Where Do We Get those Sermons? (Jonathan Storment)

On this blog others speak, but I keep the posts oriented toward the church (mostly). Voices matter to me, so on Wednesday we have been treated this year to a series of posts by young pastors in the Churches of Christ. This post is by Jonathan Storment from Abilene Texas, and I love his set of ideas here. 

Central to the way the Scriptures start off is that God creates. It is, after all, the fifth word in the English Bible. Before we even know that God is good, we know that God is creative. But Genesis doesn’t just leave us with this flat description of creativity. The first two chapters are written as a creative poem. It is as if Genesis is not just going to tell us what a creative God is like, but it makes sure we get a glimpse of that.

And as the poem goes…this creative God asks humans to partner with him in creating. They name, they tend, they plant, and they divide. They rule and care and co-create with the Ultimate Creator.

Part of my job is to write. It is not my favorite part, because I like preaching more, but writing is certainly up there for me. Because I have learned that long before a sermon ever climbs up into the pulpit with me, it is hammered out on my office IMac. I have found that for a lot of preachers whom I know, this writing time is really when we first preach the sermon. It is a creative process, of dreaming and wrestling and questioning. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes hours. And sometimes…minutes.

There have been times when I was doing something else, driving along, having a conversation, sharing a meal, when suddenly it was as if an idea externally came into me. Most of the favorite sermons that I have preached happen like that. I remember once, I was pulling into my driveway at home, and suddenly a sermon was completely there.

One minute I was thinking about what was for dinner, and the next I knew exactly how I wanted to start and end, down to the letter.

Not to romanticize the creative process; more often than not, it is laborious, it involves wrestling with God and words. But every now and then something like this happens, almost as if to remind me that I am not doing this alone.

In ancient Rome, genius was thought of very differently. People were not said to be geniuses, they were said to have geniuses. It was kind of like a spirit that lived outside of the artist. And this, Gilbert says, had its advantages, because if a project succeeded or failed, the artist’s fate and identity were not completely tied to it.

But in our individualistic culture, this is not the way we think of creating. We tend to think of artists as alone in the process, and subsequently most of us who have a calling to create feel overwhelmed at times by the burden of it all.

Last week I read an article by Joshua Shenk in the New York Times called “The End of Genius” heralding the end of what it called “the myth of the lone genius.” The gist of the article is that for too long we have bought into the idea that the best creativity happens in solitude, but in reality the best creativity happens in partnership.

Toward the end of the article, Shenk brings up Elizabeth Gilbert (the author of the book Eat, Pray, Love) and he mentions the fascinating work she has done reframing the creative process. For a lot of people, Gilbert says, the idea of creating is a life-exhausting endeavor. Think about the metaphors that we use to discuss creating. Wrestling, suffering, tortured artists etc…

But that is because we have started talking about creating as if it was all about the artist. We started thinking that genius’ was something people are, not something people have.

One of the more fascinating stories from Elizabeth Gilbert’s work on creativity was from the time she spent with the great American Poet, Ruth Stone. Gilbert spent some time with her when Stone was well into her 90’s, and what she told Gilbert on how she wrote a poem was fascinating. She said that when she was a little girl working in the fields of Virginia, she would hear a poem coming. It was like a thunderous train of air. She said the ground seemed to shake under her, and all she knew was that she had to get to a pen and paper before she missed it. And some of the time she wouldn’t get there in time, and in her words, “it would continue on…looking for another poet.”

Creativity is not something that happens primarily from the lone genius, because historically speaking Creativity is not something that comes primarily from within.

Which is why I like what the author suggests toward the end of his article, Shenk suggests that whatever our job, whatever it is we are trying to create, would be more effective if we tried to work in pairs. And here is where it gets more practical.

The first sermon I ever preached, my mom wrote. I was 11 years old, and almost every word was written by her, I have been in (real adult) ministry for over a decade, and I have written around 1000 sermons. Rob Bell wrote the majority of several of those sermons (most of the time I gave him credit).

I say that tongue in cheek, but I do think there is something here that sheds light on the plagiarism we see in our pulpits today. I don’t think it is just pastors being lazy, I think Shenk is on to something. We don’t have partners to create with. We have bought into the myth of the lone genius and crushed ourselves under the expectation that we were supposed to do this by ourselves.

Before I was the preacher at the Highland Church, I was on a preaching team with Rick Atchley, one of the best, most disciplined preachers I know, and I didn’t preach one sermon without bouncing ideas off of him. Since I have been a fulltime preacher, every series I have done, I have preached in partnership with one of my preaching friends from another church, sometimes in other states. We share the research load, and our notes of each sermon before we preach it. Afterward, we discuss what worked and what didn’t, and we Skype each week to prepare for the coming sermon. We share stories and illustrations and creative ideas for making the passage come alive.

If you are a preaching pastor, I can’t recommend this highly enough. It helps us share the burden of research, but there is something else it does as well. It reminds me that my failures and my successes aren’t solely my responsibility. It multiplies our creativity and makes us aware of a larger Creator.

It helps us catch the poem.