"Senior preachers" this Sunday!

I wrote my first sermon more than four decades ago for a Youth Sunday service. That undelivered sermon led to a five year "sabbatical" from church membership - but that's another story. The art and craft of preaching fascinate me. Following my "sabbatical" I stumbled into this reflection on preaching in a poem by George Herbert, a seventeenth century Anglican priest and poet:

            Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word?

                        He is a brittle crazie glasse:

            Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

                        This glorious and transcendent place,

                        To be a window, through thy grace.

            But when thou doest anneal in glasse thy storie,

                        Making thy life to shine within

            The holy Preachers; then the light and glorie

                        More rev'rend grows, and more doth win:

                        Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

            Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

                        When they combine and mingle, bring

            A strong reward and aw: but speech alone

                        Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

                        And in the eare, not conscience ring.

Preachers have the audacity to speak of and for God before the faithful, who gather to encounter the Word of God. The gravity of that responsibility and opportunity humble the faithful. As we prepare for this year's "senior sermons," here are a few thoughts about my intent when given the privilege of preaching thirty-six to fifty times each year.

Goal three in my fifteen to seventeen minutes (It was twenty to twenty-five minutes thirty years ago.) is to help us to connect with our tradition. Scripture did not fall from some ethereal realm in a vacuum. People trying to live faithfully in covenant with God wrote, compiled, saved, and copied it for millennia. Interpreting a passage of scripture without acknowledging them would be as wrong as voting without awareness of the candidates' positions. The more we know about the setting from which a text emerged, the more clearly we can hear the author and ultimately God speak. The image of the Lord as our "shepherd" always has meaning, but placing it in the exile and not in the glory days of David and Solomon deepens its potency.

Goal two is to address our contemporary context relevantly. Our tradition asks theologians to have a bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. We have always believed, for example, that absolutes like "love your neighbor" ask different things of us depending on our circumstances. People of power and influence and people of impotence and want have distinct capacities and opportunities to love. Addressing contemporary contexts always wanders into the political and controversial. I try to leave the most volatile issues for occasions when listeners can speak back, but faithful proclamation cannot ignore the biases of the gospel. A passage in Deuteronomy declares, "If there is among you anyone in need ... do not be hardhearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor" (Deuteronomy 15:7). The application of that verse to a Wall Street banker and Over-the-Rhine beggar vary, but the text considers both responsibile for others as well as themselves. Regardless of our political leanings, scripture considers no one "self-made."

Goal one is to glorify God and draw us closer to God. No one can know God fully, but preachers have the opportunity and blessing of pointing to where and how we experience God. Anything proclaimed about God on Sunday must hold true in the light of nuptials and births and in the dark of betrayal and death. Platitudes and placebos cannot bear that weight. By the grace of God, the faithful often hear God speak in and in spite of the stumbling words of a preacher who trembles beneath the responsibility while reaching for the possibility. In Herbert's words: "when thou doest anneal in glasse thy storie, / Making thy life to shine within / The holy Preachers; then the light and glorie / More rev'rend grows, and more doth win: / Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin."

Thanks be to God, our "senior preachers" this Sunday will have little awareness of that. I do not and prefer not to know what they will say, but I believe God will speak in and beyond their words. May those who have ears to hear, hear.  

            Lenten Blessings,

            LP