A Word for the Preacher

I have a bit of a confession. It is Pentecost Sunday after all, a good day for confessing sins and all various manner of wickedness. To my shame, I have a hard time looking at ugly and violent things, even the ones that deserve to be faced. I try to carefully attend to the news of the day in words, but if there are any images I make sure to hide them so that they don’t have time to sink in and affect any part of my dreams, which is generally where they immediately go to reside.

But there is a kind of hideous violence that I can’t even read about, that I avoid carefully at all costs. And that’s the violence peculiarly directed at women and children, the kind that, well, you know what I’m talking about. It is utterly hideous. And it is the daily bread for many women around the world.

I feel guilty about this avoidance. I avert my gaze and scroll my thumb and try to pray all at the same time, asking God to do something, anything, while also pleading for a cat or disembodied hand pecan cheesecake bar butternut cream recipe. And it’s also why I don’t like movies and tv. Because in everyone’s unaccountable desire for ‘realism’ it seems to come up everywhere sometime. And I just can’t deal.

Because when a woman is abused, and a child, something hideously wrong is said about the nature of God. It’s not just that the violence is so ugly. It’s that a deep and terrible lie is told about how Christ treats his bride, the Church. As if somehow he is a violent, unkind, abusing husband. So the pain strikes both ways–the woman is crushed, and God is lied about. It’s the first, most ancient lie. And the more it is told, the more hideous and ugly it becomes.

This avoidance is related to the wellspring of anger I find bubbling up against preachers who flinch in the face of the scripture. There are a lot of ways to avoid the text, the way I avoid violence on Facebook. One way is to take the bible and reduce it down to a set of propositions, to become more anxious about the sheep being good and doing the right thing than about their spiritual health. Another is to become over-anxious about your job and your numbers and so use the text to make the people feel good, to pretend that it is full of ways to achieve temporal happiness, to mangle it into something magical and palatable and doable.

But the most common way is to discover that you’re just too tired when you arrive at sermon preparation time. The week has been demoralizing. The hours were sucked away–phone calls, visits, meetings, people deciding they needed to see you right then. Studying inevitably falls right down on the list. But truly, if you’re going to preach, you ought to study.

Sure, you have some kind of pool of knowledge you scooped buckets of exegesis and hermeneutics into in your seminary years. You can draw on it for a while. But eventually that pool is going to become awfully shallow and the people staring at you from the pew may already have heard all your vast wisdom on that particular text. If you care about your chief task–and that would be feeding the sheep not endlessly programming them–you’re going to have to study.

But that’s difficult, because the text is for you. You are a sinner. When you read it, when you study it, it’s going to be as difficult and painful as it is for everyone else.

So, it’s not unusual to protect yourself from the task of preaching, and the difficult task of studying, by being busy and just not making time. You might show up on Friday afternoon, settle into the cool of your office, take a sip of coffee, skim the text, and then just free-form write, or sketch out an outline. It’s fine. You are more personable this way, and the sermon is not too long, and it’s the best way to get a lot of handshakes after church.

But preaching, I’m sorry to say, because it’s supposed to be about the Bible–which Jesus himself refers to not as a fluffy bunny, nor as a sweet tasting donut, but as a sword that comes out of his mouth–is very often an act of war. It is a direct assault on the powers and principalities that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. Sometimes, tragically, yourself. The war is inside of you. And the words that come out of your mouth ought to be the ones on the side of God destroying evil, beating down Satan under his feet, lifting up the weak and humble, casting down the mighty from their thrones…and yet sometimes during the week, perhaps, you were among the mighty. And so, standing there in the pulpit, you fall, the sword pierces your own soul also.

So of course you flinch. Some Sundays you just can’t do it.

But when you don’t, the faithful are left unprotected, bereft, hungry in the wilderness with no food and no water, defenseless against all their enemies, unequipped to build anything, or fight anything, or survive anything. It’s like when someone comes to defile and destroy you and no one stands up as a champion on your side in the fight. It’s like that.

Don’t say you value the flock, that you value the lowly, the cast down, the marginalized, the woman, the child, yea even the fluffy bunny, if you are not prepared to stand up and take up the sword of truth, to let the Word of God be deftly wielded against the darkness that is encroaching on every side. If you are a coward, if you are selfish, if you are proud, if you don’t know your flock, if you are not pierced and wounded, if you are constantly flinching under the bright light of the truth, so much so that you try to dim it or turn it off, if you are lying about God more often than you are telling the truth–then back out of the pulpit, slump into your office chair, repent of your sins and plead with God for mercy and forgiveness and strength. The text is for you, the Comforter is for you.

Let there be no more pulpits filled with charlatans, cowards, liars, and hypocrites. Stand up and let the Word of God dwell in you. If you can’t, get down.

And if you are in a church and the preacher stands up and lies, or shakes your hand on the way out and lies, then get out and go somewhere else. Because God is not a liar. And he is not a coward. And he does not abuse the sheep.

And if you need to hear a sermon where the preacher stood up and did what he was called to do, listen to this one. And a blessed Pentecost to you all.