Jesus as a preacher and teacher was very impressive. Mark’s Gospel says he began in Capernaum. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue and taught. The people’s reaction says it all. They didn’t say: “Wasn’t that interesting?” or “What a nice sermon.” Mark says they were “astonished.”

Have you ever heard a sermon that left you astonished? Astonished means one’s whole being is surrendered in amazement. They were astonished because “he taught them as one with authority, and not as the scribes.” Scribes, as in “the scribes and the Pharisees,” were the biblical scholars of the day. Pharisees and Sadducees were the two religious parties in Judaism. Pharisees were very conservative, tended to be legalistic, and were associated with the synagogues. Sadducees were in charge of the temple and its functions. They had none of the zeal of the Pharisees, were more political and less religious. But the scribes were the biblical scholars. They were learned, but what they taught was what they had been taught, and it was apparently pretty boring. Jesus did not teach as one of the scribes, but was astonishing. He taught as one with authority.

Mark does not say Jesus taught in an authoritative manner, like an evangelist who thinks he knows everything. What is authority? It usually means either the right or the power to do something, or both. Jesus’ teaching is undoubtedly powerful. And his right to speak is underscored by the contrast between his teaching and the scribes’ teaching. They teach from moth-eaten tomes, he teaches with authority. He interprets the Scripture as one who has the right to say what it means. His teaching has no need of external support, whether from the Scripture or the scrolls. His teaching is self-authenticating. You know it is true when you hear it.

On this occasion, at least, we don’t know what Jesus said. It must not have been what he said, but the way he said it. Remember, they were astonished. One way to understand this is to remember that the Christian faith begins, not in the active voice, but in the passive voice. Faith does not begin with a shout of praise – - “Hallelujah!” It begins in sheer wonder, saying, “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us!” (1 Jn 3:1)  Faith’s source of joy and power is the astonishment we experience at the miracle of God entering our world of need and struggle and sin. No doubt Jesus’ preaching was immediate and personal. No doubt he personified or incarnated his teaching. He spoke as one with authority.

At some point in my life I was infected by what someone has called the “romance” of preaching. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t from the pastors of my youth. But once I had heard great preaching, I was convinced that nothing could be more important or more fulfilling. Preaching is one of those things that could always be better, and done in a more worthy way. It can become an ego trip, unless you remain fearful in the consciousness of what you are actually doing.

It is said that everyone has at least one sermon in them. May I give you a little lesson in preaching? Even if you don’t get to preach, you may find it useful.

Fred Craddock wrote a book on preaching a few years ago titled, As One Without Authority. Some people think the book undermines proper preaching. Others of us think it makes it possible for the preacher to be appropriately humble. Most of the preaching you and I have heard has been based on deductive reasoning, which goes in steps. If this is true, and this is true, then THIS is true. Deductive sermons usually have three points. For example, the first point might be “All have sinned,” stating that we are all sinners. The preacher will support this with a number of Bible verses. In the pews we think, “That’s true.” The second point could be, “Christ died for our sins.” Again there are supporting scriptures. If point one is true, and point two is true, then point three is true. Point three is, “Accepting Christ saves us from our sin.” Proposition, proposition, logical conclusion. If this, and if this, then this. This has the advantage of not requiring the listener to do much, which makes it easier to nap.

Dr. Craddock promotes preaching based more on inductive reasoning. If deductive reasoning goes from hypothesis to hypothesis to conclusion, inductive reasoning goes from general observation to critical evaluation to conclusion. Deductive is from the specific to the general, and inductive is from the general to the specific. Let’s suppose you’re going to preach a sermon on the importance of the church. That is not where you would begin. “This morning let’s consider the church.” You would begin with the people, with their felt needs for meaningful relationships, with their desire to experience God, with their need for a supportive community. You end at the church.

This has the advantage of not beginning with the preacher or a biblical text and hoping to eventually get to you. It begins with you and invites you to be a part of the journey. This also has the advantage of making the preacher a member of the congregation rather than a would-be authority figure to whom you can’t relate.

We need an image or two. First, take the image of a lion tamer. Second, imagine music inside yourself. This is from Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Nikolai Nikolaievich is speaking:  “I think that if the beast who sleeps in [us] could be held down by threats – - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death – - then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don’t you see, this is just the point – - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example.”

Jesus was a powerful teacher and preacher. I would love to have heard him, not so much to hear what he said, but to experience the way he said it. I believe he still has the power to astonish us.

Lord Christ, who came long ago to Capernaum and left people astonished, come to us, we pray, with the inward music of your truth. Amen.

Jonah 3:1-10

The story of Jonah has been considered a children’s story for so long that adults pay it little attention. If all you remember about Jonah is that he was swallowed by a whale, you have so much to learn! So, let’s begin with the basics. Jonah is in the Old Testament and is a Hebrew or Jew, which are the same thing.

Jesus referred to Jonah once. The scribes and Pharisees wanted a “sign” from Jesus that he was indeed speaking for God. He said, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.” What is the sign of Jonah? Jesus said, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Mt 12:38-41; cf. 16:1-4)

The story of Jonah is readable and brief, only four chapters. It is about the prophet himself, and it involves one of the most important issues, not just in the Bible, but in the world of religion. Jonah was called by God to go to Ninevah and preach because of the wickedness there.        Ninevah was a great Assyrian city on the banks of the Tigris River in present-day Iraq. At the time of Jonah, about seven hundred years before Christ, Ninevah had become a truly magnificent city. But the people there were not Hebrews (Jews). They were Assyrians. Having no love for these foreigners, Jonah ran from the assignment. He went to Joppa and boarded a ship going to Tarshish.

This is where the story becomes familiar, with a storm at sea that threatens to destroy the ship. Jonah confesses that he is the cause of the storm and finally convinces the others to throw him overboard so that the storm might cease. Jonah ends up in the belly of a whale, where he repents and is expelled onto dry land. Then God once more tells Jonah to go to Ninevah. This brings us to the reading we heard earlier. Jonah’s work was phenomenally successful and Ninevah repented and avoided destruction. But the story hardly ends here!

The story of Jonah may be allegorical. An allegory is a story in which characters and events represent things from real life. Jonah, for example, would represent Israel. Jonah’s running away would represent Israel’s failure to be a light to the nations. The great fish would be Babylon, swallowing up Israel in captivity. The whale’s regurgitating of Jonah is the restoration of Israel to their homeland. Still, the story of Jonah ends with our hero angry because Ninevah repented and God did not destroy them. Jonah says, “This is why I didn’t go to Ninevah in the first place, because I know you and knew you would be merciful and would not destroy them.”

What is Jonah’s problem? After all, he is a proud and faithful Jew, an effective oracle of God. His problem is with Gentiles. The word “Gentile” comes from the Latin word for “nation,” and means “non-Jew.” There were seven nations of people that were allowed to remain in the Promised Land when it was conquered by the Israelites. (Josh. 24:11) The word for “nations” is “goyim.” In several places in the Old Testament (Ex 23:28-33; Deut 7:1-5; Josh 23:4-13) the Israelites are told to maintain strict separation from these peoples in religion, marriage, and politics. Despite these injunctions, interactions between Israel and “the peoples of the land” were considerable.

Jonah’s problem goes deeper than Gentiles. His problem is with God. Jonah’s problem is that his God is too small, too domesticated, too provincial. He has equated his God with his religion, his religion with his race, and his race with himself. This is not to suggest we should erase personal distinctions. A Jew need not cease being a Jew, or an Assyrian an Assyrian. Jesus respected such distinctions. He told his disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Mt 10:5-6; cf. 15:24) This instruction remained in force until the risen Christ told them: “Go therefore and make disciples of all ‘goyim’. .” (Mt 28:19)

The point is, we all have a larger identity than race, ethnicity, or even religion. Who are you? What is your most comprehensive identity? Man? Woman? Texan? Baptist? No, not even Christian. Your most comprehensive identity, your most accurate, most truthful, most important identity is – - child of God. Jonah knew, without a doubt, that he was a child of God. He knew he was a child of God because he was a Hebrew, a Jew. It follows then that the Assyrians of Ninevah were not children of God because they were not Jews.

There is another “sign of Jonah,” one more pertinent to us. When the Israelites finally began to return from exile in Babylon they were a sad lot. Nehemiah and Ezra taught them that their only hope    of survival lay in avoiding all contact with Gentiles. No commerce. No intermarriage. This led to the rigid, narrow view that the covenant with God was for Jews only. This exclusivity meant that heathen nations and peoples were simply unacceptable to God. The book of Jonah, and the book of Ruth, were apparently written to challenge such an exclusivist view.

Whoever wrote the story of Jonah saw Israel’s survival, not in separation from the rest of the world, but in reaching out. They needed to recover Isaiah’s great vision of Israel as a light to the nations: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. . . And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” (60:1,3)

This other “sign of Jonah” has a zealous Jew preaching to Gentiles, albeit reluctantly, and hoping they will not listen, hoping God will remember who the “chosen people” are. Ninevah repents, God forgives, and Jonah is furious because God did not destroy them. The story ends with Jonah angry. The last words are God’s, attempting to reach Jonah: “Should I not pity Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

We don’t know if Jonah saw the light. We all have blind spots and spells of short-sightedness. But this is the second “sign” of Jonah, a sign of second chances and a more universal understanding of God’s love and care. Carl Sandburg wrote a little poem called “Losers.” “If I should pass the tomb of Jonah / I would stop there and sit awhile; / Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark / And came out alive after all.”

O God, forgive us for being so small that we are in danger of being swallowed. Amen.

The story of Jonah has been considered a children’s story for so long that adults pay it little attention. If all you remember about Jonah is that he was swallowed by a whale, you have so much to learn! So, let’s begin with the basics. Jonah is in the Old Testament and is a Hebrew or Jew, which are the same thing.

Jesus referred to Jonah once. The scribes and Pharisees wanted a “sign” from Jesus that he was indeed speaking for God. He said, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.” What is the sign of Jonah? Jesus said, “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Mt 12:38-41; cf. 16:1-4) 

The story of Jonah is readable and brief, only four chapters. It is about the prophet himself, and it involves one of the most important issues, not just in the Bible, but in the world of religion. Jonah was called by God to go to Ninevah and preach because of the wickedness there.        Ninevah was a great Assyrian city on the banks of the Tigris River in present-day Iraq. At the time of Jonah, about seven hundred years before Christ, Ninevah had become a truly magnificent city. But the people there were not Hebrews (Jews). They were Assyrians. Having no love for these foreigners, Jonah ran from the assignment. He went to Joppa and boarded a ship going to Tarshish.

This is where the story becomes familiar, with a storm at sea that threatens to destroy the ship.

Jonah confesses that he is the cause of the storm and finally convinces the others to throw him overboard so that the storm might cease. Jonah ends up in the belly of a whale, where he repents and is expelled onto dry land. Then God once more tells Jonah to go to Ninevah. This brings us to the reading we heard earlier. Jonah’s work was phenomenally successful and Ninevah repented and avoided destruction. But the story hardly ends here!

The story of Jonah may be allegorical. An allegory is a story in which characters and events represent things from real life. Jonah, for example, would represent Israel. Jonah’s running away would represent Israel’s failure to be a light to the nations. The great fish would be Babylon, swallowing up Israel in captivity. The whale’s regurgitating of Jonah is the restoration of Israel to their homeland. Still, the story of Jonah ends with our hero angry because Ninevah repented and God did not destroy them. Jonah says, “This is why I didn’t go to Ninevah in the first place, because I know you and knew you would be merciful and would not destroy them.”

What is Jonah’s problem? After all, he is a proud and faithful Jew, an effective oracle of God.

His problem is with Gentiles. The word “Gentile” comes from the Latin word for “nation,” and means “non-Jew.” There were seven nations of people that were allowed to remain in the Promised Land when it was conquered by the Israelites. (Josh. 24:11) The word for “nations” is “goyim.” In several places in the Old Testament (Ex 23:28-33; Deut 7:1-5; Josh 23:4-13) the Israelites are told to maintain strict separation from these peoples in religion, marriage, and politics. Despite these injunctions, interactions between Israel and “the peoples of the land” were considerable.

Jonah’s problem goes deeper than Gentiles. His problem is with God. Jonah’s problem is that his God is too small, too domesticated, too provincial. He has equated his God with his religion, his religion with his race, and his race with himself. This is not to suggest we should erase personal distinctions. A Jew need not cease being a Jew, or an Assyrian an Assyrian. Jesus respected such distinctions. He told his disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Mt 10:5-6; cf. 15:24) This instruction remained in force until the risen Christ told them: “Go therefore and make disciples of all ‘goyim’. .” (Mt 28:19)

The point is, we all have a larger identity than race, ethnicity, or even religion. Who are you?

What is your most comprehensive identity? Man? Woman? Texan? Baptist? No, not even Christian. Your most comprehensive identity, your most accurate, most truthful, most important identity is – - child of God. Jonah knew, without a doubt, that he was a child of God. He knew he was a child of God because he was a Hebrew, a Jew. It follows then that the Assyrians of Ninevah were not children of God because they were not Jews.

There is another “sign of Jonah,” one more pertinent to us. When the Israelites finally began to return from exile in Babylon they were a sad lot. Nehemiah and Ezra taught them that their only hope    of survival lay in avoiding all contact with Gentiles. No commerce. No intermarriage.

This led to the rigid, narrow view that the covenant with God was for Jews only. This exclusivity meant that heathen nations and peoples were simply unacceptable to God. The book of Jonah, and the book of Ruth, were apparently written to challenge such an exclusivist view.

Whoever wrote the story of Jonah saw Israel’s survival, not in separation from the rest of the world, but in reaching out. They needed to recover Isaiah’s great vision of Israel as a light to the nations: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. . . And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” (60:1,3)

This other “sign of Jonah” has a zealous Jew preaching to Gentiles, albeit reluctantly, and hoping they will not listen, hoping God will remember who the “chosen people” are. Ninevah repents, God forgives, and Jonah is furious because God did not destroy them. The story ends with Jonah angry. The last words are God’s, attempting to reach Jonah: “Should I not pity Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

We don’t know if Jonah saw the light. We all have blind spots and spells of short-sightedness.

But this is the second “sign” of Jonah, a sign of second chances and a more universal understanding of God’s love and care. Carl Sandburg wrote a little poem called “Losers.”

“If I should pass the tomb of Jonah / I would stop there and sit awhile; / Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark / And came out alive after all.”

O God, forgive us for being so small that we are in danger of being swallowed. Amen.

Saturday, February 18th 2012, 7:00 p.m.

Edison’s

1724 Cockrell Ave., Dallas, TX 75215

Food, Drinks, Art and Dancing

Live Music by New Ground

Cocktail Attire, 60′s Mod or 70′s Disco Diva’s and Daddy O’s

I attend this event every year, and I can assure you that you will have a BLAST!

Tickets are $100 each (or $25 each if you’re also willing to work a two-hour shift).

If you would like to attend, please let me know and I will have an invitation sent to you.

Thanks! Garland

The Missions Committee is pleased to announce that our 2012 mission trip will be to San Antonio! We will be partnering with our own Linda Cross at Baptist University of the Americas. There are a number of exciting projects being considered including construction, partnerships with local relief agencies, sports camps, backyard Bible clubs, and others. We are also investigating the feasibility of offering a music and worship component that would involve our choir.

More details will be provided in the coming weeks, but for now, mark your calendar for July 14 – 21!

If you have questions or need additional information, please contact Garland Hamic.

Also, if you have furniture or other heavier items that need to be picked up on Saturday, please contact Garland Hamic.

Are you disciple material? Have you ever asked yourself that question? What is disciple material? Most of us don’t come to Jesus because we want to be disciples. We come to Jesus for what’s in it for us, not to sign on for another responsibility. We might be called theoretical disciples, not literal disciples. We do the best we can, but we already have a job and we have family obligations. Are we theoretical disciples? Theoretical disciples with a theoretical Lord?

Who did Jesus consider to be disciple material? Fishermen? Some of you would be all over that! But all of Jesus’ disciples were not fishermen. Matthew was a tax collector, and if a tax collector can be a disciple, anybody can! Jesus didn’t advertise for disciples.  He didn’t interview. The way he called his first disciples seems strange, almost arbitrary. Walking the shoreline, he sees men fishing, two sets of brothers – - Peter and Andrew, James and John. “Follow me!” he says, and they do. As a boy, I imagined that Jesus’ appearance was so mesmerizing, standing there on the shore, that the fishermen were spellbound. They dropped their nets, and went to him. But, this was not the resurrected, transformed Jesus. This was the physical Jesus, who was apparently ordinary in appearance. Commentators suggest that these fishermen had some previous encounter with Jesus. Perhaps they had heard him teach. Perhaps they had talked with him. All we know is that on that day they left their fishing and followed Jesus.

The disciples of Jesus were so varied that we can find no single trait or characteristic that they all possessed, some singular thing Jesus was seeking. Perhaps he was looking for potential, someone who showed promise. Disciples were not uncommon back then. Similar to apprenticeship, discipleship was a way of learning from a master. In the absence of colleges, universities, and trade schools, teachers were found in the daily life of the world. John the Baptist had disciples, as did many learned and skilled teachers. Discipleship was often costly. To learn a trade or a discipline required taking time away from one’s regular work or leaving it altogether, which Jesus’ disciples apparently did. Whatever they hoped to gain, they would certainly change, far more than they could have imagined. In Jesus they would not only encounter God, but over time they would discover who they were themselves.

In a book called The Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self, Robert Elliot Fitch insisted that the self is not known subjectively, but objectively. The self is not found through introspection, but in our extroverted interests, loyalties, and passions. These are located in other people, in history, in nature, and in God. Fitch said:  “Where there are no such interests and loyalties and commitments, there simply is no self.” Fitch wrote this in 1961, and today it is clearer than ever that he was going against the grain. In these fifty years since there has been an ever-growing infatuation with feelings – - depression, phobias, insecurity, anxiety. How I feel is the measure of all things. We have become decidedly more impressed with psychiatric medicine. But we are also witnessing the alarming increase of recreational drug use. Fitch was a Congregationalist minister and a professor of Christian ethics. He was concerned with what he called “false loves,”  the worst of which is love of the self (egotism, selfishness, pride). He saw Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm as fostering a scientific “cult” of self-love. Fitch held that one’s interests and passions should not be directed to one’s self, but to objective concerns, activities, and interests. Today Fitch’s work is a bit dated and thought by some to be over-reactive, but his warning about our preoccupation with subjectivity and inwardness is worth considering. If nothing else, it stresses the importance of keeping a balance between subjectivity and objectivity.

Jesus did not give his followers exercises in introspection and self-awareness. He taught them to live in openness to God, but he did not encourage endless self-examination and self-concern. He taught them to pray and encouraged their conscious reliance on God. But he focused their attention on the world of suffering people, and he made human need a priority for his followers. And remember, when he first recruited his disciples he said simply, “Follow me.”

In ourselves and in our world we look for permanence, for a fixed state of being, for an unchangeable reality. Change, however, seems to rule everything. In 1543 Copernicus expressed his frustration about this to Pope Paul III. He said: “Among the authorities it is generally agreed that the Earth is at rest in the middle of the universe, and they regard it as inconceivable and even ridiculous to hold the opposite opinion.” Copernicus was right. Now scientists say that “nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of ‘being’ and ‘becoming.’” (Haeckel) A child is a complex combination of being and becoming. The child has a fixed identity, and will never be another or different person. But the child is always changing. Some of these changes are painful for everyone! But the goal is for our children to become all they are meant to be, to become who they really are, fulfilling the Creator’s intention for them. Human life is “a perpetual flux of ‘being’ and ‘becoming.’”

Discipleship is not a static state, but a process. Discipleship is not a state of being, but a process of becoming. It is not a destination, but a journey. Some miracles take time, and the miracle of becoming is one of them. Following Jesus is a journey that lasts all our days. The first reason for this is that it is a journey into God. Alfred North Whitehead said “the worship of God is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.” The true saints have all concurred on one thing:  The more we know of God, the more we know that we do not know God. Faith in God is not a task for a Saturday that you dive into and finish so you can take it easy. John Killinger said “it is so easy to settle down where we are, and to allow the stream of our ideas to become frozen and fixed, so that even the God we pursued goes off from us and we are left to worship only our memories of the last time we saw [God], stirring the trees on distant hills.”

There is a second reason why discipleship is ongoing and unending. The second reason is that it is a journey into Christ-likeness. The Incarnation is not only the revelation of God in human terms. It is the revelation of what God had in mind when creating you and me. This does not mean we can become like Jesus Christ in anything more than the vaguest approximations, but we can see in him the vision of God for the human creature made in God’s image. In seeing Christ, and in following him, by the grace of God, someday someone may see in one of us a resemblance to the One we have tried to follow.

Lord Christ, come to our shores and give us faith to drop our nets and follow you. Amen.