Responding to a One Sentence Sermon

Tom Troeger, the insightful, retired teacher of preachers remembers watching The Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson one night when “the famous actor Orson Welles read from Genesis 9: “Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood,” he began. “When the bow is in clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth,” he concluded. Troeger recalls that “when Welles finished reading, he preached a one sentence sermon. These may not be the exact words,” says Tom, “but they are close: ‘God is not going to destroy us, but it remains to be seen whether or not we will destroy ourselves.’ Whenever I see a rainbow in the sky,” writes Troeger, “Welles’s sermon returns to me.”[i]

Given the length of time both Welles and Carson have been dead and gone, it is likely that Welles was referring to the threat of nuclear annihilation, a threat many thought was contained by treaties and pledges across the years. A dozen years or so ago the threat was raised again by the term “weapons of mass destruction.” A couple of years back it was brought forward again when two world leaders compared the size of the red buttons on their desks.

“God is not going to destroy us, but it remains to be seen whether or not we will destroy ourselves.” Hardly a week goes by without being reminded that destruction in the blink of an eye on a global scale is the least of our problems. Almost daily we are confronted with the evidence showing how we might gradually destroy ourselves a few lives at a time. News from the last 72 hours tells the tale: a speeding car crashes taking the lives of a handful of teens; a mother locks four children into their rooms and sets the house on fire; six Asian woman and two men are gunned down in Georgia; the trial of a white police officer accused of killing a black man begins; the body count after a coup in Myanmar rises; a report is released on the greed that contributed to opioid related deaths across the land; and the death toll from Covid 19 continues to climb. And on it goes.

We are tired of the numbers. We are tired of the all too familiar phrases that attempt to explain or excuse what has happened. We are tired of being reminded that merely sending our “thoughts and prayers” to the people who live under the latest bloody push pins on the map is not enough.

Each of us can be a part of the answer to the second half of Orson Welles’s one sentence sermon. Be-ginning with our children and grandchildren, we can teach the value of life, model and reward anger management, provide tips and tools for coping with disappointment and adjusting to circumstances beyond our control. To our “thoughts and prayers” we can add letters and calls to those with power to legislate change. We can add our voices to those calling for common sense steps to minimize the possibility of mass shootings and insist that those purchasing weapons receive training to ensure they know how to use them wisely.

Tom Troeger, the retired teacher of preachers, couldn’t help but offer a critique of the twenty-word ser-mon by Orson Welles. He wrote: “Like most good sermons, it is true and not true at the same time—for a good sermon never covers all the truth about God, though foolish preachers often make the attempt.” Troeger explains: “Welles’s sermon is true because it reminds us of how much trust God has placed in us: whether or not the human race will survive is in our hands. But the sermon is not true because it appears to make God only passive: God will look at the rainbow in the sky and remember not to act against us. But this says nothing about how God will pursue us with grace and love…God does more than promise not to destroy us. God persistently supplies us with resources to move from brutality to compassion, from violence to peace…God calls us to a new way of being and acting that we can embrace by following Christ.”

During Lent we are called to consider what it means to follow Christ, who spoke the truth to power, who taught that the cost of discipleship sometimes involves the relinquishing of rights and the accep-tance of costly responsibilities. As Holy Week nears, we are called to live Christ’s way: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly.”[ii]

[i] All quotes from Thomas H. Troeger, Sermon Sparks, Nashville, TN, Abingdon Press, 2011), p. 53-54
[ii] I Corinthians 4. 1b; 13a