Sunday Comes Every Week by Frank G. Honeycutt

Author:Frank G. Honeycutt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Someone once said that overtly political sermons only reveal which periodicals the pastor reads at the parsonage. With that as a warning, it is still unwise (and unbiblical) to always avoid politics in the pulpit, especially during a presidential election where candidates make inflated promises that seem at times to border on the messianic. An eager electorate, sensing needed change, may unconsciously assign to candidates attributes and hopes that flirt with idolatry and misplaced faith.

Part of this sermon’s purpose from November of 2016 was to name the simmering truth that could be palpably felt that morning all around the room: we are a divided nation, a divided community, and, therefore, a divided congregation in the wake of an election season that was perhaps unprecedented in its intense exchange of excessive heat and diminished light. My central theme statement for the sermon in this contentious context: “The words given to the disciples by Jesus usurp all other words.”

At first glance, there’s nothing earthshaking in this statement. But the theme was entirely pastoral (and even confrontational) on the first Sunday after the Tuesday vote. This was a sermon where shared confessional conviction in a common Apostles’ Creed (spoken together soon after the sermon) was named aloud as a guiding allegiance that eclipses all other allegiances, including those of flag and country. A preacher often knows right away if a sermon has made an impact. With this one, the proverbial pin-drop could have been heard. I intentionally left longer than normal silences at the breaks in the sermon (indicated with three asterisks) to allow parishioners time to ponder and do their own reflecting.

Recall Luke 2:19, where Mary, just after giving birth to Jesus, “ponders [all these words] in her heart” that are newly knocking around internally. The Greek verb in this phrase is symballo—sym (“together”) plus ballo (“to throw”). Sermons often need built-in periods of silent pondering, especially when a preacher “throws together” disparate ideas that are often kept separate (such as the oft-misunderstood separation of church and state) in the lives of many parishioners for a host of cultural reasons. Authentic conversion suggests that Jesus’s teachings newly conceived in any of his disciples will need time to gestate before bearing mature fruit. A sermon needs proper pacing in this regard.

One (unexpected) result of this sermon was that people who had been at odds through a long and straining political season talked to one another on the way out of worship. No “Kum-Ba-Ya” moments occurred, to be sure, but I came away convinced of the Spirit’s reconciling presence in worship that morning and the potential to heal a great divide. Authentic Christian community—whose identity and purpose can be formed and recalled through preaching—is one of the few remaining places where people of vastly different perspectives can come together in hopefully civil exchange and dare to call each other “brothers and sisters.”

Craig Barnes describes a divisive issue at Princeton Seminary (that even spread beyond the seminary) involving an outside speaker who came to campus,

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