The Word In Search Of Words John M, Buchanan
John 6:41-51 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
August 29, 1976 Columbus, Ohio

The burden of presuming to preach the Gospel is in the conviction that Jesus was
altogether serious when He said, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall
not hunger," The continuing anxiety of the preacher is the sense that the Gospel
isn't getting said, heard or understood with anything which resembles that original
clarity and urgency,

For many reasons the pulpit, the place where we have come to expect the Word of
God to find human words with which to be heard, is in trouble, Practically every
book written about the institutional church in the past two decades has had something
negative to say about preaching - both as a form of communication and as the primary
vehicle for relating the truth of the Christian Faith, The twenty minute, classic,
three point Protestant sermon has become somewhat of an anachronism, it seems, A
survey taken by one of our professional journals recently revealed that about half of
the church attenders could not recall much of what the preacher said by sundown Sunday,
By the middle of the week nearly everyone had forgotten, and at the end of the week
very few could remember the title. Another study revealed the fact that hardly anyone
expects a sermon to deal with issues that matter in real life, But perhaps the most
devastating indictment of all came in the midst of routine business in the office of
this Church last week, One of the staff persons was discussing the possibility of
purchasing air time with a sales representative from a local radio station, The prob-
lem was that the service would have to be recorded and then broadcast a week later,
Our staff person was commenting on the disadvantages of this system in that sometimes
sermon material and illustrations are immediate, current and therefore dated, Where-
upon the sales representative suggested that perhaps the ministers wouldn't have to
talk about current events and matters of immediate concern and instead confine them-
selves to preaching sermons,

The late Paul Scherer, Professor of Homiletics at Princeton and Union Theological
Seminaries, used to lament the lack of power in the American pulpit and called most of
the sermons he heard “Helpful Hints for Hurtful Habits", Theodore Wedel thinks that
a whole generation of Americans has grown up "which has actually never heard the
Christian Gospel; only the Reader's Digest version of it, the success-story rendition,
log cabin to White House, whereas, of course, the Incarnation is quite the other way
around", And a leading Roman Catholic theologian once suggested that if Protestantism
ever dies of an assassin's wound, the dagger in its back will be the Protestant Sermon,
I suppose we've all heard sermons which led us to the same conclusion, (See Scherer,
The Word God Sent, p.5).

Yet the tradition of the Protestant pulpit is a long and noble one, It is im-
possible even to contemplate Protestantism apart from the central and important role
played by preaching, One of the books I read on vacation this summer was a new
biography of John Calvin, I was impressed with the absolute certainty with which
Calvin identified preaching from the pulpit with the Word of God, When a preacher
studies a text, works at it, prays about it, and speaks to his people, according to
Calvin, his words become the Word of God to them, And although we may entertain that
in some back corner of our minds it would be a rare preacher today with the audacity
to put it in those words, Consider how Herman Melville described it in his classic
Moby Dick - "The pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part,..The world's a ship on its
passage out,..and the pulpit is its prow", (Ibid, p.5). Compare that with the verdict
rendered in "The Message and Silence of the American Pulpit", a book written by a
Bishop of the Church of South India, The message, he wrote, had largely to do with
playgrounds and plumbing, patriotism and labor, Mother's Day and the United Nations,

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The silence had to do with what the New Testament calls the Kerygma, the word of
reconciliation and life,"

Preachers and people who regularly listen to sermons, are stung by that, of
course, but more important is the possibility that being stung will motivate those of
us who preach and listen to sermons to think critically about the exercise and to
become more adept - to be better preachers and hearers,

The problems we face today, it turns out, are not new ones, I refer you to the
sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John, It is a remarkable portion of scripture,
The chapter begins with the feeding of the five thousand. The scholars feel that this
particular portion of the Fourth Gospel was assembled with a developing sacramental
theology already in mind, "Jesus took the loaves of bread and when He had given thanks
He distributed them", is the way John describes it, After the event on the lake in
which He was seen walking on the water, He went to Capernaum followed by the crowds
who had heard about the miraculous feeding, The bread motif continued in the Capernaum
synagogue when He said, "I am the bread of life", And in the lesson this morning the
people in and about that synagogue are grumbling because of those particular words.

after all", they said, "it's only Jesus, We know His Mother and Father," They were
too literalistic about the metaphor of bread. They were not open to what He was say-
ing.about God and about themselves for the simple reason that they knew He was merely
the carpenter's son, They didn't hear Him. He said the words - but the words were
not heard,

So today, it should not be surprising that we have difficulty hearing the Gospel
from the pulpit with clarity and urgency, with some sense that what is said here is
important enough to be taken seriously, understood and - in some way - responded to,
Let's think first about the sermon as a vehicle of communication, an exercise in which
ideas are expressed, received and understood, It is not an overstatement to suggest
that we are obsessed with communication, There are veritable libraries of books
written on the subject: how to communicate with your spouse, children, teachers,
students, employers, employees, We are obsessed with it as a topic of discussion and
we have at our fingertips the means to do more of it than any people before us, We
speak almost reverently about the miracle of modern communication,

Yet one of the prime ironies of our age seems to be that the more capability for
communicating we develop, the less we seem to have to say to one another, The proto-
type of our electronic dilemma was the convention coverage which brought into our
living rooms those interminable demonstrations for the nominees, leaving highly
skilled, highly paid commentators with thirty or forty minutes of prime time and
nothing to say, Walt Whitman was prophetic, when, having been told about the comple-
tion of the first telephone line between Maine and Texas, asked, "But what if the
people of Maine have nothing to say to the people of Texas?" In 1962 the first pic-
tures Were transmitted between Paris and New York by Satellite, We sent them a shot
of our flag and they returned a picture of a night club, The New Yorker satirized it
magnificently in a cartoon, A man was sitting in his easy chair viewing a line of
can-can dancers on the television screen while underneath ran the caption, "What
wonders God hath wrought", (Scherer p.7).

We have at our disposal both the technology and the psychological insight to
communicate more and better than ever before, Yet communication between people, not
simply ministers and lay people - but all people, seems more difficult, more elusive
than ever, The Bible suggests a reason which has little to do with technology, Human
Beings, the Bible asserts, were created for communion with God and with one another,

= 3s

But from the beginning alienation, not communication, has been our story, The first
communication device mankind developed, according to the Bible, was a tower - The
Tower of Babel, And that early technology made matters worse, The result was that
no one could understand anyone else,

Who hasn't experienced the terrible contemporary truth of that ancient insight?
It's not a matter merely of learning how to talk better, Who hasn't discovered the
irony of attempting to communicate with someone and discovering that tHe silence was
not improved upon (as they say in Maine) and that the relationship was weakened as
a result of the attempt instead of being strengthened?

Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish film maker, creates some very depressing movies
because of his relentless honesty about the human condition, In "Scenes From a
Marriage", a husband and wife who have good jobs and all the accoutrements of the good
life become aware of the fact that they can't communicate, As they learn to communi-
cate their relationship begins to fall apart, And for the rest of the film they com-
municate candidly, openly and frequently, but the relationship is gone,

The fact is that what is marketed as communication in our culture today has little
to do with that "communion" from which the word communication derives, Rather it
ordinarily means talking more and listening less,

A breakdown in communication - or communion - whether or not people are talking
at each other is simply an emergence of what we used to have the honesty to call sin,
We don't communicate with one another because at heart we don't really want to, We
don't want to acknowledge that we are incomplete, that others have truth we need, We
are not as interested in the opinions, feelings and ideas of another as we are in
gaining an opportunity to express our opinions and ventilate our feelings, Communica-
tion assumes the grace to be quiet - not simply physically quiet, but emotionally
and intellectually quiet - in the idiom of electronic communication it presumes the
willingness - and ability - to be a receiver as well as a transmitter,

And that, the Christian analysis suggests, is precisely what we will not and
cannot do, Our communication crisis is not an inadequacy in technology or psychology -
it is a matter of self-centeredness, We don't hear our children, our spouses, our
parents - the Word of God - because we don't want to,

The Tyranny of the Self, Joseph Sittler calls it. (The Ecology of Faith), Accord-
ing to Saint Augustine, sin is the "curvative of the self inward upon itself", But in
our day the self, the ego, with a heavy assist from pop psychology, has been elevated
to a position of judge and jury, "You do your own thing and I'll do my own thing" has
become the byword, Sittler writes: "What is new is that an incurvature which has
traditionally been viewed in Christian teaching as a disposition to be overcome is
among many in cur day jubilantly cultivated as a way of redemption, There is a
difference between regarding the self as a theatre of redemption and regarding the
recovery of the self as the substance of redemption," (p.12), Albert Outler in a
speech I heard recently talked about the overwhelming self-centeredness of our culture
focused on modern art, Instead of stretching to communicate some of the given beauty
and truth of the universe, the traditional function of the artist, modern art allows
for an embarassed trip through someone's demented ego, a psychic strip tease which, it
is now assumed, is edifying to those who will watch, Sittler summarizes it eloquently,
In a class on the doctrines developed by the ancient church fathers at the Council of
Chalcedon in 451, one of the theological students responded, "But Doc, I can't
internalize this stuff,"

o & =

In a recent issue of New York magazine Pom Wolfe has written about this great
celebration of egeccntricity in which we find ourselves in an article under the title,
"The Me Generation", He observes, "The new alchemical dream is: changing one's person-
ality - reamking, remodeling, evaluating and polishing one's very own self,,.and
observing, studying and doting on it,"

Jesus said, "I am the bread of life," There are many reasons why preaching the
Gospel of Jesus Christ is a perilous undertaking; reasons why the twenty minute sermon
doesn't always seem to be the place where God's saving word finds the words with
which to be heard,

What I have tried to do this morning is isolate and identify the reason which is
an inherent part of the human condition: a reason clearly part of that encounter be-
tween Jesus and a group of reasonably intelligent people in a Capernaum synagogue,

He said, "I am the bread of life." That statement presumes hunger, More than that,
if it is to be heard it presumes the grace and courage to acknowledge hunger, It
presumes that the source of fulfillment for our hunger is Located somewhere outside
the self,

All the weight of our obsession with self realization, self fulfillment, self
actualization and honest, open communication seems to be saying the opposite, The pop-
psychology which addresses us from every new book, every magazine and journal seems to
be announcing a new gospel: that the ability to achieve fulfillment and to communicate
with others is inside ourselves, The secret is simply to know about it, read - attend
a seminar, understand it, affirm it and then try harder,

Long ago Karl Jung saw the flaw in that, Writing about the Freudian school he said,
"Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man has never yet been able single
handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness..,Man is never helped in his
suffering by what he thinks for himself, but only by revelation of a wisdom greater
than his own," (Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p. 567).

Preaching and listening to sermons is the weekly effort to communicate the
audacious Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth - Jesus the Christ - is indeed the
Bread of Life, That is the Word of God always searching for human words with which to
be heard: that this man - this Jesus - is what you and I need more than anything
else in life,

My assumption is that we are not going to hear that Word regardless of the rela-
tive excellence, wit and passion of the particular preacher until we acknowledge our
hunger, our incompleteness, our need,

My growing assumption, about which I speak today with more certainty than ever, is
that one of the things God does best is to make us aware of our hunger, God, I believe,
works quietly in our lives to make us restless, to pose questions we cannot answer, to
present quandaries of conscience from which we cannot escape, It is God, I believe, who
plays devil's advocate with us when we purchase and try to live on bread, other than
the bread of life he offers, It is God who makes us hungry, Unamuno, the Spanish poet,
once wrote a line I am just beginning to understand, "God never denies a man peace,

except to give him glory!"

The Word of God is a living Word, It is the very nature of God to be in communion
with us, And He has made us for the same, His Word is always in search of words: it
comes in strange ways and unexpected places, The simple invitation of the Gospel is to
make the ultimately necessary admission - "I'm hungry" and then to hear again God's
Word finding words,.."I am the bread of life", Amen,