The Gospel People Don't Want to Hear

Preaching Challenging Messages

Rev. Lisa Cressman, Lisa Cressman

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781506456393
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506456409
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Lisa Cressman, founder of Backstory Preaching, offers preachers tools to craft difficult sermon messages that can be heard. The gospel changes lives, but to do that it must first be heard. For it to be heard, people have to trust they are "seen" and their concerns and fears are acknowledged. They have to feel their perspectives are real, valid, and respected.

Preachers have a difficult message to preach, a message many will not want to hear: new life always emerges from death. Cressman shows preachers how to craft sermons with the right tone and how to have the courage to say what you're called to say.

Part 1 of the book provides the preparatory work needed before crafting those difficult sermon messages. Here the focus is on how preachers prepare themselves, build relationships of mutual trust with listeners, and understand and appropriately use authority and leadership to proclaim the gospel.

Part 2 focuses on the sermon itself with suggestions on what to say and how to say it. The preacher will find new tools and sharpen existing ones to preach difficult messages with empathy, compassion, and skill.

2

Building Mutual Trust

Jesus tells us to trust him all the time. Often not in so many words, but he says it just the same. It’s no wonder, because trust is everything.

For example, Jesus often says, “Do not be afraid.” It’s implied we can trust what he’s saying, as in, “Do not be afraid; trust me.” Or an expanded version might be, “Do not be afraid. I know the sky is falling, and right now you have every reason to be afraid. Just the same, be still, do not be anxious, and trust me; I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen something your eyes aren’t open to yet. I’ve heard something you don’t have ears to hear yet. You’re focused on what’s scary, but I know there’s more to the story. If I told you what’s possible after this, you wouldn’t believe me, and you won’t believe me until you discover it yourself. Between now and then, listen to my voice. Trust me.”

If we give Jesus the benefit of the doubt for a moment, what is it, exactly, we’re asked to trust? Well, I don’t think we’re asked to trust that Jesus will patch the cracks in our skies and make them stay intact and in place. That would mean nothing ever changes and no one ever dies, so that can’t be what he meant.

It also can’t mean to trust that when the sky falls, those tumbling shards won’t hurt when they pierce us. Jesus was “deeply moved” and wept at his friend Lazarus’s tomb, and over Jerusalem’s intransigence. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, he wondered where God had gone. Really? Jesus was worried God might have something more important on the calendar than hanging with his son while he died? Wherever God went for those three hours, Jesus felt hurt. That falling skies won’t make us cry out in pain doesn’t seem to be what Jesus meant either.

It also doesn’t look like we’re supposed to trust that when the sky is about to fall we don’t feel actual fear. In the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified, Jesus was “grieved and agitated” (Matt 26:39), and asked God three times whether the cup could pass from him. That sounds to me like he was afraid, and it was a perfectly normal fight-or-flight human response. I don’t think Jesus meant we could trust him to shut down our protective sympathetic nervous system, which God designed in God’s “very good” human creation to warn us of danger and keeps us alive. For Jesus to feel the human response to “be afraid and flee” from his own crucifixion demonstrates we weren’t created with a design flaw. Not to feel the physical sensations of fear also can’t be what Jesus meant.

If it’s none of those things then, when Jesus says, “Even though your sky is falling, do not be afraid; trust me,” what is he suggesting? He’s suggesting we trust in hope, faith, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Hope

Hope means we trust that what’s in front of us isn’t all there is. Hope means we trust in a future we cannot see, or only see through a glass darkly. There is something better, something good, or at least something salvageable, that will emerge from the current situation. To hope is to dream, to imagine, to dare that something good is around the next bend; we’re moving toward it and believe it’s waiting to greet us. To hope is to extend ourselves outward, beyond ourselves. When our skies are falling and we don’t have hope, we believe this is truly the end of all things. We look to the ground and let those pieces drive us into it and crush us. We don’t bother to search for the new sky already under construction. Hope, on the other hand, keeps our gaze stubbornly fixed on the eastern horizon, looking for that first light that changes the shade ever so slightly from midnight blue to navy.

No matter where our hope is placed, it’s risky. We place something we value in someone else’s hands, and hope they honor and respect it. We place our dreams, desires, prayers, and needs in God’s hands. We place the needs of the community in the hands of politicians. We place our health care needs in the hands of doctors, nurses, and medical insurance executives. We place our home values in the hands of homeowner associations, the Federal Reserve, and financial industries. We place our money in banks, our children in schools, and the Christian formation of teens with youth leaders. We place our expectations in ministers, preachers, and bishops. We place our hearts in the hands of spouses, lovers, friends, and pets; in memories, homes, and columbariums. Hope places our trust in another, and we know not what future they may bring. Hope risks; so therefore does trust.

Hope is not only risky, it’s dangerous to those who would steal our hope away. Hope never settles for the “now” but trusts in the “not yet.” Hope refuses to look into the eyes of oppression, but peeks over its shoulder to see liberation sneaking up from behind. Hope is a threat to all who are determined to make us believe now is as good as it gets.

When the sky is falling, we do not have to be afraid when we trust in the hope there is abundant life ahead.

Faith

What does it mean to have faith when Jesus tells us not to be afraid? Specifically, Jesus asks us to trust he’ll get the job done because he’s dependable, reliable, and capable. That said, and with all due respect to our Lord and Savior, our experience is often different. There is too much evidence to list that Jesus appears undependable, unreliable, and incapable. Enough so that many—myself included—want to retort, “Show me the money.” Where’s the disconnect?

First, let’s remember Jesus isn’t our personal virtual assistant waiting on our command. When our car hits black ice and we go airborne, we might yell to Siri, “Call Jesus: mobile!” And when Jesus picks up, we’re likely to bellow to suspend the car right-side up three inches off the ground and set us down gently. As genuinely sympathetic as Jesus will be, we’ll probably still crash. Jesus helped design the laws of physics, like gravity, that bring us back down to earth with velocity (a lot of it), mass (a lot of that, too), and time (not nearly enough of this one). Hence our predicament in an airborne car. Those natural laws that are generally good for us still apply when we don’t want them to.

Likewise, E. Coli bacteria in our colons are necessary for human life. But outside their divinely prescribed arena they do humans great harm, even though the bacteria are still functioning exactly as they are supposed to according to their God-given natures. God does not change their properties when they escape our guts to go forth and multiply in minor flesh wounds.

God also didn’t stop fifty-one inches of rain from falling during a hurricane on the Houston metro. That colossal amount of rain is due in no small part to humans’ warming of ocean waters. Dump that amount of water where six million people live on a coastal plain (including yours truly) without sufficient water drainage built into the infrastructure, and not even Jesus can bail water fast enough to make a difference. That disaster’s on us. No, the laws of nature and the consequences of human actions apply equally to the righteous and the unrighteous.

So no, Jesus doesn’t obey our commands like the perfect virtual assistant, but that’s not enough to lose faith in his competence.

About Miracles

But what about miracles? Aren’t those in Jesus’s job description? That’s a longer subject for another day, so I’ll just say this. I believe there are miracles, but if a miracle means God temporarily alters the laws of nature to our preferences, I’m skeptical that many of the miracles we say are miracles are actually so. Here’s why. My first career was surgical intensive care nursing in a hospital serving a five-state region. It was a Trauma One center, and we got in all the “train wrecks.” I saw some people make it after horrific accidents when I wouldn’t have bet a nickel they would have. Were their recoveries miraculous? Maybe. There’s no way to know for sure. What bothers me is at what point in the process do we claim the miracle? After a patient has spent seven months in the ICU, bankrupting them and their families in the process? They will owe the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars for the implementation of their miracle, only to face a lifetime of chronic consequences—and further expense—from their injuries.

Plus, ascribing miracles begs the question how God decides on whom and when to bestow them. For instance, was a miracle bestowed on the man who was airlifted to my hospital, whose razor-slit wrists I bandaged after he tried to kill himself—and whose ankles were cuffed to the bedrail? Perhaps. But a miracle would have been timely for his wife and three children whom he had murdered a few hours before. No, I’m not persuaded if we pray fervently enough, or enough times, or in exactly the right way, or just because of the mood Jesus is in that day, Jesus will suspend the laws of nature long enough to give some a window of escape from catastrophe, but not others.

But what do I know? Pray for miracles; maybe that’s exactly what God is doing. But for me, the miracle is God’s relentless, intransigent faithfulness, care, curiosity, and compassion that imbues the human spirit and drives us to help others in need—even when we’re the ones who cause the problems in the first place that cause people to be in need. The miracle to me is God doesn’t give up on us. When we consent to God’s compassion we are driven to solve problems for others through research, experimentation, and financial donations, and through systems like health care. Indeed, it will be a true miracle when we as a nation agree to pay for excellent health care delivery for the poor, and the chronically and mentally ill. That miracle would come from God’s concern for us, which in turn inspires us to do what we can for each other. God’s stubborn grace is totally in Jesus’s job description; see below.

If we are to trust that Jesus is reliable, dependable, capable, and on the job as God’s only begotten, Jesus learned from the best. He is fully able to perform his duties and hasn’t missed a single day of work. He and God collaborated to write his job description, and we humans were not invited to tweak it. His job description is to dwell in us so we are one with God. Moreover, since Jesus is still living and contains the wisdom of the Spirit, in consultation with his fellow members of the Trinity, it is within Jesus’s scope of practice to interpret and implement his job for each generation.

Because Jesus dwells in us, we cannot be separated from God while our skies are falling. In our generation, we are not separated from God because of opioid addiction, or because of those who prescribed the pills. We are not separated while we are reaping the consequences of our greed and folly that pollutes the earth that is the source of our life and well-being. We are not separated because advances in technology outpace our development of the ethics to employ them, or to keep that technology safe from hackers, malware, and bots.

We may deny ourselves God’s love, care, and forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean Jesus separates himself from us. If he did, it would get him written up for neglecting his duties and negate the whole point of the resurrection. He still forgives us the sins of our day, of our generation’s own making. Jesus still dwells in us and we in the Holy Trinity, even if we don’t change course. If it comes to it, Jesus will go down with the good Mother Ship Earth even though we’re the ones who stood inside the engine room and blew up a hole in the starboard side. Even then. Even with us. Even now.

Because Jesus dwells in us, we have the capacity to see our mistakes, and address and apologize for them; see the suffering of others and meet them; and see the needs of today’s poor, widows, orphans, migrants, strangers, and foreigners among us, and tend to them. Dwelling in us is Jesus’s job description for which he is uniquely qualified, competent, and utterly reliable.

Neither God nor the Spirit complain about Jesus’s work performance. It is only we who accuse him of dereliction of duty. Trust him. He’s on the job.

Love

When we trust Jesus loves us, we trust he sees us as we are, where we are, and the condition we are in. Because he sees us, he wants the best for us. Wanting the best for us means Jesus wants the dignity of every human being not only to be respected, but enabled to thrive. Jesus means he not only wants justice for every human being, and especially the poor, but expects us to provide it and holds us accountable when we don’t. When Jesus says we can trust he is truly present in the breaking of bread and the gathered community, that makes us one however much we may disagree with one another. When we trust Jesus, we know the foundational truth of our belonging and worth is in our being created and seen as “very good.” When we trust we are loved, even when the sky is falling down around our ears, we trust Jesus sees us as his mother saw him in his agony on the cross, and had the courage to stay to the end. Because ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The Gospel People Don’t Want to Hear
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• The sky is falling
• Introduction
• Letting the Sky Fall
• Building Mutual Trust
• The Bully Pulpit
• The Preacher as Trusted Guide
• Sermon Approaches
• How to Offer Challenging Messages
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Working Preacher Books