Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, is known less for what he did in the games that he played during his six years in the NFL than what he did before them. At a game in 2016, during the singing of the national anthem, when everyone was standing to honor the flag, Kaepernick took the knee.
This gesture, which he repeated throughout the season, generated enormous controversy, you may remember. Whatever our own views of his actions are, what I want us to see is that our gestures can embody and carry a world of meaning. Kaepernick performed his gesture in a ceremony that involves the display of the American flag. The flag is a symbol, which stands for the values of the country it represents. The gestures that we perform before it indicate where we stand relative to those values.
We use symbols and symbolic gestures to convey meaning to one another. No less does this apply to what we do in our churches. In fact, it may be in our churches that we depend most on symbols and gestures to convey meaning.
For example, we have a pulpit. It occupies a prominent place in our sanctuary. Wherever we may be in this space, our eye is drawn to it. We can’t miss it. This suggests that what takes place there is significant, or at least it should be. +
On the pulpit is usually a large pulpit Bible. It too draws the eye. When the minister steps up into the pulpit, finds his place in the Bible, and begins to read, we understand this set of gestures to be significant. We prepare ourselves to listen carefully to what is proclaimed, because we understand the meaning of the symbols and gestures.
In the first lesson appointed for this Lord’s Day, the people gather in the square before the Water Gate to hear Ezra proclaim the scriptures. He was standing above them on a platform, or pulpit, as the Latin Vulgate translates it, and they stand up as he begins to read to them. All the people are there, both men and women, even including the children old enough to understand his words.
So also in our gospel lesson, the people gather in the synagogue in Nazareth to hear the scriptures proclaimed. This time Jesus stands up, and the scroll is handed to him. He unrolls the scroll, and finds the lesson appointed for the day. (For the Jewish synagogue too has a calendar of scripture lessons, just as the Christians church does.) And he too begins to proclaim to the people the scripture lesson found in the prophet Isaiah.
Ezra and Jesus perform a set of gestures that we regard as significant whenever we assemble together for public worship. We refer here to the act of preaching, otherwise known as proclamation.
This is a Presbyterian church. Now the Presbyterian church is one among many churches. Each, if we are charitable, can be distinguished for at least one thing it does well. We may ask of each of them what is best about it.
We can make the strong case that proclamation is what is best in the Presbyterian church. The Presbyterian tradition has always had a high view of proclamation. The Second Helvetic Confession, one of the early confessions in the Reformed tradition, asserts that the preaching of the word of God is the word of God.
The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who has had a great influence on theology in the twentieth century into our own, defines proclamation as human language in and through which God himself speaks, like a king through the mouth of a herald. To be sure, God’s word cannot be confined to preaching. Barth famously said that God may speak to us through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a flowering plant, or a dead dog. Where God genuinely speaks to us, we should listen. But none of these is what we are called to proclaim. We are called to proclaim the scriptures. The church has always regarded the scriptures as the place where we can expect to hear the voice of God. The reason why the event recounted in our Old Testament lesson was so significant, the reason why it registered so great an impact upon the people, is that it was the scriptures that Ezra proclaimed. Indeed, the people had been so moved, so convicted by Ezra’s proclamation, that they were weeping.
Incidentally, this is what can happen when God’s word seizes us. We can recall the response to the first recorded Christian sermon in Acts 2. After Peter preaches to all the diaspora Jews assembled at the Temple for the feast of Pentecost, the people who heard him were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles: “Men, what should we do?”
Perhaps those to whom Ezra is preaching too were cut to the heart. For he tells them not to mourn. Perhaps their response emerged from a certain sadness at how misaligned their own lives were with Law of God that Ezra was proclaiming to them from the pulpit.
At this point, someone may object: “But the scriptures are hard to understand. The Bible has always been opaque to me.” To this objection there are at least two responses, which we can derive from our lessons. For the first let us turn again to our first lesson. Ezra proclaimed the scriptures. But he also explained the sense, so that the people could understand them. Ezra belonged to the tribe of Levi, from which the people of Israel chose their priests. Ezra and his fellow Levites were set apart in Israel for temple service. In our text, it seems that Levites were present at the assembly assisting the people as the scriptures were read and expounded. How were they able to do this? They devoted their time not to farming and producing and selling, but to the study of Torah or Law. They were therefore qualified to teach the people their faith.
So too the church must always have a class of people set apart for the service of the church for the same end. The appointing, training, examining and ordaining of persons to the office of minister of word and sacrament must always be maintained. Without them, the church becomes vulnerable to error and prey to deception. She falls captive to political ideology either on the right or the left and then forfeits her calling, with disastrous consequences. As the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, “A false faith is capable of terrible and monstrous things.”
Let’s be honest and admit that this is a very present danger in our culture today. There exists a deep mistrust of the educated elite in our culture, in our political life, today. Whether it is justified is, of course, a debatable point. At any rate, people have a hard time accepting the expertise of those with specialized training, if they don’t reject it altogether. This is a problem that affects every sector of society, not excluding the church.
But let us be countercultural. Let us as the church acknowledge and single out those who are gifted to teach and preach. Let us support and encourage them in their studies at solid and reputable theological seminaries. And then let us receive them back among us and learn from the expertise they have acquired, even if this in itself should qualify as a countercultural act. Again, the church has always to face the challenge to stand apart from the world and offer an alternative to it.
We’ve been responding to the objection that the scriptures are hard to understand. Let us in the second place refer to the Holy Spirit. We who are in the Reformed tradition should never tire of repeating that the Holy Spirit is present and involved in the act of proclamation, from beginning to end, at every stage in the communication process.
Communication theory breaks down the event of communication into three basic parts. There is the sender, the message, and the receiver.
The Spirit is the with the sender. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” Jesus is the Spirit-empowered preacher in our gospel lesson. But this applies to all preachers who stand behind the pulpit to proclaim the scriptures in faithful witness to him.
The Spirit is with the message. It’s been the conviction of the church that all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17). When the church reads and proclaims the prophets and the apostles, she understands that no divine prophecy ever had its origin in the will of man, but the prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21).
The Spirit is with the receiver. In the classic Reformed liturgies is found what is called the prayer for illumination. In the prayer for illumination, we ask God to help us by the power of the Holy Spirit to understand what is read and proclaimed to us each Sunday. The Apostle Paul prayed for the believers at Ephesus that the eyes of their hearts be enlightened in order that they might know the hope to which God had called them. We imitate him each time we offer to God our prayer for illumination.
It’s never been more urgent than now to have a firm grasp on God’s Word. The air waves are saturated with a cacophony of conflicting voices telling us what the world is all about and how to understand our place in it. Indeed, this has become so confusing that according to journalist David Fuller we are experiencing a crisis of sensemaking.
But this should not push us in the direction of a biblical fundamentalism. “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” That option always exists as a temptation for the sincere Christian. But it tends to result only in the addition of one more shrill voice to the existing cacophony of voices already competing for our attention. The Word of God does not become our possession that is subject to our control. That is making God into an idol. The Word of God rather comes to us from outside us. It is not a word that we can give to ourselves. It declares to us: “I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.” To hear and receive these words involves giving up control, submitting to God, and renouncing a self-willed life.
We ought always to have this open and submissive disposition to the Word of God, whenever the Word of God is proclaimed to us. We should always imitate the boy Samuel in the temple in this regard. When the Word of God addressed itself to him there, he responded: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” We should always approach this part of the worship service with this anticipation, just as the people in the synagogue in Nazareth on that Sabbath day so long ago.
“The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Jesus.” We sense the anticipation, we sense the need that the people had for good news then, because we share the same anticipation, because we have the same need. We too at one time have needed to be freed from our oppression, released from our captivity, and healed from our blindness. Perhaps some of us still need these things today. If so, let us receive the good news that Jesus comes to bring.
“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is how Jesus introduces his sermon. We don’t know what followed, because Luke did not choose to give us the full manuscript of Jesus’ sermon. Let us note that today is the divine today. It is what theologian Paul Tillich called the eternal now. By this he means the event by which the eternal breaks into the now and addresses us at this moment. If you hear in the proclamation a word addressed to you in this moment, then you ought to take it to heart and obey it. Karl Barth reminds us that the prophets and the apostles are never mere objects of study and critical evaluation of later readers. They will always be the living, acting, speaking subjects on their own account. That is how we ought to regard them whenever we come to hear them proclaimed to us in worship. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide bone and marrow.
God has entrusted to the church the scriptures. When we proclaim them at our gathered assemblies we can expect to hear God’s own voice addressed to us there. Let us cherish what the Presbyterian church—indeed all Christian churches—have traditionally believed: that the proclamation of the good news has power to change hearts, to generate faith, and to give a new lease on life. “I am not ashamed of the good news,” the Apostle Paul declares, “for it is the power of God that brings salvation to all who believe” (Rom. 1:16).