The spring semester begins Monday at the Seminary and I’ll be teaching the second-year preaching class. Sometime or other, the students will hear me say that a preacher should be like a combine. “A what?” Young people increasingly know little about farming. “A combine is a harvesting machine that gathers everything in its way. The grain it keeps; the rest is discharged out the back. A preacher should be like that, observe everything. Read all you can. Something you take in will preach and help your people.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 78 years ago today, January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. When Nazi troops knew the end was near, they began shooting prisoners and destroying ovens to destroy evidence. The Soviet army found 648 corpses and 7,000 starving prisoners. (Data from History Channel).
“Tell me how you can use the holocaust to get into hearer’s hearts.” Predictable silence until someone brings up sin. Trying to be Socratic, I ask, “What comfort would you bring to people shocked by the murder of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers? What would you preach for the victims of domestic abuse or overseas, the horrors in Ukraine.” These are teachable moments! “You’ve got to get into the hearer’s heart. If you don’t, you’re not helping them grow in faith.”
My own take on the Holocaust and other atrocities is this. Jesus Christ, the victim of injustice, is now exalted at the right hand of God and will come with divine judgment upon all people. Jesus isn’t in the manger, not on the cross. Humanity’s cries and laments about injustice… read the Psalms, read the Prophets. Give us justice, O God! Righteous judgment IS COMING. That’s Law and that’s also Gospel. “In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.” (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 117).
Can you tell I get frustrated with sermons that don’t bridge from Scripture to today? Into the harvest field! So much to preach, so little time!