Listen Up!

In a conversation about the challenge of preaching in our politically divided society, a friend said, “The Gospel speaks for itself. The question is if anyone will listen.” His comment reminded me of Jesus’s word to the crowd when he told the parable of the sower, “Let anyone with ears listen!” There is a difference between hearing and listening. When I introduce a scripture reading in worship, I invite the congregation to “listen for” rather than to “listen to” the Word of God. Simply listening to the words requires little effort. However, listening for the deeper meaning of the Gospel requires you to be open to God’s truth that might confront your ways of thinking.

I keep a quote journal in which I record interesting ideas from a variety of people. As I looked through my journal, I found several entries about the importance of listening for the truth and our tendency to resist the truth when it doesn’t agree with what we already think. Let me share some of these thoughts with you and, as Jesus said, “Let anyone with ears listen!”

In a sermon at the Wallace Presbyterian Church, Rev. Edward F. Johnston, Jr. said, “The gospel is true. It doesn’t depend on my preaching or anything else I do. The gospel is true.” The American author Mitch Albom wrote in his book, Have a Little Faith. “Did you ever hear a sermon that felt as if it were being screamed into your ear alone? When that happens, it usually has more to do with you than with the preacher.” In what I think is a good commentary on the purpose of Jesus’s parables, the Irish New Testament scholar Ernest Best describes the gospel as “not a set of abstract truths to be announced but a way of life to be lived.”

Wilmington born author and graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill Sharyn McCrumb offers this unsettling but accurate description in her 2014 novel Prayers the Devil Answers, “People seldom thank you for telling the truth.” Along the same lines, British New Testament scholar N.T. Wright observes, “People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.”

New York politician Thurlow Weed congratulated President Abraham Lincoln on his second inaugural address in which he called for “malice toward none, with charity for all,” Lincoln knew his speech would not be received well by those who wanted to punish the Southern states. He responded to Weed, “I expect [it] to wear as well as — perhaps better than — any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”

The Message translation of James 1:22 is, “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear!”  That’s still good advice.