Thus does Touchstone, one of Shakespeare's richest fool-characters, introduce his redneck bride to a company of courtiers. Audrey is none too bright and her posture is bad ("Bear your body more seeming, Audrey"), she's no Rosalind certainly nor even a Celia, but then Touchstone is no Orlando and standup comedians working the circuit have to take what they can.
I have often taken comfort from Touchstone as I sit on some church platform just as the special music draws to a close and ponder the message I am about to offer. "A poor virgin, sir": I seldom re-preach sermons, though I don't see anything wrong with doing so. "An ill-favoured thing, sir": lumpish sentences, sprawling points from which stragglers escape like loose sheets that fall out of a manila folder before we can get to the filing cabinet. "But mine own": As one old preacher put it, I am not about to offer to God or God's people what cost me nothing.
I find myself increasingly in the minority on the point of preaching one's own sermons. Mega-pulpiteers now market their products for convenient download, complete with PowerPoint slides and scripts for supporting dramas. Pastors I know sell entire series, for a fee, to any nascent David determined to fight in Saul's armor. One popular book on how to jolt a mediocre mezzo-church into mutant megadom even counsels ecclesiastical entrepreneurs to preach re-treads for the first year of the venture. The "leader," it appears, will be too busy casting visions and, I guess, designing T-shirts, to bother with mucking about in Sacred Writ.
I don't suppose I can be too absolute here. After all, these guys don't "steal" their sermons any more than I steal bananas when I schlep to the grocery store: They didn't grow the messages and I didn't grow the bananas, and we can both produce receipts to prove we are honest people. I know I am the voice of a fading generation, but I'm riding into the sunset perched backwards in the saddle. From that perspective, allow me to speak a word on behalf of the antique (I prefer the term "ancient") practice of preaching one's own sermons.
The Myth of Originality
There are at least three things I don't mean when I call for pastors to preach their own sermons: legalism, novelty, and individualism.
As to legalism, I wouldn't say that it is never right to use someone else's stuff. My dad used to call it "beating a guy shooting his own guns." I'm not certain how appropriate gunslinger imagery is for the pulpit but you'd have to know my dad. I think that there are times when humility demands that we let the Lord give us a message that we could never have come up with on our own. But there are better and worse ways of doing this.
"But for your bread of this day, I go gleaning openly in other men's fields -- fields into which I could not have found my way, in time at least for your necessities, and where I could not have gathered such full ears of wheat, barley, and oats but for the more than assistance of the same friend who warned me of the wrong I was doing both you and myself. Right ancient fields are some of them, where yet the ears lie thick for the gleaner. To continue my metaphor: I will lay each handful before you with the name of the field where I gathered it; and together they will serve to show what some of the wisest and best shepherds of the English flock have believed concerning the duty of confessing our faults."
Thus the Reverend Thomas Wingfold, protagonist of George MacDonald's novel The Curate's Awakening, confesses to his flock one Sunday morning. If you're going to preach someone else's stuff, this is the way to do it. The Reverend Tom not only admits to offering his flock second-hand fodder; he even confesses that a friend has supplied him with the borrowed bits. Further, he makes sure to swipe the best, not the latest, and promises to footnote every quotation.
Then there's novelty. I wouldn't want anyone to understand me as saying that a sermon should be completely original. A professor in seminary once told us, "If you ever have a completely original theological insight, it will probably be a heresy." He was wrong: Even all the good heresies have been taken. How can we preach the faith once for all delivered to the saints if we keep chasing after fads? Really, the problem with a lot of the purchased preaching on offer these days is that it has grown bored with repeating the same old thing (you know - the Trinity, the cross, resurrection, stuff like that; "seekers," we all know, don't want to hear theology) and instead backloaded the latest intellectual and social fads onto the Bible. When this happens, the latest best-sellers in the business section become a sort of rotating Evangelical apocrypha.
Finally, we come to individualism. I do not want to be taken to mean that the preacher should not use any sources outside her own capacious noggin. No sermon will ever be (or at least, let us hope we never have to hear one that is) "original" in that sense. Leaving the Holy Spirit aside for a moment (never a very good idea), any sermon we preach should probably bear a preface quoting President Barack Obama: "You didn't build that!" Insights from commentaries, light shed by sermons and Sunday school lessons heard throughout our lives, input from friends with whom we discuss the text: All of these are fair game and to reject them would be like Elijah telling the angel "No thanks" to the desert fast-food because he wouldn't take charity.
Magic Cloth and Bent Work
It's a little harder to say exactly what I do mean - or exactly why. And remember my title: This is not so much an argument as a plea. Despite all the logic some can muster in favor of preaching purchased sermons, I remain convinced that we do better to offer our own ill-favoured things. Where syllogisms fail me, I often turn to narrative. Let me try that.
Near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, as the eight companions prepare to leave the elven land of Lorien, their hosts present them with custom-made traveling cloaks. "Are these magic cloaks?" asks Pippin, one of the hobbits. "I do not know what you mean by that," says the leader. "They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land." He adds only that the coats contain "the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make."
We put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. That sentence says something about the alchemy of sermon preparation. Alchemy may be the right word, because that discredited field of study briefly bridged the world of magic and science, a combination of bat's eyes and reproducible results that hoped somehow to transmute lead to gold. Something happens when a preacher loves a congregation, and thus loves a sermon, and loves both even as the sermon bubbles in double toil and trouble on the cauldron of a desk. And no one else can do that for me, because no one else can love this text and this people at this moment with quite the same flame, the one that boils joy and doubt and fear and frustration and triumph into a single substance that, on a good Sunday, shows flecks of gold amidst the baser matter. It is not a magic sermon; it probably shouldn't be. But if it is fair and well-woven and made in the same place where it is preached, maybe it will warm the shivering of some soul who sits beneath it.
Tolkien's pal, C. S. Lewis, in his space novel Out of the Silent Planet, imagines a conversation between an earthling and a craftsman on the planet Malacandria. Ransom, the human, asks his acquaintance how they determine who must dig gold and gems from the mines and who gets to fashion it into beautiful objects. "All keep the mines open," replies the puzzled alien. "It is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work." Ransom briefly explains the concept of division of labor that prevails on our planet. "Then you must make very bent work," scoffs the other. "How would a maker understand working in sun's blood (gold) unless he went into the home of sun's blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his hearts, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it."
"A maker" - that probably gets to the heart of my passion. In an age that regards a sermon as a tool, I persist in seeing it as a thing made, a poema in Greek, the root of our word "poem." Not that we should become impressed with our own oratory; Spurgeon once said it is better to offer your folks a chunk of beef chopped off anyhow than to give them, on a bone China plate, a delicately carved slice of nothing! But for me a sermon is not, or not quite, the same thing as the instructions that come with my new computer: simply the conveyance of information. It is gold, quite literally, Son's Blood, though perhaps poorly refined and choked with chaff. And my work will be very bent if I do not delve deep into the individual text where that particular revelation of Son's Blood resides, and know that the Spirit speaks of Christ differently in this place than in any other, and live with it for days shut up in my study until it is in my heart, until I think it eat it so deeply that, though I do nothing more than splatter and splutter on Sunday, I spit gold with every word.
I don't imagine I'll change anybody's mind, and that's all right because as far as I can tell I will never have to answer before the judgment seat for someone else's sermons. (And I'll have enough trouble answering for my own.) But perhaps I can offer some encouragement to those who even today find themselves tangled between the warp and woof of text and people, dug deep into a vein that may prove to be fool's gold: Keep working. Offer them a poor thing, but your own.
The Myth of Originality
There are at least three things I don't mean when I call for pastors to preach their own sermons: legalism, novelty, and individualism.
As to legalism, I wouldn't say that it is never right to use someone else's stuff. My dad used to call it "beating a guy shooting his own guns." I'm not certain how appropriate gunslinger imagery is for the pulpit but you'd have to know my dad. I think that there are times when humility demands that we let the Lord give us a message that we could never have come up with on our own. But there are better and worse ways of doing this.
"But for your bread of this day, I go gleaning openly in other men's fields -- fields into which I could not have found my way, in time at least for your necessities, and where I could not have gathered such full ears of wheat, barley, and oats but for the more than assistance of the same friend who warned me of the wrong I was doing both you and myself. Right ancient fields are some of them, where yet the ears lie thick for the gleaner. To continue my metaphor: I will lay each handful before you with the name of the field where I gathered it; and together they will serve to show what some of the wisest and best shepherds of the English flock have believed concerning the duty of confessing our faults."
Thus the Reverend Thomas Wingfold, protagonist of George MacDonald's novel The Curate's Awakening, confesses to his flock one Sunday morning. If you're going to preach someone else's stuff, this is the way to do it. The Reverend Tom not only admits to offering his flock second-hand fodder; he even confesses that a friend has supplied him with the borrowed bits. Further, he makes sure to swipe the best, not the latest, and promises to footnote every quotation.
Then there's novelty. I wouldn't want anyone to understand me as saying that a sermon should be completely original. A professor in seminary once told us, "If you ever have a completely original theological insight, it will probably be a heresy." He was wrong: Even all the good heresies have been taken. How can we preach the faith once for all delivered to the saints if we keep chasing after fads? Really, the problem with a lot of the purchased preaching on offer these days is that it has grown bored with repeating the same old thing (you know - the Trinity, the cross, resurrection, stuff like that; "seekers," we all know, don't want to hear theology) and instead backloaded the latest intellectual and social fads onto the Bible. When this happens, the latest best-sellers in the business section become a sort of rotating Evangelical apocrypha.
Finally, we come to individualism. I do not want to be taken to mean that the preacher should not use any sources outside her own capacious noggin. No sermon will ever be (or at least, let us hope we never have to hear one that is) "original" in that sense. Leaving the Holy Spirit aside for a moment (never a very good idea), any sermon we preach should probably bear a preface quoting President Barack Obama: "You didn't build that!" Insights from commentaries, light shed by sermons and Sunday school lessons heard throughout our lives, input from friends with whom we discuss the text: All of these are fair game and to reject them would be like Elijah telling the angel "No thanks" to the desert fast-food because he wouldn't take charity.
Magic Cloth and Bent Work
It's a little harder to say exactly what I do mean - or exactly why. And remember my title: This is not so much an argument as a plea. Despite all the logic some can muster in favor of preaching purchased sermons, I remain convinced that we do better to offer our own ill-favoured things. Where syllogisms fail me, I often turn to narrative. Let me try that.
Near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, as the eight companions prepare to leave the elven land of Lorien, their hosts present them with custom-made traveling cloaks. "Are these magic cloaks?" asks Pippin, one of the hobbits. "I do not know what you mean by that," says the leader. "They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land." He adds only that the coats contain "the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make."
We put the thought of all that we love into all that we make. That sentence says something about the alchemy of sermon preparation. Alchemy may be the right word, because that discredited field of study briefly bridged the world of magic and science, a combination of bat's eyes and reproducible results that hoped somehow to transmute lead to gold. Something happens when a preacher loves a congregation, and thus loves a sermon, and loves both even as the sermon bubbles in double toil and trouble on the cauldron of a desk. And no one else can do that for me, because no one else can love this text and this people at this moment with quite the same flame, the one that boils joy and doubt and fear and frustration and triumph into a single substance that, on a good Sunday, shows flecks of gold amidst the baser matter. It is not a magic sermon; it probably shouldn't be. But if it is fair and well-woven and made in the same place where it is preached, maybe it will warm the shivering of some soul who sits beneath it.
Tolkien's pal, C. S. Lewis, in his space novel Out of the Silent Planet, imagines a conversation between an earthling and a craftsman on the planet Malacandria. Ransom, the human, asks his acquaintance how they determine who must dig gold and gems from the mines and who gets to fashion it into beautiful objects. "All keep the mines open," replies the puzzled alien. "It is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work." Ransom briefly explains the concept of division of labor that prevails on our planet. "Then you must make very bent work," scoffs the other. "How would a maker understand working in sun's blood (gold) unless he went into the home of sun's blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his hearts, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it."
"A maker" - that probably gets to the heart of my passion. In an age that regards a sermon as a tool, I persist in seeing it as a thing made, a poema in Greek, the root of our word "poem." Not that we should become impressed with our own oratory; Spurgeon once said it is better to offer your folks a chunk of beef chopped off anyhow than to give them, on a bone China plate, a delicately carved slice of nothing! But for me a sermon is not, or not quite, the same thing as the instructions that come with my new computer: simply the conveyance of information. It is gold, quite literally, Son's Blood, though perhaps poorly refined and choked with chaff. And my work will be very bent if I do not delve deep into the individual text where that particular revelation of Son's Blood resides, and know that the Spirit speaks of Christ differently in this place than in any other, and live with it for days shut up in my study until it is in my heart, until I think it eat it so deeply that, though I do nothing more than splatter and splutter on Sunday, I spit gold with every word.
I don't imagine I'll change anybody's mind, and that's all right because as far as I can tell I will never have to answer before the judgment seat for someone else's sermons. (And I'll have enough trouble answering for my own.) But perhaps I can offer some encouragement to those who even today find themselves tangled between the warp and woof of text and people, dug deep into a vein that may prove to be fool's gold: Keep working. Offer them a poor thing, but your own.
Well said Doug.
ReplyDeleteThe toil of knowing first class conditions, the Archaeology of Sepphoris, and the medical conditions of people with whom we share no familial bond (but for the blood of Christ) is central to the pastorate.
You've encouraged me to keep to the work when it is given me. Thank you.