Leader's Insight: The Preacher's 8-second Delay

From my journal: After the “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl almost two years ago, TV networks began to build an 8-second delay into most live sports and entertainment shows in order to preclude language or behavior that was deemed offensive.

There have been a few occasions in my years of preaching when I would have benefited from such a system. Like the first time I tried to preach on a Biblical view of sexuality (I was 26, sure of myself and patently unwise). The sermon was so bad that I asked someone else to give the benediction while I left the building, ran home, and spent the afternoon in the fetal position trying to forget I’d preached that morning. A two-day delay would have saved me from making a fool of myself.

While preaching on one or two occasions I’ve had a mental lapse and said a word that was the opposite of what I really intended to say. There have been times when I’ve bungled facts, distorted stories, and mangled Greek words. Here again, the delay apparatus would be so helpful.

Moses might have made the Promised Land if he’d had a few seconds to recoup his error of hitting the rock rather than speaking to it. A delay could have turned things around for Sampson. So also Jonah, Simon Peter, and Ananias and Sapphira who were impetuous to a fault.

And the delay thing might also benefit some of our much better known Christian radio and TV personalities who some times confuse Biblical conviction and political opinion, say things that embarrass us all, and make it all the harder to talk about the saving love of Jesus to those in the larger world who are curious.

I’m not smart enough to know where one draws the line between Biblical proclamation and political ideology, but I sure worry about where the line is being drawn sometimes these days. Give me the days when Billy Graham was regularly visiting with presidents and prime ministers but keeping his political opinions to himself. He knew where his voice came from and what it was to be used for. Almost never did he wander outside the guidelines of wisdom for a person called to publicly represent the gospel of Christ.

Everyone ought to know: John Woolman, 18th century American Quaker, certainly had political opinions, but he seems to have found more dignified ways to get his points across. He had strong feelings against slavery, excessive life styles, spiritual deadness. A reading of his journal (not hard to find) is a beautiful experience.

Excerpts: (On visiting a congregation) “The Lord I believe hath a people in those parts who are honestly concerned to serve him, but many I fear are too much clogged with the things of this life, and do not come forward bearing the cross in such faithfulness as the Almighty calls for.

(On sensing the presence of God in the middle of the night) As I lay still without any surprise … words were spoken to my inward ear which filled my whole inward man …

(Reflecting upon a meeting where he felt constrained to remain silent) I found no engagement to speak … and therefore kept silence, finding by experience that to keep pace with the gentle motions of truth, and never move but as that opens the way, is necessary for the true Servant of Christ. (Old English, but the point is made)

Woolman doesn’t ever seem to have needed an 8-second delay.

In his book, The Hungry Spirit, Charles Handy reminisces about his father who was a rector in a small Protestant parish in Ireland for 40 years. “He did not have much to do with the wealth-creating part of the world, or with its products. …By the time I was eighteen, I had resolved never to be poor, never to go to church again. …

“Then my father died in the fullness of his years. I have written elsewhere about his funeral, but I was staggered by the numbers who came to say farewell to this quiet man and the emotion which they showed. He had clearly affected the lives of hundreds of people in ways I had never imagined. He had obviously got something right which I had been too obtuse to see. And, in the end, too late for him to know, he affected my life, too.”

From my notebooks this piece from Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

Lord, I find the genealogy of my Savior strangely checkered with four remarkable changes in four generations.

Rehoboam begat Abia: a bad father begat a bad son. Abia begat Asa: a bad father and a good son. Asa begat Jehoshaphat: a good father and a good son. Jehoshaphat began Joram: a good father and a bad son.

I see, Lord, from hence, that my father’s piety cannot be entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see also that actual impiety is not hereditary; that is good news for my son.

A book that has been enhancing my personal devotions: The Saints’ Guide to Happiness by Robert Ellsberg (North Point Press, 2003). Stuff like this sharpens the soul.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership Journal.

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