Ridiculous Sticks

Jack Lescoulie, sports reporter for NBC’S "Today Show," heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination while playing golf. He said, "I dropped my club, which, at the time, seemed like a ridiculous stick in my hand."

The New York Yankees win yet another of their innumerable division titles. They don’t throw champagne all over each other in the locker room. This time, the owner gives them a bottle and tells them to go home and drink it alone.

Jim Crace is getting ready to read from his new novel in Cambridge to promote his newest book. He says, "I immediately realized that this novel I had written, this rhythmic, finely written . . . piece of literature had no relevance."

The annual rush to gush over the winners of the Emmys slows to a crawl and finally stops. In one night, the same night, four Broadway shows close. Irrelevant.

Whether it’s the Yankees, Crace, or old Broadway, they’re all reacting to the same thing: September 11, 2001, as they watch the World Trade Center melt. The pennants, the books, the dramas the awards, all of which seemed so important on September 10^th, look like ridiculous sticks on September 12^th. September 11^th changed all that.

They said that on the first Sunday after September 11^th, people packed churches and for the first time in a long time, nobody sang choruses that day, only the old hymns. Somehow singing the same seven words eleven times was a ridiculous stick. No, that was a Sunday for "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" and the serious music with its strong theological bones.

Will September 11^th turn us back to sermons like the songs? Don’t we have to confess that sermons over the past twenty years have been theologically malnourishing mixtures of psychological and secular pottage? Haven’t we developed congregations so shot through with theological rickets and scurvy that they sit in pews and mumble "Kum ba Yah," eleven times? (Which leads to the question, "Does anyone know exactly what "Kum ba Yah" means, or better yet, "Does anybody care?")

Sermonic Fruit Loops and devotional Twinkies that tell us "How to Build Self-Esteem" and "How to Love the Real You," coming from paper maché pulpits seem like ridiculous sticks when television is showing us commandeered planes crashing into skyscrapers and the radio is telling us the Pentagon is burning.

As we watch 102 story buildings melt in our dens, somehow sermons on "How to Get to the Top" seem as tepid as the left over coffee from last night’s deacons’ meeting.

Maybe now, just maybe, the American congregations will demand and hear sermons that scrape the sky with their theology that takes us into the counsel and acts of a sovereign God. Maybe now we’ll listen and learn about propitiation, expiation, and the Christological center of the Bible. Maybe now we’ll demand sermons that reason, explain, and prove their way through the Bible (Acts 17). Maybe now, instead of intellectual chewing gum and popcorn balls made sweet and served from a fast food pulpit, we’ll expect our pastor-teachers to step up to the lectern having come from a week in the Word and in the presence of God, rather than a week of small-talking their way in and out of balancing the latest teacup at the last tea party.

Maybe now we’ll expect our pastor-teachers to come to us and say, "Look with me at the Bible; let me show you who God is, what He’s done, and what He’s doing and how He’s inviting you to play a part in His story.

In a time when our Christian bookstores have been sanctified trinket shops and our pulpits have hawked micro waved slogans, the day has come to serve and eat the strong meat of the Word and drop the ridiculous sticks in our ecclesiastically soft hands. Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor