The Preach Moment

I know, I know, you’re all frothing to hear how my first day of school went–to scroll through the darling first day of school pictures, to relish the blow by blow of each clever thing breathed out by the delicate lips of my lovely and charming children, to gaze in wonder at the extravagant first day of school breakfast, the hearty life giving luncheon, to marvel at the wonder of a single child learning something, anything. Yeah, well, tough. Didn’t take any pictures. Didn’t get through all the stuff. Didn’t make a fancy breakfast. Didn’t start till two o’clock. Didn’t actually instigerate any knowledge. Did, though, pray. And did give the Usual guilt laden lecture about working hard and not deliberately ticking me off for the whole year. It’s a real dream, homeschooling. I swear, it’s just like all the magazines and blog posts and everything.

But about the Usual guilt inducing Lecture, or we might call it, Preach Moment, I have been marinating in wonder and irritation the last few months about what preaching is for. I mean, as you can imagine, our lives revolve pretty tightly around preaching. The Sunday sermon is the pinnacle of my week. Matt studies all the time, but he kicks it into high gear on Tuesday. He writes on Wednesday. I read it between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. He edits and prepares for his class on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. He wakes up at 3 on Sunday morning and virtually memorizes his text. This is not a lackadaisical preaching with notes, an outline, a feeling and a prayer. This is the biblical text dug into, as deeply as he can go, pulled apart, understood, written about, each word considered and chosen, and then preached twice.

On Sunday morning, having admonished the children to stop squabbling, comb their tangled hair, find their shoes, go, for heaven’s sake, go to church, before I lose my mind, I drink another modicum of tea and lay out the collar, the shoes, the vest, the socks that pretty well match, and then I wave at him and go make six pots of coffee in the church kitchen before the first preaching. I have to be in place, in the back of the sanctuary, ears open, by 8:10, to hear if all the work has paid off. And then again at 10:30. I can’t be doing anything but listening–not welcoming late comers, not teaching children’s chapel, not in the church kitchen devouring a late morning cookie. I have to listen to the sermon to know if what he said lines up with the scripture, if he was clear, if he was faithful.

All other preaching, admonishing, rebuking, coping with reality flows out of the incredible hard work he does. If he hadn’t gone so completely and faithfully through Mark, putting back together the person of Jesus from the devestating ruin made of him by my New Testament professor in seminary, if he hadn’t so comprehensively coped with 1 Corinthians, if he hadn’t, in other words, Preached the Text, I wouldn’t have even cracked open the bible on my own this year, let alone written a book about it. I wouldn’t be reading the bible with the children school day by school day. I wouldn’t be anchored to hope and reality. All my preaching to the children–and by preaching I mean that thing you do when they’re being awful and lazy, but you calm yourself, you sit down, and with tears you admonish and rebuke them, for the sake of Jesus, to try not to be so awful–flows out of the preaching on Sunday.

But I know that this kind of preaching, urelentingly about the text and not about anything else, is not widely appreciated by the, um, church. The more usual preaching is meant to invoke two stirrings in the ears of the hearer. The first stirring is to feeling. You are supposed to feel something because of who Jesus is and what he has done. This is accomplished through alluding to various portions of a biblical text and relating them to the sitter in the pew, to the general circumstances of the average person’s life. The second stirring is to action. Having felt something, the hearer is supposed to be motivated to do something. This might come through the text, but it might also come through the listing of stats about some relevant issue, in order to produce guilt and sorrow. The preacher might give the number of babies killed each year in utero, the number of Christian refugees around the world, the number of children orphaned by aids, the number of African Americans killed by police brutality. The sitter in the pew is bathed in information about the terrible state of everything. Jesus is noted to have saved the world, the hearer in particular, from hell, but now that person sitting there should get up and do something, at the very least put money in the plate. I always walk out of these kind of sermons carrying a heavy burden of guilt, guilt that can’t be got rid of. Sure, Jesus would like to do something, but you need to work with him.

Well gosh. I wander away into the cobbled mess of my life and don’t feel like believing in anything any more. I’m failing at the stuff under my own grasp, never mind what I ought to be doing to help Jesus save the world. Plus, to pitch it really over the edge, I’m not good at feeling. When I’m also supposed to get to the feeling of loving Jesus, I fail even more.

And really speaking of this kind of preaching, isn’t this what Facebook has become? The great burdening guilt meant to spur you to both feeling and action? And the Internet in general. This nice young lady is having a baby, but she needs you to join with her to save the world by sending money. It can’t just be a baby, and joy, it has to be All The Guilt.

But God doesn’t need me to save the world. He doesn’t need me at all. He wants me to read and understand the text in order to know and understand him. Everything I need, that he has prepared for me to have, both for feeling and for action, is in the guts of the text, if I would just be curious enough to look at it. However much I, or the world, want something else, nothing else is needful.

And on that note, I will go face down day two of the school year, and maybe I’ll manage pancakes for breakfast.