Receptivity
How to Listen to a Sermon, prt. 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
January 2, 2011
Welcome to our first church service of 2011! What I am going to talk to you about today is something I have known for a long time I wanted to approach with you, but I didn’t know when the time would be right. The time is right today.
If you attend church somewhat regularly, you will probably listen to between 30 and 40 sermons this year. If you have been with us for five years, and have attended somewhat regularly, you have listened to between 150 and 200 sermons at Wildwind. If you have attended church somewhat regularly for ten years, you have heard somewhere between 300 and 400 sermons. If you have attended regularly for 20 years, you have heard between 600 and 800. I know a few in this church have attended church nearly every single Sunday for 40 years, and those people have heard between 1200 and 1600 sermons, and because I know how faithful some of our people have been in their attendance, I’ll bet they have heard 45 sermons a year for 40 years, which puts their lifetime sermon ingestion at 1800. Some of you have favorite preachers that you listen to on the radio, or perhaps now on podcasts – that of course adds to your lifetime sermon total. Think for a moment about how many sermons you have listened to in your life – that will be important in just a moment. I’ll bet we have people in this church who have listened to upwards of 3000 sermons in their lifetime.
Now whatever group you fall into, whether you are fairly new to Wildwind and have only heard a few of my sermons, whether you have been at Wildwind for a few years and have heard many of my sermons, or whether you have attended many churches over many decades and have heard sermons by perhaps hundreds of preachers in church and at camps and on the radio, my question for you is the same. Have you ever heard a sermon on how to listen to a sermon? If you are positive that you have heard a sermon before on how to listen to a sermon, please raise your hand.
No one. Doesn’t that seem odd? Think about it for a second. Oftentimes when we attend a class at school, the instructor will make it clear how we can best understand what is being taught. They’ll tell you they use handouts, or videos. They’ll tell you whether or not it might be a good idea for you to take notes. They’ll tell you roughly what you are going to be tested over and expected to know and understand. In fact every student knows that usually when you start a new class, the instructor spends almost the entire first class session telling you how to proceed through the class – how to hear and understand the lecture and how to think about what you are hearing – how to process it in in-class discussion groups – and what is at stake when you have to miss a class. So broadly speaking, it is a general practice when you start to learn something, that the instructor doesn’t just start spewing out information, but tells you how to hear what is being said.
The reason pre-marital (and often post-marital!) counseling is so valuable is because communication is always complex. There’s what your partner believes they are saying, then how they are saying it, then what you are hearing them say, and then what you believe about what they are saying. Do you see how treacherous this is? No wonder communication in an intimate relationship is so difficult. When Christy has a thought, feeling, or idea and chooses to share it with me, it has to clear all those hurdles! She has to somehow take her idea or intention, get it into words that accurately capture what it is, and then deliver those words to me. Once she has done that, it’s completely out of her hands what happens next. I then hear what she is saying (assuming I am listening to begin with, and we won’t even cover how many communication problems come from people not even listening!), and lay my own interpretations and beliefs and understandings onto it. That’s why my feelings and opinions about what Christy just said may actually have very little to do with what she wanted to say and what she thought she was saying. That’s the reason why couples go endlessly around and around about the same things year after year. Each assumes they are speaking clearly, and each assumes they are hearing clearly, when in fact neither of them is either speaking or hearing clearly.
Communication is complex. Communicating well is one of the hardest things we undertake to do in our lives, whether with our wives or with our children, or with crowds, like I am doing now. I mean honestly, it’s more than most of us can manage just to learn how to hear our spouse and children correctly on a consistent level, and these are the people we supposedly know best and spend the most time with. We share a common life and set of experiences with them, and we STILL get it wrong a lot of the time.
And yet, week after week and year after year, congregations of people, each person with their own individual feelings, beliefs, opinions, backgrounds, biases, ideas, ideals, and hangups gather in churches all over our country and listen to one human being as he (or she) stands up and delivers one message to the whole group. What’s the chance of that working out well, do you think?
There are times my wife sends me to the store to pick up some things and when I return home and unload the bags, I realize I did not correctly understand what she needed. That can be frustrating, and we’re talking about something as unimportant as milk or bread or dish detergent or toilet paper. What about when the subject at hand is God? What about when it’s eternity? What about when it’s the way we live, and about the quality of our lives with God and with one another? In sermons the stakes are just so much higher and it’s so critical that we all understand what in God’s name we are here to accomplish – what is the point of me standing here week after week – what are you supposed to be doing, what is your role to play in all this, how are you supposed to be hearing, what are you supposed to be seeking to “get out of it”?
So we have talked about how difficult communication is and how high the stakes are when it comes to hearing sermons. So why haven’t you heard a single sermon in your life on how to hear a sermon? I can assure you, most preachers have spent countless hours learning how to prepare and deliver them. We invest so much into that process, as if we are the most important part of it all. But we’re not. Yes it’s important that I speak clearly and persuasively and authentically, but no matter how skillfully I do this, it will make little difference if you do not know how to listen, how to hear, how to think, and how to participate in what it is that I am saying to you. And it’s my responsibility to teach that to you, just as on the first day of class, the instructor realizes that he will need to spend that time educating the students on how to learn what he is going to be teaching. We’re going to spend the next few weeks about how to listen to a sermon.
Six times in the gospels, Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” The fact is that the importance of my skill in speaking pales in comparison to the importance of your readiness to listen, and to your capacity to take what is given and allow God to work it into the deepest places in your life. As you develop that capacity, you will find nuggets of truth and wisdom in more and more things. When that capacity goes undeveloped, the skill and power of the speaker makes almost no difference. Jesus spoke to this spiritual fact very powerfully and directly.
He was telling a story to teach the people, which of course is how Jesus often taught. He finishes the story and says,
Mark 4:9-13 (MSG)
9 "Are you listening to this? Really listening?"
10 When they were off by themselves, those who were close to him, along with the Twelve, asked about the stories.
11 He told them, "You've been given insight into God's kingdom—you know how it works. But to those who can't see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight.
12 These are people— Whose eyes are open but don't see a thing, Whose ears are open but don't understand a word, Who avoid making an about-face and getting forgiven."
13 He continued, "Do you see how this story works? All my stories work this way.
I love this passage because Jesus lays out his hand. Here he says, “What I’m trying to do is help people to listen – not just for words, not just to agree or disagree and then debate it after synagogue over falafel – but to get this deep into who they are.”
Jesus talks about nudging people toward “receptive insight.” Receptive insight. See, this whole sermon thing begins there. Assuming that your responsibility is you and my responsibility is me, then my job as I have prepped a message was to do my best to clear my heart and head and life of all the things that are roadblocks to my own receptivity. Believe me, I know this is hard. I know very well how hard it is to have a week where you are discouraged and depressed and have to come into church and sit through a sermon you feel like you’re not going to care about, because not infrequently I have weeks like that and have to somehow get into the headspace where I can listen to Spirit, and be receptive to what God might want to say to me so that, hopefully, some of you might have an opportunity to be receptive to what God might then want to say to you. This whole thing begins with receptivity. Give me a truly open, receptive person, and that person can learn from the crummiest of teachers. Give me a person who is not open, who is not receptive, and Mother Teresa herself couldn’t do anything with him.
Of course receptivity is a heart thing. Receptivity is about what is going on in you. It’s about your having an openness, being willing to learn to hear and think in new ways. But most people don’t listen to sermons like that. Most people sit down to hear a sermon with their set of preconceived opinions, notions, and ideas already rock solid, and then they judge the sermon against those things. If the preacher says things that confirm their opinions, reinforce their notions, and agree with their ideas, they can maybe enjoy the sermon and feel good about it. If the preacher questions their opinions, challenges their notions, and disagrees with long-held opinions, they are not receptive – they close up, seeking to protect what is most precious to them, which is their current world view, just as it is.
Frankly that’s why I gotta give this congregation a lot – and I mean a LOT – of credit. Week after week you guys come in here and listen, while I ask you to reexamine your current notions of what Christianity even IS, where I tell you there’s no excuse not to love, where I challenge prejudice and pettiness, where I constantly make some people feel uncomfortable. But you keep coming back for more. That in itself is a profoundly good thing – it says that so many are receptive – are willing to listen, to ask questions, to seek to understand, and not simply to storm out in a huff. Receptivity is always about you, and either you are or you aren’t. I realize that simply coming and sitting through my sermons week after week doesn’t necessarily mean you are receptive, but I know that many of you are. Challenging preaching that makes people sometimes feel uncomfortable is what creates in our congregation the willingness to find God. Because the gospel confronts, converts, and comforts you – in that order. If you have not found that being a Christian is forcing you to revise your understanding of yourself and other people and God and the world in ways that you sometimes find very challenging and very difficult, then what you are hearing is not the gospel. And if you find that you keep running away from those elements that confront you, that seek to convert you and change you, and are just trying to always move right to the comforting parts, that is not the gospel. The gospel confronts, converts, and comforts you, in that order. And the first two of those, confrontation and conversion, ONLY happen in a person who is receptive, who recognizes the discomfort as a possible sign that God is knocking at the door of their heart and says to God, “Come on in. I don’t care how much I have to change, as long as I am changing to be more like you.”
So it all begins with receptivity. In fact it is all about receptivity. But how do we know if we are receptive? There are things we can do to cultivate receptivity to God. And there are things we can do to kill receptivity and make ourselves unable to hear and understand. I’m well under the 40 minutes I normally speak, but so as to help you be receptive, and to help you hear as clearly as possible, I want to just end this here for today. We’ll explore more about this in the next few weeks.
I’ll leave you with these questions, which get at receptivity. How has the gospel confronted and/or converted you in this past year? How has it made you uncomfortable and driven you to seek change?
