Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource: Year B Part 1

By Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is widely acclaimed as one of the top ten preachers in the world. For each Sunday of the Christian year, Will provides just what you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. This guide will stoke, fund, and fuel your imagination while leaving plenty of room to insert your own illustrations, make connections within your congregational context, and speak the Word in your distinctive voice. Guidance from Will Willimon is like sitting down with a trusted clergy friend and asking, “What will you preach next Sunday?” Year B, Part 1 is part of a six-volume set that includes years A, B, and C (2 volumes per year) in the Revised Common Lectionary.

Each week of sermon resources includes:

1. Readings
2. Theme title
3. Introduction to the Readings
4. Encountering the Text
5. Proclaiming the Text
6. Relating the Text

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501847240

Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

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Introduction

For over three decades Pulpit Resource has been helping preachers prepare to preach. Now, in this volume, some of the most helpful resources have been brought together to help you faithfully preach your way through the first half (Advent through Easter) of Year B of the Common Lectionary. This Lectionary Sermon Resource doesn’t claim to be the sole resource needed for engaging, faithful biblical preaching, but it does give you, the pastor who preaches, accessible, easy-to-use help on your way to a sermon.

No sermon is a solo production. Every preacher relies on inherited models, mentors in the preacher’s past, commentaries on biblical texts by people who have given their lives to such study, comments received from members of the congregation, last week’s news headlines, and all the other ways that a sermon is communal. Using this resource is equivalent to sitting down with a trusted clergy friend over a cup of coffee and asking, What will you will preach next Sunday?

In the sermons that follow, I give you just what you need to begin the journey toward a sermon. I hope that this Lectionary Sermon Resource stokes, funds, and fuels your imagination. Rarely do I give you a full sermon in the Proclamation section that can be preached verbatim. I’ve left plenty of room to insert your own illustrations, to make connections that work within your congregational context, and to speak the word in your distinctive voice. Sermons are occasional: God’s word spoken in a particular time and place to a particular people. Only you can speak God’s word in your distinctive voice to your distinctive context. All I try to do in this volume is to give you my insights and ideas related to a specific biblical text and then leave you free to allow the Holy Spirit to work within you and your particular congregation.

From what pastors have told me, the value of this guide is its simplicity, its unvarying format. Every Sunday you are given the following sections: Theme (I still think the time-honored practice of using a theme sentence to begin sermon preparation is a good practice, enabling the sermon to have coherence and unity); Introduction to the readings (that can be used as preparation for listening to the texts read in corporate worship); and Prayer (because every sermon is a gift of the Holy Spirit). The sections Encountering the text (listening to the biblical text, engagement with its particular message, is the first essential step on the way to a faithful sermon), Proclaiming the text (my sketch of ideas and movements for developing what I hear in the assigned text), and Relating the text (copious illustrative material that helps the sermon hit home) are given on different Sundays.

I’m honored that you have invited me to be a partner in your preaching. It’s a demanding, challenging, joyful vocation to which God has called us. Let’s work together to make sure God’s word is offered in a lively, engaging way to God’s people. Onward in the great adventure of preaching!

WILL WILLIMON

First Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

Where Is God?

Selected reading

Isaiah 64:1-9

Theme

Advent is a time of expectant waiting for God to come among us. Waiting for God can be difficult, yet we wait with the faithful conviction that our God will come among us, and come with power to save.

Introduction to the readings

Isaiah 64:1-9

The prophet Isaiah cries out to God to return to help and to heal Israel in its distress.

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Paul counsels the Corinthians not to lose hope in their waiting for the return of Christ.

Mark 13:24-37

Jesus tells a parable about servants who wait for the return of their master.

Prayer

Dear Lord, we are not doing that

well on our own.

Come down and help us.

We thought we had matters in our

hands, fending for ourselves.

Come down and save us.

We presumed that we had all we

needed to give ourselves a sure

and certain future.

Come down and rescue us from

ourselves.

We lost our way. We sit in

darkness.

Come, shine your light before us

this Advent. Amen.

Encountering the text

Claus Westermann calls Isaiah 64 the most powerful psalm of communal lamentation in the Bible (Isaiah 40–60 [Louisville: Westminster, 1969], 392). This is the anguished lament of those returned from exile, returned to the ruins of the temple and the rubble of defeated national hope. The historical context is that part of Isaiah, so-called Third Isaiah (chs. 56–66), that tries to make sense of the exile after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. The lectionary’s omission of verses 18 and 19 of chapter 63 is unfortunate. Verses 18 and 19 are evocative images of a people who, having once held the temple, the seat of God’s presence, now see the temple in the hands of foreigners.

It is as if Israel no longer belongs to God or, even more frightening, as if God no longer belongs to Israel, like those not known by your name.

The prayer moves beyond tearful lament to a bold calling of God to account, reminding the Almighty of divine deeds of deliverance in ancient times.

Do you know people who can readily identify with the prophet’s prayer that God would tear open the heavens and come down? As pastor, you certainly do.

Our lection ends with the affirmation that you are our father. The Old Testament has a rich store of images and metaphors for God—the words you are our father occur only here. God as father was a pagan, mythical idea that Israel carefully avoided until rare usages in postexilic times. In this highly unusual use of the term, the fatherhood of God is presented in terms of our last refuge when even our ancestors no longer know us. Although our sins are manifold, "But . . . you are our father." Upon that great, divine, paternal nevertheless rests the hope for deliverance in Isaiah 63 and 64.

It is a fearful thing for a people to arrive at a point in their history at which they charge God with having hidden yourself from us. Yet even in our hard iniquity, we dare to believe that we are but clay being worked by the formative hands of a skilled potter. Our hope, at the end of our collective rope, is for the advent of a God who remembers us, even in our forgetfulness of God, and reforms us into people more worthy to bear the image of the divine. In good or ill, our lives show the thumbprints of the hands of an active God.

Proclaiming the text

If only you would tear open the heavens and come down! Today’s Old Testament lesson, Isaiah 64:1-9, is the anguished outburst of a desperate people, having exhausted all possible human alternatives, having given up on polite, respectfully restrained prayers to God. Tear open the heavens and come down! they cry.

People on the bottom, people who have lost hope in conventional means of change, do not have the luxury of a Deistic Unmoved Mover, a God who merely sets the world in motion without continued intervention in the world. They want God, and they want God now.

Isaiah prays the prayer of a people who long for a God yet cannot see or hear God, people for whom God is absent. Do any of you know what that feels like? Have you ever prayed but felt like you were only talking to yourself? Have you ever stood beside the bed of one in pain and prayed for God’s help but felt like God was far away? Have you known the prayer that prayed, God, tear open the heavens and come down?

Perhaps you are surprised that anybody in the Bible ever prayed this kind of prayer. Sometimes you get the impression that people in the Bible always have God right next to them, anytime they snap their fingers and call for God. Paul met God in a blinding flash on the Damascus Road. If God were always among us in a blinding flash, then being related to God would be easy.

Isaiah had such an experience with God when he was young (Isa 6:1-6). One day, praying in the temple, it was as if the heavens were opened and Isaiah looked right up into heaven and saw God sitting upon a throne, clear as day.

But that was a long time before today’s scripture. In today’s scripture Isaiah is not a young man on the way up, but an old man returned with his people from exile, returned to a city in ruin, a temple in ruin, their lives in ruin. Perhaps, remembering his vision as a young man in the temple, standing now in the rubble of a lost temple, the ruins of lost faith, Isaiah blurts out, God, tear open the heavens [again] and come down!

Something in me wishes that God was always present, visible, clear as day standing beside us. But in my experience, that’s not the way it is with the living God. Sometimes there is the blinding flash of light, the unmistakable voice from above, but in my experience God speaks most often through whispers, not shouts. God is found in the shadows, rather than appearing as blinding light.

Sometimes the whispers are very low whispers, and sometimes the shadows are very dark shadows. In fact, sometimes, I am not that sure of his words or his will.

Sometimes, when you are the only one who sees a glimpse of God or hears what God says, you wonder if you really saw and heard God. For instance, when you are recovering from an illness, try saying, God restored me to health. How will your friends respond? With strange glances? You believe that God has restored you to health, but it was not obvious. Not everybody sees God the way you do. So you wish there would be a voice, a nice, clear, possibly bass voice, saying from the heavens, This is God. I helped Mary through her illness.

Say to someone, God answered my prayer. How will that person react? Probably they will somewhat nervously say, You always were lucky, or, What a coincidence that should happen. I heard the great preacher Fred Craddock, someone who speaks marvelously for God, confess, My problem with God has been God’s timidity, God’s quietness.

If someone who daily communicates with God, speaks for God, says that God is timid, quiet, how much more must it be for the rest of us.

Did God once communicate with people, in a voice unmistakably loud and clear, but no longer does? If that were the case, then why today’s anguished prayer from Isaiah? How could the one who once saw God face-to-face in the temple now cry out, If only you would tear the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, . . . so that the nations might tremble at your presence?

There is a curious kind of presence and absence in many biblical people’s experience of God. When the resurrected Christ appeared to Paul on the Damascus Road (Acts 9), note the difference in the way Paul heard these voices compared to those who were with him. Paul clearly heard the voice of Christ, so clearly that his life was changed forever. But those who were with him heard nothing. Have you ever had that experience?

Fred Craddock suggests that the presence of God is so easily missed because what may have originally happened in rather muted tones, is later reported in technicolor in the Bible. For instance, when Luke tells of the death of Herod, he says that God struck him dead instantly and he was eaten up with worms (Acts 12:20-23). However, history tells us that the original Herod died of the gout.

Exodus says that God buried the chariots of the Egyptians. And yet contemporary historians don’t even notice such an event. Maybe to the casual onlooker it was a matter of the Egyptian chariots getting stuck in the mud, so the Hebrews escaped. But in the eyes of faith: God stepped in and dramatically saved us from slavery.

You know how preachers, in order to make a point, in order to be heard, sometimes overstate things. Maybe it’s that way in the Bible, too. The voice of God, which was a whisper to them, is reported to us as a great shout.

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul tells his own story very quietly, in subdued tones. It is quite different from the way Luke tells it in Acts—with a vision, the light, and the voice.

Sometimes the difference lies in the way you tell something. Have you ever tried to tell somebody why a movie meant so much to you?

You finally just give up and say, Well, you’ll have to see the movie for yourself, then you’ll know why I liked it so much.

Rarely are events as obvious as they seem to those who are actually experiencing the event.

Remember that passage in the Gospel of John, when Jesus hears directly the voice of God, speaking from heaven? But John says that for others who stood there, Some said it thundered.

Sometimes, only the eyes and ears of faith get the message. Sometimes, God speaks, but we need to be leaning toward him to hear. Sometimes, God is there but is standing in the shadows, therefore we have to look toward the shadows to see. What kind of ear do you bring to the hearing?

Some people saw the miracles of Jesus, and did not say He must be the Messiah, but rather said, What gives? How did you do something like this?

Rarely is God obvious. God is sometimes heard by those who lean toward God. When faithful people hear God, it is often a whisper. Yet later, when they describe what they have heard of God, it is a shout.

Why does God communicate this way? Perhaps that when someone does hear, when someone does say yes, it will be a free, uncoerced yes. We all have moments when we, like Isaiah, wish that God would rip open the curtain of heaven and come among us in irrefutable earthquake, fire, and undeniable vividness so that any fool would say, Yep, that’s God.

Yet such moments are rare, even rare in the Bible, as today’s word from Isaiah shows. Why? I don’t know, unless it is because our God is a free, unrestrained living God, not some tame house pet on a leash who comes at our every beck and call. There is space between us and God because God is God and we are not. My ways are not your ways, Isaiah once heard this God say.

If you look directly into the sun, you will only be blinded. You must see the sun indirectly, in the sun’s reflection. Maybe it is mostly that way between us and God.

So if God is most often known in a whisper rather than in earthquake and fire, then it must be easy to miss God’s voice when it comes to us. If God stands aside in the shadows, flirting with us, appearing among us only indirectly, then it must be easy not to see God’s appearances among us.

I fear, when it comes to God’s presence among us, we are like those sad teenagers who, having listened to rock music through headphones with the volume so high that their hearing is damaged, are now no longer able to hear any subtleties of sound. Everything must be in a shout to be heard.

Or we modern folk are people who are never free from the blare of the TV or the radio or the cell phone, constantly being bombarded with sounds and sights, so much so that we become numbed, blinded. Sensory overload leads to a kind of blindness.

So maybe that’s why the church, in its wisdom, has the season of Advent in the weeks before Christmas. If we are to see the fragile light that dawns among us in Christ, we must sit awhile in the darkness. If we are to hear the songs of the angels, we must first be silent. What could you do (or, perhaps more to the point for us busy people, What could you avoid doing this Advent?) that would make you better able to see God’s subtle incursions among us?

I daresay that when many people first saw the babe at Bethlehem, they saw only another poor baby. Yet for those who were listening, leaning toward the light, here was Immanuel, God with us.

If only you would tear open the heavens and come down! begs the prophet. But the living, free, loving God rarely does. More often God comes to us in a glimpse, a whisper, a shadow moving in the darkness, and we, whose lives are so full of noise, sights and sounds, lights and thunder of our own creation, miss heaven’s opening up for us.

Relating the text

Today’s Old Testament lesson arises during Israel’s exile. In what ways can it be said that our time is a time of exile, too? Walter Brueggemann says,

The exile of the contemporary American church is that we are bombarded by definitions of reality that are fundamentally alien to the gospel, definitions of reality that come from the military-industrial-scientific empire . . . the voice of this empire wants to reshape our values, fears, and dreams in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the voice of the gospel.

—Second Isaiah, in Reading and Preaching the Book of Isaiah, ed.

Christopher Seitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 73

Toward the end of one of his movies, Woody Allen says something like, It’s not that I hate God. I have nothing against God. I think that the worst you could say of God is that God is an underachiever. In our minds, God never quite lives up to God’s potential.

Our director of music refuses to sit in a crowded, loud restaurant. He takes earplugs with him to Duke basketball games. You see, he explains, when your life is music, when your main tools are your ears, you must be careful. The difference between making good music and making great music is often the difference between the slightest variations of sound. I must guard my hearing so that I can distinguish between those slight variations.

Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 40:1-11

Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

Returning

Selected reading

Isaiah 40:1-11

Theme

Everyone needs a time of homecoming, a time to return to that place where we know, in our heart-of-hearts, we belong. Advent is an invitation for each of us to return to God, to our true home.

Introduction to the readings

Isaiah 40:1-11

The prophet Isaiah proclaims comfort to the suffering people of Israel. God is bringing them out of exile and back home.

2 Peter 3:8-15a

The writer urges a group of early Christians not to lose hope for the return of their Lord.

Mark 1:1-8

The gospel opens with the appearance of John the Baptist, who proclaims the advent of God’s Messiah.

Prayer

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may he give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

—John Henry Newman (1801–1890)

Encountering the text

Our Old Testament lesson is the first note of a grand symphony of comfort and hope that scholars called Second Isaiah. The poet proclaims that God is working behind the scenes, in Cyrus’s war on Babylonia, to bring God’s people back home. Like a responsive psalm, the text is composed of four speakers. In verses 1 and 2 the prophet hears the Lord speaking. Then, verses 3 and 5 are the words of a voice. Verses 6 through 8 are words of a different voice. The prophet concludes the section with his own words. Listen to each of the voices as a distinctive word of hope for the chosen people.

Today’s Proclaiming the text picks up on the musical analogy in referring to Handel’s Messiah. Today’s text speaks of home, homecoming. All people need a home. There is no sadder state than to be homeless. Today’s text is the good news that we have a home, that we can return, that by the grace of God, we are returning.

Proclaiming the text

Clear the LORD’s way in the desert! Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God! Every valley will be raised up, and every mountain and hill will be flattened . . .‘Here is your God!’

Messiah opens on a somber chord; then the orchestra moves upward toward a clear, tenor voice: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people . . . the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Last Sunday Isaiah spoke for a people in the wilderness, in Babylonian exile, a people so lost, orphaned, that they could cry, You have hidden yourself from us (Isa 64:7). Refusing to blame others for their situation, the prophet told the exiles, We sinned. . . . We have all become like the unclean. . . . All of us wither like a leaf; our sins, like the wind, carry us away (Isa 64:5-6).

Into this forlorn, self-deprecating exilic gloom, the preacher speaks, Comfort, comfort my people! says your God. . . .‘Clear the LORD’s way in the desert! Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God! Every valley will be raised up, and every mountain and hill will be flattened.’

It’s the announcement of a divine highway construction program through the wilderness, the lostness, from Babylonian exile back home. Note that it’s a straight road. Ordinarily, the way back from Babylonia to Israel followed the Fertile Crescent, going out of the way to avoid the desert wilderness. But this road is straight in the desert. Notice also that it is the Lord who will be traveling that road, leading Israel homeward. It’s an announcement of homecoming.

Clear the LORD’s way in the desert! Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!

Surely Isaiah means for us to think of earlier Israel on exodus through the wilderness. Getting free from Pharaoh was not the toughest exodus task. Between Egyptian slavery and freedom of the promised land lay wilderness. When you hear the word wilderness you are not to think back-to-nature freaks in their cozy prefab cabin in the woods, nor are you to have granola visions of hiking in the Adirondacks on your vacation. Wilderness for Israel was a place of wild beasts, temptation, sin, and bewildered wandering with no star for a guide. It took Israel forty years of wandering in the wilderness finally to find their way home.

I know a man who took forty years in the wilderness to find home. Dan Wakefield, in his popular book Returning, describes how he wandered away from God, how his life as an adult became chaotic, confused. Then, he says,

I cannot pinpoint any particular time when I suddenly believed in God again. I only know that such belief came to seem as natural as for all but a few stray moments of twenty-five or more years before it had been inconceivable. I realized this while looking at fish.

I had gone with my girlfriend to the New England Aquarium, and as we gazed at the astonishingly brilliant colors of some of the small tropical fish—reds and yellows and oranges—and watched the amazing lights of the flashlight fish that blinked on like the beacons of some creature of a scifi epic, I wondered how anyone could think that all this was the result of some chain of accidental explosions! Yet . . . to try to convince me otherwise five years before would have been hopeless. Was this what they called conversion?

The term bothered me because it suggested being born again and, like many of my contemporaries, I had been put off by the melodramatic nature of that label, as well as the current political beliefs that seemed to go along with it. Besides, I didn’t feel reborn. No voice came out of the sky nor did a thunderclap strike me. . . . I was relieved when our minister explained that the literal translation of conversion . . . is not rebirth but turning. That’s what my own experience felt like—as if I’d been walking in one direction and then, in response to some inner pull, I turned. (pp. 23–24)

Go up on a high mountain, messenger Zion! Raise your voice and shout, messenger Jerusalem! . . . say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

Wilderness is a metaphor for lostness, exile, homelessness. It was from the wilderness that John the Baptist appeared, quoting Isaiah, Prepare the way for the Lord; make his paths straight (Mark 1:1-3). Mark says in his first chapter, first verse, The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ . . . The beginning of good news is the announcement, a voice shouting in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make his paths straight’ (Mark 1:3).

Note the good news that this is God’s highway. God brings homeless people back home. I teach the first-year course The Search for Meaning. (I talk to the students about humanity’s search for a meaningful life, and they talk to me about their search for an easy A!) We enjoy thinking of ourselves as folk who search for God, people searching for answers to life’s tough questions.

But note here that no one has been searching for God. The text tells of what God will do, where God is going, God dragging Israel along with him, down the straight road home. No one asked for John the Baptist. The way out of the wilderness is a way initiated by and led by God. So the question is not, What am I looking for? or, What would it take for me to grope my way back home? The question is, What road is God building toward you today?

Christmas is a time for homecoming. Look out on any mid-to-late-December congregation, and one sees familiar faces of kids home from college, wise relatives from the East bearing gifts, and always, I think, exiles come back to church. Sometimes preachers make wisecracks about these lost sheep who wander back in from the cold every year about Christmastime. Where have they been all year, we want to know. See you again on Easter, we say.

But why not homecoming now? Have you been on exile? What voice, what recently smoothed way has beckoned you back?

Think. What road is God building toward you today? Those words were spoken not to you, but you heard them as if spoken only for you. That face from the past. That vaguely felt, but gnawing, sense of yearning. That echo evoked from deep within the soul’s memory upon hearing again a carol not heard since childhood. That coincidence that might not have been merely coincidental. I wonder.

Clear the LORD’s way in the desert! Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!

Wilderness is that place, which is no place, where we lose our way, wander from the path, get lost. Exile is that time when we become enslaved to false gods, serve an alien empire, sell out, forget.

Fred Craddock remembers a little girl from one of his early pastorates in Tennessee. Her parents sent her to church but never came with her. They would pull in the church’s circular drive, the little girl would hop out of the car, and they would go out for Sunday breakfast. The father was an executive for a chemical company, upwardly mobile, ambitious.

The whole town knew