Introduction:

Welcome to Preacher P.S. Today, we’ll hear some additional thoughts about this past Sunday’s teaching shared at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’ll get inside the meaning of the sermon and the heart of the preacher as we consider the why, what, and how of the message.

Tommy Branagh:

I’m your host, Tommy Branagh, and today I have the privilege of having a conversation with Bart Garrett, who preached the sermon on Sunday, June 7, entitled “The Best Stump Speech Ever.” A link to that sermon is in the show notes. Great to be talking with you, Bart.

Bart Garrett:

You too, Tommy.

Tommy Branagh:

Man, just listening to that intro again. Brian Kay has got a killer podcast voice.

Bart Garrett:

It’s funny, my confession—I always confess envy because I love his voice, but I tend to listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed, so anytime I hear him here, he’s so much slower than I’m accustomed to listening to him. But yeah.

Tommy Branagh:

Yes, indeed.

Bart Garrett:

Great intro, Brian.

Tommy Branagh:

Well, Bart, this is a First Sunday, which means that we’ve got kids in the room, and we have started over the last couple months shortening the sermon length. So we’ll get to some things that didn’t make it into the sermon.

Bart Garrett:

Sure.

Tommy Branagh:

But before we get there, one of the questions I had was I was kind of wondering with preaching this text from Isaiah, which is a kind of Advent-y text in a lot of ways. It’s this prophecy of the stump of Jesse pointing towards Jesus and the new kingdom. And so I think often when it finds itself on the preaching calendar, it’s in December.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah.

Tommy Branagh:

But here we are, first Sunday of June. And so I’m a little curious, just how did it feel to come to this text in some ways out of season, like in not its normal place. Did you feel like you saw it with any different eyes or did that—

Bart Garrett:

Yeah, it’s not Christmas in July. It’s June.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, it’s just June. It’s just regular old June. So did that feel any different?

Bart Garrett:

Yeah, it’s a good question. Well, firstly, I mean, I guess if you’re ranking Isaiah Advent texts, Isaiah 11 is probably the second most famous Advent text. Isaiah 9—”the wonderful counselor, Mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”—but yeah, right up there. I’ve preached it maybe three times in Advent over 25 years, maybe more than that, but at least three sets of sermon notes.

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, you know, if you’re new to the podcast or new to the church, we’re in the context of going through all of scripture in one year. So literally, most of my introduction today was transitioning us from talking about kings to now talking about prophets, because this is our first sermon in the Prophets. So part of my rationale for even selecting Isaiah 11, even though it’s more or less an Advent passage, or at least as we use it, is I was trying to find a place that names the grand scope and scale of God’s ultimate vision. Because I know, I mean, it’s called the Fifth Gospel oftentimes—Isaiah—and we’re only in it for one Sunday.

Tommy Branagh:

One Sunday, yeah.

Bart Garrett:

So I felt like, yeah, I’m going to kind of push aside conventional wisdom or liturgical wisdom and just pull this into June and make it the Isaiah sermon. I don’t know that that caused me to come to it with new eyes or fresh eyes, so to speak, probably because I’ve already interpreted it as so Jesus-centric and Jesus-forward, given my time and attention to it in Advent anyway, for Christmas. So in that regard, it felt similar, though I knew, like, even though I threw a Christmas tree in there, I wasn’t going to have many illustrations around, like unwrapping Christmas presents or things that showed up in the sermon before.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, that’s interesting, actually, even as you say that, because what it makes me think is that, you know, as we’ve been going through this one series, we drew some inspiration from the Jesus Storybook Bible, which I think the tagline is “every story whispers his name.” And we really do have the deep conviction, as the Orthodox Church always has, that the Old Testament is ultimately about Jesus and does point towards him. But I think as preachers, people do not always preach the Old Testament as a direct pointer to Jesus, except we always do in Advent. It’s like the one time of year in which I think you kind of have a very Christocentric preaching. Yes. And so in some senses, I feel like the Advent instincts serve us well. It’s not like, “Oh, now it’s not December. This is Texas. And actually about Jesus.” Like, no, it always is. And Advent has a way of focusing you on that in ways. And so we’re kind of bearing the same fruit of that here in June.

Well, in this sermon, you talked about A Streetcar Named Desire, and you talked about sort of three journeys.

Bart Garrett:

Homage to my Southern, Southern roots and Southern writers.

Tommy Branagh:

Yes, indeed.

Bart Garrett:

I’m reading Flannery O’Connor’s short stories right now.

Tommy Branagh:

I’ve still never read Flannery O’Connor.

Bart Garrett:

Beautiful.

Tommy Branagh:

It’s a big omission.

Bart Garrett:

Jarringly beautiful.

Tommy Branagh:

Yes. Anyway, but you kind of talked about these three different destinations that the trolley could take you to, which is really three different visions of heaven, sort of depending on what worldview you might hold. And I thought it was a helpful illustration, I think, because you really lived in it for a while, which gave some nice structure and consistency. But I’d just be kind of curious, one, about how you came to that metaphor and then two, why you wanted to do that comparison between the three sort of heavenly visions in this sermon.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah.

Tommy Branagh:

Or I should say they’re not all heavenly visions, but just the reason behind this, like—

Bart Garrett:

Yeah, well, a couple thoughts there. One—I really wrestled with it. It’s funny we mentioned this short sermon. Like, I think it was 16 minutes, supposed to be 15, which I think is a wise way of doing First Sundays because our elementary students are in there. We did some amazing baptisms. You did a tremendous job teaching on baptism and membership.

Tommy Branagh:

And we got out on time for middle hours.

Bart Garrett:

We got out on time. Literally walked into the restroom between services. And I received a compliment, which I deeply appreciated from a man. But anytime I receive this compliment, I always follow it up in my own heart with, “Oh, no.” Because he was like, “That was so rich. Like, I felt like I took a year of seminary. I wish we could have a lot more time.” And I was like, “Oh, thank you so much.” And, oh man, that was a dense 16 minutes. And so I felt like I was working toward some metaphor that I could hold onto, which became the Streetcar Named Desire. Because this is also our desires for life beyond this life that would, at least if you will, drive through the density a little bit. So that was my first thing: gosh, if I’m going to be teaching the grand vision of God’s shalom, I need something to just again drive through the theological density.

Secondly, we try and I think do a pretty good job every week to address the reality that there are people in our room who are not Christian, they’re dechurched, unchurched, back to church after 30 years, whatever. And that’s especially true on baptismal Sunday. So, like, I notice a ton of families I’d never seen before who are probably here supporting the family that was becoming members and being baptized, have no idea what their spiritual backgrounds are. So also trying to name on the forefront of a teaching of God’s grand design, God’s shalom, there are other visions that we are invited to live into. The secular vision is one, kind of a popularized version of kind of broad-based Christianity of fluffy clouds and cherubs dancing or flying by. So yeah, it kind of congealed there in deference to trying to break away from density and trying to appeal to people who may not have much church context.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, I mean, I was listening to it. I was thinking this might be the longest I can remember in one of your sermons where we lived in the same picture. And I found it to be really helpful as an organizing principle. So I think it helped accomplish those goals.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah, I tried to offer the same verbiage each time.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah.

Bart Garrett:

So people would kind of catch on and stay connected to it. So I’m glad to hear it at least slice through a little density maybe.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah. No, I mean, it did for me at least.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah. Good.

Tommy Branagh:

Well, recognizing that there’s so much in this and not all of it would have made it into a 22-minute sermon, much less a 16-minute sermon. So anything that was kind of the hardest cuts for you—on the cutting room floor, or not necessarily that it was on the verge of making it in. But if you could do version 2.0 or 3.0 of this sermon, like taking a different tack or angle on it, what would have been in there?

Bart Garrett:

Such a rich passage. I mean, two thoughts that come to mind immediately are one: a lot more could be said about justice and how it requires judgment and a judge. So I would appeal to our own existential realities where we’ve been wronged, where we’ve wronged others, that to make things right or righteous, there needs to be some sort of enacted verdict which often and usually involves the repercussions of punishment for a wrongdoer. You know, so that is received with such celebration. I mean, I did mention the trees even clap their hands. The birds of the air rejoice in songs. That’s because to name it. And this gets to the second piece: often scripture is written by people on the fringe and margin that are longing for all the wrongs in the world—things like inequity and injustice—to be done away with and made right in the holiness of God, the justice of God. So I think I’d love to unpack a bit more of why the world needs a judge. I’d love to unpack a bit more that so much of the lean into this vision was that that judge was judging on behalf of the needy, that these are people again longing for the life and opportunity and agency that they deserve to have as dignified human beings. So I made it more about our own verdict with God moment with God—that we try to make ourselves look alive when we’re dead—principally because I was leaning more into the person-to-person existential gospel, if you will. But I would have loved to have unpacked that more.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, totally.

Bart Garrett:

I mean, oh, sorry.

Tommy Branagh:

No, no, no, go ahead.

Bart Garrett:

I was just going to say back to Advent: this could be Isaiah 11 could really be a whole Advent series, and maybe we should do that sometime because you could preach easily five sermons out of those ten verses.

Tommy Branagh:

Oh, easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of makes me think as well, just noting that this is our transition into the Prophets. I’d be curious, you know, for those who are following along this one series. We’ve kind of moved from, as we were just talking about recently, one genre to another in type of biblical book. And so, you know, if you had to give a kind of quick 101 summary for someone of what does it mean to be in the Prophets? What are you going to find there? What’s the gist of the prophetic works in the Old Testament?

Bart Garrett:

Did you just say one-minute summary?

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah.

Bart Garrett:

That’s cruel.

Tommy Branagh:

I was trying to give you a helpful guardrail. Yeah, I mean, you could make it a couple minutes.

Bart Garrett:

I mean, it’s a huge transition, I would say. And firstly, everyone can tell in two seconds when you generate an image from AI like I did with “Prophets, Priests and King.” But I will say I love what AI did with that because I think for people to see these three icons that really do kind of hold center in our Hebrew scriptures. And then we have rich theology about Christ, another cutting room floor item—as prophet, priest and king, holding these three in appropriate ordering and relationship to one another. So this transition from kings to prophets is a transition on many levels. One: from a lot of historical narrative to poetry. So it’s a genre transition. So we take up poetry and read it differently than we read historical narrative. Which brings me to a second transition: we tend to read prophets as prophecy or future-telling or foretelling rather than truth-telling. So a lot of the imagery, metaphor, symbol—I mean, the prophets were doing some weird stuff in addition to writing this poetry—is intended to be like this jarring confrontation with the truth that is ushering in repentance or turning away from wickedness and idolatry and returning to the Lord. You hear the prophet say that: return to God, return to me, return to God. You know, so I think dealing with the genre as it was intended is a very important hook to hang a hat on as we get into the Prophets. This is where people get super weird with the Bible. So that’s one intro I would say. And then I would just say maybe lastly—and then I’d love if you have anything to add to this: all of the Prophets is almost, think about it as like a set of road signs of not only like preparing the way and pointing the way, but also “you’re going the wrong way.” So I think what you’re getting in the Prophets is like again this truth-casting of a Messiah. This is where we start learning of a Messiah who is to come. And this is the way forward. And also you’re going the wrong way. Many of you need to return and get back to the path—becomes a very pervasive metaphor. Isaiah 35. So many places in the Prophets where we’re hearing about the path of righteousness for the sake of righteousness.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, you did that in two minutes.

Bart Garrett:

That’s pretty good. All right, here we go.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, I mean, I think the only addition I would make there is that in the Prophets, it’s always helpful for me to think about it in kind of a scope of time that the Prophets are dealing with past, present and two futures.

Bart Garrett:

Yes.

Tommy Branagh:

And so the past is really the Prophets are in conversation with the law. They are reminding the people of the covenant that they made and the things that God has laid out for them. So it’s kind of pointing back. The present is helping the people understand the ways in which they are out of step with the commitments that they’ve made to the covenant. So that’s almost always—not always, but almost always—sort of a prophetic judgment against the people. And then the future is they are often foretelling through this kind of imagery that can be hard to parse out some near-term consequences for that and then also some long-term consequence. So you kind of will have like a near term might be that you’re about to get conquered by another nation. And a long-term one is a prophecy about Jesus, the Messiah coming. So you’re kind of always looking back, assessing the present, looking to the future with some near-term and then also some longer term. And the longer term tend to be much more messianic. Yeah, but that’s kind of—you’re somewhere in what you’re reading in the Prophets fits in one of those timescapes.

Bart Garrett:

So good. Thank you for bringing that up. I’d add one metaphor to it. Even when you get to the Messiah, I mean, so much of why all of the expectations that the people had were sort of, you know, the apple cart was knocked over is it’s almost like if you’re heading towards the Rocky Mountains and you see one mountain from a long way away, and that’s kind of the coming of the Messiah, the coming of the kingdom, God ushering in his new reign and rule. And then the closer and closer and closer you get, you actually see that wasn’t one mountain. It was a pair of mountains or even a triad of mountains. So a lot of that future vision, the longer-term future is the Messiah has come. The Messiah is coming. The kingdom has come. The kingdom is coming. The already and the not yet. You know, so you get a lot of that in the Prophets.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah, absolutely. So kind of helping orient yourself—and there’s really that can be hard to do on your own. And so that’s a place where some of those Bible tools can be really helpful. Okay, well, one bonus question. We can do this one quickly, but we debuted a new middle hour class today, “Ask the Pastors.” And when you do something called “Ask the Pastors,” you don’t know how it’s going to go because people can ask whatever they want. So you prep a little differently for it. So I’d just be curious—your initial feedback to 1.0 version of “Ask the Pastors.”

Bart Garrett:

I thought it was so fun.

Tommy Branagh:

I did too.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah, I think so much so that I’m still someone who is arguing that we do a whole series of questions where we just like throw text messages out there and read a passage and preach on it based on the questions. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it would be fun. But yeah, I, firstly, I love our people. I mean, I felt like the questions were well conceived, humble, charitable. There weren’t any like gotcha questions. Yeah.

Tommy Branagh:

I feel like people received it in the spirit that we hoped they would.

Bart Garrett:

And that’s, and you know, we may get some of those as we do this more and that’s also what you sign up for and that’d be fine as well. Suppose. But I, you know, I thought the questions were ranging from our denominational affiliations to what we think about sacraments, to what worship looks like, to what we are encouraged by or surprised by. It was delightful.

Tommy Branagh:

Yeah.

Bart Garrett:

How about you?

Tommy Branagh:

Oh, totally agree. I thought it was very fun. And yeah, I mean, I think we have great people who—it’s encouraging to know that people are engaged enough to want to come have those conversations with us and ask those questions. And I also think there were way more questions about our denomination than I was expecting, which sometimes once the ball gets rolling in a certain direction, it kind of keeps rolling. But it did—it was kind of an opportunity for me to think, “Oh, that might be something we’ve not done enough teaching about.” And I’m glad we had the opportunity for people to ask questions. But, like, “Oh, if this is a large area of curiosity, like, we should address that.” So it was helpful as a feedback loop in that way, too, for sure. So well, Bart, thanks for a great sermon.

Bart Garrett:

Yeah.

Tommy Branagh:

And we’ll see you next time. I was going to say next week, but you’re out next week, so.

Bart Garrett:

I’m out next week, but the week after.

Tommy Branagh:

See you then.

Bart Garrett:

The Lord wills it. All right.

Tommy Branagh:

Thanks, Bart.