Know your Ten Commandments
I couldn’t resist this joke, because I can imagine it having quite a lot of truth about it.
When Henry arrived at the church an usher intercepted him at the door and took him to a pew where he had to sit and listen to the entire sermon on “The Ten Commandments”.
After the service, Henry met the vicar in the vestibule doorway, shook his hand vigorously, and told him, “I want to thank you, Father, for saving my soul today. I came to church to steal a hat and after hearing your sermon on the 10 Commandments, I decided against it”.
The vicar answered, “You mean the commandment ‘Thou shall not steal’ changed your mind?”
“No”, retorted Henry, “the one about adultery did. As soon as you said that, I remembered where I had left my old hat”.
People do hear different things in a sermon, and do pick up on things that you wouldn’t expect them to. Okay, maybe not in quite the extreme way the old chap in the joke does. But you can just imagine it happening.
A question of authority
I should have been preaching at our 8.00am Holy Communion service today. But, because of the difficult time I’ve been experiencing over the last couple of weeks I had to pull out. As the sermon was more or less prepared, it was decided that someone else would read it for me. It isn’t the first time it’s happened, my health can be very unpredictable, and probably won’t be the last. It isn’t the same as preaching a sermon myself, but at least it means I can still feel a part of the ministry at Church.
The text below is what was read on my behalf:
Matthew 21:23-32
May I speak in the name of the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Authority in our culture
Our culture puts great store on authority. Those in authority are listened to simply by virtue of their position. We may grumble and groan about them, but on the whole we do as they tell us.
And conversely, we regard with suspicion those who appear to have something to say but who don’t possess the necessary qualifications to say anything.
It’s when you find someone who has no qualifications whatsoever, yet who clearly possesses a kind of inherent authority within themselves, that trouble really brews. People like Jesus, who “taught as one having authority” (Matthew 7:29) but who (as far as we know) had no formal training to be a rabbi.
Pharisees were big on authority
The Pharisees, who were into authority in a big way, couldn’t cope with the success of this itinerant preacher, who turned the time-honoured, traditional concept of religion on its head, but whom the ordinary people loved.
Perhaps it was because the ordinary people recognised Jesus’s inherent authority and found it to be so much more convincing than the authority of the Pharisees, that the religious leaders of the day hated him so much. They went out of their way to trap him, but always ended up with egg on their faces.