Preaching: The Act of Creation!

To preach and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to align oneself with the God of creation.  Preaching and proclamation are acts of creation.  To utter, to vocalize, to speak is to reveal; it is to show a world that we don't think could exist and to speak of its possibility!

When God creates the world in Genesis 1, all God has to do is speak!  Time and time again we are told, "And God said..." and it was.

Jesus comes into his ministry by preaching.  In Matthew he announces, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!"  (Matthew 4:17) In essence, he is telling his people who are burdened, over-taxed, lame, blind, turning away from God, that God is actually closer than any of us ever thought.  We all thought that God lived up above in the heavens - that world that constantly eludes us, just beyond the clouds.  But heaven (which is often a code-word for God in the Gospel of Matthew) is falling out of the sky and landing among people like you and I.  In fact, after Jesus declares the closeness of God, he goes out searching for disciples (students), and he says, "Follow me!" and then he goes throughout the countryside preaching and teaching and healing - evidence that what he is saying is true - that God is really setting up shop among people like us.

As Jesus heals the lame and the blind they see a new world.  As onlookers watch Jesus heal they see a new world.  As Jesus preaches about the kingdom new possibility arises; people see the world like they've never seen it before.  It's a whole new world.

It's interesting that Jesus is called "the Word made flesh" at the beginning of the Gospel of John.  It's like God has uttered and that utterance has become wrapped in human skin and we just see a human being with the exceptional gift of disrupting our world and drawing people to himself.  He draws people to himself who admire him as "God's Son" and others who are happy that he hangs from a cross dying.  Little did those who killed Jesus know that the world he was recreating didn't involve them.

Will Willimon often reminds his listeners that after his resurrection we'd expect Jesus to go on a witch-hunt looking for Pilate and his henchmen.  But no!  Jesus doesn't search for Pilate, he searches for the lower class fishermen who abandoned him as soon as the thugs came to arrest him in that garden they call Gethsemane.  he searches them out and the first words to spill from his mouth are, "Peace be with you!"

You see, it has to be a brand new day when the teacher and best friend you abandoned returns to you with best wishes.  It has to be a brand new day when people like you and me aren't condemned, but rather co-opted into a peaceful revolution that, for 2000 years, has continued to sweep across the globe like a raging forest fire.

In Genesis 2 God is characterized as a seedsman who plants a garden.  In the Gospel of John's account of Jesus' resurrection he is presented as a gardener.  The God who plants the seed also causes the growth.  Life began in a garden.  Life returns to a garden.  Life is restored in a garden.

Gardens are places of possibility; they are places of hope; they are places where the impossible becomes possible; they are places where we see the dead matter nourishing the living.

Gardeners are people of possibility; they are people who make a way out of no way.  They are people who are gifted at sowing new life and planting seeds of hope when the rest of us are insistent that there is no way out of our problems.

In the thick of all of this economic meltdown in the United States and around the world we see people like the citizens of Detroit, and people in other cities like Toronto and Vancouver developing community gardens and raising crops to localize our eating habits, to localize our economies, to simplify our lifestyles, and to generate an atmosphere of hope that you don't have to be a farming conglomerate or some corporate multinational to make it in the world.

When we see signs of hope; when we see signs of a renewed world emerging - a world that we didn't imagine was possible - all that we who trust in Jesus can do is to preach!  To remind people that in all of this hope that "the kingdom of God (really) has come near!"

Hallelujah!