbs even after St. Andrew’s opened. Predictability was one of the virtues that the congregation had always valued, especially the predictability of the sermon being exactly eighteen minutes long, no more, no less, though less would have met with greater approval than more. For instance, the fact that the service was over at precisely twelve o’clock every Sunday permitted Frances McGregor to rendezvous at the Swiss Chalet restaurant with her friend, Edith O’Connor, whose Catholic mass also ended precisely at twelve o’clock, unless, of course, Father Boulette lost his place in the missal, which, to hear Edith talk about it, was happening more and more in recent months.

So things had been out of kilter ever since Brian Templeton had been elected to the session. Many of the church members thought that a young face on the church board would signal that Old First would have a future beyond the greying heads in the pews on a typical Sunday morning. New blood was necessary if the old traditions were to be carried on, if Old First were to maintain its role as a stable community institution at a time when everything else seemed to be changing. There were so few anchors anymore, so few dependabilities. Ian Thompson, good old Ian, could tell you about the time that someone on the session proposed replacing the threadbare green carpet down the center and side aisles of the sanctuary with mauve—mauve!—which had led someone, tongue-in-cheek to be sure, to suggest going all the way and installing red, to which Ed Douglas, who loved to give the second to motions but also drifted off to sleep during meetings sometimes, shouted Second as he was emerging from one of his slumbers, and so a vote was actually taken to put down red carpet, and it almost succeeded—well, eleven to five, but that was the closest vote on anything that anyone could remember. Ian Thompson immediately proposed replacing the green with green, and, cool heads prevailing, the motion passed fifteen to one. That one started coming to worship less often and eventually resigned from the session and left the church altogether.

Ian Thompson could also tell you about the time the pastor search committee interviewed a young man in his early fifties—from somewhere out west, he was—who, inspecting the financial report and seeing the size of the endowment fund and learning that over a million dollars was reserved for stabilizing the tall brick steeple—a landmark that identified the location of St. George’s Square over rooftops for miles around—had the indiscretion to pronounce the church a museum and withdrew his name from consideration as pastor—not that he would have been seriously considered after such a faux pas anyway.

So it was considered astonishing when Brian Templeton, at only his fourth session meeting, said that he thought the church should make some effort to attract members of the growing East Asian immigrant population into the congregation. A couple of the elders had leaned forward, thinking that they had not quite heard correctly what he had said, and in fact were not quite sure that they had heard Brian making a suggestion at what was, after all, only his fourth appearance among them. He did not seem to realize that the reason he had been nominated by some of the elders for election to the session in the first place was in order to learn how things were done so that he could help insure that they would continue to be done that way when their time was up. Socialologist! muttered one elder to another in disgust on their way out to the parking lot that night, apparently a comment on Brian’s field of teaching at the university—sociology—rather than his political leanings, which, though it was rumored that he was a socialist, were by no means certain. Either of these, of course, would have been a sufficient explanation for Brian’s impertinent behavior and radical suggestion.

If only Reverend Clarkson hadn’t attended that workshop on evangelism at the recent meeting of the General Assembly, what Brian suggested would not have mattered that much. You know, Reverend Clarkson said in response to Brian’s comment, which otherwise had met with uniform silence in the session meeting, I’ve been thinking along those lines myself.

"He’s not being paid to think! said Alice Humphries to Marcus Lindholm after the meeting. He’s being paid to save our souls!"

There are a lot of Asian people moving into the city, and there’s no reason to suppose that some of them wouldn’t find First Presbyterian an appropriate church home. I hear that the Koreans are largely Presbyterian . . .

Mrs. Humphries had given a sort of a snort at this comment, though no one else responded. Isn’t reaching out to others what Christianity is about? Brian persisted, unwisely, as some thought. Didn’t Jesus tell his disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations?

Quite true, responded Ian Thompson. "But we’ve done that, haven’t we? We’ve sent missionaries to the heathens, haven’t we? What you’re speaking of isn’t really the same thing, is it? I mean, they’ve come here now, thick as thieves, and if they want a church, they can start one of their own. I’m sure they’d be more comfortable being with their own sort, anyway. I know I am."

"Whether they would or wouldn’t," Brian continued, still ignoring his proper role on the church board, "perhaps they haven’t the financial means of doing so. After paying the immigration fees, starting over in a new country, finding entry-level jobs, and securing housing, they probably don’t have much in the way of leftover funds. Think how impossible it would be to start this church over on the basis of what current congregation members here pledge."

This, of course, was not a diplomatic thing to have said, and everyone felt the atmosphere in the session room thickening. Reverend Clarkson came to the common aid with a suggestion that seemed at first quite innocuous. Why don’t we pray about this during the month, and perhaps revisit the question at our next meeting? In the meantime, it might not hurt to get some statistics from the city government and make some inquiries about how we could go about welcoming our new Asian neighbors to the church. The phrase our new Asian neighbors elicited another snort from Alice Humphries.

Do you really think this would be a good idea? Marcus Lindholm asked Brian Templeton over crumb cake after worship the next Sunday. Frances McGregor, of course, had already slipped out of the building for her weekly lunch with Edith O’Connor, but a respectable number of people did linger a few minutes to chew on the sermon and swallow the pastry. "I mean, everything is going smoothly now as it is at Old First. We’re comfortable with who we are."

"But is God comfortable with who we are? Brian responded. How do we know that the way we are is the way Jesus Christ wants us to remain?"

Marcus Lindholm was taken aback by this response—he’d never been asked such questions before. Well, he said after a few moments of thought, "if Jesus didn’t like things the way they are, he’d certainly be the first one to change them, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t need the session to discuss it and vote about it."

Which is precisely what Brian Templeton—whatever he might have thought of Marcus’s answer originally—reminded the older session member of when, lo and behold, the very next Sunday, in through the front door walked a young Asian family who sat down, before the usher had recovered his faculties, in Ian Thompson’s pew not sixty seconds before Ian’s usual arrival time with his wife, Margaret. How could you let that happen? Ian had asked the profusely apologetic Billy Higgins. Now we have no place to sit! Billy had looked around the sanctuary, still less than a quarter full, like most Sundays. I’ve half a mind to go home! Ian said.

Reverend Clarkson was standing within earshot, lined up behind the beadle and the choir in the forming processional. Surely there are other seats available, he said to Ian and Margaret. How about up there in front, near the pulpit?

The look on Ian’s face showed that he did not know whether to take the minister’s suggestion seriously. Please, Captain, Margaret Thompson said to her husband, let’s not make a scene. Let’s just go in and sit anywhere, and she led him down the dull green-carpeted aisle as he was muttering something about having been a member of the church for over fifty years and guessed he knew which was his pew and which wasn’t his pew.

Whatever inspired Reverend Clarkson to ask for prayer requests that day, of all days, no one could say. But he did, in spite of the fact that the other two or three times he had done so during his six years at Old First not a single voice had been raised in petition or intercession—not even the week that it had been announced the local football team was being sold to new owners and moved to a larger, more lucrative market. That day, to everyone’s amazement, one of the Asian worshipers stood up. Please, the man said in broken but understandable English, we have just come from Hong Kong. We want to give God thanks for our new home in this wonderful country, and also we want to pray for ourselves and others like us, that we may contribute to our new country and also have jobs for all our people so they will have homes and food. Thank you. As his brief request had come toward its conclusion, his voice choked with emotion, and, as he sat down, he dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.

Only Reverend Clarkson and Brian Templeton spoke to the visitors after the service. Maybe that’s why they didn’t return the next Sunday, or the next. Reverend Clarkson had written his usual visitors’ letter the day after they had attended worship, addressed to the location Mr. Woo had put down on the visitors’ register in the narthex. He had tried telephoning, but information had no telephone number for a Woo family at that address. That’s when he decided to drive over to the