The Word of the Lord Spread

We have entered the Time after Pentecost or Ordinary Time.  It is the LONG green season in the church lasting from two weeks after Pentecost (mid May to mid June) and ending in late November.  Many pastors dislike this season because it last forever and things are the same for so long.  Right now I'm loving getting to this Ordinary Time.  For Bethlehem it has meant using a new liturgical setting for the summer and another for the fall, doing the psalm in a different way, and it means going back to stories!  After the season of Easter when we had so many gospel lessons that were parts of Jesus' theological discourse to his disciples shortly before he was killed, I'm excited to have gospels and other lessons that have a plot.

I'll let you know if I change my tune by November ;-)

One of the main reasons why I'm excited to have stories is because they are easier to learn and remember for biblical storytelling.  Yesterday gospel, while short at only 7 verses, took me about a third of the time memorize and I was more confident remembering it, even with so much less prep time, than I have been since "doubting" Thomas on April 11th.

Also for me stories are easier to preach on, often they are more applicable to our lives, even when such as yesterday's gospel (Luke 7:11-17) the stories are about something that doesn't happen too often in our lives. For yesterday's sermon  I even talked about the Old Testament lesson, 1 Kings 17:17-24, and the New Testament reading, Galatians 1:11-24, as well as the gospel.

The following is my written sermon.  I ended up doing a last minute, for me, rewrite on Saturday evening.  So I realize there are some flow issues and maybe even a sentence or two that make no sense in the written document (I did a lot of copy and pasting from the original sermon) but verbally they were edited and let's face it, I'm too lazy to change the written sermon now. 


What is the heart of this gospel lesson?

To me the heart, the meat, the point of today’s gospel is not that Jesus raised a young nameless man from the dead but that the crowd began to glorify God and the word about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.

Yes Jesus raised a man from the dead, and that is amazing, but his resurrection on gets a small blimp on the screen of this lesson. A crowd was there. Jesus had compassion for the mother, we aren’t told anything about the man other than he was an only son. Jesus tells him to get up and then the crowd is seized with fear and begin to glorify God by saying things like “A great prophet has been risen among us” and “God has looked favorably on his people”. And then reports about Jesus, the word of the Lord, spread.

Throughout Luke’s gospel we are told that reports about Jesus spread. Spread like gossip, like wildfire, quickly throughout the land. And crowds form. Already Jesus has a crowd that follows him to Nain, and then there is the crowd of mourners from the town. And the crowd, both those following Jesus and the town’s people, are amazed at what Jesus has done and begin to glorify God.

And the word of the Lord spreads throughout the surrounding country.

Throughout scripture, it is the words of ordinary people that spread the word of the Lord. The widow at Zarephath, whose son Elijah brings back from the dead, proclaims to Elijah “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth” Do you think she kept her son dying and being brought back to life a secret? No I’m sure she spread the word of the Lord. The word of the Lord that was in Elijah’s mouth is now in her mouth as she tell her friends and neighbors about the great things that were done in the name of the Lord.

And the word of the Lord spreads throughout the surrounding country.

Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the gospel he proclaims is not of human origin. He goes on to tell of his amazing conversion story and how Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem were upset with him for not being an authorized speaker of the word of the Lord. Yet he continues to tell the word of the Lord.

And the word of the Lord spreads throughout the surrounding country.

We have heard the word of the Lord because of the widow told others. We have heard the word of the Lord because of the crowd told others. We have heard the word of the Lord because Paul told others.

Who spread the word of the Lord to you?

Both our actions and our words spread the gospel, the word of the Lord throughout the surrounding country. Our words and actions, whether we are God incarnate, a prophet or just us regular folk, proclaim the gospel to others. The gospel, the word of the lord, is a living word! It is living in the words we speak and in the actions that we do. When we have compassion for others and care for those in need we are proclaiming God’s love. When we cloth the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and visit the imprisoned, we are showing others that the Word of the Lord is truth. And that the word of the Lord is alive.

I recently read in Take this Bread, a wonderful description of how the word of the Lord is alive. Sara Miller describes the word of the Lord something like this: The word of the lord is not just the words printed on the page of a bible. The word of the lord is what is heard by the people of God when the Bible is read. The word of the Lord, the gospel message, is not living because it is magical but because over and over down the centuries, believers have wrestle with texts, adapted them, edited them, interpreted them, swallowed them whole and spat them out. The stories in the Bible are records of human attempts to understand God, attempts that were hopelessly incomplete. But through words and acts we keep trying.

Our Gospel is alive. The word of the Lord is alive. And it continues to be alive with each retelling, with each time we glorify God. The word of the Lord is alive every time we tell others about Christ and every time we proclaim the good news. We probably are not able to name each person who has shared the word of the Lord with us, our Sunday School teachers, pastors, a person of faith who first taught us part of scripture, or even random strangers on the street but they did share the word of the Lord with us. And they were able to do so because they first wrestle with those texts after someone taught them, and that person was taught by someone else and so forth on up the line back to those who were there, who saw Christ

For we have heard the word of the Lord because of the widow told others. We have heard the word of the Lord because of the crowd told others. We have heard the word of the Lord because Paul told others. We have heard the word of the Lord because others have told us. And others hear the word of the Lord because we tell them.