(73) How to Hear a Sermon

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for How to Hear a Sermon, originally shared on December 17, 2020. It was the seventy-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How many sermons have you heard in a lifetime? Did anyone ever teach you how? Today, you are going to learn how.

   The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has made the US a poster child for what not to do. We are close to, and maybe have surpassed, 300 deaths in a single day in California. Half of all California infections are in LA County, the most infected urban area in the country. One in 80 people here are believed to now have the virus. There are now 100 ICU beds in the whole of LA County. Some hospitals are out of ICU space; that means that if you have a heart attack or break a leg there will be a place for you, but it will not likely be in a place best designed to care for you. The governor just ordered another 5,000 body bags. Body bags. Medical personnel are near or at the limits of their endurance, and yet they go to work every day to minister to the sick, comfort the suffering and hold the hands of the dying. And many of us, at least to the extent necessary to make the difference, could care less.

   We are sinners, separated from God and from one another. Only God can bridge the gap, and bring us out of ourselves and our selfish interests.

   My question is, “how many deaths are acceptable to us in order to keep open or reopen our economy, our churches, and our schools. Apparently, we haven’t reached that number yet.

   Why do people come to church week after week and not get it? How can people be raised listening to sermon after sermon and learn nothing from them?

   I think that the answer, at least in part, is that there is a difference between listening and hearing.

   Maybe it’s a stretch to even hope that people will listen to a sermon without their minds wandering, much less hear what God is saying to them through it.

   One of the best books I never finished was How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. I guess I was too busy reading other books.

   I don’t know of any mainstream books on How to Listen to a Sermon. I don’t know of any instruction in it either. I don’t know that listening is valued any more. We prefer to be told what to think. We seek out what we want to hear. There’s even a name for this. It’s called “confirmation bias”. It’s easier.

   Sermons, however, are preached for life transformation. How do we listen to a sermon with the expectation that God will work through it to bring or encourage the new life, the born again nature of the Christian life?

*Isaiah 29:13-14

   A lot of it depends on what of ourselves we bring to a sermon, and what we expect will happen.

   I think I mentioned last time is that one of the reason most people say that they like their pastor’s sermons is that people have such low expectations for them and what sermons can accomplish.

   Many of the same ways to prepare and conduct ourselves in worship that I mentioned a couple of sessions ago in the “How Did I Do?” video (i.e. prepare, be open to the Holy Spirit, focus, etc.) apply to how to prepare to hear a sermon.

   In fact, when Martin Luther wrote the meaning of the Third Commandment in his Small Catechism (a pamphlet he wrote to help parents teach their children the basics of the Christian faith, and which he himself read every day), he said:

“What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.”

   Be a good place for the seeds of the Holy Spirit to take root. Be good soil for God’s Word.

   Hearing a sermon in this way is central to worship.

   To listen to a sermon is to hear the words. You could pass a test on what the sermon said if you were a good listener, and you would completely miss the point.

   To hear a sermon means to come to know what God is saying to you through the words, the things that lead to life transformation.

*Romans 10:14-17

   God communicates with us more like a movie does, than like a cell phone. God gives us pictures that have meaning, not just words we consume.

   Say you had to chose which of your five senses you would have to lose? Which one would you choose? Most of us, I would say, would say “Sight”. We depend upon our sight for everything. We are a visual culture.

   I think that Biblical-era people would say, without reservation, their hearing. There was no multi-media, no TV, no computers. Most people couldn’t read. They depended up their hearing.

   But even hearing a message is not enough. Taking it to heart is not enough. To result in life transformation, what we hear from God’s word in preaching and the faith that comes through that hearing, must be put into practice in response naturally.

   Share your faith. Start with the people you see after a worship service has ended. Share it with people among your friends and family. It can be a great opening for sharing the Gospel, i.e. “I heard something the other day that was really meaningful to me.”

   Faith grows by giving it away.

   Jesus said,

*Matthew 13:10-18

   That’s how to hear a sermon. Be open to the same Holy Spirit who inspires those who preach, let it inspire you to hear the very words of God in a sermon. And then, act in response to the presence of God.