Be Ye Hearers of the Word and Not Doers Only
Ralph C. Wood
Romans 10:14-17
The Warren Carr Preaching Series
First Baptist Church, Elkin, North Carolina
Ralph C. Wood
This series of sermons and lectures in honor of Warren Carr has been established in the conviction that we live amidst a great famine of the Word. We are a famished people because there is so very little preaching and hearing of the Gospel. This may seem to be a strange claim. Our churches as well as our television stations and our radio networks seem quite well-nourished with preachers. Indeed, we are bloated with them. Yet for all our religious fatness, we remain a skinny, even an emaciated people. We are anorexics and bulimics of the Word. We stuff ourselves with preaching, but then we put our finger down our throat in sickness at these thousands of words which are no real Word.
This anorexia and bulimia of the Word marks our great divide from Jesus himself. He was physically famished after his forty days of temptation in the Wilderness. Satan promised him power to turn the desert stones into nourishing bread, if only he would bow down and worship the Prince of this world. Jesus replied that there is a starvation far worse than having nothing to eat. He tells the devil that men will die if they try to survive on the foodstuffs of the world. Only the Word that proceeds from God will nourish of our souls. Eight centuries earlier, the Hebrew prophet Amos made a similar prediction of our late 20th century condition. Amos prophesied that God would send a time of dearth and drought on sinful Israel. It would be a famine that would make mere hunger and thirst seem nourishing. God would unleash, instead, a famine that would devastate his people at their very core: a famine of “hearing the words of the Lord” (8:11).
I believe that something similar has happened in our time. I believe that God has sent a terrible famine of the Word. Why would the good God do so horrible a thing? Why would He prevent the hearing of his Word? God is no capricious and arbitrary deity who acts without reason, much less a monster-god who delights in our misery, tearing the wings off flies to see them squirm. As always, God acts for our good, even when his actions seem hurtful. He sometimes takes good things away from us to awaken us to their real value and thus to prompt our eager return to them. We often learn the privilege of health only when we’ve fallen sick, the value of money when we’ve gone broke, the sweetness of victory when we have suffered the bitterness of defeat, the blessedness of hearing when we’ve become deaf. The 19th century Danish poet and prophet Søren Kierkegaard explained the matter well. He declared that God would take the Gospel away from Europe–and America, we would add–as the final way to convince us of its truth. I believe that Kierkegaard has proved right: God is deliberately starving his churches and his people in order that we might learn to feast upon his true Food. My purpose in this sermon is to identify the reasons for this awful famine that God has sent upon us, this awful famine of the Word. For if we can discern why we have grown deaf to the voice of God, we might yet again become hearers of his holy Word. In religion as in medicine, diagnosis is two-thirds of the cure.
In Romans 10, the Apostle Paul wrestles with the problem of his own people’s deafness to the Word: why his fellow Jews refused to receive Jesus as the Anointed of God–as the Messiah of Israel and thus of the whole world. Paul poignantly confesses, in the very first verse, that “my heart’s desire and prayer is that [Israel] may be saved.” Earlier Paul has admitted, in one of the darkest lines in all Scripture, that he would be willing to be damned if Israel could be brought to redemption (9:3). His people have rejected Christ, Paul says, not because they are so wicked but because they are so good. This is usually the case: we are undone by our virtues far more than our vices. We sin against God and man more often through our strengths than our weaknesses. The intelligent person looks with scorn on the stupid, the courageous man despises the cowardly, the beautiful woman has contempt for the ugly. Our blessings become our curses.
So it was with ancient Israel: she became deaf to God’s Word precisely because of her obedience to the Law. God had given his elect Nation the precious gift of the Law to be the means of her salvation. Unlike all other races, Israel was set apart as the one People whom He would graciously enable to live in faithful obedience to the Law. Thus would Israel become ever more reliant on God, since the Law could be fulfilled only through the Covenant of forgiveness that God had made with her. Israel could not keep the Law of her own accord, but only by means of God’s own goodness and power. This explains, by the way, why an Alabama judge is wrong to think that posting the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall will make the people there more righteous. It may have the opposite and terrible effect of making them self-righteous. For if we think we can make the state do the work of the church, as if we could obey God’s Law by our own might–apart from the worship and service of Jesus Christ–then we are indeed damnably mistaken.
Israel made exactly this mistake. She came to regard the Law as something that she had to do, as an activity that she could undertake on her own. Israel could not hear Word of God because she was so busy doing it. So it is with us. We Americans are nothing if not doers. This can-do spirit is our great national talent. Living in Europe will quickly make you wish you had someone who can do something and not just stand there. After spending a year in Italy, my family and students joked that the Italian national gesture is a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, and the national motto is Forse domani: perhaps tomorrow. Yet as I have said, our virtues become our vices. We Americans make long lists of things we have to do–as if the world would cease to turn if we stopped our desperate doing. Even middle-schoolers now carry calendars to keep up with their busy schedules. Parents wear themselves out running the taxi-service that takes their kids from one activity to the next. When we adults greet each other by asking how we have been, what do we nearly always reply? Exactly so: “Busy.”
Our busyness comes in two kinds, the unworthy and the worthy. Our frenetic activity often constitutes a secret attempt to fill our emptiness. We hurry and scurry, lest we might have to stop and reflect upon the bustle of furious activity that we have become. Warren Carr taught me, early in my years at Wake Forest, that people always find time to do the things they really want to do. The 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal also saw how our busyness is a cover-up for some hidden malaise. “Most of the world’s misery,” said Pascal, “derives from our inability to sit still in our rooms.” To sit still is to wait, to watch, to listen, to hear a surprising and uncomfortable word, perhaps even the Word of the Lord himself. I confess to being one who cannot sit still in my room: I have to be up and about, hurrying to and fro, wanting to get something done, and to get it done not tomorrow but yesterday. Surely this fine line from Alice in Wonderland was meant for all of us: “Don’t just do something: stand there!”
There is a second kind of busyness that is even more dangerous because its activities are constructive rather than self-interested and escapist. Surely you will ask what is wrong with constructive activity, especially when it occurs in the church? What is wrong with the father who gives up his entire weekend to work on a Habitat for Humanity house? What about the mother who surrenders her vacation week to accompany the young people of the church to summer camp? What about high school and college students who devote their spring break to helping storm victims clean up property devastated by tornado or hurricane? What about the family who is here every time the church doors open? Surely these are all worthy activities, and surely they are to be commended. Yet such noble doings are strangely dangerous. They threaten to become substitutes for what must always come prior to them: the hearing of God’s Word. We should be active only and precisely because Christ acts, not in secret fear that God will do nothing unless we ourselves get busy.
I shall always remember, in this regard, an admission made by a middle-aged couple after I had lectured at a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. When I had finished my lecture, this husband and wife confessed that, if their marriage ever ends in divorce, they ought to sue their church–so totally have its activities consumed their lives. They have become such over-eager doers of the Word that they are in danger of not hearing God at all. Like many of us, they are doing themselves out of the Gospel–and perhaps out of their marriage as well.
My first call, therefore, is for us to slow down and to listen, to hear God’s word before we too eagerly do it. Jesus Christ is the steady center of our lives, the stable stackpole around whom the harvested grain of our lives is to be gathered. He is not a helpless bystander to our furious activity, a mere hanger-on to our godless striving. We cannot work our way into the Kingdom, though we most certainly can work our way out of it. We are saved not by our works–not even by the noblest of activities–but by grace through faith, as hearers of the Word and not doers only.
If busyness and activity are the first reason that God has sent a famine of the Word upon us, then our noisyness is surely the second. Ours is an age frightened of silence. We can’t even shop in the stores, or be put on hold as we use the telephone, without the ever-present racket of Muzak in our ears. When I complained about the high-decibel background music in a local grocery store, the manager told me that it was required by company policy. We fear the prospect of being silent and alone with our thoughts, much less with our prayers. And so we fill our lives with constant noise. We leave the television on, even when we are not watching or listening to it. Young people turn up their car radios so loud that the whole machine shakes–do all other cars in the vicinity–ith the deafening erotic throb of the music. Yet we adults are no better able to withstand silence. Many of us now use sleep machines to make the soothing noises that help us drop off at night. How ironic that the silence which once was the precondition of sleep has now become its dread enemy!
Yet it is not only mechanical noises that make us very poor hearers of the Word. It is also our own noisy voices that silence the voice of God. We gab and rattle about everything and nothing. Again it was Søren Kierkegaard who gave the right name to our time when he called it the Talkative Age. He meant that, in our age, everyone has an opinion about nearly everything, but few of us have convictions about much of anything. We are eager to attitudinize about this and that, but we are reluctant to take a stand–to live and to die–for the sake of the Gospel. We can all give our opinion about Al Gore or George Bush, about Tiger Woods or Deion Sanders, about rock stars and movie stars. But when it comes to our convictions about Jesus Christ as God’s saving Word incarnate, we hem and haw and stew and stumble. Or if we are professors or preachers, we are likely to chatter endlessly about those awful fundamentalists or those terrible liberals. Thus do we become noisy gongs and clanging cymbals–not only because we lack the love of God, but also because we have not listened to the God of love.
To hear God speak we must first fall silent. The Bible puts considerable emphasis on silence. Elijah hears the voice in God, not in the tornadic winds, not in the thunderous earthquake, not in the crackling and consuming fire. God speaks to Elijah out of the silence that enables him to hear “a still small voice” (I Kings 19:12). Because God does not shout, we must first be quiet if we are to hear his own quiet Word. “Be still, and know that I am God,” declares the Psalmist (46:10). Hebrew scholars tell me that this is a polite rendering of a rather harsh declaration that should better be translated, “Shut up, and listen to me.” To know that God is truly God–our Father, not our Daddy–we must first stop our mouths, sit still, and listen. St. Thomas Aquinas wisely declared that “Silence honors God.” When we are noisy, God refuses to speak. He sends, instead, a terrible silence of the Word. But when we stop prattling and rattling, God will indeed speak. And when He speaks, He will enable us both to hear and to do his Word.
There Are Not Many Preachers of the Word
We fail to become hearers of the Word not only because we are too busy and too noisy, but also because there are not many preachers. Here, I believe, the fault lies less with us laypeople than with our ministers. To say that there are not many preachers may seem an odd claim. In the Baptist South, there often seem to be more preachers than believers. It is obvious that I am using the word in St. Paul’s special sense when he says that “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ.” There are not many pastors who preach nothing but Jesus Christ and him nailed. Yes, there are many story-tellers who string together interesting narratives and call it preaching. Yes, there are many expositors who make verse-by-verse commentary on Scripture while the congregation faithfully takes notes, as if the church were a lecture-hall. Yes, there are many counselors who offer psychological help to the hurting, by feeling our pain and telling us how to accept our victim hood. Yes, there are many social reformers who lead their churches to engage in worthy projects for the poor and the needy. Yet these are all preacherly substitutes for the proclamation of the Word, even as our own activism and noisyness are similar substitutes.
I receive occasional requests from Baptist churches to recommend preachers to fill their empty pulpits. It’s always an embarrassing moment when I have to confess that I know only a handful of preachers. I quickly add that I know dozens of ministers who would make fine denominational servants and excellent administrators, who would visit in the hospitals and counsel the troubled, who would become well-regarded citizens of the community, who would join all the right civic clubs and be seen in all of the right places, who would smile a lot, shake a lot of hands, slap a lot of backs, and offend absolutely nobody. But one doesn’t need to be a preacher to do any or even all of these things. I contend, on the contrary, that one had better not be a preacher if one believes that this is what it means to proclaim the Word. “How shall they hear without a preacher?” asks Paul. The answer is that God will send a famine of the Word against those who preach without having anything truly redemptive and revelatory to say–against those who preach without preaching the Gospel.
Who, then, is a true preacher of the Word? It is a man or a woman who has been encountered by the crucified and risen Christ, who has been saved by God’s grace from all busy and noisy activity (albeit of the worthiest kind), who has been called and commissioned to announce the Only News that can redeem the world from sin, death, and the devil. True preachers of the Word are those men and women who wrestle daily with the dangerous God of the Gospel. Thus do they have a Word to declare which we can hear from no one else. They refuse to repeat the tired and boring (or even the fresh and interesting) truths that we can learn from television or from the public schools and the universities. They confront us with the Good News that, while we were yet sinners, Christ has died for us, that he has risen from death’s bonds to set us free from our busy and noisy lives, that he reigns at the right hand of God to put real life in us–new life, abundant life, eternal life.
With uncommon self-restraint, I have refrained from quoting the man whom this preaching series honors. Since nearly everything I know about the Gospel I have learned from him, this amounts to an almost miraculous silence. Yet I cannot end without this single personal reference. Warren told me recently that many people, especially those strange folks who calls themselves moderates, want to salute him for having been the first Southern Baptist pastor to ordain a woman to the Gospel ministry. They want also to honor him for having been one of the first Southern white preachers to insist that we must not deny black people their rightful place in society. Already in the 1950s Warren was preaching that Negroes are our fellow human beings created in the image of God, and also that most of them are our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. So it is with women: in Jesus Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female. In him alone are we all one. It is a gross sin against God, Warren preached, to exclude blacks and women from their rightful place in our churches and in our society. Warren Carr has been such a faithful doer of the Word because he first heard it.
Hugely important as the liberation of women and blacks remains, Warren confesses that this is not the thing that he most wants to be remembered for. He explained the matter recently by telling me about a phone call from a pastor in Charleston, South Carolina. This man had come under the influence of Warren’s preaching many years ago, at the Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. Through Warren’s ministry there, he himself was called to become a minister of the Gospel, to proclaim and to enact the saving Word of God. “That,” said Warren, “is the witness I hope to be remembered for.” The preaching and the hearing of the Gospel redeems human life, Warren was confessing, as the grandest ethical ideals do not.
The liberation of women and blacks is hugely important, as is the overcoming of all the other sundry and sorry forms of oppression and self-absorption. But racial and gender justice will not endure forever. The one thing that remains the same yesterday, today, and forever is Jesus Christ: He is our only justice because He is our only mercy. God will lift our present famine of the Word, therefore, when we cease from our busyness and noisyness, when we sit still and listen to this one Voice, and thus when we all become hearers and therefore doers of the Word.
