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    Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2
    Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2
    Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2
    Ebook336 pages4 hours

    Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2

    By Bishop William H. Willimon

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    About this ebook

    Will Willimon is widely acclaimed as one of the top ten preachers in the
    world. For each Sunday of the Christian year, Will provides just what
    you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. This guide will stoke,
    fund, and fuel your imagination while leaving plenty of room to insert
    your own illustrations, make connections within your congregational
    context, and speak the Word in your distinctive voice. Guidance from
    Will Willimon is like sitting down with a trusted clergy friend and
    asking, “What will you preach next Sunday?” Year C Part 2 is part of a six-volume set that includes years A, B,
    and C (2 volumes per year) in the Revised Common Lectionary.

    Each week of sermon resources includes:

    1. Readings
    2. Theme title
    3. Introduction to the Readings
    4. Encountering the Text
    5. Proclaiming the Text
    6. Relating the Text

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781501847325
    Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2
    Author

    Bishop William H. Willimon

    Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

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      Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource, Year C Part 2 - Bishop William H. Willimon

      Introduction

      For over three decades Pulpit Resource has been helping preachers prepare to preach. Now, in this volume, some of the most helpful resources have been brought together to help you faithfully preach your way through the second half (Pentecost and the Season after Pentecost) of Year C of the Common Lectionary. This Lectionary Sermon Resource doesn’t claim to be the sole resource needed for engaging, faithful biblical preaching, but it does give you, the pastor who preaches, accessible, easy-to-use help on your way to a sermon.

      No sermon is a solo production. Every preacher relies on inherited models, mentors in the preacher’s past, commentaries on biblical texts by people who have given their lives to such study, comments received from members of the congregation, last week’s news headlines, and all the other ways that a sermon is communal. Using this resource is equivalent to sitting down with a trusted clergy friend over a cup of coffee and asking, What will you will preach next Sunday?

      In the sermons that follow, I give you just what you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. I hope that this Lectionary Sermon Resource stokes, funds, and fuels your imagination. Rarely do I give you a full sermon in the Proclaiming the text section that can be preached verbatim. I’ve left plenty of room to insert your own illustrations, to make connections that work within your congregational context, and to speak the word in your distinctive voice. Sermons are occasional: God’s word spoken in a particular time and place to a particular people. Only you can speak God’s word in your distinctive voice to your distinctive context. All I try to do in this volume is to give you my insights and ideas related to a specific biblical text and then leave you free to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and your particular congregation.

      From what pastors have told me, the value of this guide is its simplicity, its unvarying format. Every Sunday you are given the following sections: Theme (I still think the time-honored practice of using a theme sentence to begin sermon preparation is a good practice, enabling the sermon to have coherence and unity); Introduction to the readings (that can be used as preparation for listening to the texts read in corporate worship); and Prayer (because every sermon is a gift of the Holy Spirit). The sections Encountering the text (listening to the biblical text, engagement with its particular message, is the first essential step on the way to a faithful sermon), Proclaiming the text (my sketch of ideas and movements for developing what I hear in the assigned text), and Relating the text (copious illustrative material that helps the sermon hit home) are given on different Sundays.

      I’m honored that you have invited me to be a partner in your preaching. It’s a demanding, challenging, joyful vocation to which God has called us. Let’s work together to make sure God’s word is offered in a lively, engaging way to God’s people. Onward in the great adventure of preaching!

      —WILL WILLIMON

      Day of Pentecost

      Acts 2:1-21 or Genesis 11:1-9

      Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

      Romans 8:14-17 or Acts 2:1-21

      John 14:8-17, (25-27)

      What a Crowd!

      Selected reading

      Acts 2:1-21

      Theme

      It is of the nature of the Holy Spirit to gather a crowd, quite a multitude from every nation, race, and region of the earth. The Holy Spirit promotes unity, brings diverse people together. That Holy Spirit work, seen so vividly at Pentecost, is the origin and the sustenance of the church.

      Introduction to the readings

      Acts 2:1-21

      It is the day of Pentecost. Jews from every nation on the face of the earth are gathered. Then, with a mighty wind, the Holy Spirit shakes the foundations where the followers of Jesus are gathered, descending upon them, empowering them to speak and to hear. And thus the church is born.

      Romans 8:14-17

      We do not pray by ourselves, says Paul. The Holy Spirit, the very power of God, empowers us to speak as beloved children of God.

      John 14:8-17, (25-27)

      I am in the Father and the Father is in me, Jesus proclaims to his followers. Then Jesus promises the gift of the Spirit, the Comforter, so that God might be in you (v. 11).

      Prayer

      Almighty and ever-loving God, we give you thanks, on this Day of Pentecost, that you did not leave us alone but came to us, in the power of your Holy Spirit, and breathed your life-giving power into every life gathered here this day. You found a way to get to each person here, even when we had no idea of how to get to you. Furthermore, you refused to let us be alone, all locked up in ourselves. You found a way to thrust us into the church, to drag us into the fellowship with a group of people whom we would probably never have joined if you had left us to our own devices. By your Spirit you put us into a new, diverse family that stretches from one end of the earth to the other.

      In all this we give thanks that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, you saved us from ourselves. Amen!

      Encountering the text

      All of our Pentecost texts explore facets of the multifaceted Holy Spirit. The Feast of Pentecost is mentioned a good deal in the Hebrew scripture. It is a harvest festival that became a time of covenant renewal. How fitting it is then that Pentecost as presented in Acts 2 is a great harvest of souls.

      Acts begins with Jesus promising, You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you (Acts 1:8). That promise is soon fulfilled. But power to do and be what?

      Unlike the transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13) where the deep mystery at the heart of God is shown only to a couple of disciples, Pentecost is a revelation to a whole multitude. No one is excluded from this Spirit glory. The tongues of fire rest upon each (Acts 2:3) of those present. Every single person hears the disciples speaking in his or her native tongue (2:6). Just about every corner of the Greco-Roman empire is listed in the roll call of place names (2:9). What happens at Pentecost gathers a crowd from all over the earth and touches every single one in the crowd.

      The crowd in the street reacts to this multicultural outpouring of the Spirit with mocking derision (2:13). But Peter interprets the descent of the Holy Spirit as a sure sign that God is working God’s promised signs and wonders in reconstituting and gathering Israel as a nation of prophets.

      The divisions in humankind are being healed. A new family is being born, the lost are being found, and a great harvest is happening called the church.

      In the Sundays in our recent past we have noted how the Holy Spirit empowers us for discipleship, how it enables us to pray, and how it helps us in our weakness. Last Sunday we saw Christ promising to send his Spirit and praying for unity among his followers. This Sunday, Pentecost, we note the Holy Spirit’s propensity to gather a crowd. And some crowd it gathers!

      Proclaiming the text

      How did we get here? Not how did we get here with all of our differing opinions, conflicting doctrines, and opposing ideas of how to truly be church. That’s easy to explain. Human beings are diverse. Differences among people, even Christian people, particularly Christian people, are thoroughly understandable. The Bible is a complex, often conflicting, multi-vocal book. No wonder there are disagreements over biblical interpretation. Not, how did we get here, together, this morning? But, how did we all get here together at this common table? How did this motley crew, called God’s people, all get here today, here in this congregation, or for that matter, any other congregation of Christians?

      I’ll tell you a story:

      We had all been scattered to the four winds. We began as one family, all descended from one common ancestor. But then we scattered. We took up different ways of talking and different ways of living. We were separated by race and tongue and culture.

      Then, on Pentecost, we were all gathered in one place. Of course, we were not much more than a conglomeration of strangers. We couldn’t understand one another. We had little in common with one another. We could hardly be called much more than a gathering of strangers.

      Then, without warning, without being requested, the Holy Spirit descended. And what happened? People began to talk in our many different languages, and, wonder of wonders, people began to hear one another. We who were strangers were made into one family. It was the birthday of the church.

      Now do you see how we got here? We are here, all together, not because we share the same opinions. Not because we are all of the same socioeconomic level or have the same backgrounds. We are here as a miraculous, unexpected work of God’s Holy Spirit.

      You’re here gathered as you are. Our church is but one of the many miracles of the risen Christ.

      Maybe there are things that I don’t like about you, and as you have been listening to me in the last few minutes you are reminded that there are things that you don’t like about me. But that is all quite beside the point. Jesus has called us to be his disciples; that is, Jesus has put us here in church, together.

      Earlier Jesus told us a parable that portrayed the reign of God like a great banquet. At first, the big people are invited to the feast. But they find other things to do. And so, in desperation, the master of the banquet goes out and invites anybody and everybody—the maimed, the lame, the blind, the broken-hearted, the failures, the people who have not been invited to join the country club or even the men’s garden club.

      How do you like that reign of God?

      Get it? That parable is being enacted right now in Acts 2 at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit descends and gathers a crowd, makes a family out of anybody and everybody—the church.

      Earlier, Genesis says that the world began when the Spirit hovered over the dark, chaotic waters and brought forth creation. The Holy Spirit is generative, life-giving, and loves to make something out of nothing. So here at Pentecost, it’s like creation all over again. God is gathering up all these different and diverse people and is making them into a new family, the church.

      Here is one woman’s story: we were all going around the room telling why we enjoyed being Methodists, why we dearly loved The United Methodist Church. Some liked the fellowship, others liked the friends, and some liked the music.

      Part of me hates The United Methodist Church, one young woman said. Before I became a Methodist, my life was my life. I was fairly content with myself. Then the church took me to Haiti and made me stare at people who are dying because of their dire poverty yet who were also undeniably richer in faith than I would ever be. I could have had a fairly happy life without the church. Now, those strangers in Haiti have become my obsession. I’m thinking about them as if they were my family.

      It seemed to me a wonderfully Pentecostal moment, evidence of the descent of the Holy Spirit. God’s Holy Spirit continues to make something out of nothing, continues to make a family where there were once only strangers, and continues to empower ordinary people to preach like saints.

      Pentecost continues, right here, right now. Amen.

      Relating the text

      The church once taught Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, apart from the church there is no salvation (the phrase is first used by Cyprian and later much modified by Augustine in his De Baptismo contra Donatistas, book 4, chapter 17, section 24). Before you dismiss this claim as the height of ecclesiastical arrogance—we’re inside and you are out, sorry about you—note today’s lesson from the Acts of the Apostles. Salvation in Jesus Christ is a group, a corporate, and a social affair. We come to church to practice salvation, not only to get prepared now to live with a living, righteous, and loving God forever, but also to learn those practices that are commensurate with what we now know of salvation in Christ. The church is more than the means of salvation, the path toward salvation someday in eternity; it is salvation embodied, practiced, and enjoyed here, now. Showing open hospitality, confessing sin and receiving forgiveness, giving gifts to the poor, actively seeking those who don’t yet know, and exploring ways to tell them the good news in such a way that they might hear and respond are among the practices necessitated by our soteriology.

      The church is necessary for salvation. Church is more than the ark that rescues the righteous few, leaving the wicked rabble to perish in the flood. The church is Christ’s self-appointed means of enabling his loving movement on the world for the purpose of communion, that place where God also propelled egoists like us toward the neighbor, where we are taught to name strangers as family. The church is saved for the world not out of it. The church is where the risen Christ graciously takes up room, locates, incarnates.

      Last fall I spoke at a Presbyterian seminary. After I gave my lecture, a distinguished Presbyterian theologian gave an hour-long lecture on Reformed doctrine. All those Presbyterian clergy were taking notes and listening intently. I couldn’t make much of it out.

      At the end of his lecture, I thought to myself, Lord, thank you for Presbyterians and others within the Reformed Tradition. Thank you for enabling them to believe all of that stuff so we simple Methodists don’t have to bother with it. Amen.

      I preached at the National Cathedral last year. When they invited me, they told me that I would have about twenty minutes for my sermon. But the week before I preached, my host graciously called me and told me that maybe I would have fifteen minutes, but please take no more. They would have a full Eucharist and were recognizing a couple of committees for their work on the National Cathedral. That service lasted nearly two hours.

      And yet, I marveled at the experience of worship. Since I had such a small part in a very full service, I could sit back and enjoy the service. The magnificent prayers, the full range of scripture, the music—it was wonderful. I’ve been the victim of a great many services that are said to be contemporary worship and I can tell you, I sat there just reveling in it all, muttering, Lord, thank you for Anglicans. I am glad that they dress up in all of this stuff and do all of this, so we don’t have to on Sundays, though maybe we ought to feel guilty for not doing it.

      Perhaps the Holy Spirit means for all of us—Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Catholics, all of us—to believe and worship and serve together. Serving, worshipping, and believing with our various differences, in order to do justice to the fullness of God in Jesus Christ.

      Being a disciple of Jesus is no easy matter. Jesus has promised us that he will be crucified, and if we follow him, there is a cross that fits our backs, too. Jesus has told us that if we become his disciples, we must relinquish many of the things that we hold on to and follow him down a narrow way that could lead to suffering and even great relinquishment.

      But I am here this morning, in the light of this story about Pentecost, to tell you that one of the great challenges about following Jesus is being with other people who are following Jesus!

      One of my jobs as a bishop is to be with clergy who decide to call it quits. Clergy who having once put their hands to the plow, look back, and walk away, find some easier way to make a living than being a preacher. I can tell you, in my three years as a bishop, we haven’t lost any clergy who said, I am quitting because I am just fed up with Jesus.

      No, their major reason for leaving is the people of God, the church! I think the world of Jesus, but I am fed up with the people whom Jesus has called to follow him!

      I ask you clergy: when you have had a family leave your church, drop out, or look elsewhere, have you ever had one say to you, We are leaving this church because we have just had enough of Jesus. His way is too difficult! We are not up to it. No, what they more typically say is, We love Jesus and all that, but this group of people here at St. John’s on the expressway is a pain in the neck. They’re back-biting. There are arguments at board meetings and squabbles over the budget. They fought over the color of carpet in the parlor! We’re leaving for a place where people are more spiritual!

      Well, today’s lesson from Acts suggests that one of the most spiritual conglomerations imagined is the church!

      I saw the expansive Acts 2 reach of God in the great mosaic apse at the church in Monreale, Sicily, a wonder of the medieval world. There, presiding over a dazzling array of jewel-like depictions of the story of our salvation is Christ Pantocrator, Christ creator of all. Having seen photographs of that apse, I expected to be bedazzled by the Byzantine otherness of Christ, Christ the judge of humanity. And yet the Christ I saw was Christ of the wide embrace, hands outstretched, reaching out from his majesty as if to encircle the whole church, the whole creation, in his reach. All the stories of scripture—told with such vitality and wonder in the mosaics of Monreale—are vignettes of this grand vision of a God who is stubbornly determined to have all of humanity.

      When I was leaving the church at Monreale, a street vendor held up a trinket with Christ’s picture stamped upon it. Don’t you want to take a little Jesus with you, mister? he asked. No, we don’t take Christ with us; he takes us places.

      God’s intended oneness, because of our sin, ended in a crucifixion, yet even in the crucifixion, God is not thwarted. God creatively weaves such tragedy into God’s purposes, thereby remaking our sin into God’s great triumph. If we are disloyal, he stays faithful because he can’t be anything else than what he is, says 2 Timothy (2:13). The best modifier of this God is love.

      God returns to us in the resurrection of Jesus, and now in Acts 2 at Pentecost, God again returns to us in the person of the Holy Spirit. This God is determined to embrace all of us.

      Trinity Sunday First Sunday after Pentecost

      Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

      Psalm 8

      Romans 5:1-5

      John 16:12-15

      Continuing Education

      Selected reading

      John 16:12-15

      Theme

      In Jesus Christ we have seen the fullness of God but not all at once. Jesus says that he will give us the Spirit of truth who will continue to reveal the significance of Jesus for us. The Holy Spirit reveals the Son, who is the revelation of the Father. This educating, revealing, self-disclosing work of the Holy Spirit is an appropriate theme for Trinity Sunday.

      Introduction to the readings

      Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

      Proverbs praises the great glory of the wisdom of God.

      Romans 5:1-5

      Paul speaks of Christ as the manner in which God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

      John 16:12-15

      The Spirit is that force that unfolds for us all truth, says Jesus in his farewell address to his disciples (v. 13).

      Prayer

      Lord Jesus, do not leave us without revealing your full will to us. Keep speaking to us, keep showing us your glory, keep changing us for the better. Keep telling us the truth, even when it may hurt us to hear it. Keep believing in us so that we might believe in ourselves. Keep calling us so that we might come forth and be the faithful, lively, courageous followers that you deserve. Do not leave us. Amen.

      Encountering the text

      During his extended farewell discourse, Jesus speaks of the Spirit of Truth, this Paraclete, who will proclaim to you what is to come (16:13). Among the many possible meanings of this verb anangellein are declare, preach, proclaim, and announce. Today we are dealing with the homiletical, hortatory work of the Paraclete in John.

      Jesus says that there are things about him that the disciples cannot bear that will be declared to them by the Spirit of Truth. Are there special, secret things that Jesus is keeping from his disciples, things that must be revealed later? Does the revelation of God in Jesus Christ continue, even after his earthly ministry, even after the canon of the New Testament is closed?

      There are rather controversial questions put to us by the Gospel lesson for Trinity Sunday.

      It may be worth noting that the Greek prefix an that is set at the beginning of anangellein is equivalent to our English prefix re, as in report, renew, or rededicate, implying repetition, renewal. So in saying that this Spirit will proclaim to you what is to come, Jesus is saying that the Spirit will re-declare, or re-proclaim what has already been declared and proclaimed.

      What is to be taught and preached among us by the Paraclete is thus no new, esoteric, secret knowledge that could not be declared to the original disciples. It is rather the unfolding of the significance, to our little, constricted minds, of the grand significance of Christ. Christ is the fullness of God’s self-disclosure. The Spirit of Truth is not telling us something other than what is present in Christ. The Spirit of Truth (and here is the linkage for Trinity Sunday) is none other than the very Spirit of the Christ, the Spirit of Jesus, not some other or additional deity.

      Here is a promise of the continuing, unfolding revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The Spirit continues to teach us, continues to disclose to us the truth of Jesus, finding just the right time and place for us to receive such teaching. Discipleship is, as all of the Gospels depict it to be, a journey, a pilgrimage in which we who follow the Christ learn more about Christ as the journey continues. The truth of Jesus is too large and grand to be mastered in a moment. We must be ready for insights that are fresh and new to us, though as ancient as creation, for the work of the Spirit of Truth continues among us.

      Proclaiming the text

      A few years ago, this Sunday, Trinity Sunday, I labored mightily on a sermon on the Trinity. I had been dabbling in Augustine on the Trinity and was eager to show the congregation all the neat things I had learned about one of the most difficult doctrines of the church—I mean to say difficult to understand doctrines of the church.

      I told the congregation, You think because it’s a beautiful Sunday in June, that I should cut you some slack, allow you off the hook, let you out of here with a tastefully short sermon. Well, this is Trinity Sunday so you can forget that. I’ve got a lot to say about a large idea of the church so you can settle back and relax because this is going to take a while.

      After my Trinity sermon, at the door of the church, someone said, "I’ve been a Christian for thirty years and never have I ever heard about the Trinity.

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