What distinguishes capable preachers from humdrum preachers?
The ability to see things. It’s as simple as that.
They don’t go through life like Mr. Magoo, myopically missing the brilliant hues, interesting sights, and exciting occurrences in their environment. Instead, they are like Zorba, in Kazantzakis’s novel, who sees everything as if for the first time, and is always thrilled at viewing the shimmering sea in the early morning or encountering an absurd-looking donkey on a mountain road.
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The gospel we preach is incarnational. This means it is about what happens when mystery inhabits broken bread or a shared cup, when the shafts of sunlight strike the mottled leaves on the floor of the forest, when children throw back their heads and laugh, when an old man touches the gnarled and calloused hand of his wife, when a pigeon lands on the bench beside a girl eating her lunch in the park, when a rabbi strolls through an art gallery and pauses before a painting of the crucifixion.
The gospel is refracted through all living things. And preachers make a mistake when they try to preach out of dogma or doctrine without freshly seeing where the gospel is occurring, or has occurred, and sharing this with the congregation.
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Once the preacher learns this, the world becomes a kaleidoscopic delight. Sermons leap out on every hand, begging to be preached. Instead of wondering what there is to preach, the preacher wonders if a lifetime is long enough to deliver all the sermons begging to be preached, to recreate for the congregation the marvel of it all.
A notebook is essential.
Even the preacher with a photographic memory needs a notebook to put things down in, for how else can you sort through the memories, earmarking this one for that sermon and the next for another sermon? The fact is, there are soon so many.
The observant preacher is always writing in that notebook, like an anthropologist living with a strange tribe or a traveler unlikely to pass a particular way again.
My notebooks are the most valuable things I have. I lock them up when I go on vacation, or, sometimes, take them with me. I would grieve if they were ever lost. They contain irreplaceable treasures. They remind me of what I have seen and heard, where I have been, how life broke into rainbow colors around me the way it does in the ocean spray.
When I look back through them now, without any plan, my eye strikes all sorts of things, evoking many memories.
There is a line from the British stage play Across from the Garden of Allah, in which the wife of a British screenwriter working in Hollywood, looking at herself in the mirror, remarks, “I hate my life for not being a movie.” Glenda Jackson played the part of the wife. I remember her look of self-disgust as she spoke the line. And I wonder how many people in my congregation have thought the same thing. They are always judging themselves by the people they see on TV or in the movies.
There is a note about something I saw at the National Aeronautics and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I was riding up on the escalator in the huge foyer, and looked down upon a group of 15 or 16 small children being shepherded by a caretaker who had a rope running around the periphery of the group.
What a marvelous picture, I thought at the time, of the pastoral work of the local minister. The trick is to keep the rope around everybody and keep them moving more or less in the same direction, but with a maximum of personal freedom within the circle.
There is a remark made by a friend about what he called “The Waiter’s Epitaph”: “God finally got his attention.”
And there is a remark made by a woman in one of my parishes who was dying of cancer and confided, when I visited her in the hospital near the end of her days, “I’m ready to go, but I’m not ready to leave.”
There is even this word from a bumper sticker I saw in a Western state: “If you’re walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.”
The point is, we are always walking through a wonderland of beauty, pathos, insights, inspiration, and excitement. There is nowhere that God, the gospel, the continuing power of the Incarnation, may not be seen, and, having been seen, brought into a sermon to enrich it with life’s true texture.
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The world is indeed thick with the grace of God. We have only to see it-and to gather it into our sermons, a little bit here and a little bit there, the way an elderly woman tucks pieces of her past life and her family’s life into the quilt she is making.
It will be like the wonderful glass in an ancient cathedral, staining whole areas of pew and pulpit and choir with the many-colored radiance of the eternal Sun beyond it.
John Killinger is professor of religion and culture at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
138 SUMMER/93
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
