Build and Plant
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

January 28, 2007


We’ve heard a lot lately about Bishop William Willimon of the United Methodist Church in North Alabama. Willimon is a prolific writer and I am looking forward to his most recent book, Conversations with Barth on Preaching. The photo on the cover looks innocuous, an open Bible with reading glasses on top and a folded newspaper underneath. It is the symbolic rendering of one of Karl Barth’s most remembered pieces of advice. Barth was a Swiss theologian who wrote even more prolifically, died in 1968, but is still considered the greatest theologian of the 20th century. Even Pope Pius XII called him the last of the Church Fathers.

Barth began as a pastor in the Reformed Church, serving for 10 years in Safenwil, a small industrial town in the north central region of Switzerland, so preaching every Sunday was his major challenge. He was unique in developing his systematic theology, Church dogmatics as he called it, around the central act of preaching the sermon to God’s people. And how does one preach? With the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The Bible is not about some other world; it is always about the world in the newspapers. It’s a good idea to read them side by side and let their mutual events work on one another.

After Karl Barth became a professor and was expelled from Nazi Germany, there was only one place you could be privileged enough to hear Barth preach. Barth preached regularly for years in the Basel City Jail. His collection of sermons, Liberty to the Captives, is the Isaiah scripture that Jesus is handed in the Nazareth synagogue. Barth told his captive congregation that they were more free than most people in the free world.

Jesus and Jeremiah did not have newspapers available in their towns, but I don’t doubt that the buzz around town was any less informed about things happening in the community that had an impact on the lives of those seated in the synagogue. And I tend to believe that people then did not talk about God outside the sanctuary any more than they do today.

It is in this space and this hour that you and I engage in an activity rarely done in the newspaper world - talk about God. Even in here it is not easy and not without some risk to speak of God. Barth also said that trying to say a word of God is impossible for a human being, and yet, we are required to speak, so we must speak knowing how impossible it is to do it right.

Jeremiah would have said Amen to that, for that’s what he was saying in so many words to God when confronted about being a prophet. He was young, inexperienced, perhaps physically challenged, and definitely scared. From what we know about Jeremiah’s subsequent preaching and prophetic declarations he had plenty to be afraid of, for he was beaten badly on occasions and thrown into prison. He was always in trouble, but what he talked about became tragically true. Speaking of God is not a glib bunch of words, but a rare moment of grace. We dare not speak of God, yet we cannot stop and we dare not stop speaking of God. Jeremiah sees God reach out and touch his mouth, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth... to pluck up and to overthrow... to build and to plant.”

All right now, how I am supposed to preach now, plucking up yet planting, overthrowing nevertheless building? How are you to speak of God in a religionless age? Our model should always be Jesus, but here in his first sermon, Jesus breaks all the rules that any preaching professor has ever devised.

Never mind preaching professors. As I was about to head off to my first pastoral charge upon completing seminary, Sachi Ishida, the secretary of the Japanese United Methodist congregation I had been serving as a youth pastor came up to me, looked me in the eye, and said, “Bob, for the first six months, keep your mouth shut and don’t change anything!” Poor Jesus, he didn’t have Sachi around to set him on the straight and narrow.

Jesus looked good, sounded impressive, but perhaps a little threatening to his hometown synagogue. Another rule is never to become the minister of the congregation in which you grew up. When people know you too well, they don’t want you to change because that always means they have to change. A prophet is without honour only in his own country. And then frankly, after an impressive but slow start, Jesus lets them have it with both barrels.

He does it by telling them a couple of Bible studies, who would ever fault him with that? Actually, the stories are far from innocent, for Elijah and Elisha, the two great iconoclastic prophets, were always in trouble with the establishment. Elijah in a time of drought is rescued by a widow from Zarephath, a Gentile pagan by our measure. Only she would help Elijah, none of the Israelite widows. Elisha could have cured thousands of Israelite lepers, but it was only Na’aman the Syrian general who had led his foreign enemy army to victory over Israel whom Elisha healed. The Nazareth synagogue crowd thought Jesus was saying they were not good enough anymore for the God who had adopted them as the chosen people.

Moreover, Elijah and Elisha were constantly struggling against Israelite kings who had gone a-whoring after pagan deities and had led Israel into an era of decadent culture. Is Jesus identifying our congregation, our Jewish culture with such a decadent era? Nobody is cited as saying a word, though one needs little imagination to think of the words tossed about, and voted with their feet, dragging Jesus out to the cliff to throw him to the rocks below. Is there any Bible story you know that could incense you to throw someone off a cliff? All I can say regarding my preaching is, thank God, we’re in Saskatchewan.

The Nazareth guys were also pretty annoyed that Jesus wouldn’t perform any of those miracles he had done in Capernaum, as if they again weren’t good enough for him. But when they take Jesus to the cliff, he turns around and walks right through their midst and goes on his way. Luke says it so nonchalantly that it is hard to take notice, but this had to be some kind of miracle if there ever was one, a miracle ironically at their own expense.

No wonder you and I are afraid to speak of God openly. It’s hard to keep your mouth shut for six months and not say anything, and when you do whisper the sacred name most people react as if you have said the foulest profanity. I have heard the stories of people who have spoken of God at work and as a result have been bluntly told that others have lost faith in their intellectual abilities. There certainly is no sweet Jesus here to imitate, so that how you venture to talk about the ineffable is never obvious and what precisely you are allowed to say never seems right and never really safe.

This may sound like running around in circles, but you and I speak a word of God because we must, because we have no choice. Like Jeremiah, God puts the words in our mouth, and that is precisely why the words don’t really sound right - the words are not ours, but God’s. Our words would be more measured and well-crafted, more poetic and crafty. Instead, we are compelled to stutter out something clumsy and crude, yet something so true and honest that we can no longer keep our mouths shut whether six months have passed or not. You and I have to speak of God for some undeniable reasons.

We have to speak of God to declare that life, our lives, are not controlled by and helpless before death. We have to speak because the Word became flesh and that’s how God has decided to work things out. Cynics and agnostics and demonic agents have long claimed that God is silent. As long as we don’t say a word of God, as long as you and I keep our mouths shut and are quiet lest others think we are ridiculous or even stupid, they are right. We have to speak liberty to the captives or we become entrapped in a world in which freedom is simply a word and not a reality or a practice. The more you know that it is arrogant or impossible for you to speak a word adequately of God, then you’ve got a word to speak. Today, this word has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan