Preaching on Ethics in the Local Church

Preaching on Ethics in the Local Church
By George A. Mason

The title I have been assigned for this address is “Preaching on Ethics in the Local Church.” So I suppose the first thing I ought to say to you is that I don’t believe you ought to preach on ethics in the local church. I mean that to be provocative, of course. I don’t mean you shouldn’t ever preach on a something that has ethical content, because then you wouldn’t be able to preach on anything, since everything has ethical content. I don’t mean, of course, that you should preach unethically, although I do believe there’s a lot of that going around these days. I mean the subject of preaching is not ethics per se; it’s the gospel. We preach the good news of Jesus Christ, and when we do it will touch on so many sore spots and funny bones in personal, social, political, economic, environmental, aesthetic and even athletic life that just preaching the gospel itself will be an ethical act.

The problems, you see, in deciding that you are going to preach now and again on ethics is that it tends to 1) turn your preaching into nothing but moralizing—which gets the cart of doing good in front of the horse of grace that draws the cart along; or 2) that in the name of having a prophetic ministry you fail to have a priestly one—that is, you get all up in arms about the threat of nuclear arms, say, that you have no arms to comfort those who feel bombarded by life already; or 3) you end up trivializing the Christian faith by making it seem that it fits somewhere on the op-ed pages or somewhere on cable TV between Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann.

So with those caveats in mind, let’s look at what might be some faithful and profitable approaches to preaching the ethical gospel in the local church.

First, as a preacher, strive more to be a faithful pastor than a lone prophet. Now, I have been misunderstood on this more than once, so let me be clear. I don’t believe any of the biblical prophets who called Israel or the church to faithfulness stood up in their third-grade class and said, What I really want to be when I grow up is a prophet. And they certainly didn’t start out every speech they made by saying, I have a prophetic ministry—by which they meant that people ought to take them seriously because they have courage to tell it like it is whether anyone likes it or not. No, they seem to have had a burden of truth in their bellies that they couldn’t hold in. They were most of them reluctant to take on the role. And most of them were only proven to be real prophets long after their lifetimes.

My point is this: Our job in preaching is to proclaim the gospel as best we can–not to build our resumes for being prophets in our times. If what we say proves prophetic, fine and good; but the goal is to do as Frederick Buechner reminds us in his wonderful book “Telling the Truth,” that the bereft Edgar did at the close of Shakespeare’s King Lear. After all the lives wrecked by lies and bodies lying dead on the stage, he declares: The weight of these sad times we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Our duty as preachers is to speak what we feel in our bones is true, with a view toward building up the body of Christ, the Church. Which leads to the next thing: The context of our preaching is the congregation. When we preach, we are preaching to a people gathered. We are not preaching primarily to Congress or to City Hall. We are not preaching to people anywhere else beside in the pews in front of us. We hope and pray that our preaching will help to shape public life. We are not sectarians or isolationists. But we are trying to build communities of faith shaped by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And if we do that, we will have a larger effect on the wider world.

And that’s because the church itself is an ethical community. As Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon never tire of reminding us, the church is a social ethic more than it has a social ethic. That is to say, when we are preaching about ethics in the church, that preaching begins by getting our own houses in order.

For example, if we get it in our heads that we should tell politicians that every American has the right to health insurance, but we are saving money in our budgets by hiring only part-time employees in order to avoid our responsibility to provide health insurance, we are hypocrites not prophets. We have only the moral authority to speak to others in the measure in which we are holding ourselves accountable at the same time.

Similarly, if we say we favor adoption over abortion but then create such a climate in our congregation that a young woman who gets pregnant feels she has to hide her pregnancy lest she be shamed or ostracized by the community, how is that consistent with the gospel?

We want to uphold high moral standards in the church. That’s a good thing. But let me ask you, what comes first, the demand that we be holy or the grace of God’s acceptance? Most of the time we seem to convey the idea that sin is the problem to which grace is the answer. But the covenant of God’s gracious acceptance of Israel—and of all the world through Jesus Christ—is what makes the demand for holiness possible. We are included by God’s inscrutable mercy, not by our impressive merits.

Which also means that God doesn’t hold us accountable for our sin; God holds us accountable for our forgiveness. God has reconciled the world unto God’s self in Christ Jesus—has (aorist tense of completed action)! God is not waiting to reconcile us if only we are willing and sufficiently worthy. But having been so reconciled, we are now called to live as forgiven people. We are given grace not only to be made right with God, but also to live rightly as a result. That’s what being accountable for our forgiveness means. It’s why Jesus told the parable of the man who was forgiven a great debt and then immediately failed to forgive another a smaller debt to him. Only then was the man judged, because of what he failed to do with his forgiveness.

Any call we make to ethical living in our preaching must be accompanied by a declaration of God’s grace that makes it possible. We can sober up—not by our own willpower, but by the God who wills to empower us by the Holy Spirit. We can love our enemies and refuse to strike back at those who hurt us, not by trying hard to be nice, but by allowing the resurrected Christ to live through us. This is why Paul could say, I have been crucified with Christ, so it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.

Next, when we preach the gospel, we are not drawing a distinction between a personal gospel and a social gospel. This is a longstanding error in American Christianity, and the choosing of true religion being primarily an inside matter or outside is perennial and cuts both left and right.

As to choosing the personal, literary critic Harold Bloom has declared that American religion is and always has been essentially Gnostic in character. The liberal version of this stems to New England transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who so believed that true piety was a matter of spirit and not matter that he gave up administering the Lord’s Supper and then gave up taking it. Emerson, Thoreau, and others like them were mostly on the right side of things like the abolitionist movement, but you can hardly make the case that their position followed straight from their theology of pure religion being a thing of the soul and not the body.

Likewise, on the conservative personalist side, the evangelical mind might be characterized by the preaching of George Whitefield, the legendary evangelist of the First Great Awakening. He defined the kingdom of God as the rule of God over the human heart and that alone. In a sermon on Romans 14:7, which reads: For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, he went on to say that “the kingdom of God in the text [is] signifying the inward work of grace, that kingdom which the Lord Jesus Christ sets up in the hearts of all that are truly brought home to God ….”

The problem with this is not that it’s so much wrong so much as it is only partially right. The kingdom of God is an inward and outward reality both. It has to do with our relationship to God, AND our relationship to other people AND to all creation. Righteousness is not merely, as Whitefield would have it, Christ’s imputed work into our hearts; it is God’s justice that works its way into every relationship of life. God’s peace, likewise, is not simply a feeling of contentment that comes from having accepted Jesus into our hearts; it is God’s comprehensive peace—that is, God’s shalom—that makes the world a home fit for God. And the joy of the Holy Spirit is more than a happiness your heart can’t contain; it is a chorus of angels who celebrate the redemption of all creation through Jesus Christ.

This is why Archbishop Desmond Tutu could say: I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned with the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, ‘Now is that political or social?’ He said, ‘I feed you.’ Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

The fact that Jesus said of himself, I am the bread of life, does not mean we are to neglect the bread that keeps people alive in favor of the bread of eternal life. Both are important. And that means we can never choose one over the other and get the full sense of the meaning.

As to those who choose the social definition of the faith alone, some on the left would make the gospel nothing but a humanitarian aid project or a mission to overturn all oppression politics and would thereby miss the personal transformation that is possible by the power of God’s Spirit. Yes, God wants to heal the human community and God is using the church to be the vanguard of that coming kingdom; but it’s not enough to have everyone know they have an equal place at the Table; they need to know it’s the Lord’s Table. It’s not just bread and wine we share, but the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Likewise, if all the conservative Christian political activists were to succeed in passing laws that would make our country over into something more like a theocracy than a democracy, what then? They will only have worked on the outside, not on the inside of people’s hearts.

We need a both/and, not an either/or when it comes to seeing the gospel in personal and social terms.

But there’s a more subtle matter of balance to consider. We have a tendency to lean heavily toward personal ethics or social ethics, even if we think they should both be included. On the one side are those who preach about personal ethical behavior and what they mean by that is almost always sexual. It may extend to the family—being a good husband or wife, being a good father or mother. But holiness is comprised of not having sex before you’re married, not having sex outside of marriage, and only marrying someone of the opposite sex.

There’s a movement among some churches nowadays to take church discipline more seriously again. Good in theory, suspect in practice. See, when you hear of churches holding people accountable for their behavior, it’s almost always sex that is at issue. Somebody is having an affair and the church is “lovingly” trying to bring the marriage back together. Or so goes the reasoning. If it works out that that is so, all good. But often, what happens is something that is hardly beside the point: What happens is that by doing so, the church gets to portray itself as a church that takes the Bible seriously. One church I know of even says of itself, We do church; others only play church.

Right. Well, here are my two questions: First, after you’ve gotten through making people’s private lives public for the sake of being able to prove that you are taking the Bible seriously, how will these people recover within the church? They may have their marriages restored, but because of the public nature of the discipline, will they ever recover enough in the church to be able to hold their heads up high again, let alone serve again? We need to be careful that we are not making an example out of people for the sake of publicity, which, in the end means sacrificing the couple’s reputation on the altar of the church’s reputation.

We had a difficult situation develop recently at our church in which one of our staff ministers came home to find that his wife had left him for a man she reconnected with on Facebook after 25 years. She stayed gone for four months and then came to her senses and returned. She was able to return, because her husband kept his heart open to her, and because the church made it clear that she could start over again if she returned. She did. And I am happy to say that she has become active again in the church, and is finding her way. They are doing well, in counseling, learning to build a new relationship. The hardest part, she is finding out, is forgiving herself. But one woman came to me after her return and thought we should have let the minister go. I asked her why, and she said, what will people think of our church? And I said that maybe that we really take this forgiveness thing seriously. And then it dawned on her that she could tell people that we practice what we preach about the gospel. Exactly.

The second question I have, though, is this: Is anyone ever brought before the church for participation in corrupt systems in business or schools or government, say, that violate our sense of just and fair treatment? Something tells me that as long as someone is a good family man and a tither, you’ll never hear about how the money is made or how people are treated on the job. This is duplicitous at best. The OT prophets were relentless about how the widows and orphans were treated, and whether the poor could get the same justice as the rich.

We need to be consistent, but we also need to show some sense of proportion. If we were following Jesus around today, why do we think his priorities would be so much different than they were in his days on earth? When he overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the temple, he was preaching ethics in the local church, so to speak. And the point of that act was not that they were doing business in the temple precincts, but that they were exploiting the poor and thus acting unjustly in the name and service of God.

On the other side are those who seem to think that as long as you are right on public policy, what you do in your private life isn’t anybody’s business. But the very essence of hypocrisy is in this cleft between person and persona—the person we really are and the one we want others to think we are. What good is it to advocate for children if we neglect our own at home? How can we demand that the government be responsible in managing its resources if we ourselves are driven by a consumer lifestyle and live with crippling debt?

I would like to end with two practical suggestions that might help preaching on ethics in the local church over time. First, be careful with topical preaching on ethical issues. Sermons are not white papers on abortion or homosexuality or health care or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or prayer in public schools. When people come to church, they are entitled to hear the good news of Jesus Christ from someone deeply acquainted with that subject. Along the way in expounding upon the gospel, there will be many opportunities to speak to ethical issues that the gospel touches on. But the gospel ought to be front and center, not something to tack on at invitation time after opining on some ethical subject.

And that leads to the second thing: Discipline yourself to preach a wide range of biblical texts and not just the same favorites that you feel comfortable in handling. An extreme example of this would be taking with equal seriously John 3:16 and Matthew 25:40 (Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me.) Or maybe make sure you are balancing your preaching of the gospel, epistles, and Old Testament texts. This will help you avoid being too Pauline or too Johannine, which may make you too asinine if you’re not careful. One way to do that is to follow the lectionary, which over a three-year period will expose you to many texts that you might not otherwise preach on if you were doing the passage picking. The canon is a rich collection of voices that join together to give us a broad and deep perspective on the saving work of God in the world.

We’ll let Paul have the last word from his charge to young Timothy: In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching (2 Tim. 4:1-2)  

This paper was presented at the Currie-Strickland Lectures at Howard Payne University on 15 March 2011. George A. Mason is pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, TX.