Sermon Library
“Reflections on the Dalai Lama, Jesus and Thomas Troeger”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
August 03, 2008
Service Theme: Pentecost XII - 2008
Source: Luke 18: 9-14
Pentecost XII-2008 August 3, 2008
Reflections on the Dalai Lama, Jesus and Thomas Troeger
Luke 18: 9 - 14
Gregg Anderson
If You Get the Congregation to God, Sit Down!
A preacher with band-aid on his chin explained at the beginning of his sermon; “I’m sorry about this band-aid. I cut my chin shaving this morning when I was thinking about my sermon.” A voice from the congregation spoke out: “Next time why not think about your chin and cut the sermon?”
Today is a Sunday which has annually been blessed with a sermon from Thomas, a wonderful speaker. Thomas Troeger is a professor of preaching and is now a Professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School. In his honor I would like to talk a little bit about preaching this morning. I am utilizing an article written by him to other clergy just a couple years ago entitled If You Get the Congregation to God, Sit Down
Augustine on Preaching
I would like to begin with one of my favorite quotes about preaching. I have read it a few times over the past 30 years. It is from one of our most well known Christian Church Fathers, St. Augustine. He writes in the sixth century, “My preaching almost always displeases me. For I am eager after something better, of which I often have an inward enjoyment before I set about expressing my thoughts in audible words. Then, when I have failed to utter my meaning as clearly as I conceived it, I am disappointed that my tongue is incapable of doing justice to that which is in my heart. What I myself understand I wish my hearers to understand as fully; and feel that I am not so speaking as to effect this purpose. The chief reason is that the conception lights up the mind in a kind of rapid flash; whereas the utterance is slow, lagging, and far unlike what it would convey.” I quite identify with St. Augustine and am humbled that I am in good company.
I remember when I first cited this quote many years ago; I was immediately criticized, on the way out the door, by a visitor to the Chapel for such a confession. “If I was really in tune with the Holy Spirit,” he said, “I would know that I am clearly speaking the word of God and would have no doubts.” I wondered if he would have said this to St. Augustine as well? I do want to be in tune with the Holy Spirit and sometimes I have moments of significant personal inspiration, insight and feelings of connection beyond expression. But that is the point, not everything can be placed in words. I think there are unique and very personal experiences that can never be completely expressed. That which is most spiritual for many of us and even, life altering, we typically cannot express in words as keenly as the experience.
Poetry, music and art, help to convey such heightened realizations, but still can never fully capture many of our deepest spiritual moments and experiences. I still humbly identify with St. Augustine, who, by the way wrote prolifically about his thoughts and experiences and because of his authenticity and integrity, his words and thoughts remain with us today. Theology has changed quite a bit today, but his influence was significant. Thomas Troeger writes just a few years ago, “There are things that are dated and sexist about St. Augustine, but I love some of his basic insights, particularly that God made us for the love of God, to love God and that until our hearts rest in God they are restless.” And perhaps it is still in this very restlessness that we continue to seek God in various ways.
Imagination
It is in our restlessness in which we need to be creative and imaginative to feel and find a glimpse of God. Tom Troeger recalls that it was the early Protestant Preachers like Luther and Calvin, who emphasized preaching the word of God only, citing scripture after scripture in their sermons. But in the 19th century, Henry Ward Beecher, in his lectures on preaching, said that imagination is the single most important gift for a preacher. Tom states, “I think that to be imaginative in a faithful way is to be more faithful to God, because I consider God the most imaginative of all Imaginers.”
“Who else would think of a universe with 50 million galaxies and billions of stars and putting chocolate and broccoli on the same planet? God is just wildly imaginative. And really imaginative when you think of who God has called to be preachers. It’s really a crazy act. So if God can be this playful and also this mysteriously complex, one of the ways I can be faithful to God is to use the imagination that God has placed in me,” says Tom Troeger.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a deep theological thinker, profoundly influenced by Immanuel Kant. He calls the imagination “the recapitulation of the Great I Am in the human soul.” So when the imagination is at work creating something that is beautiful, it is then actually recapitulating the creative work of God. Troeger also states that he creates sermons to cultivate his own relationship with God. “As far as I am concerned, if anyone neglects the cultivation of their relationship to God, I don’t care how skilled anyone is, sooner or later people will pick up on the hollowness of it.” We all need to continue to be sensitive to who we really are along our own spiritual journeys. Being honest with ourselves and then to others is a beginning of connecting our hearts with our mind and with our words and then with one another.
A Parable of Prayer
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I receive.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18: 9 – 14)
I know that I am always trying to find the right words to say to make a prayer provocative and personal. Yet, Jesus reminds us that prayer is not about the words, but about the humility and looking honestly inward. It is to come to God a penitent, not a preacher. Paul writes in the book of Romans, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men and women knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8: 26 – 27)
“I Can’t Always Explain It”
Words are words and cannot always describe the heart and the spirit. How many times have you said about something that is very significant, “I just can’t explain it” or “I can’t really put it into words.” Sometimes we make the connection fairly well and the prose finds purpose and lasts a long time. I think this is why we have poetry, music and art. We want to express a significant feeling and realization in which just words cannot be adequate. We turn to a medium which lifts words out of the ordinary to the extraordinary.
In fact, states Thomas Troeger, this is why people go to church in the first place. He states, “People go to church not to make homiletical judgments or hear great prayers; they go to church to encounter God and to develop their faith. It is an appropriate act for people who are in full-time ordained ministry to look at the technical aspects of homiletics: How does communication work well? Why doesn’t it work well? How can I make a transition from a biblical text to the contemporary scene – or back? These are technical questions about how to put a homily or sermon together. But people don’t come to church to learn homiletics; they come to know Christ and encounter God. So if you overdid that kind of thing, you would skew the focus.”
What Troeger means by “overdoing that kind of thing,” is overdoing the technical and or mechanical aspects of communicating and forgetting the real essence of worship and communication which is being very human, real and authentic in the enterprise of connecting ourselves with other people and with God. In fact, the name of the article by Thomas Troeger in a subscription especially designed for clergy which is simply called Homiletics is If You Get the Congregation to God, Sit Down. For those of us who know Tom Troeger, that title sounds just like him. You do not “get the congregation to God” through academics and technical skill, but through personally relating, honesty, humanity, humility, authenticity, integrity and reality. Ron James would often repeat a quote he heard from Tom Driver of Union Seminary that means a great deal to me as well. “A minister is not a model of morality, but a mirror of identity.”
“Preaching is Truth through Personality”
It has been said often and in various forms that a good speech is 10 percent content, 10 percent presentation, and 80 percent the mere quality and character of the speaker. When Tom Troger was asked if today’s media and technical gizmos make a poor preacher into a better preacher? He responded, “No. Absolutely not. I’ve seen preachers who have depended upon that, and I’ve seen some pretty glitzy presentations, but at the end it rang hollow for me.” He then quotes another homiletics professor, Phillips Brooks who said, “Preaching is truth through personality.” There is nothing, nothing, nothing that any electronic wizard can design that will be as powerful witness to God as a human being speaking to another human being as a human being about God. I would quickly ad, I would think that this is the purpose and incarnation of Christ. Troeger continues, “I don’t want to know that an electronic chip can give me a spectacular image; I want to know that my fundamental human beingness is being redeemed by a Power that I can rely on. And the only witness that can tell me that is another human being.” Then he ads, “That’s why preaching will never die.”
“The Dalai Lama Preaches Compassion, Responsibility”
To preach literally means to prophecy and prophecy literally means to proclaim. But many connotations have evolved around the word preaching and preacher. Personally, I do not like either term, preach or preacher, even that is what I do and I are one. But I do like to talk. I think I have always liked to talk. I also like to listen.
I was surprised to see the headlines of the Aspen Daily News last Sunday which boldly pronounced “Dalai Lama Preaches Compassion, Responsibility.” My immediate response was, Buddhist’s don’t preach, they may teach, but they don’t preach; they meditate and chant, but they don’t preach. Who would come up with this headline? I looked below the headline and it was by Jonathan Bastian. Jonathan Bastian is the son of Ed Bastian. Ed Bastian has spent ten years in Tibetan monasteries and has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin. When I mentioned this title to him last Sunday, Ed essentially concurred with me and said that Jonathan usually does not get to pick the headline. The Editor or editors pick out the headlines.
Perhaps one of the dynamics of Buddhism which is appealing to many people in the West is that it does not emphasize preaching, but practice. I understand that the Dalai Lama rises at 4:00 am every morning and sits inside a sacred room to practice between four and five hours of meditation. Clothed only in humble red robes, he is completely alone, sitting cross-legged on the ground, contemplating the teaching and texts of Tibetan Buddhist masters. For years, people have asked him exactly what he is meditating on. And for years, he has given them a one-word answer that is a primary tenet of Tibetan Buddhism: compassion.
His message is simple and yet extraordinary. We all concur with his message of peace, non-violence and respect for all of humanity. He is indeed a living Gandhi, Theresa and King. Yet, practicing what he preaches and what he practices is difficult for most people. Yet, let us remain hopeful. Sometimes it takes generations of words and hope, for any level of transformation to come into reality.
What is most remarkable is that his message is extraordinary because of his practice and because of who he is as a person. He is an epitome of the saying, “Preaching is truth through personality.” He is not a good speaker, yet we hang on his every word. I heard a number of comments last week that he is even difficult to understand. Of course, we need to consider a different language barrier and only admire his skill with the English language. But we still listen most intently to his broken sentences. Not because he is a great orator, but a great person.
He is a refugee and has witnessed great atrocity of his people and land and when he is not expressing great compassion, he is laughing. We all love his laugh and unpretentiousness. He starts to laugh and often at length and everyone else laughs with him even when we don’t know why he and we are laughing. That’s because he is who he is and we want to be with him.
In the Presence of Jesus
Imagine what it would have been liked to have been in the actual presence of Jesus. Now that I think about it, Jesus was not a great speaker either. His Sermon on the Mount is very disjointed and just rambles on. Half the time he spoke in parables leaving people just scratching their heads. There is no record of him attending any class on Homiletics in Jerusalem or at Yale. Yet, he changed the world. Perhaps, it is because of who he was and what he did.
The message this morning is not a sermon to other clergy. It is a message to all of us. I do not like the word preaching nor sermon. I prefer message and my title today is simply a reflection. My intention is that these reflections from Thomas Troeger, on the Dali Lama and Jesus might be reflected within all of us. In many ways, we all preach at one time or another, and we all know it really is in our practice. After today, let us spend a little more time with God in prayer and meditation and a little more practice of compassion with one another. And now that I hope I have gotten the congregation to God, I am going to sit down. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Dr
Aspen, CO 81611
http://www.aspenchapel.org