How Blood-Earnest Should a Preacher Be?

Mike Leake

hqdefaultC.S. Lewis once spoke about the difficulty of sustaining worship. Worship by it’s very nature is a looking outside of ourselves. As soon as we start thinking about worship we end up not worshipping, this is how Lewis said it:

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping.

I was thinking about that Lewis quote recently while thinking through this address by John Piper on The Gravity and Gladness of Preaching. Piper is trying to make an argument for a seriousness to our preaching that conveys both the gladness and happiness and joy that we have in Christ but which moves away from frivolity or levity.

I’ve gleaned so much from John Piper over the years. I believe his blood-earnestness in preaching has had such a great impact upon me. The seriousness with which he considers the glory of God is helpful and challenging. And that is, I believe, what Piper is attempting to communicate in this lecture on preaching.

But there is something which I’ve observed among those of us who got our preaching legs while being immersed in the Reformed evangelicalism of Piper. It’s a particular tone, a way of organizing the service, a way of carrying ourselves with “blood-earnestness” but a seriousness that is more of a mask than that which comes from having been through the fire.

To put this another way, the blood-earnestness that accompanies powerful preaching doesn’t come from a fixation on blood-earnestness. That’s why I think of that Lewis quote. If we fixate upon the tone of the service—stamping out laughter and mirth—making sure we have the proper atmosphere of being around the holy, we’ll never arrive at anything more than contrived stillness. Because when you focus upon being blood-earnest you’re no longer really preaching.

When he was laboring to discern whether or not he was called to the ministry, John Newton, put together some of his thoughts upon preaching:

I do not think either sourness or gloominess become a preacher…True gravity is far from these and is a temperament of behavior arising from a fixed persuasion of the presence of God, the value of souls, the shortness of time, the influence of example, the love of mankind and the vastness and reality of eternal things, all impressed upon the mind together. (Newton, 180)

I’m not saying that Newton and Piper are necessarily disagreeing. But what I am saying is that Piper’s disciples would do well to hear this word of Newton. We don’t arrive at gladness or gravity by making either of them our goal in preaching. They arise from other things.

Focus upon the glory of Christ, aim to love your people and to honor Christ while doing so, and you’ll have plenty of experiences where the Spirit rests upon your congregation in such a way that a holy hush falls upon them. That is Newton’s point.

Dig deep in Jesus and the atmosphere will take care of itself.

A New Project

Mike Leake

Trauma2TraumaLogo2023 small versionI am excited today to launch a new project with my friend Dave Pittman.

Survivors and pastors may speak with the same native tongue but we often aren’t speaking the same language. Often we struggle to hear beyond our own trauma, as well as acknowledge it’s role in the life of another. So, Dave and I hope to translate for one another.

We believe that most of what happens on social media and in real life is that two people aren’t having conversations but rather one trauma response is talking to another trauma response. And we seldom acknowledge this. We need a new way to converse to bridge the gap between pastors and survivors.

Today we posted our first article. A fair amount of it was a cut and paste job from something I wrote here last year. But it lays the foundation for what we hope to accomplish in the coming days.

Check it out:

https://trauma2trauma.org/f/what-is-trauma-2-trauma

Worship Is the Fuel For Helping

Mike Leake

grave-clothes“How’d you keep from quitting?”

That’s the question that I would love to ask the prophet Isaiah. I’ve always wondered how he kept from being bitter and jaded. Deep discouragement has to accompany years of seemingly fruitless ministry.

I’ve had seasons which felt like nobody is listening but I’ve never been there. I’ve also wondered how in the world did Isaiah remain faithful to the message. Did he ever flirt with the idea of tweaking it a bit to make it more palatable to his countrymen? Did he ever think that maybe a different tone would turn the burnt stump into a mighty oak of ministry? I bet this guy had to hate going to the monthly meeting with area pastors…”how many did you baptize this month, Isaiah?”

But Isaiah remained a faithful prophet of God for a very lengthy ministry. And he wasn’t just really good at one thing. He wasn’t only one of those preachers that was amazing at beating you up and bringing a flood of conviction. He was also one of those preachers who helped you heal. Likewise, he wasn’t just filled with syrup and sugar. His words could lay you bare and have you snot-crying without a moments notice. That’s really what the gospel does, though. It breaks when we need broken and heals when we need healed. Isaiah was that type of gospel minister.

And that blows me away. Because it had to have been tempting for Isaiah to either compromise the message in order to at least gain a couple friends. Or perhaps to go all 2pac and take a me against the world posture. But he doesn’t do that. He’s balanced. And he does this for 50 plus years. How?

I’ve long thought that something is happening in Isaiah’s vision of God in chapter six which answers our question. So, I was encouraged to read a little section in Diane Langberg’s Suffering and the Heart of God, where she makes a similar connection.

How Can We Keep Going?

She refers to advocacy work to walking among the catacombs and then asks, “How can you and I persevere, living and working among the tombs, in the places of death?”

Her answer is that worship is the fuel that keeps us going. And it is what causes us to respond with compassion instead of bitterness. I love how she says this:

We cannot walk among the traumatized and the suffering with humility, patience, compassion, and comfort in a way that honors the Man of Sorrows until we have truly seen ourselves before him. (Langberg, 72)

Langberg goes on to say that without the Isaiah 6 experience of life-changing worship, “we will respond with pride and superiority, impatient that people are not better yet, intolerant of their repetitions and prolonged fear.”

The task of working with the traumatized isn’t an easy one. It’s in the category of raising the dead to life and so our only hope is the resurrection. This is the picture:

The traumatized are buried under layers of fear, self-protection, previous traumas, depression, layers of their own sin, and the litter of others’ sins against them. (Langberg, 73)

If we don’t begin this work, repentant and on our knees, we’ll bring our shovels and thrust even more piles of dirt upon the traumatized. But worship opens us up to being involved in the process of sprinkling beauty over ashes and slowly but certainly unraveling grave clothes.

It’s good work, but it’s tough work. Worship alone will sustain us and give us the strength to help rather than hurt.

Did Jesus Mess Up On His Jewish History?

Mike Leake

jeopardy-boardIt’s Jeopardy in the first century.

“High Priests for 200, Alex.”

The question pops up. Who was the high priest when David was running from King Saul? 

Jesus quickly buzzes in, “Who is Abiathar?”

The buzzer sounds and the host informs Jesus that it was not Abiathar as the high priest. After nobody else buzzes in, the host is able to give the answer, “It was Ahimelech.”

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To be clear, Jesus wasn’t actually on Jeopardy in the first century. That is obvious. But he did give the same answer when he is talking to the religious leaders about Sabbath observance. Check out Mark 2:26,

“…how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence…”

The event to which Jesus is referencing comes from 1 Samuel 21:1-7. It clearly says that Ahimelech was the priest and there is no mention of Abiathar.

What do we do with this? Did Jesus miss the Jeopardy question? Did the Son of God need to dust up on his Jewish history a little before this debate with the religious leaders?

Potential Solutions

What options do we have here? One option, simply, is that either Jesus or Mark were wrong.

Most would lay the blame at Mark’s feet. It’s a simple error by Mark. But what would this do to our view of inerrancy? Can we say that Mark was unintentionally wrong?

It is possible that the text itself is wrong? Perhaps there was a copyists error somewhere along the way. Does it matter that Abiathar isn’t mentioned in either Matthew or Luke’s rendition of the story? But the omission would be easier to explain than the assertion. It’s not likely that this is a textual problem.

So, what other options do we have?

Craig Blomberg has suggested that we should read this as “the passage concerning Abiathar”. It was customary to refer to only a section of a book or story that would recall the whole. The problem, though, is that Abiathar appears a decent amount later. It wouldn’t make sense to make Abiathar the header to the story and not Ahimelech.

There are a few others suggestions but these leave us unsatisfied. We might be left to conclude with Thomas Lindsay’s words from 1883: “Various explanations of the difficulty have been given, none very satisfactory.” 1

Intentionally Wrong?

There is one other option, though. What if Jesus was intentionally “wrong”? What if he referenced Abiathar to make a different argument, one that would not have been lost on his original audience?

We must understand that Jesus and his contemporaries held the Bible and history and such differently than we do in the West. Chronology was not nearly as important. Their interpretive methods were not as wooden and literal as our tends to be.

To put it a different way, they didn’t use the Scriptures as fodder for Bible Trivia. Jesus wouldn’t have been playing Jeopardy with these questions. It was more lively. It was telling a story. And so in order to aid a story or a key theological point, he might say something like “Abiathar”.

This wouldn’t be as acceptable to us. We would say that this is an error. But for Jesus’ and his contemporaries it’s not an error if you know what you’re doing and you are doing it intentionally to make a point.

What point was he making?

Who was Abiathar? He is Eli’s great-great-grandson, the one who would eventually be removed because of his wickedness. Abiathar, in some sense, is parallel to Saul the rejected leader.

This, then, would fit much of what is happening in Mark. They are trying to get Jesus to fit into their preconceived mold of who Messiah is, and what Messiah is supposed to be. But in reality they are fighting for a kingdom that has been rejected. He parallels King David and his opponents are Abiathar.

Andrew Wilson, in my opinion, says it well:

All of this means that Jesus mentions Abiathar rather than Ahimelech for good reason. He is saying, “I am David, these are my men, and the current priests are Abiathar. They are in charge now, but in just a few years their priesthood will end, just like Abiathar’s. And my kingdom will be established, just like David’s.”

I think that’s wonderful. The Holy Spirit didn’t put discrepancies in Scripture to provide fuel for skeptics, employment for commentators, or annoyance for evangelical Christians. He did it to make us think, search, meditate, read, learn—and be ever filled with awe.

Conclusion

Jesus didn’t miss a history question in Jeopardy, because he wasn’t playing that game. He was doing something entirely different. He was referencing Abiathar, who was mentioned only a few verses later in 1 Samuel, because he fit the purpose of his story even better.

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Photo source: here

1 Thomas M. Lindsay, The Gospel according to St. Mark (Edinburgh: Clark, 1883) 91.