And What I Preached Did Not Work at all

Third, and First in a series about speaking, hearing and preaching

My “prayer list,” at least for today, is not the written roll of the living and the dead for whom I regularly intercede. Quite the contrary. As you will momentarily observe, today’s “pray-er list” is a short index of the departed souls I would (presumptuously) ask to pray for me. And not just today, in truth; I will hope they would add my name to their roll; and not just mine, but the names of others who, like me, have responsibility as the saints also had. They lived and worked and died in faith—and so we now look to them for both inspiration and their peculiar intercessions:

St. Francis de Sales, patron of writers and journalists, pray for us now as we compose our compositions, and again at the hour of our submissions.

St. Isidore of Seville, patron of those who work with computers, pray for us now as we try to write and not just type, as we noodle more than edit; and pray for us again in the hours before our deadlines.

(St) Barclay Newman, may his name be remembered and blessed as a master and exemplar of “dynamic equivalence,” pray for us who Sunday by Sunday are also trying to get a “thought to thought” correspondence between “Thus saith the Lord” and “What I have for you today.”

St. Jude, patron of lost causes, pray for us after the preaching hour has come and gone and we have experienced yet again that God’s thoughts were not out thoughts, nor our words his.

St. Isaiah, pray for us who have been set apart to speak but have unclean lips; pray also for all of us and those who have been set apart to listen but have unclean ears. Pray angels come from the altar with coals and shovels, to expurgate our tongues for the time of speaking, and to “dig out” our ears for the time of hearing.

Who else might I ask to pray for me? More narrowly and personally. Who would I ask?

Frederick Buechner, Fred Craddock, George Buttrick, Jack (C.S.) Lewis, Harry Emerson Fosdick, (St) John the Divine… and oh, yes, please, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and even Elie Weisel…all you guys with whom I presume kinship only on the basis of common call and task…remember your own hours of frustration and pray for me to know when it is time to stop. Please tell me the truth as to time—because, here’s the thing…

I seem to have forgotten how to preach.

Meaning how to conceive and craft and deliver sermons. I’ve just forgotten.

Or maybe I haven’t. Maybe I never knew how to take my particular pan into the River of Life and find treasure. I used to think I was a pretty good preacher, but self-delusion is a real thing and even especially among folk like me, so maybe I was not nearly as good as I imagined.

Whether I was or wasn’t, at this point—now—I am not confident that I will either know or remember how to preach again.

An analogy: when I was a teenager, I was a pretty good pitcher. I had better than an age-appropriate fastball, a decent slider, an ankle-breaking slow-curve for my off-pitch, and really, really good control. Normally.

But there were games—moments and sequences within them—where I could not, as they say, find the zone on, say, 5 or 7 successive pitches. And I would pace in the area between the bump and second base and wonder, seriously wonder, if I would ever throw another strike. Or record another K. The feeling was strong as a night terror. I did, of course—both things, lots—but the panic was real.

That was then and this is now. I was thirteen and now I am 70. That was baseball and this is… come to think of it, what is this? That preaching is such a part of it? To three souls at 9:45, and few more than that at 11. But each Sunday I take the mound, as it were.

And it is important what I am doing, for them and also for me. (I do not preach to change Sodom, as much as I preach so Sodom does not change me.) And so the urgency: I am wondering: will I ever preach another good sermon? Which given my broken self-image begs the question: have I ever preached one? How am I to judge?

There were people who apparently liked my style—which could be categorized as a formal frenzy, as manicured mania, a scripted spontaneity. I was an animated manuscript preacher—and I am sure there were times when I may have been too concerned with vocabulary and poetry and was more style than substance. Nor did everyone like my style, either. If some felt the effect; some chalked it up as fluff and affect.

Be any of that as it may, what people thought of my preaching, sermon to sermon, is less important to me right now than what I thought and think of it. And right now I am thinking that I have no clue, no sense of what I am trying to do or how. In short that I have forgotten how to preach, if ever I knew.

I still work hard at it. At least an hour of study and crafting per minute of presentation—all new stuff, never old stuff (except conceptually—the obligation of justice, for instance, on account of the Cross; and Narratively, in the sense that the Story is both old and new), this, when I am serving two tiny churches whose people might not mind or even notice that the bread is stale—that I have brought out what’s left of what I served-up some years ago. In fact, I know some in my position who go to the files, preach the same sermons they preached at other churches over the years, take the money and run. They rather enjoy the dynamic of rinse, repeat, deposit.

I am not that kind of preacher: if God’s mercies are new every day, I feel I should, as best I can, bring a new word every week—though it is clearly not a new word at all but an old word that the people have heard from the beginning (see I John 1:7-8).

I am trying to be that scribe trained for the Kingdom who brings out of the treasury what is old and new.

Right now, however, what is new to me, which is to say, what is resonating most deeply in my spirit, I can’t seem to express in a way that seems to interest, much less enthrall listeners enough to make the church more crowded. Compounding the matter, if I aim to interest or enthrall, it’s barely possible I would appear as Tom MC, or TRay, the Entertainer. Not that I would actually entertain and most likely wouldn’t but either way my arrow would have missed the target.

Do I have homiletical dysphonia? Pastoral dementia? St. Dymphna, pray for me. St. Benedict Joseph Labre, St. Christina the Astonishing, Matt Talbot, Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Bernadet, pray for me.

I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t know what I am doing. St. Dominic, pray for me. St. John Chrysostom, pray for me.