In 1940, the philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler published a book entitled How to Read a Book. Now we might think reading a book is sort of self-explanatory, after all if we needed to know how to read it wouldn’t we have been taught. And yet, if you have read Adler’s book you come to realize we come to realize that we actually didn’t know how to read a book. So today we are going to try and tackle something more important to us, and that is how to listen to a sermon. Perhaps this too should be self-explanatory, after all we have been doing it for a long time, but I’m guessing that we were never taught how to listen to a sermon, or what we might do to get the most out of a sermon. I was certainly never taught that, nor have I ever taught it. I was taught how to preach, or at least the basics of doing it, but never how to receive the words of scripture. This was not always the case. It used to be that people would be taught how to listen to sermons, but according to Christopher Ash, who published a pamphlet on this very issue in 2009, he could not find any writings on this subject over the past 200 years. But, I think knowing how to be active listeners is even more important since TV has turned us into passive recipients of information. But the truth is this emphasis on how to hear God’s word goes all the way back to Jesus, as we heard in the passage from Matthew.
Jesus tells us that a sower goes out to sow seeds, and some seeds fell on the path, and some seeds fell on rocky ground, and some seed fell among the thorns; all of those seeds did not take root because the soil was not ready or able to receive them. But, some seed fell on good soil and they produced a plentiful harvest. And then Jesus says, “let anyone with ears listen.” While this is called the Parable of the Sower, it might just as well be called the parable of the soil, because is there anything wrong with the sower? No, the sower is doing his work just fine and scattering the seeds everywhere. Is there anything wrong with the seeds? No. The seed is absolutely fine, and the same seed is scattered everywhere. The sower is not using different seeds for different soil, it’s the same seed. Now Jesus will go on to explain that the sower is God (or Jesus himself) and the seed is the word of God, the message of the kingdom, so if the sower is fine and the seed is fine, what is the different reactions to the seeds? It’s in the soil, it’s in the people who hear the word, some people Jesus says, are hearing but not listening. The sower can be the best sower ever, and the seed can be the best seed every, but if the soil is not ready, if we are hearing but not listening, then nothing will take root. Let anyone with ears listen.
That means that what I am up here doing nearly every week is not entirely up to me; you play a crucial role in this process as well. The effectiveness of preaching is not simply up to the preacher. It takes all of us to be involved. So, here is how I believe we prepare the soil of our lives in order to be able to hear and listen to a sermon.
