Quarterbacking The Big Game

The air was crisp, the sun was bright, the crowd was large and energetic. It was worship on Easter Sunday, of course!

Easter Sunday, the Super Bowl of Preaching, my friend Jim calls it, has unnerved me from the very first Sunday I celebrated Easter up front, looking out over the crowd, responsible in some way for leading worship.
I remember processing my thoughts with my boss, the Senior Pastor, the Monday after my first Easter on a church staff. Strangely, I found myself feeling . . . angry. I recall Steven looking at me incredulously (which, as he will tell you, was not really all that unusual over the course of our work together). Yes, I told him, I feel angry. I couldn’t really put it into words e

xactly, except to say that my job is to help create and build community all year long. When I looked out and saw all those people attending worship, people I didn’t know and strongly suspected I would not see again until Christmas, if not Easter next year, I got mad.

“This is not the church!” I remember thinking. Church is being here Sunday in and Sunday out, all year long, making a commitment to community, not just dropping in because you feel guilty, or your mom is visiting, or it’s the culturally expected thing to do.

Yes, I said that day that I felt rather used and angry.

“You might want to work on that,” Steven told me.

As it turns out that was good advice, since no matter how mad I felt, the Easter phenomenon of multiplying worshippers never changes.

But now that I am preaching the sermon on the Super Bowl of Preaching, my perspective has changed a little bit.

Instead of feeling angry at all the visitors, I’ve felt more pressure . . . pressure to perform for folks who give church a one-shot-a-year chance to impress . . . pressure to answer the question: What to say? What to say on this rare opportunity to preach a message someone needs to hear . . . ?

What if I run the wrong play, throw an interception, fumble the ball?

Despite the anxiety of playing the biggest game of the year in front of a large crowd, the thing that saves me every Easter now is the story. Forget deep theology; forget textual criticism. Leave the word studies in the study and, for heaven’s sake, ditch the corny illustrations you got in your in-box all week. No matter what the theological challenges of the day may be, no matter the pressure to perform, in the end it’s the story that matters.

And people come to church on Easter, even if that’s the only time they attend all year long, to hear that story. The hope and freedom of the story stands on its own, which could, in fact, make this the easiest sermon of the whole year!

This was my Easter revelation, though sad to say it took about 10 years of serving on a church staff to come to this realization.

I looked out over that crowd yesterday morning and saw, not people who are generally too lazy to get up on Sunday mornings every week, but people who took the

time to find a place of worship, get dressed up and try something new . . . in a culture where it would have been just as acceptable to trot on down to the White House lawn and chase some Easter eggs.

They came because, on some level, they wanted to hear the story.

My job is still to help create and build community all year long, but I’m no longer angry and I’ve given up feeling performance anxiety. All those folks who come to church on Easter Sunday (the Super Bowl of preaching) come to hear the story because on some level (family, tradition, culture, whatever) the story touches their lives.

I’ve finally realized that the best thing I could do on Easter Sunday is to leave the preaching acrobatics alone and just tell the story. The whole show might not be a total success every single year, but I’m learning.

Tell the story, then pitch the ball to the Spirit of God, who can certainly take the power and hope of the resurrection from the pulpit all the way into the day to day lives of people looking for hope.

Quarterbacking the Big Game