Hard Work

Psalm 19

Preaching for me is a frightening endeavor.  Part of it is research of what was, part of it is consideration of what is happening in the world, part of it is remembering what issues are working in the community of faith.  But that makes up less than half of what happens in this holy moment.

I remember my father working on sermons.  He’d close the French doors that sealed off his study like some wizard in his tower.  If I stood at the right angle, I could watch him working, hunched over the desk, covered with volumes of commentaries.  After hours, these would be replaced with a Hebrew or Greek text and an English text.  Then there would be times of elbow supported head holding.  I never saw him all the way through this process, I had other things to do, trees to climb, things to imagine.  But many times when I came back from my excursions, he was still there. 

Years later I’d been taught to use those magical tomes.  I was now the wizard, I had my own tower.  And I came to realize that all the incantations within the tomes, all the ingredients I could gather from the wide and local world meant nothing.  They were dry weeds and empty words.  And I remembered him, elbows planted, holding his head.  I came to realize that he’d been praying, praying for the lightening, praying for the spirit that altered these bits of news and scholarship, transformed them with the breath of the eternal into a living and breathing moment of God’s touch.

He did that.  He opened the pipes for people to be touched with a sense of more.  Everything else he did for and with and in the churches that he ran and administered and pastored may have been important to the world and to the people, but it was all secondary to those moments of touch.  Because then and there, God was present. 

I also came to realize over time, that all the preparation in the universe couldn’t open any pipes, because the Lord of all time tends to work in the present tense.  That time of preaching is consecrated, set aside.  It is a place of glory and of storm.  It is full of hope and fear.  It is full of darkness and of light.  And I remembered the prayer he said each Sunday, ‘May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, our rock and our redeemer.’

Then I realized, and have ever since that this whole thing is not about producing some sort of presentation or even achieving a result to be measured by categories of success or failure.  It is an act of prayer.  It is about placing everything one can gather, every bit of wisdom and perspective before the living Lord as a sacrifice, to be used by that Lord as He wills.  It needs to be acceptable in no one’s sight except His.  And that net is thrown over the entire congregation.  We’re all confronted by the measure of the God of all that is, was, and will be.  So, why aren’t we simply terrified?  Because, as we pray, we also claim this Lord as our ‘rock and our redeemer.’  We preachers open ourselves in humility and confidence, we claim this Lord as our own.