I keep my preaching notes. Sometimes, I'll look through them to see what I believe. It's a silly joke, but when someone asks me what I think about some obscure verse or doctrine I haven't meditated on in a while, I say I have to look at my notes to see what I beleive. The Bible is a big book, and the more I study it, the more I realize how much I don't know. In Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, the main protagonist is an elderly preacher named John Ames. He's elderly, but his wife and child are not. Ames is writing letters to his son because he knows he won't be around much longer and wants to pass on some wisdom. He does some calculations while looking around the attic where all his old sermons are kept. There are close to 70,000 pages of sermons he's written in his ministry. He wrote to his son, "There is not a word in any of those sermons I didn't mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought."
A few months ago, I started a sermon series in the book of Genesis. I had preached through the first 11 chapters once upon a time, and as I was preparing the series, I found the old notes and gave them a once over. It's amazing how I thought they were good messages and that I preached them. It's not that they were false. In the spirit of Ames, there wasn't anything in those sermons that I didn't mean when I wrote it. And there wasn't anything I read that I would necessarily disagree with now. But every message in that series was an exercise in missing the point. Maybe you've heard that pastors tend to answer questions that no one is asking – well, I was answering questions people were asking. It just wasn't the questions that we should have been asking. The thrust of most of the messages was an apologetic for young earth creationism. There were many scientific facts about light, matter, stars, and the atmosphere. But there was very little Jesus.
I took my cue from some homiletic textbooks, but I wish I had taken my cue from the Apostle Paul. As a Christian pastor, I don’t try to preach Genesis with “no spoilers” to what happens at the end of the book. Our joy is that not only do we know what happened, but we also see how it all ties together. Paul preached Christ from the Old Testament, knowing his task was to preach the mystery of redemption to the Gentiles. When Paul preached from Genesis 1-3, he preached Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6; Romans 5:12-21). When Peter preached on Noah, he preached Christ (1 Peter 3:18-22). When Jesus taught Noah, it was about Him and His return. There are avenues one could go down in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Marriage, made in God's image, the martyrdom of Abel, the spirit of the age in the days of Noah, Satan crushed beneath the feet of the Lord, and on and on. Not every sermon needs to be the same. I also understand and commend the necessity of apologetic work. But even then, it’s not morality, anthropology, or apologetics for its own sake but for Christ’s. Christian preachers need to preach Christ and preach the book of Genesis like a Christian.
Maybe, if I have another 20 years, I’ll start to get the hang of it.