Countdown to Sunday

I am currently reading a book by Chris Erdman entitled Countdown to Sunday.  It is a book about preaching -- for preachers.  I just finished a chapter entitled "Preaching and War."  It has challenged me in the middle of a reassessment of my preaching. 

 

First, let me say that I am a proud American.  But I am 1st and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God.  And these two kingdoms are more mutually exclusive than they are overlapping.  This is where the problem has often come for preachers.

Here are some quotes from Erdman:

"It's hard to keep the Word and its people free from entrapment to powers that aim to enlist God and everything else in service to their agendas.  It's hard but it is necessary.

It's an astonishing thing in my mind that in 1944 a Nazi soldier could attend worship on Sunday, then bludgeon a prisoner to death come Monday, or that in 2003 someone in the Pentagon could name a bomb the Mother of All Bombs and threaten to drop it on Iraqi women and children . . . and there was nary a peep from American pulpits. 

Holding fast to this story that has captivated us, we will be unable to shake ourselves free of the gospel that declares that the world is saved -- that we are made safe and receive the peace of a just world -- through the ministry of the One who disarmed the violent without violence, who died before he would kill, who loved and refused to give in to hate.  And we will arm ourselves only with this word of truth, so apparently fragile up against war and all its machinery.  But we, who are conformed to the One in who name we preach, realize that preaching, rightly done, does violence to violence itself."