ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
June 11, 2025
This past Sunday, Rev. Dr. Stephen Cady preached at Cypress Creek Christian Church. Though I was not in attendance, the sermon was brilliant. I watched online the sermon in both the Traditional and Contemporary services. I know ministers who do a lot of preaching have a different ear for sermons. I’m listening for six or seven different qualities, a sort of rubric for evaluating. To be honest, the first time I listened to the sermon, my mind was not in an evaluating mode. I was so captured by the experience that I found myself totally involved in the message. He told what I would describe as a lengthy parable about a world that had only one language, or a single native tongue. Like any good parable, I do not believe there was only one idea Stephen wanted us to hear. I’m sure it spoke to different people in some pretty dramatically different ways. And that’s great! What I heard was how this imagined world, once with a common language, lost that language. As the people lost the common language, they lost their ability to understand one another and it became a world of Us vs. Them. The common language in my mind is the common story of Christ, and the power of unconditional and unrelenting love. Stephen said in the sermon how having this common story creates understanding. People may not always agree, but at least there is understanding. To have understanding requires a common starting place, and when people have often passionately disagreed with me, they have often (not always) set aside the Christ story. As I have often shared, the three sermons I’ve preached when people have accused me of being too political were the most Biblically centered sermons I ever preached. To accuse a minister of preaching politics is, in my opinion, the unconscious recognition that a person cannot argue from the perspective of the Christ story. They were troubled by what they heard, but instead of engaging in a respectful dialogue within the common language of the Christ story, they resorted to a disruptive smoke screen by jettisoning the Christ narrative altogether. While it’s true that political speeches have often disguised themselves as sermons, I wonder what it would look like to maintain a respectful conversation within the familiar framework of the Christ story and explore the reasons behind the sermon’s discomfort. We can have valid disagreements about the interpretation of Jesus’s use of an ancient prophet, but staying within the shared narrative provides an opportunity for us to better understand each other, even if our final conclusions differ.
Continue to teach me the story of Jesus, O Gracious God, so I can engage and seek to understand others’ opinions. I might not change, but maybe I will learn something and see things differently. Or maybe will agree to disagree, while always seeking to put Love First. Amen.
