Incarnate Preaching

The man's 51-year autobiography took more than an hour to read, and it disclosed struggles with addictions, difficult personal relationships, and career disappointments. It included accounts of success and failure, discoveries and disappointments. Mixed in were his ongoing efforts to improve a static-ridden connection with Jesus.

This level of candor in our group is the result of almost two years of weekly meetings. That's how long it has taken us to build an appropriate trust level. Only now is there a willingness to peel back the secretive layers of life and invite the responses of friends.

As this man read his story, I shook my head. Not at the nature of his self-revelations but at how little, before this reading, I really knew him and the issues he was dealing with from day to day. I'm his pastor, for crying out loud, and until this moment I've seen only the surface of his life. And I was supposed to preach to him each week? And make a difference?

As his story continued, I actually had something like a vision. I saw myself walking down a long hotel corridor (I travel a lot). I passed endless numbers of closed doors. Behind each door I could hear sounds, the kinds you hear in hotels—loud televisions, people talking, bathtubs filling with water, and other sounds I'll not identify. In the vision each sound was an indication of diverse life and activity. But here is the point. Each closed door separated me from knowing with clarity what was happening on the other side. I could only guess at what needed to be said.

The vision helped me realize that the guy telling his story had opened up the door of his room and invited the group and me in to look around.

Glimpses of their reality

This, I suspect, is one of the greater challenges of the preacher. How to get people to open the doors of their lives. Only then can there be hope of riveting the truths of Scripture to the truths of actual human experience. The truth? I don't think that can happen in a lot of churches.

My life as a preacher began in my mid-twenties. One year I got to speak on many weekends in various churches (not necessarily large ones) in different parts of North America. In those days guest preachers were usually billeted in private homes (the so-called prophet's chamber) rather than in hotels (deemed an excessive expense). This resulted in an educational experience I could never have anticipated.

I have written of this before: how under such arrangements I met lots of people on their "turf," not mine. On these weekends, I became a part of all kinds of family life. I saw how marriage partners treated each other, how parents and children related, how some things were celebrated and other things disputed. Sometimes I heard and saw things that shouldn't have been seen or heard. Every preacher should have this experience.

They live 95+ percent of their week in non-church-related situations.

Often, late in the evening when most of the host family had gone to bed, I would sit—cold drink in hand—with the husband/father of the household. We would have long talks that went deep and wide. And I learned things.

First, (and please forgive the gender specificity for a moment) I learned that men talk with other men differently when they're not around church.

Second, I learned that men talk differently when they didn't classify me as a pastor (and I wasn't telling).

Third, I learned that men talk differently about themselves when asked questions that seemed not to be related to church life or even faith.

In those late night conversations, I came to know about men and their work, men and their fears, men and their disappointments in their marriages and in family life. I heard about their dreams and the obstacles between them and those dreams. And, more than a few times, I became aware of the attitudes men had about church and about their pastors.

There is a book making the rounds that suggests why many men hate going to church. The book is a worthy read. But I can tell you that I heard most of that stuff forty years ago in those midnight conversations.

It was not unusual to hear, "Our pastor is a great guy, but he really knows very little about life outside the church. He's never had to face the real world. He hasn't a clue where I'm coming from."

One man said to me: "Want to know our pastor's view of life? His benediction the other day went like this: 'Lord, we close this service asking your blessing on AWANA as it meets on Monday night, the choir as it practices for the Easter concert, and the youth as they go away next weekend on their snow retreat. And bring us all back together again next Sunday for a great experience of worship.'"

The man who described this benediction said, "The pastor doesn't know I have a job."

A man in my own church, some years later, said to me, "Pastor, I know you eat, sleep, and breathe church. That's what we pay you for. But me? When I leave here this afternoon, it's likely that I won't think about church for two or three days. I've got a living to make, and that takes just about every ounce of energy I've got. So, understand, I love you and I love this church, but for most of the week it's just not the most important thing on my mind."

The wide world of work

That was the first time I realized that most people did not live (as I did) church-centric lives. Nor did they spend major amounts of their mental energies on church matters.

Nevertheless I was supposed to walk that "corridor" on Sunday morning and preach through the doors and into the lives of people who lived 95+ percent of their lives in non-church-related situations. As long as those doors were shut and I could only hear vague noises behind them, I was really in the dark as to what to preach about and how to make my points sharp and incisive enough that I was not wasting everyone's time.

If I knew their stories how would my preaching change?

After more than forty years of preaching, I am still amazed that there are people who actually sit still and give me a chance to monologue at them for anywhere from 28 to 38 minutes on Sunday. Who in our society—excepting a few comedians and professors—gets that privilege?

Back to the days when I toured as a guest preacher …

On certain occasions, when my plane was not taking me back home until Monday afternoon, I joined my host at his workplace for the morning. I visited offices and met bosses and colleagues. I toured labs, went on sales calls, and observed manufacturing lines.

I pressed my luck a bit when a construction worker planted a hard hat on my head and told me to climb a ladder straight up a six-story steel skeletal structure. We ate a bag lunch straddling an I-beam at the top. To put it bluntly, I was terrified. It was no place to be if you needed a men's room.

Those conversations and those visits to the workplace changed me and my preaching. Of course the final evaluation of my change rests with those who have listened to me preach over the years. But the questions that should be asked are these:

1. Did Gordon preach as if he understood your world?
2. Did Gordon speak to the questions that are relevant to your situation?
3. Did Gordon's vocabulary and illustrations connect with the world you live in?
4. Did Gordon tie the message of the Bible to the issues that are most important to you?
5. Did Gordon show any evidence that he had prepared in a way that took seriously the things God may want to say into people's lives?
6. And finally, did Gordon reveal anything about himself that indicated he also shares the challenges that you face?

A doctor friend once said to me, "When you prepare your sermons, Gordon, make sure the last question you ask yourself before you preach is this: What difference does this make?"

Where was Jesus' pulpit?

Most of what we call the preaching of Jesus was done in places where people caught fish, collected taxes, and drew their water. He did some speaking in synagogues, but the major contacts he had with people seemed to be where they lived and worked.

A lead preacher (if he or she is not sharing time with a preaching team) probably gets no more than 35 preaching opportunities a year to address the congregation. When you deduct vacation days, guest speaker situations, and holiday themes (Lent and Advent come to mind), even 35 opportunities may be optimistic.

So if one gets 35 shots at people in a plenary session like Sunday worship, what will the themes be? And how will you communicate with the diverse people who populate the room?

In most churches, we probably have five culturally defined generations sitting side by side in worship. Assume an age-range of 10-97 years. I can document that range in the New Hampshire congregation where I have been lead preacher for the past few years (I have now stepped down from that responsibility).

One Sunday morning I got reactions to my sermon from a child, age 7, and a man (who is very alert) who is 97. Not a bad bandwidth.

In a recent book, A Resilient Life, I suggested we need to understand these generations in terms of underlying thematic-questions that seem peculiar to each decade of life. [See below.]

I think about these theme questions each time I prepare a sermon. Being in my sixties I am quite aware that the theme questions that drive my life today are completely different than the theme questions driving a 30 year old.

When I was a pastor in my thirties, I often wondered why men of the age I am now so rarely talked to me about their personal thoughts or issues.

Now I know.

They believed I wouldn't understand what preoccupied them.

Today I would never "bore" people in their thirties with my personal questions. They'd have to ask, and I would have to feel assured that they would not blow me off or perhaps snicker at me.

My mind snaps back to the small group of men with whom I have met each week, men who have, in the course of our time together, put their stories out on the table for everyone else to hear. And I say to myself: If I knew the story of every person in my church, how would my preaching change?

Then I think of the dialogue between Jesus and the woman of Sychar—the one he met at the well. What made their conversation so powerful, so life-changing, so resourceful that it led to a whole town coming to sit at the feet of Christ? Answer: he knew her story, and she knew he knew it.

Get that far into a person's life, and the preaching has its effects.

***

Questions of the Decade

When I preach to people in their twenties, I am aware that they are asking questions such as:

1. What makes me different from my family of origin or the people around me?
2. In what direction am I going to point my life in order to pay my way through life?
3. Am I lovable and am I capable of loving?
4. Around what will I center my life?

Those in their thirties tend to have accumulated serious long-range responsibilities: spouses, babies, home mortgages, and serious income needs. Suddenly life becomes overrun with responsibilities. Time and priorities become important. Fatigue and stress levels rise. The questions shift to:

1. How can I get done all of these things for which I am responsible?
2. Why do I have so many self-doubts?
3. Why is my spiritual center so confused?
4. What happened to all the fun I used to have?
5. Why haven't I resolved all my sin problems?
6. Why is there so little time for friendships?

For people in their forties, the questions do not get any easier. Now they are asking:

1. Why are some of my peers doing better than me?
2. Why am I so often disappointed in myself, in others?
3. Why isn't my faith deeper?
4. Why is my marriage less than dazzling?
5. Why do I yearn to go back to the carefree days of my youth?
6. Should I scale back some of my dreams?
7. Why do I no longer feel attractive?

People in their fifties are asking:

1. Do these young people think I'm obsolete?
2. Why is my body becoming increasingly unreliable?
3. Why are so few of my friendships nourishing?
4. What do my spouse and I have in common now that the children are leaving?
5. Does this marriage of mine offer any intimacy at all?
6. Why is my job no longer a satisfying experience?
7. Are the best years of life over?
8. Do I have anything of value to give any longer?

Those in their sixties ask:

1. How long can I keep on doing the things that define me?
2. Why do my peers look so much older than me?
3. What does it mean to grow old?
4. How do I deal with angers and resentments that I've never resolved?
5. Why do my friends and I talk so much about death and dying?

Those in their seventies and above have questions such as:

1. Does anyone around here know who I once was?
2. How do I cope with all this increasing weakness around me?
3. How many years do I have left?
4. How long can I maintain my independence and my dignity?
5. When I die, how will it happen?
6. What about all these things I intended to do (and be) and never got around to?

Can a sermon speak to these issues? For many listeners, sermons that ignore these questions will not be credible.

It is around matters like these, which change through the years, that the preacher can speak into the fears, the failures and regrets, the longings and opportunities, and bring words of hope and clarity, touching a life with Christ's presence.—G.M.

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