I tried to think of a more interesting title for this piece. Something catchy. I can’t. I fear that you have already lost interest in what I’ve got to say. I’ve only got a sentence or two to grab you by the throat, and here I’ve already expended four sentences, going on five, without catching your attention. Please, don’t change channels. I promise, I’ve got something pentecostal to say that’s interesting.
I recently watched a couple of hours of videotapes of our Annual Conference. It looked like octogenarians in slow motion, geriatrics in molasses, slogging through mud. What is there about church that slows to the pace of a slug? We think we look more pious when we decelerate.
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Then comes Year B, the Common Lectionary, manic Mark, with his favorite word immediately. Everything heats up, gets frenetic, intense. Immediately Jesus did this; immediately He went there. Church, in Mark, is dull until Jesus shows up; and then demons scream, Jesus shrieks, and the staid, stolid religious folk mutter, “We never heard anything like this! What? A new teaching?”
Mark gets going by a descent of a great bird at Jesus’ baptism and a Jesus who is always mobile, driven by a relentless Spirit. You don’t have to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder to read Mark’s Gospel, but it sure helps.
I worked my way through more than a dozen sermons I preached sometime ago. Most of them were biblical, somewhat well-illustrated, thoughtful. Yet too many of them were, in a word, dull. Though correct, they were characterized by a conspicuous lack of energy. They managed to present the gospel in a way that was strong on the ortho and weak on the doxa. Sermons that are intelligent but uninteresting are unfaithful to the weird wildness of the gospel that is induced by the dramatic, pentecostal descent of a big bird. With claws.
Say what you will about Jesus, nobody ever called Him dull. “Come, let us reason together,” was never said by Jesus. He more frequently screamed, punched, poked, disrupted, and dislodged. He told us that He hadn’t come to bring peace.
Isn’t this close to what Augustine meant when he taught that the purpose of preaching is to teach, to move, and to delight? I take back my nasty retort to the woman who said, after one of my sermons, “That was really…..entertaining.” I was offended. But she could have said worse. By the grace of God she didn’t say “dull.”
I don’t recall that Jesus ever made dullness a sin, but maybe—what with the things He said and the things He did—He didn’t have to. So I’ll say it: Dullness in preaching, church meetings, and magazine articles is downright sinful, an offense against Easter, a crime against the work of the Holy Spirit.
My first Sunday in Germany, preparing to teach homiletics, I attended a church in Bonn on Pentecost. The preacher began, “There is among us some confusion about a correct understanding of the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Today I shall attempt to explain Geist to you.” Two elderly people in front of me keeled over and died at the thought of having to sit through this. I gave up, got on a plane, and headed back home. As Augustine once said, “Sometimes we sin against Sunday.” That failed Pentecost, I understood why Jesus said that there’s no unforgivable sin except sin against the Holy Spirit.
