Luminescence, Volume 2

The Sermons of C.K. and Fred Barrett

C. K. Barrett, Fred Barrett, Ben Witherington

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498240536
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What is found in this series, unveils an entirely different side of C.K. Barrett, a side one might never have known about if one had knowledge only of his famous commentaries and monographs. Herein lies a goodly selection of Kingsley's sermons preached largely in small- and medium-sized Methodist churches in the Northeast of England, though often elsewhere in England and around the world.Fred Barrett was not the scholar his son was, but on close inspection, one can most definitely see the impact of the father on the son when it came to preaching.It seems rightto include as many sermons from both of these men as we can in this series. One thing sorely lacking in much preaching these days is in-depth engagement with both the biblical text and one's tradition and theology. The sermons in these volumes demonstrate what such preaching can look like.While the first volume presented sermons on the Gospels and Acts, this second volume covers the rest of the New Testament and extensive portions of the Old Testament.

SERMONS ON THE LETTERS OF PAUL1

1. Editor’s Note: There are, not surprisingly, so many sermons that CKB composed and delivered on the Pauline letters, that it was quite impossible to include them all in this collection whereas there are much fewer sermons on the General Epistles and Revelation and we were able to include all of those. There was room also for the vast majority of the OT sermons.

“THE GOSPEL REVEALED”—Romans 1.16–17

[Preached seven times from 5/25/03 at Bishop Auckland to 1/20/08 at Witton Gilbert]2

There is no greater text in the Bible, and I had the cheek to make on it the first sermon I ever preached. I have it still; it is tucked away at the back of a drawer in my study. But you need not worry, I am not resurrecting it today. In the last sixty odd years I have, I think, learned a thing or two about the world, and life, and myself, and other people, and about goodness and badness, about mercy and truth. But you may well think I have not lost all my cheek.

If you and I did not belong to a godless, profane, secular society the text might well lead us into the same hell that it gave the young Martin Luther, five hundred years ago. “The Gospel in which God’s righteousness is revealed.” But that is no Gospel, no good news. Luther knew the meaning of the words. He had been brought up on Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, one of whose virtues was that he never said anything without carefully defining the words he used. He could tell you what righteousness, justice meant. Cutting a long story short, and simplifying a good deal, it is plain common sense that we all accept. Justice means giving every person their due. If he does well, he gets a reward, if he has done ill, he gets a punishment. We still expect to see this kind of justice done, and complain if it is not done. But now the court is not the Old Bailey, the court is God’s court. And here Luther knew that while he was as good as most folk, he was not good enough. Had he, and had I, loved God with all his heart, and soul and mind and strength? Had he, and had I, loved his neighbor as himself? Always? No. So righteousness could only say guilty, and pack us off to where the guilty go.

It was the Psalms that cracked the Pauline nut. First, by making it worse. “Free me by thy righteousness, Nazarene!” But the Psalms were the source of the words Jesus quoted on the Cross, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If Luther knew God forsakenness, so did Jesus. “He had taken it for me.” So Aristotle was wrong, at least as far as God was concerned. God’s righteousness is not a matter of handing out the punishments we all deserve. For God, it means putting things right, especially putting right the wrong relation that exists between us and God. That is where we can move on and take the next step. In the Gospel God reveals his power to put wrong things right, in particular wrong people into the right relationship with himself. Because of this, the Gospel is the power of God leading to salvation.

SALVATION

Nothing can work properly if it is out of the proper relationship with its Maker. Years ago now, so long ago I had almost forgotten it, I was talking to Conrad Eden, the great organist of Durham Cathedral. He told me that stacked away somewhere in the Cathedral archives was a quality of fine music written by earlier generations of cathedral organists. He would have loved to have played it, and to get the choir to sing it. But he couldn’t do it. The music was written on scraps of paper and no one could put them together. Here was a line for the tenors to sing; here was one for the altos, but they didn’t fit. They didn’t belong together. And (though I suppose someone may have succeeded since) up to that time, no one had been able to bring them together in harmony. One man could have done it, the composer. He knew what it should all sound like. The harmony was singing in his head. But he was not available, his creation was out of touch.

Creation is wonderful, however you think it happened, whether in seven days or with a Big Bang. Nothing is more wonderful than the creation of the human race. And somehow the human race has got it all wrong. Wasn’t the Garden of Eden somewhere in Iraq? What a story for the history books, or tabloids. The story of Eden is right at least in this: what went wrong was sin, and sin meant the rupture of the relations between the Maker and the thing made. “I hid myself because I was naked.” The point is not, “Because I found out that my wife and I are sexual beings.” It means because I sinned, because I disobeyed, because I ate of the tree which you forbade me to touch. Breakdown of relations, hence suffering and sweat for the man, suffering and subordination for the woman, and death for both.

How this chaotic state of human affairs reveals itself in practice I shall not attempt to describe, partly because we lack the time and partly because you know it already. You read the papers, you watch the news on television, you hear it on the radio. I expect the Garden of Eden has been well and truly blown up by now. And I have said it so often, and so many other people have said it so much better than I have. It is the story of Jesus. If we are, not to sum it up, but at least to stretch out a pointing finger in the right direction, I begin and end with the death cry I have already quoted from Luther. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” The one person God could not justly forsake, felt bitterly the forsakenness that we in our insensitivity will sometimes shrug off. And he bore it for us, entering our hell so that we might recover heaven.

All the images human beings have used to describe this event are faulty for it is unique. There is nothing like it. I think sometimes of a medicinal tablet that you throw into a glass of water. It sinks to the bottom and in effervescing it disintegrates, but the health-giving, life-giving properties of the medicine permeate the whole glass full of water. You drink it and it heals. Christ too sank to the bottom of life, touched the very bass string of humanity. And so the human creation is cleansed. Sounds like a conjuring trick, does it? But wait. The rich text has another word for us faith.

FAITH

The power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes (that is, has faith). Therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith (that is faith all along the line, from beginning to end). Only believe? It sounds easy, easy enough to mock. So for example Bernard Shaw. I haven’t read it for decades and I am not sure in which of the prefaces you will find it, and I am bound to quote from memory. But he says ‘the Reformation, with its doctrine of by faith alone, was a triumph of cheapness. Saved at the cost of a credo and a penny in the plate.’

Remarkable, isn’t it, how an intelligent person can read a plain text and get it wrong? But perhaps he wanted to get it wrong. Henry Drummond had a better picture of the matter. He was asked once to speak to the members of an expensive and exclusive London club. He began his address: “The entrance fee to the Kingdom of God is—nothing. The annual subscription is all you have.”

Faith means freedom all the way through, and in more ways than one. It begins, as the New Testament tells us, as a gift from God. There is no other way it can begin. The trouble with God’s human creation is that we have cut ourselves adrift from God. We want to go our own way, not his. We want to go under our own steam, responsible to no one but ourselves, unwilling to place ourselves under an obligation by discovering all the strength that God supplies. And if we sense something is wrong and want to put it right, we draw on our own strength to do so and make our own existence more self-centered than ever.

The only way forward is to accept God’s gift, knowing that it can never be anything but a gift, that we can never deserve it nor find the resources to buy it. We must accept God’s gift of faith and go on accepting it. Faith is always a gift, always free; we never have it by right. I said that faith is freedom all the way through. It is. It starts and continues as a gift and it sets us free, free from fear, from anxiety, from habit; free from ourselves. That means it sets us free for creative service.

I started with Luther. Let us have him again in the greatest Christian epigram that ever he uttered: “A Christian is a free lord over everything, and subject to no one. A Christian is a menial servant of everything and subject to everyone.” He is free through faith, a servant through love. The same faith that sets him free manifests itself only in universal love. There is far more to say in this greatest of texts, but time allows for only this—the Gospel is for all.

THE GOSPEL IS FOR ALL

Paul has his own way of putting it here, and we shall have to find ours. Paul’s world was made up (so most people would have said) of ordinary normal people, and of Jews. Of course they, in truth, were normal too. But everyone knew they were odd. They had their own religion which was different, their own laws and customs, their own fierce nationalism which prevented them from sharing fully in the almost universal civilization of the Greco-Roman world. The Gospel began amongst them, for Jesus was a Jew. So, to the Jew first. But Paul adds at once, “but also to the Greek” meaning by that non-Jews. So that was everyone. The good news for all. What Paul says and the way he said it is still important, but guided by it, we can put it differently. The Gospel is for all—for the naturally religious and for the naturally irreligious.

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2. Editor’s Note: This is one of the latest sermons composed by CKB, in 2003 and one of the later ones to be preached as well. This is appropriate, for as Kingsley says, the first sermon he ever preached, as a teen, was on this text. This sermon is not a revision of that one, but rather a fresh take on that key text.

‘THE ADVANTAGE OF THE JEW”—Romans 3.1–2

[Preached fourteen times from 10/7/51 at Wesley Memorial Lowfell to 5/28/80 at Thornley]

Do not at once dismiss this text as an academic answer to an antiquated question. If you only take the trouble to transfer it into our own idiom you will find that the question is the most relevant one we could ask on a Sunday morning in the mid-twentieth century. “What advantage has the Jew?” asks St. Paul speaking of the elect and privileged people of God. In this year of our Lord we ask—What good is it to be a Church member? Well you are one; what good is it? Do you know? Do you care? Could you explain it to anyone else? I don’t think we can afford to despise St. Paul’s assistance in finding an answer. But we must first consider how and why the question came to be asked.

HOW AND WHY THE QUESTION CAME TO BE ASKED

You will not understand the question if you do not know what is contained in the first few chapters of this epistle. The first chapter must have given a good deal of pleasure to many of Paul’s Jewish friends. It was the kind of thing they liked. Look at the Gentile world says St. Paul. Take idolatry. Here are people living in a world God has made and instead of worshipping the Creator, they pass him by to worship his creation—humans, birds, four-footed beasts, creeping things. Can you wonder at the consequences that follow from this original offense? Wonder that they are filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness? That they turn to lying, murder, adultery and sodomy? Can you wonder that the whole of life goes wrong when its starting point is wrong? So far so good; but the Jew gets a bad shock in chapter 2.

Are you any better? With all your privileges and advantages are you ahead of the Gentiles? You who boast in the Law and suppose that in it you have the very truth of God himself visible before your eyes; do you not earn greater condemnation? I know you don’t worship a cat or a snake, but do you not do a far more dreadful thing? Do you not worship yourself? In other words, these things being so, and here we come to our question—What is the good of being a Jew?

Now just as Paul pleased the Jews so it is possible to please a Methodist congregation today. I say that in no critical spirit; every preacher knows that it is true. You can go the round of the things that Methodists do not like. Take drink. There is plenty to talk about there. Think of the colossal expenditure, the ruined health, the broken homes, men turned into beasts and some into devils, and children into frightened beaten urchins. Think of gambling. Think of the average weekly budget on the pools. Think of the perversion of thought that turns little words into a combination of providence and fairy godmother, of the demoralizing search for something for nothing. Take sex in all its twists and follies and perversions, from the divorce courts to the filthy words and pictures scribbled in the street and public lavatories.

Of course it is always easy and popular to talk about these...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• SERMONS ON THE LETTERS OF PAUL
• SERMONS ON THE OTHER EPISTLES AND THE REVELATION
• SERMONS ON THE OLD TESTAMENT