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| $10 Not to Preach We were in mid-worship not long ago, when my very able associate, Angela Menke, stepped to the lectern to lead the congregation in a Prayer of Confession, which would in turn lead into Holy Communion. However, the worship bulletin indicated that the sermon was to occur now, not the Prayer of Confession, and I quickly decided that there would be no good time to insert the sermon later. So I interjected that we would indeed confess our sins - right after I had preached my sermon, a sermon to which I had given several hours of preparation during the week. I added further that I was sure that this transparent attempt to keep me from preaching was an innocent lapse on the part of my colleague, and that I, too, had frequently lost my place in the order of worship in times past. No harm; no foul. Later, I was standing at the door greeting people as they departed, and my good friend Tom Glover confided to me that he had paid Angela $10 to keep me from preaching! Of course, he jested. I shared this encounter with the congregation the following Sunday, and told them that it would take more than $10 to keep me from preaching. I mentioned Glover by name, knowing that there were no doubt others in the congregation who would rise up and call him blessed. Continuing, I shared what happened immediately after my encounter with Mr. Glover. A couple approached me, he in the agro-business in Colorado and the Western states, and she, a Ph.D. professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. They said that they’d noticed that the sermons had become shorter - and shorter - over the past couple of years. They felt this was an unfortunate trend, and said that they’d really like to hear more, not less, from Angela and me. And that gave me pause. Is the long-winded preacher a thing of the past? What do you think? Have I succumbed to the spirit of our twitch-thumb, attention-deprived, sip and spit, sound bite culture? Do we live in an era when people “will not put up with sound doctrine”? (2 Timothy 4:3 NIV). Did I think it wasn’t possible to hold an audience for more than 20 minutes -fearful that the popular definition of a preacher as “someone who talks in someone else’s sleep” - might be true? That “those who preach longer than 20 minutes must speak either with the tongues of angels or to a congregation of angels”? Generally, I assume that people want me to break the bread, but not bake the bread. I want to be a preacher who leaves ’em wanting more, not wanting out. I retrieved Alan of Lille’s classic, The Art of Preaching, and saw that his advice to his medieval colleagues was to keep the sermon brief - counsel that flew in the face of the medieval preaching and exegetical tradition of exordium, narratio, partitio, etc. In the classical era, a would-be public speaker had been urged by the priestess to avoid public speaking because “if you say what is right, the people will hate you; if you say what is wrong, the gods will hate you.” Others, however, encouraged the young man to proceed and had a different spin: “If you say what is right, the gods will love you, and if you say what is wrong, the people will love you.” I remembered that the apostle himself had droned on so long, that a child, succumbing to weariness, had fallen out of an upper-story window. The Puritan preachers were accustomed to preaching for hours, filling their sermons with what one observer noted was “turgid language, florid declamation, imaginative finery and tawdry ornamentation.” The long-winded preacher has become a caricature in American culture of which the following chestnut, among thousands of possibilities, is a sample: A young child stays in the sanctuary for the first time for the whole worship service. She asks her mother all sorts of questions about what’s happening. When it’s time for the sermon, the pastor removes his wristwatch and places it to the side of the pulpit before preaching. This prompts the child to ask what this means, to which the mother replies, “Absolutely nothing.” Expository preachers have an easier go of it. Any Baptist preacher worth his salt can take John 3:16 and preach on it for three years. If our sermons have been getting shorter - and perhaps it’s just me - perhaps it’s because I’ve wrongly assumed that most congregations aren’t prepared to listen to a well-developed, finely nuanced, and intellectually heavy development of a text. Perhaps I’ve bought into the idea that in our therapeutic culture what people are looking for and will more easily respond to are quick, motivational, self-help, locker room pep talks rather than a strong treatment of the text and a vigorous proclamation of the word of God. At a recent workshop for preachers, I asked them which most closely expressed their attitude toward sermon preparation: sucking on a lemon, riding a bike, preparing a gourmet meal, BASE jumping off the Sears Tower, or having a root canal. The answers varied, but the most popular response was that when they worked on their sermons they saw themselves preparing a gourmet meal - slow food, good food, with exquisite taste. Unfortunately, when the table was set, however, and people were invited to eat, what they were getting was fast food - for many satisfying, but for others - including this couple who approached me - unappealing, tasteless, full of too much fat and not enough nutrition. I don’t want to be a blind man in a room full of deaf people. Who does? Do we need to revisit Paul’s advice: “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage - with great patience and careful instruction”? (2 Timothy 4:2 NIV). My experience suggests that we do need to do this, and that our people will respond to it if we do.
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