Tough Texts

A wise senior at seminary once told me that preaching on a text that challenges you is a good thing to do. Well, I took his words to heart and chose to preach on this text this weekend. We are in the middle of a sermon series on the prophets and I decided to preach on Amos. We knew that a choir from the Romanian Gypsy Village was going to be in town. Christ Lutheran has been going on mission trips to there through The Smiles Foundation for I think six years now so it's near and dear to our church's heart. I chose Amos because he's known as one of the most outspoken prophets when it comes to "justice." Plus, we had preached on Micah 6:8 (do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your Lord) about two months ago.

"Let justice flow like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream." Pretty verse, right? However, getting this whole text to preach was a challenge for me. There's a lot of law in here (you've been doing this, this, and this wrong and are in bad shape in the eyes of God) and not a whole lot of Gospel (God loves us even though we suck because of what Jesus did on the cross).

And for some reason, on this one, I had a hard time finding my voice. I knew that I wanted and needed to tie in Romania to the sermon. One of the great things about where I work is there are lots of chances to throw out ideas to lots of people with lots of great insights. However, this time I got too much and therefore I went into the sermon thinking I had to do a lot and cover a lot of ground. When I finished my first draft my sermon was a mess. I had the law, Gospel, some personal stories, and I knew what the focus of my sermon was. But I had too much going on because I felt that I had to get everyone's agendas in there. So, somewhere in there the focus had become fuzzy.

However, I think God never meant for us to face these challenges alone. First things first, we have God to lean on when we are having a hard time and I do trust that if I would have gone to bat with the original draft of that sermon, that his Spirit would have found some way to use the words that I preached to do the work of the Lord. And I trusted that God had been present throughout the entire process of writing the sermon. However, I needed some outside help this time around. And that help I found in two friends, one who is another pastor in the church and the other a good friend who also happens to be very interested in religion and, as he put it, "good at making order out of chaos." Both gave me helpful feedback and helped me par down the length and put the pieces in good order by asking simple questions such as what is your point, what is the focus. And with those questions I was able to articulate, "The only way we can do justice and let justice flow out of our lives like a river is if we go back to the source of it all, Jesus."

And off I went. The sermon then needed some rearranging, some new transitions, and some deletions. Then I was ready to go and I felt about 10 times better about my sermon and was able to bring my best game to the pulpit on Sunday.

This week I was reminded that I have friends that are willing to help me on this internship in any way they can. I was reminded that challenges sometimes aren't always there to prove how strong and independent we are but to remind us how much we need the people around us.