This is a really good reminder for those of us who inflict our words on others :)
x + y = z. I f you know the value
of one of the letters, you know something. If you know the value of
two, you can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don't know the
value of any, you don't know much.
Preachers tend to
forget this. "Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and
be saved from your sins," or something like that, has meaning and power
and relevance only if the congregation has some notion of what, humanly
speaking, sin is, or being saved is, or who Jesus is, or what accepting
him involves. If preachers make no attempt to flesh out these words in
terms of everyday human experience (maybe even their own) but simply
repeat with variations the same old formulas week after week, then the
congregation might just as well spend Sunday morning at home with the
funnies.
The blood atonement.
The communion of saints. The Holy Ghost. If people's understanding of
theological phrases goes little deeper than their dictionary or
catechetical definitions, then to believe in them has just about as much
effect on their lives as to believe that Columbus discovered America in
1492 or E = mc².
Coming home from church
one snowy day, Emerson wrote, "The snow was real but the preacher
spectral." In other words, nothing he heard from the pulpit suggested
that the preacher was a human being more or less like everybody else
with the same dark secrets and high hopes, the same doubts and passions,
the same weaknesses and strengths. Undoubtedly he preached on matters
like sin and salvation but without ever alluding to the wretched, lost
moments or the glad, liberating moments of his own life or anybody
else's.
There is perhaps no
better proof for the existence of God than that year after year the
whole God enterprise survives despite the way the professionally godly
promote it. If there are people who remain unconvinced, let them tune in
their TVs to almost any of the big-time pulpit pounders almost any
Sunday morning of the year.
- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
Ha Ha... I just noticed that the number of my posts has declined by half every year for the last four... guess I'd better get on it ...
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