Epiphany 4
25 January 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
IN THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS:
The Sacred Acts of Worship (#3 of 8)
WORDS FOR THE JOURNEY: LISTENING FOR GOD’S VOICE
Nehemiah 8:1-12. Luke 4.16-30
After missing a week of worship and fighting through the cold this morning, the reward you receive today is that your wildest dreams come true: you get a sermon about the sermon. As we continue our thoughts on congregational worship and why we do what we do, we’re considering today how we listen to God’s Spirit primarily through scripture and the sermon. Having entered the presence of the Holy, the God of All Creation, and offered our praise and thanksgiving, and seen ourselves for who we really are – God’s beloved children, sinners saved by love, forgiven by grace, now we seek to hear God speak.
It has been said that the confession of sin and the experience of pardon clears out room in our hearts to receive a word from God, that before confession our hearts are too cluttered.1 Whatever it is we need to do in order to hear the whisper of God’s Holy Spirit into our lives, we must do.
As noted a couple of weeks ago, Kierkegaard suggested that in worship God is the audience. But God is one who engages in active audience participation. God speaks and acts in worship. Worship is not a monologue of our words to God. Worship is a dialogue between God and ourselves: God speaks. We respond. Of course, scripture and sermon are not the only ways in which God speaks in a service. God can speak through song and prayer, prelude and offertory, choral anthem and silence. God often speaks through the voices of children during the children’s moment. But today we focus our attention on how God speaks through scripture and sermon.
When we come to the reading of scripture in Sunday morning worship, we are listening to our story, our faith history, the source of our identity, the guiding judge of our faithfulness or infidelity to our calling as God’s people.
Much care needs to be given to the reading of scripture in worship. We read in First Timothy, “Give attention to the public reading of scripture.” The Bible is the Church’s book an oral book intended to be heard primarily in the midst of the faith community. I think it’s important for the scripture to be read apart from the sermon because scripture needs some room to speak for itself without interpretation from a preacher. In order to enhance our public hearing of scripture, I’m going to make a suggestion. I hope you’ll try it. If you don’t like it, please feel free to be Baptist enough to disobey your pastor. I won’t punish you for it, but God on the other hand?
(I mean, Angela did come down with the flu less than 72 hours after her outburst in worship
two weeks ago! I’m just saying! It could have been worse – just read about the 42 children in the book of Second Kings who mocked God’s prophet Elisha. I would say ask the children, but the bears put an end to them. Side-bar point made!)
The suggestion I would like to make that could perhaps help you hear God speak through scripture is that when scripture is read in worship that you NOT follow along in your own Bibles. Instead listen reflectively and prayerfully, perhaps even close your eyes and imagine the text, making space for God to speak to you through the reading of scripture. Remember: For the first 1500 years of the church’s life, scripture was only heard in worship, because no one had a copy for themselves. And today with so many translations, if your translation is different than the one being read, you may begin to ask questions about why the words are different instead of prayerfully listening to what God is saying to you through the scripture. I think it’s vitally important to ask questions of translations because all translations are human interpretations, even good ole King James. And that’s more of what we do in Bible Study and Sunday School. I would suggest that worship is not the best place to be considering those differences as scripture is being read.
I like what Robert Benson has to say when he writes: Each time we gather, we are asked to become hearers of the Story. We are asked to go from being moderns to being ancients, to go from being students and scholars of the Bible to simply being hearers and listeners to the Story of us all. We are asked to stop working on the word with our pens and our study helps and our discussion questions. We are asked to set aside our theological positions. We are invited to stop working on the word and let it work on us instead.2 I am suggesting that as we listen to Holy Scripture being read we sit quietly and prayerfully and allow the Spirit to speak into our lives.
This is exactly what happens in our Hebrew lesson for today. The exile is over. It has been years since people have heard scripture read aloud in Jerusalem. So Nehemiah builds a wooden pulpit in the midst of the city and begins to read. He reads from early morning to midday. The people hearing the scriptures begin to weep. Some weep for joy to hear Scripture for the first time in years. Others weep in guilt and remorse, for they realize how far their lives have fallen from God’s way. But the prophet says, Do not grieve over the past. This is a holy day of joy. ‘The joy of the Lord is your strength.’ Rise and hear and follow what God has to say to you today.
God speaks to us through the words of scripture and from beyond the words of scripture. The revelation of God comes to us inspired of God’s Spirit as we hear scripture read and interpreted. It is the Bible that gives shape to the church’s identity as the people of God and challenges us to see the world differently and live in the world differently. Through its powerful testimony God speaks to us the words of eternal life. The Bible as the church’s Book, as the sacred Story of Holy Scripture, must be the starting place for the shape of the preacher’s sermon. Scripture even allowed at times to speak for itself without interpretation. So can we not just read scripture? Is the sermon really necessary? Paul called preaching foolishness. He probably was not the first. He certainly was not the last. Every honest preacher can recall stepping down from the pulpit on a given Sunday, rolling the eyes of her heart, pondering the folly of his own words. What is it then about this foolishness we call preaching that has enabled it to endure down through the centuries? How can the wisdom of God turn the foolishness of human words into a vessel of healing and transformation?
There have been times when the church has placed too little emphasis on preaching. However, I think we as Baptists have sometimes placed too much emphasis on the importance of the sermon in worship. We have made it the centerpiece of worship. We have spoken of the other acts of worship as preparation for the sermon as main event. I would suggest to you this morning that the sermon is not the place toward which all worship moves. The sermon is an offering, one act of worship on behalf of the preacher. The preacher is one who is on the journey with the people of God. The preacher stands with the congregation, also in need of the word he or she brings. The act of preaching is not the property of the preacher. The gift of preaching belongs to the church and to the Holy Spirit. The preacher has been entrusted with the gift and is accountable to God and the congregation for how he or she uses that gift. But the sermon itself is not the climax of worship or the centerpiece of worship but one act of worship on behalf of the preacher. It attempts to do what everything in worship seeks to do – point us toward God and orient our life toward what it means to live as children of God in the kingdom of God.
The sermon is not a Bible study or a motivational speech. It is not offered for personal enrichment. While I do people the church should help people with money management, marriage and parenting skills and the like, I do not feel those particular issues are fitting subject matter for the sermon. The sermon is larger than simply supplying principles for living.
The act of preaching is the task of connecting the biblical story to the life of the faith community weaving scripture and cultural context and personal experience in such a way that it shapes and transforms the congregation ever more faithfully into the people of God. Preaching is first and foremost a challenge to the church to be God’s holy people.
Faithful preaching helps enable people to look within their own lives and see where they can place the needs of others above their own. Faithful preaching helps people see the places deep within where they’ve not allowed God’s grace to reach. Faithful preaching calls people to ask the big questions of their existence. Faithful preaching calls persons into community as part of the “answer” to the difficulties life brings our way. Faithful preaching moves people towards life together under Christ.
Preaching professor Elizabeth Achtemeier says that “the purpose of preaching is to remind people that we are glorious creatures of a more glorious God made for God’s glorious works.”
God’s word comes to us through human lips and through the Bible’s sacred pages in ways mysterious beyond words. The preaching event is a mystery. And to honor the mystery of preaching means that we never seek to say more than we truly know, and it means we never equate our words with the words of God, but rather we understand our words to be vessels through which God may speak God’s word to us.
It is not encouraging to the preacher to realize that Jesus preached away more people than he reached, especially when you want to be liked and you want people to join your church. When Jesus finished his first sermon as recorded in our gospel reading today, the congregation was so angry they ran him out of town and tried to push him over a cliff. And that was his home church!
His message is full of tough, difficult sayings – not always so easy to understand or accept or preach to those one loves. Will Willimon may be right when he says, “People may not want ‘biblical preaching’ as much as they think they do.”3 Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor said: “It’s surprising that more preachers aren’t physically attacked by their congregations, given the gospel we have to preach.” I wonder: Are we preachers attacked less because we are not faithful enough to the gospel? Beware of the preacher who needs to make everybody happy – an inclination most of us preachers share.
You know you really should actually feel sorry for us preachers. (Do I hear sniffles?) I mean,
think about all the things we have to say in order to be faithful to our calling as preachers of the Christian gospel. On those occasions when faithful preaching is difficult we end up sometimes being called communists, unpatriotic, naive concerning the real world. In a world where almost everyone, including a majority of Christians, fully supports violent retaliation when you are attacked, how would you like to have to preach a Christian gospel of non-retaliation and non-violence, calling us to love our enemies? In order to be faithful to the gospel in a nation of growing white supremacy we have to say that God does not favor one race over another. And that cost many courageous preachers their jobs in the sixties and again today in some places. We preachers also have to say God does not favor one nation over another and neither should God’s people. We have to say that any national citizenship you have means very little in light of your citizenship in the kingdom of God whose flag is the cross and whose economic indicators are not found on Wall Street. When Jesus said he had come to bring good news to the poor, we have to ask how any economic system affects the poor. We have to preach the call to sacrifice rather than self-fulfillment, to give ourselves away rather than protect our own interests. And what about those twenty plus verses in scripture about welcoming the stranger and treating the immigrant as a citizen of your country?
You think all that stuff is fun to stand up and say? I often have knots in my stomach over things I feel I must say. Because preachers, like anybody else, want to be liked. And we are liked
when we talk about the peace and comfort and grace and love of God, as long as it’s not offered to people we don’t approve of.
The preacher can be wrong in his or her interpretation of the gospel. The preacher does not issue the final authoritative word. At its best, preaching begins or continues a conversation; it does not seek to end a conversation.
But preaching is not just about the things I have to say. Thanks be to God, there are also things I get to say: I get to say with Nehemiah, “Eat the fat and drink sweet wine.” I get to say that God’s grace is greater than your sin. I get to say that God has hopeful plans for your future, no matter what your past. I get to say that in the midst of your deepest darkest night God will meet you there with the light of his love, in the faces of friends, with hands beneath you and arms around you. I get to say that God has his arms around our church and will grant us the courage to be God’s faithful people in this place.
If the truth be told about all of us in the depths of who we are, this I believe is the truth: We who gather for worship are, for the most part, those who long for a word from beyond ourselves. At our better moments, we are those who feel called to a life greater than ourselves. We are a people yearning for Something, Someone, more. Scripture and preaching seek to address that yearning with a gospel that calls us to find our life by losing it, a gospel that calls us to receive life and meaning by giving our lives away for the sake of a lost world God loves so very much.
It’s foolishness, I know. Just don’t try to follow Jesus if you want to be considered wise and reasonable by your friends. However, know this: God’s foolish gospel is wiser than the best human wisdom our minds could ever conceive.
At the end of the sermon, the question we want answered is not, “Did you enjoy it? Did it apply to your life? The question we want answered is: “Did we hear God speak a word to our life together?” God’s loving, challenging, uncomfortable, hopeful word.
Scripture and sermon. Words for the journey.
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- Robert Benson, Living Prayer, 23-24
- Robert Benson, That We May Perfectly Love Thee, Paraclete Press, 2002, 52
- William Willimon, With Glad and Generous Hearts, 1986, 97-98