Proclaiming the Christian Gospel in a Secular Culture

3:54 I'm going to be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, starting at the fifth verse of the first chapter. It is a passage of scripture that we are accustomed to hearing at the Advent season, just before Christmas. But for those of us who are gathered for this conference, I believe that this is a text for all seasons. Let us hear the good news. In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord, but they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both of them were getting on in years.

4:53 Once, when he was serving as a priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot according to the custom of the priesthood to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord Standing at the right side of the altar of incense When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified And fear overwhelmed him But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah Your prayer has been heard Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son And you will name him John You will have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink.

5:48 Even before his birth, he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah, he will go before him to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. Zechariah said to the angel, How well I know this is so, for I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years. The angel replied, I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God. I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news, but now because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak until the day these things occur.

6:46 Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. When he did come out, he could not speak to them. And they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. When his time of service was ended, he went to his home. and after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived and for five months she remained in seclusion she said this is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people Amen I assume that all of us who have gathered in this place for the pastor school are here because in one way or another we are interpreters of the Christian faith, communicators of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

7:49 Some of you are preachers and pastors. Some of us are seminary teachers, some campus administrators, some chaplains, some lay leaders and church authorities. We all have our different ministries. We all have our different places and ways of service. But what holds us all together today in this place is that in some way or another, we have all been called to the task of interpreting the Christian faith and proclaiming the Christian gospel. Now what in the world does that mean? In this kind of culture? is there anybody out there still listening?

8:36 The voice of the Christian gospel is not the only voice out there. In fact, it's not even the dominant voice anymore. There are more Muslims out there in America, you know, than Episcopalians these days. And even when our voice is heard, is it really heard? I was reading a review in the New York Times book review recently, and the reviewer got to the end of the review, and she said, All in all, this is a very disappointing book. It is filled with maudlin sentimentality, and as such it will probably appeal only to the clergy and other easily domesticated types.

9:12 It's true, isn't it? We live in a world that finds us to be fairly easily domesticated. It will let us be the chaplain at the Rotary Club to pray over the football team. But what does it mean to be an interpreter of the Christian faith and a communicator of the gospel?

9:35 Sometimes our uncertainty about that task is not created because of resistance and pressure from the world, but because of internal chaos in the church. Those of us who are not Southern Baptists have stood on the sidelines and watched with astonishment and horror to see that very fine tradition publicly dismantle itself. And those of us who are not Southern Baptists cannot and will not gloat over that because we recognize the controversy in our own midst as well. And the ministry itself today is also infused with a kind of uncertainty. I have a friend who believes that we have been completely co-opted by the therapeutic mindset, that we do not know how to be anything other than caregivers and sensitive providers of rather marshmallow, flabby pastoral care. Even seminaries, he says, have become like medical schools, focusing on the diseased and the broken.

10:37 If somebody is hurt, we know what to do as pastors. But if somebody is strong and resourceful and wants from us some vision of the Christian faith, we don't know what to do. We just circle them like vultures waiting for them to go down. sometimes it's not pressure from the world or chaos in the church that makes us uncertain of our role as communicators of the gospel. Sometimes it's our own internal doubt. There is no one in this room who has not wondered at some time or another if your ministry is in vain. When I was teaching at Erskine Seminary over in South Carolina, every now and then I would be invited to supply the pulpit of a small Presbyterian church out in the country from Lawrence, South Carolina.

11:36 It was a tiny congregation meeting in a decaying building with paint peeling off the walls. There were only about ten people in the congregation. All of them were over 80 years of age. They were delighted to see the young preacher come on Sunday morning, not so much because you brought a fresh sermon, but because your body was still young enough to stand on the commode lid and change the light bulb in the bathroom.

12:01 The way you get to this church is you go down the main street of Lawrence, you get to the traffic light, you turn left, and you go out into the country several miles. Now, when you make that left turn in Lawrence, there is on the right-hand side of the road a Studebaker dealer. Now, this was in the late 70s. Studebaker had been out of business for years, but there was, to all appearances, a working Studebaker dealer in Lawrence, South Carolina. Studebaker signed service department, showroom window in the showroom, a 1962 lark, looking for all the world like some mastodon in a museum of natural history. Now, I suppose what happened is that when Studebaker went bankrupt, the owner of this dealership just locked the door and walked away from it, leaving it as a shrine to nostalgia. But I used to fantasize that maybe the people in Lawrence were so out of it that they were not aware that Studebaker was out of business, that the dealer went to his dealership every day, pacing the showroom, wondering where the customers were and why his latest shipment of automobiles was now 15 years overdue.

13:08 That was amusing. until I would stand in the pulpit of that church with the paint peeling off the walls and the aging congregation sitting out there for all the world like a 1962 lark. And I wondered if maybe I were a Studebaker dealer of the soul who was not aware that the company was now belly up and there would be no more shipments from the factory. to me, communicator of the gospel. If we look closely at the story I just read to us from the Gospel of Luke, I think we may recognize our own faces and our own ministry in the face of this priest named Zechariah.

14:12 In many ways, he is discontinuous from us, but there are two aspects of his life I believe that we share. Number one, he is a religious functionary. It is his job to go into the holy place, to straighten up the liturgical clause, to set the candlesticks on the table, to turn the scripture to the proper page, to set the thermostat on the wall, to distribute the bulletins, and to make sure at his proper time and place that everything in the religious environment is in order. James Didis at Yale University once remarked in one of his books, he said, you know why people in an ordinary congregation love to sit in the back pew? It's not because they are disinterested in what's going on in the sanctuary. It is because ordinary people carry with them a certain lure of the holy, but fear of it as well.

15:12 They want to be where they can see it, but they do not want to get too close to it. But like Zechariah, we walk right into the holy place. We handle the holy things because we are, after all, religious functionaries. And like Zechariah, we are also barren. To be technical, of course, it is his wife Elizabeth who is barren, but the text will not let us get away with that. The text talks about the two of them. It uses couple language. They were both righteous. They were both without child. They were both getting on in years. They are both barren. and so are we.

16:09 We're not barren of education. We're not barren of information. We're not barren of technique. But in terms of the thing itself, being able to speak the gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that people can feel it, receive it, let it seep into their lives and make it their own in terms of the thing itself, the very thing we are about, we cannot do it. As Karl Barth once said, the only appropriate attitude for anyone who claims to be a communicator of the gospel is embarrassment. Because we do not have the very thing we claim to bring. and any time the word of God happens in our ministry it is because the free act of God's grace has chosen to impregnate our barren wounds.

17:18 The good news of this story is that what Zachariah and Elizabeth could not make for themselves, they are given as a gift. What they could not create out of their own work and sweat, their own egg and sperm, they are given as a gift. As the religious functionary works in the religious place, the angel appears to him, Zechariah, your prayers have been answered. Elizabeth will bear a son. And in the presence of that holiness, Zechariah is so astonished with this belief, he cannot even speak. The text tells us that he cannot speak, that he is left, as all ministers are finally left, simply to point toward the holiness that has happened because he does not believe.

18:19 what does he not believe does Zechariah not believe that God can do magnificent things yes Zechariah believes that he's read the scripture he knows of the God who split the Red Sea and brought the children of Israel out of bondage he knows that God can do great things what does he not believe does he not believe that God can bring fruitfulness in places of barrenness he knows that He's read about Abraham and Sarah. He believes that. What does he not believe?

18:54 What he doesn't believe is that it could have happened here. That holiness could have been born in his own barrenness and in his own ministry. When I became pastor of a church in Atlanta, I had not been there very long before I announced to the congregation that two Sundays hence, I was going to be opening up a confirmation class. And anybody who wished to be confirmed in the faith, or simply anyone who wished to learn more about the Christian faith, was welcome to come during the church school hour to my office. when the appointed day came I swung open the door of my office to greet the great throng that had assembled and there were three little girls there, only three little girls.

19:54 I was disappointed, of course, but tried to hide it, brought them into the office, and said, well, these are the three who have come. I'm going to do the best I can to teach them. I taught them all that I thought that they needed to know, and at one point in the teaching, I was telling them about the Christian year, and I said to them, I said, do you know about Pentecost? How many of you little girls know about Pentecost? And they didn't know about Pentecost. So I said, well, Pentecost was when the church was sitting around in a circle and tongues of fire came down from heaven and landed on their heads and they spoke the gospel in all the languages of the world. Two of the little girls took that news rather calmly, but one of them got her eyes as big as saucers. And when she could speak, she finally said, Reverend Long, we must have been absent that Sunday. What's wonderful about that experience is not that she misunderstood my teaching. What's wonderful about that is that she thought it could have happened in our church.

21:03 Where none of the rest of us expected anything but the offering plates to move, she thought the spirit could have renewed us and as her pastor I was left simply to point at that kind of holiness born in this place. They buried Grace Thomas at age 76 in the cemetery of the Decatur Baptist Church over in Georgia.

21:44 She'd lived a long life and a good life. You may not recognize the name Grace Thomas. No reason for you to, I suppose. She was born here in Birmingham, the second child of five to a streetcar operator and his wife. She fell in love with a boy from Atlanta, and she married him and moved to Atlanta and raised her children or family there. In order to supplement the family income, she took a job as a secretary at the Georgia State Capitol. And because of her work there, she became interested in law and politics. And so as mother and worker, she also enrolled at night in law school and got her law degree. And in 1954, she absolutely astonished her family by announcing that she was going to run for the governor of Georgia.

22:38 There were nine candidates that year, 1954, eight men, and Grace Thomas. There were nine candidates, but one issue. 1954, the integration of the public schools. Eight of those candidates appealed to the worst instincts of the citizens of Georgia, riled up the citizenry to resistance and rebellion. Only one candidate, Grace, said that she thought the Supreme Court decision was just and fair, and Georgians of all colors ought to join hands together in an act of goodwill. In fact, her campaign slogan was, Don't say hate, say grace at the polls. Fewer than 1% of the voters did so. She ran ninth. In 1962, she astonished her family by announcing that she was running again.

23:44 This time, the stakes were higher, the atmosphere hotter, the situation more dangerous. She ran ninth again, but she received death threats almost every day of her campaign, so much so that her family began to travel with her. And one day she took her campaign into the little town of Louisville, Georgia. If you've ever been to Louisville, you know that the centerpiece of that town is not a monument, not a courthouse, not a town square. It's a slave market.

24:24 Louisville was the center of the slave trade in Georgia, and their monument of civic pride is a place where human beings were bought and sold. Grace decided to give her campaign speech standing under the canopy of that slave market. She stood there and there gathered a gaggle of farmers and merchants, a hostile crowd, to hear this Grace person. She said, this has passed away and the new has come. and it is time to put aside all of our hatred and bigotry and work together as brothers and sisters. No sooner had she said that than somebody called out in the crowd, Are you a communist?

25:22 No, she said. Well, where did you get those golden ideas? she thought for a minute then she pointed at the steeple of the first baptist church said I got them over there in Sunday school and in the kingdom of God, some Sunday school teacher remembered a flannel graph and a book of stories about Jesus and a little girl in the class named Grace.