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Last Sunday night I preached on the Good Samaritan. My final point was that the only sustainable motivation for loving our neighbours is an understanding of grace as opposed to morality.
I said that morality is used by secular society as well as every major religion to get its followers to do good deeds to those who are poor. Morality is essentially this: I am a good person if I do good deeds and I will therefore be worthy to receive an award. In religion it often manifests itself in: you must give to the poor because the bible commands it or the Koran commands it or the Torah commands it. If you do this, you will be rewarded by going to heaven; if you don’t do this you should feel guilty!
I stated that morality is a weak motivator; it doesn’t take people where Jesus wants them to go because it is essentially a selfish motivation. If I do good things then I will get a good reward, but if doing good things causes me to sacrifice then I will not do it because the reward doesn’t seem to be worth it. You see this clearly in the Priest and the Levite who show us how far morality can take you: not far enough. Morality is a weak motivation for mercy.
I then went on to say that experience of grace is the only motivation; Jesus puts the law expert (and us) into the story as the beaten Jew lying on the road being aided by our enemy who had no obligation to help us. A real understanding and experience of this in the saving work of Jesus is the only motivation for grace because it is not selfish but responsive.
Anyway that is all preamble to my current thought that I wanted to share with you.
(AAP: Alan Porritt)
I was thinking about how to illustrate this and I didn’t come up with anything decent for the night but since then I have had the thought that maybe the weakness of morality brought down an Australian Prime Minister!
I am speaking of course of Kevin Rudd who famously called climate change “the greatest moral challenge of our time!” The implication being that if you were a moral person – a progressive person, a good person, then you would care about climate change and vote for him. Which Australia did in the Ruddslide that was the 2007 election.
But morality is a essentially a selfish motivation and so once the cost became real, once the implications of sacrifice came home, once businesses didn’t want to pay for a price on carbon; the reward wasn’t worth it and it fell by the wayside. We couldn’t even take the first step towards conquering the greatest moral challenge of our time. Morality is weak in the face of sacrifice. Now neither party has a real policy on climate change.
I am not saying that everyone in Australia needs to become a Christian for us to do something about climate change (indeed that might even be a step backwards considering that the Christian Democrat Party for example are self confessed ‘agnostics’ when it comes to climate change, are against the Kyoto Protocol, against a prince on carbon (ETS) and refuse to do anything that will have a negative economic consequence).
The reality is that we are stuck in a way of life that has a large negative environmental impact, if we want to change that then it is going to mean sacrifice. Calling something the greatest moral challenge of our time and appealing to morality is not going to work.
But then again a citizen’s assembly of 150 randomly selected people isn’t going to work either.
Anyway, what do you think?
Sunday week I am preaching on the parabe of the Good Samaritan.
Found this on the net and thought I would share it.
In the previous post based on T. David Gordon’s book Why Johnny Can’t Preach” I presented his point that Preachers today are generally aliterate, that is, they know how to read but they choose not to. Gordon states that this significantly affects the way they communicate, not having a solid structure to their sermon, causing their listeners to become lost, disinterested, confused and bored. This however is not the only flow affect for an aliterate preacher…
Gordon argues that being aliterate leaves a preacher with an incapacity to be truly significant. Gordon states that we live in a culture where information is presented to us in six minute periods between breaks ad breaks. Six Minutes! He states that:
“Only by televised news’ own silly standards can someone spend six minutes (sometimes even 10-15 minutes) on a matter of public interest and call it ‘in-depth’ coverage. Nothing of public importance can even be adequately introduced in 10 minutes!”
He goes on to illustrate this by discussing how he wanted to understand more about the Vietnam War. He began by deciding to read 5 books on the subject, just to get a basic overview and general introduction to the complexities of the conflict. He states that if reading 5 books will merely give you and introduction to a topic then we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we have gained an adequate understanding of an important matter in a televised news story! This makes us people who are constantly taking in the trivial. He states that this creates an ironic cynicism in people as they become consumed by the myriad of media in their lives; speaking of people who have grown up in the last 30 years he says:
“as they watch TV, they know that everything in media is transient, disposable. Everything on television is just for the moment – its just television – they pick up this derisive tone and gain the sense that noting is truly serious. Electronic media – dominated culture has robbed us of the reflection about life and its meaning that has previously been fairly common. Much of the time the everyday noise of media is the buzz of the inconsequential, the just there. This is neither the media’s downside nor their saving grace. The buzz of the inconsequential is the media’s essence. This pointlessness is precisely what we are, by and large, not free not to choose.”
What kind of ministers does this produce? Gordon answers his own question by describing them as ministers who are not at home with what is significant, whose attention span is shorter than that of a four year old in the 1940s, who race around constantly distracted by sounds and images of inconsequential trivialities, and out of touch with what is weighty! Their sermons become trifling, thoughtless, uninspiring, mundane, moralistic, sentimental or simply ‘how-to’ sermons. The great seriousness of the reality of being human, of God’s coming judgement, the comparative insignificance of our time in light of eternity – things that used to be the subject of virtually every sermon have been replaced with one triviality after another!
Terefore, Johnny can’t preach! Any Thoughts?
Preachers today just can’t preach. Most could not be classified as ‘good’ and a very small minority could be classified ‘great’ , at least this is what T. David Gordon argues in his book “Why Johnny Can’t Preach”. I thought that as I read the book I would share with you Gordon’s points that I found interesting (or at least worth sharing). I have previously raised two issues, but you can scroll down and read at your own leisure.
3/ Johnny is Aliterate. Gordon states that one of the main reasons Johnny can’t preach is because Johnny is aliterate, no, not illiterate, A-literate! Gordon uses the term aliterate to define people who: know how to read, but choose not to.
Gordon stresses that the emphasis our society places on reading has dramatically changed, we just don’t read texts anymore. We may still read magazines and road signs, but we don’t read texts! Gordon attempts to prove this by describing a game that he plays, which he calls ‘the airport game’. At an airport he strikes up a conversation with someone he has never met before, then after 10 minutes he will be able to tell (by their choice of words and sentence structure) whether that person is a reader. Gordon says that when he talks to a ‘reader’ he can hear a difference in the way they order their sentences and in the words they choose to convey their points without using unneccesary words. When he plays this game, Gordon says that after 10 minutes of chatting he will make his guess and ask the person: “What are you reading at the moment?”, which will of course give him his answer. Gordon’s point is that our societies emphasis on reading texts has changed so much that you only need ten minutes of small talk to see a huge difference between a ‘reader’ and someone who is aliterate.
This of course has an overflow affect to the way we write, or as Gordon would say, the way we don’t write. Because of telephones, videos and other forms of communication including (dare I say it) blogs, we no longer ‘compose’ texts. We don’t sit down with a pen and pad and go through drafts, thinking about what we want to say instead we just say what comes into our heads. During the First World War soldiers would write to their wives and their letters would be full of emotion and purpose, nowadays I would just call her and whatever popped into my head would more or less pop out of my mouth. If I was to write a letter to my wife in the same style as a WWI love letter, I don’t think it would be nearly as well planned or well written… plus I think she would be weirded out.
Gordon suggests that most preachers are aliterate and therefore they struggle to structure their sermons clearly and helpfully; people in their congregations tend to get lost easily and can’t quite figure out the main point of the sermon. This is what Gordon classifies as bad preaching.
What do you think about this? Do you think there is a noticable difference between readers and aliterate people? Are you sold on Gordon’s point? If so, are you going to read Crime and Punishment first or Les Miserables!
By the way, I wonder if Gordon read this post whether he would be able to tell in these 575 words if I am a reader or aliterate… hmmm that thought is gonna fester!
I am currently reading a book called “Why Johnny Can’t Preach” by T. David Gordon. I am not very far through it yet but have been surprised with some of the points that he has raised. I am going to share some of them as I read the book, however you can also get some good insights into preaching by reading my friend Matthew’s blog, he has written a series called: “the problem with preaching”.
Gordon wrote this book as he was staring death in the face, he had just been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and was told the chances of surviving were less than 25%. That kind of news focuses the mind. It so focussed Gordon’s mind that he decided he was going to write a book to leave to the world when he was gone – Why Johnny Can’t Preach. I give this introduction because if you are just about to die then that frees you to be a lot more… ‘Blunt’ when discussing a problem in the church. The problem being: most ministers can’t preach. Gordon comes straight out and states that most preachers could not be classified as ‘good’ at preaching and there are very very few that he would class ‘great’. He cites several reasons for this, but I’ll let you read the book to find out what these are.
Gordon’s point that I want to bring to you today is two fold:
1/ The problem is not with preaching. Gordon states that it is becoming more and more popular to say that preaching is an outdated communication tool in a 30 sec TV generation. That our generation simply can’t take a 30-40 minute sermon each week as our attention spans have been shrunk, that we need to replace preaching with conversations or discussion times or without any message at all! Gordon strongly rejects this and says that a shrinking attention span brought on by TV is just an excuse that preachers use to justify themselves when people complain that their sermons are too long or boring. (I told you he was blunt). Gordon instead states that preaching is not outdated; we just have bad disorganised preachers! He gives this analogy:
A surgeon in a hospital repeatedly fails to keep his patients alive during surgery, they all keep dying on the operating table! The solution to this problem then is not to replace the scalpel with another surgical tool but to better train the surgeon so he knows how to properly use it!
It is not because preaching is an outdated form of communication; it is because Johnny can’t preach. We shouldn’t abandon preaching as a primary way of communicating the gospel; we should just get better at doing it (I’m not yet up to the chapters where he outlines how Johnny can get better at preaching).
2/ Preach shorter sermons. If you take Gordon’s blunt approach that most preachers wouldn’t qualify as ‘good preachers’ and that very very few would qualify as great preachers than it stands to reason that preachers should be preaching shorter sermons. His view is that if most ministers aren’t good at preaching than ministers should recognise this and not put their congregation through a 40 minute sermon. This is something my own dad has always said: “Think of how long you can hold someone’s attention, now halve that number, and you will know how long you can actually hold their attention for”. That doesn’t add up to very much when you do the math…
Disclaimer: I am not a preacher, I am a social worker; but having preached a few times I can understand how hard it is. Thus these are not my views but the views of Gordon. But what do you think about this? Do you agree with Gordon? Do you think that it is an American thing and not as much of a problem here in Australia/Sydney? Do we need to replace preaching with another way of communicating the gospel e.g. cafe styled discussion times, music and reflection, short films, dramas etc…
