preaching to myself

One of my pet peeves about myself is that I tend to get preachy. It is, as you would guess, a hazard of my trade- since I am in fact a preacher. This is the part of my self that I really don't like to admit to or look at seriously, but I can really launch into sermons about the most trivial issues. I know you are shocked by this (tongue is firmly in cheek right now), but sometimes I launch into sermons involuntarily even when no one is around. It is really sick, I know. I can't help it.

Which raises the philosophical question "if a preacher preaches a sermon in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, is it a real sermon?"

But I digress. What I mean to tell you is that I preached a sermon to myself while driving down the Broadway Extension this week.

I was listening to talk radio when a woman who claimed to be a lifetime evangelical Christian called in to defend Christianity to an antagonistic talk show host. He challenged her faith by asking her to answer one simple question about the creation account in Genesis. He wanted to know how is it that eeevanJELical (that word spoken with particular scorn) Christians could claim their little corner of the truth when ALL these other religions have their own creation account.

I stared at the radio waiting for this woman to come back with SOMETHING half way thoughtful or informative in retort. I knew the odds were not in evangelicalism's favor, as one recent study found that a majority of teenage evangelicals believe that MOSES was one of the 12 disciples (If you are wondering why that is disturbing, you are hereby banned from my blog site). Anyway, the woman was speechless. She had nothing to say.

Nothing.

She just said she didn't know how to respond.

That is when I started preaching my sermon. The sermon was about our responsibility as Christians to know our faith. And in fact to know how to answer people when they ask us for the REASON for the hope we have, but to be able to do it with such knowledge and forethought, that our answer is gentle and respectful (1 Peter 3:15).

It was about our responsibility not just to know our religious belief, but in a multicultural multi-religious context within which ALL OF US now live, it is important that we even know what other religions believe and teach.

It was about how in order to truly love someone with you whole heart, you have to KNOW them. I waxed eloquent to myself about how true Christianity is not just experiential knowledge, it is also informational knowledge and to truly know the Lord you have to know doctrine. You have to love doctrine and love His Word.

And how if this woman really was who she said she was (a lifetime evangelical Christian) and was being asked in front of the entire national talk radio audience to give a reason for the hope she had, and if she truly had through her love for the Lord and for her love for others and her love for the gospel had taken the initiative to learn about these things, she would have been able to very simply, very powerfully answer his question.

In my sermon, I went on to explain that the talk show host had framed the question in the wrong way. She should have just asked him what he knows about what other world religions teach about creation? If she had done that she would have changed the focus of his scorn and a very good point about truth could have been made. Because in fact while most of the world religions do not agree about the most important truth issues, it just so happens that creation is NOT one of them. All the major monotheistic religions in the world agree in essence on the creation account. In fact the major religions all read and claim belief in the same text- the Genesis account is agreed upon by Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Mormonism and only disagree in their interpretation of it. Eastern religions believe that the material world is an allusion so their ideas of creation are not even in the same context- they wouldn't agree to the question in the way he framed it, it seems to me.

I went on in my sermon to myself to talk about how all of us are given the responsibility to engage our culture, to love our culture, to understand our culture and to not be intimidated by the questions of culture. I talked about how all truth, by it's very nature, is narrow and that even the talk show host would have to agree to that.

I pointed out that if one says that there is no such thing as absolute truth then he is making an absolute statement and therefore we can't even believe that assertion, making it irrelevant and empty. As C.S. Lewis correctly pointed out, "you can't go on seeing through things forever, if you can see through everything, then what you see is nothing".

Man, that was a good sermon.

Too bad I was the only one who heard it. The only thing worse than me preaching to myself is when I amen myself.

(And by the way- this is a good time to remind you that the next "Explore the Journey" Course on the doctrines of our faith begins Wednesday night October 17 in room 200)