The Bible and The New York Times

By Fleming Rutledge

This collection of vividly illustrative sermons by a leading contemporary Episcopalian preacher eloquently heralds the Christian call to faith in the face of modern challenges.

Widely known for their up-to-the-minute relevance to modern life, the sermons of Fleming Rutledge are always out on the edge, challenging the boundaries of contemporary thought and experience. No issue is too threatening, no event too shocking, no question too impertinent to be addressed. Following Karl Barth's dictum that sermons should be written with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, Rutledge weaves the changing events of the daily news together with the unchanging rhythms of the church seasons. Her book leads readers through the liturgical year, from All Saints to Pentecost, showing how the biblical story intersects with our own stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 18, 1999
• ISBN: 9781467427050

Fleming Rutledge

 Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest, a best-selling author, and a widely recognized preacher whose published sermon collections have received acclaim across denominational lines. Her other books include Help My Unbelief, Three Hours: Sermons for Good Friday, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, and The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, which won Christianity Today's 2017 Book of the Year Award.

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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1996

The New Form of Speech

ST. JOHN’S CHURCH, SALISBURY, CONNECTICUT

So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.

Romans 10:17

Agood deal of attention is being given nowadays to the language fof the Presidential campaign. It’s generally agreed that Mr. Dole has a problem with language. His lack of eloquence is such a handicap that novelist Mark Helprin was brought in to write some of his speeches. The President and Mr. Kemp, on the other hand, need to be put on a word diet.¹

In this age of images, with our children and grandchildren certain to be more familiar with cyberspace than with books, we need to find new ways to convey the power of language in human affairs. We have all heard the saying, The pen is mightier than the sword,² but in another twenty years there will be no one left alive who personally remembers what it was like when Winston Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it off into battle.³ Two years ago during the 50th anniversary of D-Day, many of us older heads were shocked to realize how little our own children knew of the titanic struggle that gripped the globe for seven years. It will not therefore be amiss if we call to mind some of Churchill’s words as they fortified not only the British, standing alone against the Nazis, but also the waiting, watching, listening Americans half a world away:

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

(Speech in the House of Commons, June 4, 1940)

There is a Scottish proverb, Fine words butter no parsnips. We know what is meant by this, but we also know that in certain times and seasons words can make all the difference. Andrew Young has recently told us a detail about the March on Washington in 1963 that we did not know. The older veterans of the civil rights movement scheduled their own speeches early and Martin Luther King’s speech late, because they thought the TV cameras would be gone by then.⁴ There is delicious irony in that; the last shall be first and the first last, as our Lord said. The world was transformed forever as a result of those last words that day.

One of the unique features of the Judeo-Christian tradition is its primary emphasis on the power of speech. The agent of the creation itself is the Word of God. The Psalmist says, By the word of the Lord the heavens were made.… For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth (Psalm 33:6, 9). His mere word is enough: God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light (Genesis 1:3). God’s Word makes things happen. In the language of the apostle Paul, God calls into existence the things that do not exist (Romans 4:17). This is completely different from religion in general. Not even Islam, which is considered one of the three religions of the book, has anything comparable to the Biblical concept of revelation through the Word of God. We cannot understand even the most basic things about the Christian faith if we do not grasp this fundamental Biblical assertion: In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). God does not exist in unbroken silence. He has communicated. He has gone out from himself in self-expression. But this expression is not through vision; it is through audition. As Martin Luther wrote, the Christian experience of God is acoustical. God has spoken. His speech, his communication, is his Word. In all the Bible there is not a single example of God appearing without saying anything. If there is a vision without audition, it is not God. As the prophet Habakkuk said, "Write the vision" (2:2). Only through God’s speaking can we know anything about him.

This is poorly understood in the mainline churches today. I remember an encounter when I was a young seminarian, very excited about my preaching classes. A fashionably skeptical Episcopal clergyman said to me, I don’t preach any more. I never even go into the pulpit any more. I just talk with my congregation. How can human beings presume to know the Word of God? Looking back, I am amused to remember his own arrogance; he was openly relishing the opportunity of taking a young enthusiast down a few pegs. I was duly dashed for a while but not for too long, I’m thankful to say; I had professors who understood the doctrine of revelation and who believed it.

You may be shocked to think of this clergyman who never preached, but I assure you that he was one of many. Disbelief was all the rage among the clergy in the 60s and 70s, and we have not recovered by any means. There is a real crisis of confidence about preaching in the church. Many churchgoers no longer have any idea what preaching is, and since they do not know, they no longer expect to hear it.

The dictionary gives us a definition of preaching that has nothing to do with the real thing. My favorite dictionary definition is this one: To give religious or moral instruction, especially in a tedious, didactic, tiresome, or unwelcome manner. That’s what Madonna had in mind in her song, Papa, don’t preach. Popular culture being as pervasive it is, it is a daunting prospect to try to correct this misapprehension. It may be that God has called forth the great black preachers of America to keep vital Biblical preaching alive in our time.

In the tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (v. 17), the apostle Paul writes, So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. That is how the gospel spread. The Christian faith swept through the Mediterranean world because God gave the early Christians a new language in which to preach Christ. The best book I know about this new language was written by Amos Wilder, the brother of the playwright Thornton Wilder. The first Christians, he writes, were convinced that the promises of the Old Testament had come true; God had given them new tongues, a new song, a new speech.⁵ That speech had a power behind it that was, and remains, unique.

When the Word of God is read and expounded in common worship, it has the character of an event. That’s why Christian preaching is different from any other kind of public address. A lot of people don’t realize that; we hear of rabbis and imams preaching sermons, but with all due respect, that is not what they are doing. (To be honest, many Christian ministers are not preaching sermons either. They may be giving instruction, exhortation, or inspiration, but they are not preaching.) There were a lot of speeches at the original March on Washington in 1963, but there was only one sermon.⁶ There is all the difference in the world between speaking and preaching. When preaching is going on, you feel the dynamism. You know something is happening. Wilder and others call it a speech-event.

Preaching is a human activity, but it is derived from God. It has nothing to do with the religious accomplishment or perfected piety or spiritual achievement of the preacher. It is an impossible activity; in that respect, my skeptical clergy friend was quite right. It is not possible for mere mortals to know the Word of the Lord. If it depended on us, we would remain in silence and in ignorance. This is the basic premise of the Bible. Speaking of God is only possible because God has spoken to us. To use the words of our liturgy, God opens our lips so that our mouths can show forth his praise. Incredible and foolish though it may seem, God has turned his message over to us. That’s why we are called an apostolic church; we are founded upon this impossible possibility;⁷ God has summoned human beings, flawed and sinful, to be his apostles, to be his mouthpieces. This is the scandal … of the gospel; there is no Word of God without the word of the human herald.⁸

Perhaps, as you hear me saying these things, you can imagine the risk and the danger of preaching. It’s scary to undertake preaching. The pulpit at Grace Church in New York where I was for 14 years had a high pulpit with a number of steps going up. I never climbed them without remembering Donald Coggan, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said that if your knees did not tremble as you ascended the pulpit stairs you were not fit to preach. For twenty years I have had a prayer of Martin Luther in my office; I always hang it where it is the last thing I see as I open the door to go into the church to preach the gospel. It begins, O Lord, I am not worthy. No preacher is worthy. That is just the point. Only God is worthy. Only God is great. Only God can make his Word live. When preaching is working the way it is supposed to, the Word of God causes the preacher to disappear into the message. The Word escapes from the preacher altogether and becomes a transforming event in the lives of the hearers. Only God can make that happen. No amount of eloquence on the part of the preacher can make it happen. In fact, too much eloquence can work against the Word, because it draws attention to the preacher instead of the message. As St. Paul says in a key passage: When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words of wisdom. For I was determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (I Corinthians 2:1-5).

So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. That phrase, the preaching of Christ, is an odd one. If we think about it, it will unlock the secret of preaching for us. We wouldn’t say that a Buddhist preached Buddha. We wouldn’t say that a rabbi preached Moses. We wouldn’t say that an imam preached Mohammed. Only in Christianity do we have this odd expression, to preach Christ. Christian preaching is like nothing else in all the world of language. Here is the reason. In the preaching of the Word of God, the risen, reigning, living Jesus Christ has promised to be present in power. He is present in the Word, because he is himself the Word. God’s speech, God’s self-expression, is Jesus himself. The famous prologue of John’s Gospel tells us: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him.… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-2, 14).

As our American culture drifts farther and farther away from its Christian moorings, a movement that is probably unstoppable, it is going to become more and more important for those of us who are Christians to be, not just remnants of a denomination, but committed disciples of a living Lord. Week by week, in the preaching of the Word, we will encounter Jesus of Nazareth, not as the so-called historical Jesus, but as the risen Christ. When the Christian preacher ascends the pulpit steps, he does not go to lay down human words from on high. The only person who is on high is the reigning Christ. I, like you, am one who despite my sin will be encountering him in his love for me, his love for you. He comes to meet us, preacher and congregation alike, in his Word. The preacher is in the same place as those who hear, for the preacher is only a channel, a vessel. She is like John the Baptist, who said, He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30).

Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. There is no greater purpose this morning than that you should come to a deeper trust in our Lord through what we together have heard. May we open our lives to the Word of life this very day and receive from him the love from which we shall never be separated, for this life and for the life to come.

Fides ex auditu. Amen.

THE FEAST OF ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS 1996

What the Angel Said

ST. JOHN’S CHURCH, SALISBURY, CONNECTICUT

And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua … said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries? And he said, No; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come.

Joshua 5:13-15

And the angel said unto them, Fear not.…

Luke 2:9-10

Here is the front cover of Time, December 27, 1993: The New Age of Angels, it announces; 69% of Americans believe they exist. What in heaven is going on? Three years later I don’t see any slackening of commercial and quasi-religious interest in angels. Angel sightings are reported on the Internet. Angel experts show up on Oprah and Geraldo. In fact, somebody is making a lot of money out of this current enthusiasm. In addition to the ubiquitous Christmas ornaments, you can buy angel note paper, angel address books, angel calendars, angel key chains, and a whole shelf full of books including one called Touched By Angels: True Cases of Close Encounters of the Celestial Kind, which as far as I can tell is a glossy, expensive version of the supermarket tabloid stories about extraterrestrials and aliens. A more recent book by the same author was a selection of the Literary Guild. It offers practical advice for making angelic contact and tapping into angelic resources. In other words, America is in the throes of angel worship. To many observers, there is a manifest link between angels and the self-help craze: Get in touch with your inner angel, we are advised. Simply be the angel that you are.

Most Christian theologians take a dim view of this therapeutic, New Age angle on angels. I have always loved angels myself — I decorate my house with them at Christmas just like everybody else — but I’m beginning to think it’s time to call a halt. The Bible has stern warnings against cults of angels. The whole first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews is explicitly directed against angel worship. I used to think this chapter from Hebrews was arcane and unteachable, but I certainly don’t think so any more; it might have been written this morning. Hebrews was addressed to a congregation that saw no contradiction between the worship of angels and the worship of the one true God. That was precisely the problem. In the Bible, angels are of no interest in themselves. They exist only to direct our attention to God. Indeed, in the Old Testament, they have no separate existence. They are pure, unmitigated divine presence. Thus, when Abraham entertains angels, when Jacob wrestles with an angel, when Gideon is stunned by the appearance of an angel, we soon learn that the almighty, transcendent God himself is present in the encounter. The Biblical angel is at the furthest possible remove from the guardian angel lapel pins available at the checkout counters.

In order to understand what angels are, we need to understand what they are not. Consider the pictures of angels that we see on greeting cards and in catalogs, especially at this time of year. These so-called angels are invariably adorable, pretty, feminine, sweet, or cute. They are blown in glass, carved in wood, draped in tinsel, painted with gilt, tinted with rouge, and coiffed with hairspray. They wouldn’t hurt a Lyme tick. These domesticated commercial angels are the last gasp of a trend begun in the Renaissance when angels began to be depicted as less remote, more human.¹ We have to go back to Byzantine, Romanesque, and medieval art to find the best representations.² These austere images have an iconic, hieratic look that hints at unearthly reality. They stare down the viewer. An art critic writes, Nowhere in Scripture is an angel cute. Isaiah’s seraphim have six wings and their cry fills the [temple] with smoke. Ezekiel’s cherubim have four wings, also four faces … their very feet sparkle like burnished brass.³ The angels of the Bible and of the best Christian art are not Barbie dolls with wings; they have a quality of strangeness, as though they were representatives of another order of reality — which indeed they are. When angels appear, it means the divine world has broken through into this one. For this reason, angelic appearances in the Bible always cause dread. Samson’s mother received a visitation, and we are told that the stranger’s countenance was like the countenance of an angel of God, very terrible (Judges 13:3).

If there were to be any doubt about this, look at the various Biblical references to angels. They don’t flutter about carrying songbooks and playing harps. They bring fire out of rock, smite the Egyptian firstborn, wake the dead with trumpets, swing the apocalyptic scythe over the earth in the Last Judgment. As Lord Byron wrote,

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d …

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal,

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!⁴

Angels are not household pets; angels are not decorations; angels are not magical talismans to help us get parking places and protect us from getting stuck in the snow. Angels do not draw attention to themselves, but to the pure holiness of God, both in his mercy and in his judgment. In the Time magazine article, a Catholic theologian is quoted as saying acerbically, If people want to get in touch with their angels, they’d be a lot better off working at a soup kitchen. That’s very apt, and very Biblical. Angels don’t appear at the beck and call of books instructing us to tap into angelic sources. Angels appear at the pure will of God and for no other cause. If there are any Angels in America right now they are less likely to appear with magic wands and showers of gold than bearing God’s judgment on us for abandoning America’s traditional compassion toward the defenseless and unfortunate. Christian people need to be a lot less focused on angel sightings and a lot more focused on the 15 percent cut in the Social Services Block Grant that until recently helped a lot of truly needy people, including the widows and orphans who, in the Old Testament, represent those for whom God has special concern.⁵

You see, God has a case against us. That is why his presence causes dread. That is why Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich (Each and every angel is terrible). That is why the first words of angels to human beings have to be Fear not. In the book of Judges, we read that during the Midianite raids on the Israelites, a strange man appeared to Gideon: When Gideon perceived that he was an angel of the Lord, Gideon said, ‘Alas, O Lord God! for I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face.’ And the Lord said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die (Judges 6:22-23). God’s judgment is encased in his mercy. The proper reaction to a seraphic appearance is one of fear, but the Lord protects his children from his judgment with his own compassion. He does this throughout the Bible. As we read in the prophet Isaiah, In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them (Isaiah 63:9). When the prophet Elijah is at the end of his tether and starving to death, God’s angel comes to feed and restore him (I Kings 19:4-8). When Daniel is thrown into the lion’s den, an angel appears to shut the mouths of the beasts (Daniel 6:21). When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace, King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up in haste. He said to his counselors, ‘Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?’ They answered the king, ‘True, O king.’ He answered, ‘But I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods’ " (Daniel 3:24-25).

There is something quite wonderful here. In the history of Biblical interpretation, this fourth figure in the fire is sometimes described as an angel, and sometimes, with the boldness of faith, identified as a pre-incarnation appearance of the Lord Jesus himself. Both of these interpretations have worked powerfully in the church. For in the last analysis, the true test of an angelic appearance is quite simple: Does it glorify Christ? If it does, then it’s an angel; if not, it is just one more religious fantasy.

In this Biblically illiterate age, very few Biblical stories are known. I suppose Noah’s Ark is chief among them. Another is the battle of Jericho, where the walls come a-tumblin’ down.⁶ Less well known is the fact that the narrative of the battle of Jericho contains one of the most remarkable of all the angel appearances in the Bible.

You will recall that Moses was forbidden to enter the promised land; he died, and the privilege of leading the people over the Jordan passed to the young and vigorous Joshua. On the night before the assault on Jericho, Joshua was encamped with the people of Israel. We read, "When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood before him with his drawn sword in his hand; and Joshua went to him and said to him, ‘Are you for us, or for our adversaries?’ And he said, ‘No; but as commander of the army of the Lord am I now come’ " (Joshua 5:13). The angel in the book of Joshua has been variously identified. The rabbis of early centuries thought he was Michael the archangel, the commander of the heavenly host. One of the most breathtaking sermons I know identifies Joshua’s angel, like the angel of the fiery furnace, as the Lord Christ himself.⁷ Again, that is as it should be, for in the end the angels exist only to manifest the divine presence and purpose. We need not concern ourselves with the name of the angel; but rather with what he says. Joshua quite naturally inquires of the strange man with the drawn sword, " ‘Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?’ And he said, ‘No; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come.’ "⁸

The irruption of the presence of God in the midst of our world upsets all our accustomed categories. We ask, Why do God’s people behave so badly? Why doesn’t God answer my prayer? Why did this happen? We ask, Are angels male or female? Is God a Republican or a Democrat? Is the Lord on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side? The startlingly irrelevant answer is neither one or the other, but simply No. God is not