May the Lord torment you

The past week I encountered a woman named Sheila Richards who has a habit of sharing a particular benediction of retired Indiana Conference Bishop White. He contributed this benediction to the now no longer in print United Methodist Reporter. Since she shared it with me I thought others may resonate with it. 

May the Lord torment you. May the Lord disturb you. May the Lord keep before you the faces of the despised, rejected, lonely and oppressed. May the Lord give you strength and courage and compassion to make this a better world. And may you do your very best to make this a better city, a better state, a better world. And after you have done your best, may the Lord grant you peace. Amen. 

My Trainer Gives Me Donuts and Beer

Once a week I go to a trainer at the gym and she is great. You should meet her. She is funny and easy to work with. She tells me stories and gives me a good feeling every time I leave the gym. Most of my week is spent dealing with heavy things and the last thing that I want to do on my day off is to lift do any more heavy lifting. I was looking for a trainer for a long time, but most of them made me uncomfortable with the amount of work they were asking me to do. Which is why my trainer is great because she gives me what I really want donuts and beer.

Of course this is fictional. No one wants to attend a gym that employs trainers that will give you donuts and beer. We go to gyms to work out our bodies and stretch beyond what we think we are able to do in order to be fit for whatever may happen in our lives. 

In my years of ministry I have met a good number of people who want a pastor to be the equivalent to the donut dispensing trainer. Some of us are looking for a pastor that will tell us good stories, to make us feel good, to get a good laugh and walk out in the same shape as we walked in with but with a smile.

It has been said that the prophets are those who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. But I can tell you that many pastors feel like we are not able to follow this calling out of fear. There is a fear among many of us clergy to do the work of afflicting the comfortable because we fear loosing out jobs. At times, clergy have been known to gripe about the church for being too complacent or too petty. However these conversations distract us clergy from the hard truth that many of us do not want to face: we are the trainers passing out donuts and beer. 

This season of Lent, I am going to spend a decent amount of time considering how it is that I have become a donuts and beer pastor. 

Preaching - what is it and what it is not

The more that I am in local church ministry the less I am drawn to talk about preaching because the more I am in local church ministry the more I understand the shelf life of a sermon. Despite what preachers want to admit, the shelf life of a sermon is like that of a cracked egg. It is good for breakfast, bad by lunch.

So why preach at all?

I would submit there is a role for preaching that is rooted in the ministry of Jesus – preaching gives language.

There is a reason when Jesus taught few understood what the heck he was saying; he was using a language that would be the mother tongue of the culture of God (which he called the Kingdom of God). He spoke in parables and cryptic sayings. He re-appropriated words like blessed and mustard seed. He was creating a lexicon that would be bedrock of this thing called the church. Notice that he gave Peter a new name, he called tax collectors disciples and he called sinners children of God. He was a walking translator.

This is the role of preaching – to translate this new language. With that in mind I would like to share what the role preaching is not.

The role of preaching is not to try to inspire people. That is the role of the Holy Spirit. What that means is that the preacher must trust that the Holy Spirit is working among the people and not try to manipulate a pre-determined outcome. The pre-determined outcome can often time narrow the range of imagination of those listening to do only that which the preacher hopes you will do. If preachers want people to trust in the power of God in their lives, then we must being by trusting the Holy Spirit to inspire.

The role of preaching is not a sales pitch. Preachers have a captive audience and have been trained to point out to that audience what they are missing or what is wrong with them. Then, after the problem is articulated, the preacher is then trained to pitch the product – Jesus. The commodification of Christ is what marketers do - preachers do not. Jesus is not a solution but a companion who sojourns with us. Or as the great preacher William Sloane Coffin said after the death of his son, God provides minimum protection but maximum support.

Finally, the role of preaching is not to give the answers. This may be obvious, however preachers are often tempted to give the congregation solutions to money problems or marriage situations or even how to vote. To put it most succinctly I give you Kallistos Ware who when talking about the faith said, “It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much an object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”