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Every age has its emergencies, and the church must never ignore them. Yet, our response cannot be one of panic or propaganda.
The government may be open again, but the deeper closure remains, the one that shut down the heart long before Washington ever did. The real shutdown began long before Washington stalled. It is the human heart that keeps grinding to a halt, overloaded with fear, outrage, and the exhaustion from trying to hold the world together.
Every few months, another crisis arrives. Pastors feel it too. The inbox fills with requests for statements, prayers, and commentaries. People want clarity and reassurance that someone still knows what is going on. Yet the gospel is not a press release.
I learned that lesson early in ministry. Six weeks into my first call, the twin towers fell on September 11, 2001. I remember the smoke on the television, the fear in the pews, and the silence in the sanctuary that night. I called Cliff Pederson, unsure what to preach. Cliff was the former president of Lutheran Bible Institute. His answer was short: “Open the Bible, turn to Revelation, and tell your people, ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord God the Almighty reigns.’”
The preacher’s job is not to interpret the headlines but to announce good news in the middle of them.
That one sentence carried more comfort than any commentary ever could. It reminded me, and still reminds me, the preacher’s job is not to interpret the headlines but to announce good news in the middle of them.
Karl Barth called this kind of preaching an “emergency homiletic.” In 1933, when the church in Germany was being drafted into the politics of the moment, he told pastors that the real emergency was not political but theological. The church had forgotten the difference between God’s Word and the words of men. Sermons had become propaganda.
That is not only a problem from the past. Every age faces the temptation to replace proclamation with activism and grace with opinion. On the right, we are told to “save America.” On the left, to “heal the world.” Both sides agree on one thing: preaching must be useful. The problem is that preaching is not always useful, but it is always true.
And because it is true, it is also free.
When the preacher opens the Scriptures and dares to say, “Christ for you,” something happens that no law, policy, or movement can achieve. The burdened hear rest. The guilty hear forgiveness. The fearful hear freedom. The Word does what no human word can do. It raises the dead.
That is what Barth meant when he spoke of the “Godness of God,” the otherness of the One who cannot be managed or marketed. The pulpit is not an emergency operations center. It is the place where the dead are called to life, where sinners are justified, and where the world’s noise is answered by a louder Word: “It is finished.”
The government may close its doors. Christ does not. The world may freeze in indecision. The gospel runs free.
Every age has its emergencies, and the church must never ignore them. Yet, our response cannot be one of panic or propaganda. It must be proclamation, the Word that interrupts our self-importance and speaks mercy into our fear.
We have lived too long in an age of emergency. Perhaps that is the point. The Lord keeps allowing our illusions to fail so that we might finally hear the one Word that endures.
So when you step into the pulpit this week, do not try to hold the world together. That is not your job. Your job is to open the Scriptures and say to the weary, “Hallelujah! For the Lord God the Almighty reigns.”
That is not denial. It is deliverance. The only kind that lasts.
