Since 1987 while I was still in seminary, I have viewed myself as chiefly a preacher. Since that is an astonishing 38 years ago now, that means preaching has been a focus for me for over half my life.
For the last nearly 20 of those years I have directed Calvin Seminary’s Center for Excellence in Preaching, which means I think about preaching in one way, shape, or form every day. If I am not preparing a sermon or preaching a sermon myself, I may be grading or evaluating other people’s sermons or I am collecting and writing sermon ideas for our website to help fellow preachers in their vital work.
Sermons and preaching represent the world I inhabit but to no one’s surprise, even regular churchgoing folks don’t have preaching on their minds anything nearly like on a daily or hourly basis. Certainly those who seldom or ever attend church don’t typically tumble to think about a sermon on the average day. So in late January when it seemed like the whole world was suddenly talking about one particular sermon, that was a rather odd moment for someone like me.
I am referring of course to the sermon delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. at a post-inauguration prayer service on January 21.The Right Reverend Mariann Budde is the Episcopal bishop of Washington. It fell to her to deliver the sermon at this high profile service attended by the most powerful people in Washington, chiefly of course, the President and Vice-President.
Most people are familiar with only the final few minutes of her 15-minute sermon. You cannot, however, understand properly the final challenging things Bishop Budde said directly to the President without hearing the whole sermon.
It is also good to know what biblical passages had been read ahead of the sermon. From the Old Testament there was a reading from Deuteronomy 10 that includes a refrain in the Pentateuch about how God lovingly upholds the cause of orphans, widows, and strangers and so calls God’s people to do the same. The New Testament reading was from the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7 where Jesus urges us to build on the solid rock of his teaching. In that immediate context, the solid foundation on which we build is everything Jesus had proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount, starting with his Beatitudes that lifted up as blessed the meek, the sorrowful, the lowly of the earth.
Bishop Budde then preached a sermon whose core theme was a call to unity. She suggested that unity can come through three key attitudes and the actions produced those attitudes. And as a good preacher she used alliteration: Honesty. Humility. Honoring the inherent dignity of each human being we meet. None of these things is easy for any of us, Budde made clear. Still, we are all called to these things by the Word of God and by the Word made flesh in Christ Jesus the Lord. So in the final minutes when Budde directly challenged the President to exercise mercy to the people in our society who are afraid and vulnerable, she was not asking him to do anything different from what we are all to be and to do.
She also prefaced those remarks by noting that the President himself in his inaugural address the day prior had invoked the providence of God in saving his life last summer and perhaps God had a reason. Budde did not suggest that God was not involved in saving Trump’s life, but she did suggest that maybe God’s hopes are deeper than making America great again. Perhaps the divine purpose would involve also heeding the call of Scripture and of Christ Jesus to show mercy to the weak and vulnerable.
Would anyone have taken much note of this sermon had it not concluded with this attempt to speak truth to power? Probably not. Could or should Budde have sketched the picture she did and then left it to the listeners, including the President, to connect the dots to what they should do in their own lives? Possibly.
Had Bishop Budde ran her sermon past me ahead of time to ask what I thought about it and particularly about the conclusion, what would I have said? I don’t know.
Every once in a while, when a student sermon contains some challenging words for a given congregation, I usually tell them that if they want to do that, then there are two things to bear in mind: First, it may not go over well. So be prepared for that. Second ,and precisely because there may be push back from some, the student has to be absolutely certain that the sermon says what it does because that is what the text says. In the case of Budde’s sermon, I would say she was prepared for the criticism and definitely had the biblical texts in that service on her side.
The President demanded an apology but did not get one. And then he spent his first week in office showing anything but mercy. His executive orders targeted immigrants and transgender persons, including those serving honorably in the military. Also, in a display of petty vindictiveness he withdrew the security details of people Trump felt had crossed him, including Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, John Bolton, and 47 others. Honesty, Humility, and Honoring the dignity of other people died a quick death after the prayer service.
Shane Claiborne attracted a lot of attention when he claimed that what we saw across those days in January was the collision of two different forms of Christianity. On the one side were people who hijacked the Lord’s Prayer to twist it into a pro-MAGA screed, along with Franklin Graham telling God in a prayer that he knew exactly the mind of God and it turns out to be all about supporting everything the President does as somehow divinely sanctioned.
On the other side were people like Bishop Budde who proclaimed some of the fundamentals of the Gospel and the teachings of Christ and of Scripture and its calls for mercy to the last, least, lost, and lonely of the earth. Although we cannot usually see this contrast as starkly as across those January days, this divide is visible most every Sunday in churches all over the country.
None of us possesses a perfect faith. None of us is purely Christ-like in all we do or think or say. No one congregation or denomination embodies the Gospel in every detail. But at a time when such starkly different ideas of who God is, what God wants, and what living out the Gospel looks like, we all need soberly, humbly, and honestly to submit ourselves to Scripture and to Jesus and then repent where we fall short, give thanks for the grace that can make us Christ-like, and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us going forward.
Or to quote a common sentiment in the Book of Psalms:
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139: 23-24
19 Responses
Thank you for this Scott ~ a message to ponder and act out of.
Thank you for these crucial reminders!
Thank you for helpful perspective on what might be the most analyzed sermon in recent memory. Bishop Budde graciously and courageously spoke truth to power, and as has been said, distractors don’t have a problem with her, they have a problem with The Sermon on the Mount. May the truth of the Word somehow penetrate the darkness and meanness of our present reality.
Thanks for this, Scott. Especially chilling in the days that followed was the resolution that a member of Congress introduced, “condemning [the sermon’s] distorted message.” Over the years, one or two people – okay, a lot more than that – have expressed some displeasure with what I said from the pulpit, but thankfully the Congress never became involved. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/59
I would also encourage people to listen to the entire service before offering criticism. The prayers, scriptures and songs were well done in my humble opinion. And I think planning and leading an interfaith service would be a challenge. One of my favorite moments was early in the very long musical prelude (55 minutes long) when the soloist offered the Malotte version of the Lord’s Prayer – the acoustics and his large voice in that large cathedral must have been chilling! It gave me goosebumps even on YouTube. But yes, the sermon was on unity—such a needed word. Can we, in the humility you name, accept it?
Thank you stating this so well, Scott. I have listened to the entire sermon and she spoke in love, with the power and authority of scripture behind her. It was a still, clear, and small voice in the whirlwind of hatred that has taken over our land. I pray that she and others like yourself continue to speak God’s truth to power, preaching that same God whose message is being distorted by so many. May we all try to live in confidence as people who belong to the city of God, not the city of man, as preached so eloquently by our pastor this past Sunday.
Beautifully written, Scott. But the ending touched me the most. It made me weep just to personally apply the sermon to me.
Your friend Dean.
Thank you, Scott.
“Had Bishop Budde ran her sermon past me ahead of time to ask what I thought about it and particularly about the conclusion, what would I have said? I don’t know.”
You, our denominational preacher teacher, don’t know what you would have said about a ‘sermon’ that never once mentioned Christ crucified, risen, and ascended to the right hand of God? A ‘sermon’ that failed to passionately call people to true repentance and to place their faith and trust in Christ alone? A ‘sermon’ that equivocates ‘the Rock’ as some sort of nebulous sense of unity based on moralisms instead of the atoning blood of Christ shed for the salvation of all who believe?
You may like Budde’s supposed speaking truth to power. Whatever. It’s the sort of Christian Nationalism I expect to read on RJ (oops, you don’t designate it as such when it leans left). Call her speech whatever you like, but please don’t call it a sermon.
Chad, since you give something of a definition of what qualifies as a “sermon” (and imply I don’t seem to know this), I listened in on one of your sermons, specifically your Thanksgiving Day sermon on Psalm 95 last November. I think it’s a good sermon and, thankfully, it is not one of those Old Testament sermons you sometimes hear that could have been preached in a Jewish synagogue or temple without anyone batting an eye. You clearly bring in Christ as the one to Whom we need to cling. But most of the sermon focuses on God without reference to Jesus and nowhere do you mention Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension nor do you talk about the atoning blood of Christ nor is there a direct call to repentance (though you do call on people to not harden their hearts in sinfulness so maybe that is repentance). But I think it’s still a sermon and a Christ-honoring sermon at that. I could quibble with Bishop Budde saying the Sermon on the Mount is a call for a “nation” to build on the solid rock. I think it is first of all a call for individuals and the church to so build not necessarily whole nations per se. Then again, since the President as leader of a nation claimed a divine mandate, he did present the opportunity to point out what our God in Christ expects people who claim to be following God should support even though we should never confuse the nation with the church. Anyway, every sermon should point to Christ even if in some sermons–as in your Thanksgiving Day one–we know that our hearers (most of them) know that in being pointed to Christ, we are pointed to the fullness of his work, his ministry, his kingdom, his cross, his empty tomb, his ascension, his reign whether or not those are specifically named in every single sermon we preach. My two cents anyway.
Scott, I don’t fault Bishop Budde for seizing the moment. In doing so she joins a long and distinguished line of people called to preach to those in positions of power, which is a tricky thing to do. My ambivalence comes, I think, from the fact that after emphasizing the dignity of every human being, when she came to the time of application, she focused too neatly on what could arguably be called “Democratic talking points”. Absent from her mention of those who deserve dignity and protection as the vulnerable, for instance, were the unborn. That partisan “ghost” in her final words weakened her application and her overall point of unity amidst differences. But I would have been truly surprised if she would have done so.
Your expectation that this sermon should have had more (any) reference to the risen Christ and to repentance made me think that perhaps she was aware that a National Prayer Service would be attended by a congregation of many faiths, and that this was really not the right venue for an altar call so to speak. I definitely heard her speak Jesus!
Thank you, Scott.
Up front and (thankfully) unapologetic, Scott.
As I end this note, within earshot of our kitchen radio, I hear a news “clip” about President Trump’s being impeached.
My hope is that you can/will be able to work within the respective networks of accountabilities of both the Reformed Church of America, and the Seminary of the CRCNA.
Thank you for sharing the context and essence of Bishop Budde’s closing comment. I did not have the opportunity to hear the entire message. Your comments were very meaningful, and I can profit by taking to heart time and again the words of Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart . . . See if there is any offensive way in me . . .”
Thanks for this, Scott.
I was born and raised in the CRC and remained a member until 2002. I still have many friends and family in the denomination, although their number will be vastly reduced after disaffiliations are finalized later this year. I take no pleasure in this reality, which has been described by a current student at Calvin University and member of Sherman Street Church (one of the churches opting to leave) as a “necessary tragedy.”
I became an Episcopalian in 2002. As many (but clearly not enough) people are aware, the Washington National Cathedral is officially named the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington, a cathedral of the Episcopal Church (TEC), my denomination. Contrary to apparently widely-held belief, it is not publicly-funded and can’t be forcibly closed down in retaliatory protest of a bishop’s sermon. It is a house of prayer for all people, and regularly hosts events of great civic and national significance at which all Americans, regardless of religious belief (or none at all) are welcome. As such, those speaking during the course of a civic (i.e., interfaith) service of worship or other ceremony are mindful of the many perspectives represented in the congregation, which is not gathered for the purpose of taking part in evangelistic outreach. So whether the spoken word is called a homily, sermon, meditation, lecture, etc., it’s generally been understood – over the course of many years of hosting such services – that the expressed views of the speaker may and will likely be divergent from those of the listeners. An “altar call” is not a feature of Episcopal worship.
I realize that in the “new CRC,” the accepted practice is to publicly proclaim “I am more Christian Reformed than you” and threaten loyal, committed members with excommunication. That’s not the approach in the Episcopal Church. All are welcome.
Keeping that in mind, and realizing that not all sermons are crafted to please only the narrow preferences of a CRC or other Reformed audience, one can view the national prayer service and others hosted by the National Cathedral as humble offerings of grace and beauty which are hopeful attempts at bringing the nation together, and leave it at that.
I hope this is helpful.
Beautifully said. We watch the National Cathedral most Sunday mornings on YouTube. Always a spiritual experience and very Bible based. Thank you
That sermon seemingly changed not one thing in the Trump agenda. Do sermons change people? Or do they mainly serve to confirm what we hold to be true due to our confirmation bias?
Thanks, Scott. In addition to listening to the whole sermon, you all might listen to “The Convocation”‘s podcast of Jan. 24 (On Substack and Youtube). They spend some time discussing the prayer service. Most notable is a comment by Diana Butler Bass who had communicated with Bishop Budde before and after the service. Bass reports that the Bishop ad-libbed those last few minutes of her message. It was not part of the script of the message, but she decided to add it immediately before getting up to speak.