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This is a response to a thread on CRC-Voices about sermon length. The discussion got into various aspects of sermon preaching and listening.

The conditioning of modern media often comes into the discussion here. Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a standard text. I remember John Stek remarking that past congregations had the capacity to listen carefully for extended periods of time, could follow audible detailed and nuanced argument, had critical listening skills and an amazing ability to retain. We also forget that past educational methods emphasized memorization (it was expected that huge amounts of material traditionally would be devoted to memory, not the least of which being Scripture).

Read a Jonathan Edwards sermon sometimes, like this one: http://www.biblebb.com/files/edwards/charity.htm It’s not easy for us to read. CCEL.org has some Edwards sermons that are read by some nice West Michigan woman and you can get a sense for what “regular” congregations a few hundred years ago expected.

In our consumer culture the audience sits back with a demanding posture and says “It’s all up to you, communicator!” In some sense it is, especially if the listener adopts this posture, but the listener then basically defeats their own interests. If the listener enters the process and takes some responsibility for what they get out of the process, they will likely find something of value that occurs within the process, even perhaps from the most unworthy sermon. Papa of the older Berenstein Bears demonstrated that even negative examples can be instructive.

There is a real component of this in the gospel. Again, I’m doing Revelation with our Sunday School. God’s wrath gets poured out and even God’s children are subject to its general and widespread havoc. To those in rebellion against God it is all negative, but for the elect even the negative works to their purification and strengthening.

I find this all the time in life. I am most often a very selfish, self-centered person who’s greedy little id wants to dictate and evaluate every waking minute. Other people intrude. They bring requests, stories they want to tell me, agendas they want to foist upon me. My id resents it. I want to send them away, to mock them, to belittle them, to banish them from my precious eyeball time and consciousness so I can direct my life along the way I think it should be so that my little will fills my experience of this world, so that things that I like fill my life and I can avoid things I find annoying.

It’s not too hard to see that I am in my selfishness a prisoner of my own smarmy little will and that all of these annoying people are God’s gift to break me of my self-centeredness, which if left to its own progressive growth with result in hell itself.

Why would I say that? Because as my selfish little will expands in power it must block out the ultimate intruder, God himself. So God comes to me in children who have little, sometimes inane stories to tell me. He comes to me in the mentally ill who are going to ramble at me in twisted and irrational fears and notions. He’s going to annoy me with people presenting political or theological views that I disagree with. He’s going to place me in a world filled with sinful, broken people that do real damage and whose irresponsible ideas do real damage. He places me here and he says “love them as I have loved them because I love them”.

Why does God allow there to be lousy preachers and terrible church musicians and annoying and offensive congregations? They are all for our benefit, as opportunities to grow in his generosity and love.

You can sit in that church service letting that internal grumbler and critic find fault in innumerable things around you and you can leave angry and upset. You can walk out desperately wishing, like Hyacinth Bucket from “Keeping Up Appearances” or like the denizens on CS Lewis’ imaginary bus from hell in “The Great Divorce”, for a more suitable, more elevated, more appropriate context for your obviously refined and informed sensitivities, someplace where others properly measure up to your fine standards. Or you can accept the invitation into the relational polarity of the life of God, who listens to the selfish, rambling prayers of everyone, who pays attention to us who, to him look both insane and childish.

In Christ every lousy day filled with evil, annoying and obnoxious people and experiences is yet another opportunity to grow in love for the unlovely and the unloving. Why wouldn’t church fit into this picture? pvk