chandlerNow that we’ve been here a few weeks we’re full swing  into our church, uh…search (really didn’t want to rhyme there). We’ve been a couple of places, though, we’d really like to go to the Village which is only 45 minutes from here. But we’ve decided we’d rather stay nearby, since we can get Matt Chandler’s teaching online.

But today I realized just how spoiled we were at Garnett. Wade’s sermons, like Chandler’s are deep, thoughtful, and exegetically responsible. They take the time to make sure their thoughts are cogent – and coherent. But today I heard a sermon that left me sad and frustrated.

The preacher spent just over an hour reducing the parable of the shrewd/dishonest manager into a call to give money to the poor. In the process he mangled the interpretation of several other parables, including a beattitude. It was sad.

What made me sad wasn’t the message, it was the way he got there.  There are enough places in the Gospels where Jesus talks about helping the poor, we don’t need to take complicated passages with much deeper meanings and reduce them to something so simple. It’s the same problem I have with the “2000 verses” issue.

He even said that the meaning of the parable would be “disturbing” and “uncomfortable”. But it was perfectly pedestrian.  There was nothing said that was more interesting than “give more money to the poor”. And the to that ground breaking statement was littered with bad history, conflicting statements, and very, very poor exegesis.

Part of the reason I was so disappointed was that Chandler recently hit this passage in his series on Luke, and Wade did a series on the beattitudes shortly before we moved. And while these two are uncommonly gifted by God, Every preacher can work to be more faithful to the text.