 Dr. William A. Ritter Senior Minister |
That'll Preach
Sermon:
Scripture: |
|
To a roomful of preachers and preacher wannabes, John Claypool began anecdotally: One of the good things that I got out of my ministry in Texas was a delightful story about a certain Mexican bank robber by the name of Jorge Rodriguez, who operated along the Texas border around the turn of the century. He was so successful in his forays that the Texas Rangers put a whole extra posse along the Rio Grande to try and stop him. Sure enough, late one afternoon, one of these special Rangers saw Jorge stealthily slipping across the river and trailed him at a discreet distance as he returned to his home village. He watched as Jorge mingled with the people in the square around the town well and then went into his favorite cantina to relax. The Ranger slipped in and managed to get the drop on Jorge. With a pistol to his head he said, “I know who you are, Jorge Rodriguez, and I have come to get back all the money you have stolen from the banks in Texas. Unless you give it to me, I am going to blow your brains out.” There was one fatal difficulty, however. Jorge did not speak English and the Texas Ranger was not versed in Spanish. There they were, two adults at an utter verbal impasse.
But about that time, an enterprising Mexican came up and said, “I am bilingual. Do you want me to act as translator?” The Ranger nodded, and he proceeded to put the words of the Ranger into terms that Jorge could understand. Nervously, Jorge answered back: “Tell the big Texas Ranger that I have not spent a cent of the money. If he will go to the town well, face north, count down five stones, he will find a loose one. Pull it out and all the money is behind there. Please tell him quickly.” The little translator got a solemn look on his face and said to the Ranger in perfect English: “Jorge Rodriguez is a brave man. He says he is ready to die.” From which I draw a pair of conclusions. First, what we don’t know can hurt us. Second, when life and death are matters of language, you had better be able to trust your translator. Which interests me more than a little, given that I have spent the last forty years of my life in the language and translation business. You have heard me say that most of us come to life carrying some sort of toolbox. But when I open mine, I find no hammers, heat thermometers or heart catheters. Neither do I find any slide rules or stethoscopes. Just words. Only words. Nothing but words. “Talk is cheap,” some say. But it’s put bread on my table….and bread-eaters at the Lord’s table. To be sure, ministry is more than words. Much more than words. But I didn’t know that when I was starting out. Because I don’t remember having been called into ministry. I was still in high school when I went before my denomination’s Board of Ministerial Training and Qualifications for the very first time. And nobody sitting around that table asked about my “call to ministry.” Instead, they asked me to describe my “call to preach.” Then they gave me a list of books to read so that upon completing them, I could be granted a License to Preach. Today, all the nomenclature has changed. Nobody is asked about a “call to preach” anymore. Which, in a very small way….but maybe not so small a way….contributes to a mindset that says preaching is not all that important anymore. But if that be true, why does preaching rise to the top of so many search committees’ wish lists? And why does an unwillingness to prepare sermons diligently and deliver them adequately saddle so many careers to a lifetime of mediocrity? Preaching….
Is it easy?
Are congregational expectations
lower?
Are listeners patient, tolerant
and forgiving?
Why is that? Virtually every other task of the ministry….from strumming four chords on a guitar so middle schoolers could sing folk songs, to putting those same fingers in people’s pockets so churches could build buildings….I learned as I went along. But from the very first time I stepped into a pulpit, I said to myself:
I must not fail at this. Over the flow of 2,080 Sundays, I have preached some bad sermons. But never once did I preach an under-prepared sermon. How long should preparation take? When I was in seminary, the rule of thumb was twenty hours (or one hour in the study for every minute in the pulpit). I confess I have never come close to that standard. But when you add up my reading, jotting, sketching, writing, rewriting and reviewing (the latter step requiring two hours on Saturday night after Kris goes to bed), the hours are never less than ten. And when you add re-dictating and proofreading for publication, you tack on two more for a total of twelve. Does any minister have that much time? No. Would preaching be better if more ministers took that much time? Yes. So why don’t they? Frankly, some are lazy. Others have different priorities. But more often than you would guess, many sell out before they start, fearing congregational indifference at best or congregational rejection at worst. One can almost hear those preachers say: “What if I put all that effort into it, and nothing comes from it? Or, worse yet, bad things come from it?” If a preacher is not moderately confident of success on the back end, it will curtail effort expended on the front end. And then there’s the matter of self-revelation. Good preachers begin with a text. But good preachers never hide behind their text. Meaning that preaching is incredibly self-exposing. When you take a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking (and would it surprise you to know that I have never taken a course in public speaking?), you are told to conquer your fear of the audience by picturing them naked. But what they never tell you in seminary is that one of the things that makes a sermon great is when the congregation is permitted to see the preacher naked. But what a wonderful calling it is….challenge it is….opportunity it is….trust it is. When I started out, my fear was that I would drain my cup after three or four sermons. What I discovered was that mine is a cup-filling Lord….even a cup-overflowing Lord. Meaning that most Sundays I can preach out of the saucer. Today, my worry is different. I no longer worry about what I will do when the cup runs dry. Now I worry about what I will do with all the stuff that, thanks to the uncappable spring of the Spirit, keeps welling up inside me. I go through life seeing movies, reading books, holding conversations, eavesdropping on everyday life. Which leads me to say (ten or twenty times a day): “That’ll preach.” You and I look at the same stuff. You think it’s interesting and may (or may not) remember to tell your spouse about it when you get home. I am already slotting it into a sermon. They tell me that George Buttrick (late of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York and Memorial Church at Harvard) wrote a new sermon every week of his life after his retirement. Not to keep his skill from declining. But because new material kept arriving. But our material is not just random material. Our words are not just any words. And our sermons are more than simmering stockpots of chicken soup for the church-going soul. Instead, there’s a point to all this talk….a life-changing, life-saving point. Do you remember Scheherazade? Of course you do. She was one of the wives of the emperor of Persia. And Persia’s emperor was a man who was convinced that all women were unfaithful. So he vowed he would marry a new wife each day, have his way with her at night, and would then have her executed the next morning. Which was a rather lethal problem. Except that Scheherazade was a very clever woman. Crafting a strategy to save her own neck, she ended up saving all the women of Persia. On her wedding night, she began to tell the emperor a tale that so fascinated him, he decided to stay her execution for an additional night so he could hear the rest of the story. You know the outcome as well as I do. Scheherazade kept on talking, and so fascinated was the emperor that he listened to her tales for one thousand and one Arabian nights, after which he was sufficiently convinced of her fidelity that he made her his own. Don’t you see? Some stories are the thread upon which life itself depends. And the story “of Jesus and his love” is the one we preachers put forth as a means of offering the world a stay of execution. Still, as a story, it needs people who can tell it. “How shall they hear without preachers?” ponders Paul. By which he means people who fire the gospel story in the crucible of their lives and are not afraid to go public, Sunday after Sunday, to reveal the burn marks. Preaching lives in the church when the gospel lives in the preacher. In a little letter called I Peter, Christians are told they should be prepared….at the drop of a hat….to defend the hope that is in them. Which suggests three things.
That Christians will be ready. If I have heard it once in the last few weeks, I have heard it (quite literally) a hundred times. “Thanks,” you have said, “for sharing so openly, honestly and personally with us.” Which I have done, not accidentally, but intentionally. I am told by Eugene Peterson that it was once the fashion in Bohemia (no wonder I like the Czech Republic) to build pulpits in the form of upright whales. In order to take his or her place for delivery, the preacher was forced to enter the interior of the pulpit at the whale’s tail, climb an upright ladder through the whale’s belly, and then come into the whale’s mouth to speak the word. I have always wanted a pulpit like that. Not because I see myself as the mirror image of Jonah, but because I believe the best preaching occurs after the preacher has come through a dark and confining place, survived the experience of being lost at sea, or been nearly swallowed by forces bigger than life itself. My favorite definition of what it means to script words for a living came courtesy of the late sportswriter, Red Smith, who is alleged to have said: “Writing a daily column is really quite simple. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” That’s how I feel about sermons. One has to cut and bleed over them before they’re done….trusting that, on good days, there will be power in the blood, leading to the possibility that (here and there) lives will be transfused. Hopefully, you have heard that in my preaching and have been transfused when blood was low and leaking. Over the years, some of you have had reasons to disagree with me about theology, philosophy, spirituality or worldly strategy. But if you have not seen in me evidence of the faith preached by me, then one of us has failed miserably, causing my sermons to misfire tragically. Because, in the words of the beloved hymn we shall soon sing, I wouldn’t love to tell the story if it hadn’t already done so much for me. “And that is just the reason I tell it now to thee.” One of you wrote: “I don’t understand why you and your ministry represent security to me. But they do.” Well, I don’t understand that, either. But it may have something to do with the fact that I have never taken you where I haven’t already been or sold you something I haven’t already bought. It is well with my soul. And “wellness of soul” is not something you can fake. * * * * * Now it is time to move along so others can preach and bleed a bit. I can’t begin to tell you how much like home this is, and how much like family you are. To a degree, every marriage of a Methodist preacher to a Methodist congregation is a forced marriage….at least an arranged marriage. But in this case, Bishop Ott, father really did know best. Infatuation was almost immediate. But our bonding came in the wake of tragedy, eleven months later. That bond remains….can’t help but remain….and is virtually certain to remain. Retirement is not divorce. No one is asking us to love each other less. But our hearts are wider than we think, enabling us to make room for more than we think….some of whom will soon arrive wearing nametags that say “Jack” and “Judy.” Woo them, too. For when it comes to marrying ministry, you are allowed to commit bigamy. But now it really is time to go. But let me route us by way of Columbus, Ohio where I once served as a seminary trustee. Picture Graduation Saturday in mid-May. See the faculty, students, family members and friends seated on folding chairs in the great, green, grassy quadrangle facing the pillars of the library. Now watch as a scared-stiff student body president steps to the podium, having been chosen to speak a final word on behalf of the graduating seniors. Peering at this assemblage of dignitaries, classmates and friends, he runs the gamut of things that nervous speakers do. He plays with his hair. He plays with his tie. He plays with his notes. He plays with the microphone. He sighs….coughs….clears his throat….and says: The chairs in which we sit are not the chairs of the prophets and the apostles. The chairs in which we sit are not the chairs at the left hand of power or the right hand of glory. The chairs in which we sit are not the chairs of the last, or even the next-to-last, judgment. The chairs in which we sit are the property of the Greater Columbus Ohio Rent-All Society. Which they were, of course. As are all chairs. Rented, I mean. No occupancy is permanent. Seminary is a rented chair. Ministry is a rented chair. Life, itself, is a rented chair. But how good this one felt. And how good this one fit. And for that, I thank you. Kris thanks you. Julie and Jared thank you. We will never forget you. And we will always care.
Note: the story of Jorge Rodriguez and the Texas Ranger was told by John Claypool in his Lyman Beecher lectures, published under the title of The Preaching Event. The story of Scheherazade is part of the classic tale of 1001 Arabian Nights. For the life of me, however, I cannot recall the name of the student speaker at Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio, although I vouch for the fact that his words about the chairs are reprinted accurately. Let me take this final moment to thank readers of these printed messages, whether received from First Church’s sermon racks, through the United States mail, or via the First Church website. George Buttrick’s example being admirable, I do not foresee writing new messages weekly. Though who can tell? Which means that the final preached word is also the final printed word. Not forever, but for now. Thanks for your interest.
|