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March 9, 2008 / Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Evaluating the Sermon

For a congregation sort of reducing its musical intake during Lent to try and create space, we sure are enjoying a lot of great music lately…great instrumentals last week, the choir & Sylvia today, the concert Friday night. Great!

Here we are again in the gospel of Mark. I know I’ve said at least 3-4 times that, especially in this early part of Mark, we mostly learn who Jesus was by what he did, not by what he said. Mark is an action gospel. But finally this morning, we get to hear Jesus speak. In fact, he preaches a sermon.

So I have a proposition for you. Let’s evaluate Jesus’ sermon. “What,” you say? “Who are we to evaluate a sermon?” To which I would say: you do it every Sunday! You say “boy, Dan that was too close to home.” Or “Dan was a little dry.” Or “I didn’t like the second of Jeff’s three points.” Or whatever.

But think about it. If you have been in a church setting for, let’s say, 10 years. If you went to worship 40 Sundays out of the year, a modest proposal, it means you’ve heard at least 400 sermons! If you were in church for 25 years, you’ve heard 1000 sermons! 40 years, 1600 sermons! Surely you are qualified to evaluate a sermon with all that practice. Now granted, it is Jesus’ sermon and that does make it a little daunting. But let’s see what happens.

Reading: Mark 4:1-9

Well, if we are going to evaluate Jesus’ sermon, we have to say that he clearly chooses an odd place to preach from. A boat. I once stood in a pulpit in Vermont, a 200-some year old church where the pulpit was so high off the ground that the pastor could have reached over and borrowed a hymnal from someone in the front row of the side balcony!

And then I’ve read about a pulpit in Poland that is built in the shape of a whale, as in Jonah and the whale. The pastor stands in the whale’s mouth, with teeth just above his head hanging down, to preach the sermon! So Jesus choosing to sit in a boat to preach is a little strange, but I guess there are stranger places.

And it would seem that Jesus clearly is on the low-tech side of the preaching spectrum. I mean, no pulpit, no notes, no spotlight, no recording, no microphone, no powerpoint, no clips of videos. Old-school, for sure. I mean, today we’re in the age where some preachers slip in and out of several services going on simultaneously…drop into a worship service in progress, preach a sermon, go down the hall to the next theater-type room, preach a sermon.

Jesus…sits in a boat. Now, granted, people have identified a bay in the vicinity of where Jesus was, that has something of a natural amphitheater into the hillside. It’s actually called the Bay of Parables. And technicians think that if a crowd had gathered there, a strong voice on the water could have been heard by several thousand gathered on land. Still, it doesn’t seem like this sermon is getting off to a very good start. Odd location, low-tech.

Now, the preaching books say that starting the congregation off with something that will hook them, get them listening is a good thing, so when Jesus plunges in without any introduction to a story, he scores points on the preaching scale. “Listen! A sower went out to sow some seed.” And then my preaching professor always said “make sure you know your congregation.”

And apparently Jesus knows that too. Because in a very agrarian culture, most everybody would have been very, very familiar with the whole cycle of growing crops. Even if you were a fisherman on the lake, most of the people you knew would have been farmers. And it wouldn’t have been difficult at all for them to picture the sight of a farmer with a bag slung over his shoulder, the main part resting on his hip where he could reach in for a handful of grain-seed and then with a sweeping motion scatter the seed far and wide in a graceful arc. The seed would bounce, perhaps, on the ground, hitting here and there and coming to rest in various places to await the second-stage, the plowing that would bury it under the soil.

Well, maybe everyone listening to Jesus’ sermon back then would have related easily to that, but most of us don’t. If Jesus is going to get our attention, he’s going to have to get more contemporary. Most of us in this room have never stood in the middle of a large field of waving, golden, wheat. Many of us have never had a pea patch garden, or even put a single seed in the ground to see what would happen. Most people I meet say things like “when people give me plants, I have this amazing ability to kill them within weeks.”

Very understandable. After all, 65% of our country’s population now lives in just 100 metropolitan cities. We really don’t know about farming. The closest we get is buying organic vegetables. So if Jesus is going to relate to us today, he needs to update his illustrations, right? Maybe a story about a barista? or “Once there was a woman who worked for Microsoft.” Or “A man went knocking on doors in a highrise downtown condo building.” Those all sound a little forced. So let’s put up with Jesus and the farmer for a little while longer.

It’s interesting to note, isn’t it, just how indiscriminately the sower throws the seed. There is seed going everywhere. Footpath, shallow soil with the hardpan just an inch or two below the surface, wild soil susceptible to weeds, and finally a little good soil too.

Does he not get it?! Seed is not going to grow well in some of those places, it just won’t! And yet he does it anyway. Is he careless? Does he have bad aim? Why would a sower throw seed even in places highly unlikely to give any growth? Or…is he for some reason choosing to do this intentionally? Humm. Questions. Evidence that Jesus’ sermon is starting to work on us, we’re asking questions. Questions are good.

So the various soils receive the seeds. Three out of four of them are failures.

Birds get fat off the path.
Rocks just under the soil block roots from going down.
Plants grow up, but not as plentiful as weeds and are choked out.
And finally, way down the list, the fourth of four, some of the seed ends up in good soil, grows, and the crop is plentiful. In fact, it’s amazing. In fact, the harvest there ends up ranging from 30-fold, which would be very very good, to 60-fold which was nearly unheard of, to 100-fold, which is pretty much miraculous.

Maybe some more questions are coming now.

Why is Jesus telling us this story? Is he in this story? Have I ever seen good soil? Am I supposed to be in this story somewhere? Does this have anything to do with my life? Questions are good. We should pay attention to the questions.

And then, with incredible abruptness, Jesus stops the sermon right there. Ruins it. No dramatic story, nothing personal from his own life, no scripture from the Old Testament, no 1-2-3 points illuminated, no quotes from famous writers, no personal application to walk away with. No final takeaway hammered home. He simply says- “Let anyone with ears to hear…listen.”

Well. It’s clear Jesus never went to seminary. You can’t end a sermon like that.

I have 20 preaching books, I’ve taken classes. You can’t do that. That’s leaving everything up in the air. And we can see exactly how weak it was, because as soon as he’s finished and standing at the front door, his closest followers come up to him and say “We don’t get it. Will you explain what you just said?” I’m sure Jesus went into depression at that point. All that work, and they don’t even understand it. (read verses 10-12)

Now, Jesus’ answer to his followers is very interesting. “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God…but it’s going to seem like a puzzle to lots of folks.”

In fact, Jesus finally gets around to quoting a little scripture. The quotation is from the Old Testament, Isaiah 6:9. Maybe you remember that story. Isaiah receives a vision of the Lord in heaven, and he falls down, convicted of his own sin. And he is forgiven, and hears God say “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And Isaiah finds himself saying “Here am I. Send me!” It is God’s call to Isaiah to be his prophet, to speak his word.

God also says, using these same words that Jesus quotes in Mark, that Isaiah is supposed to speak but that many, many people will not hear or see or understand what God is doing in the world. A few will, but many won’t. And interestingly, God answers by predicting that Israel will be a wasteland, but a stump remains, what God calls the holy seed. More seeds.

In a similar way, when Jesus addresses his closest followers, he’s acknowledging that many other people won’t understand. But to them the secret (mystery) of the kingdom of God has been given.

Aha. So this is a kingdom parable, a kingdom of God story. Now, we know that the use in the gospels of “the kingdom of God” can encompass two different things: one is God’s presence impacting life on earth now. And the other is what happens at the culmination of time, the end of the age. Often “the kingdom of God” means both the here and the not yet.

In this case, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to have been talking about the afterlife, so it seems he must mainly be thinking of God’s kingdom on earth, and he says “to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God.” You are receivers of who God is, what he is about, how he feels about you, what he wants life on earth to look like, in a way never before made so clear.

Jesus tells them this, standing in front of them, and they stand as blankly as you and I probably would and say “What? What have we been given?” And Jesus standing there in front of them …sighs. “Let anyone with ears to hear…listen.”

In verse 13 Jesus says, “If you don’t get this. You won’t get anything. Let me explain it to you in simple terms.” And then Jesus does what I always want him to do, what I suspect you always want him to do- he explains what he just said.

Don’t you? Don’t you wish sometime you would cry out and say “Jesus, where are you? I haven’t felt you in my life for months!” And His voice would say “I’m right here with you. Been here the whole time.”

Don’t you sometimes wish you could take a thorny problem to Jesus, “Lord, why do such crummy things happen in life, violence and hatred. Why?” And Jesus would say “Here, let me explain it to you.” That’s what he does here.

Reading: Mark 4:10-20: “Let anyone with ears to hear…listen.” Here’s what Jesus says:

The seed is the word. God’s word. (made flesh/understandable in Jesus) And the sower sprays it out there. And I have to tell you I love that it is flung with abandon, to every nook and cranny, every promising or unpromising place, they all have a chance, the odds aren’t good, ¾ fail but still the word goes out.

The soil packed down for a path resists the seed even sinking down at all. the birds are Satan, and he takes it away immediately. The presence of evil, that which opposes what God wants to do in a life, resists. The seed is gone. This happens, doesn’t it. Some people just flat out resist. Doesn’t matter what evidence, what experiences.