The Individual Impact of Writing a Sermon

Preparing a speech is something I have done in the past and is an activity I have relished. While there is certainly a great deal of anxiety that comes with performing before an audience, the thought process that goes into presenting a message to others is unlike anything else. When I have written essays, the intended audience is almost always the grade. I see that the only people who will generally read these assignments are myself and the professor. In writing a journal, I know the primary audience is myself. Even this blog, something that other will read, is written as a means of communicating my personal beliefs to a larger whole. It is a means of pointing my audience to myself and to whatever I have thought is relevant and meaningful enough to share.

 

There is a painting done by Matthias Grunewald called the Isenheim Altar piece. In it, John the Baptist stands to the right of the crucified Jesus and points to him. This painting was most recently brought up in a class by a visiting

The role of the preacher is to facilitate the spirit. Prior to this year, I had never realized the reality of this statement. I have written two sermons at this point, a smaller one for my multi-faith worshiping community and a full length one for my preaching class. In both, my creativity in putting words to the page was inspired by my faith and I felt as though I truly was working with the spirit. Being a somewhat of a liberal intellectual, I feel very odd acknowledging a reality of God in my life. I often think of His esoteric presence, something that is influential but not powerfully moving. However, by beginning to point to the cross, there is a power the raises my eyes to that reality. In writing a sermon, I feel as though I look upon that Cross, the holy to which I am trying to understand, and am captivated by its complexity and depth. Only after taking time and internalizing the sermon do I pull myself away enough that I can look to my audience, reach out my hand, and invite them to look on with me at what I am trying to understand.  A preacher’s objective in speaking is not to confine the Cross in his or her words but to use his or her words as a key to a latched door. The objective is to open the audience to the presence and power of the Spirit in the many forms it takes so that their lives might be changed. professor, but it is one I have seen a few times since high school. It has been explained to me that John represents the modern preacher and indicates his/her role in that vocation. To preach the word of God, to lead a religious community, is to point to the cross. I would take this meaning a bit further and say that the preacher’s role is to point to the Cross and God’s truth with one hand and stretch out his or her other in a gesture that would say, “Come with me and let us see”.

When I write a sermon, because I am trying to point to the cross, a sense of responsibility grips me. It is a responsibility to the Spirit, to the text, to those that have written it, and to myself and my audience. It is a space in which I must interweave the issues that face us today with the Presence which brings people to church. But more than anything, I have seen the opportunities as a gift in which I am able to share my experience in a way which connects myself and others to God. I hope that in my future endeavors at sermon writing I can honor the opportunity that is given to me with humility and wisdom.

 

Why do we as Christians do theology?

The question I pose is one I have in the past struggled with greatly because of my over emphasis on objective moral law and the strict code of the Bible. The issue in this case was, why do we speak of the nature of God? Why do we postulate anything if our only source of objective knowledge is the Bible? Why conjecture about what heaven and hell look like without data from the Bible? From this standpoint, I believed I was pursuing a useless exercise in my theologizing.

However, I still persisted in it. I continued to think of the nature of God, the possibility of salvation, the definition of Sin, the proper conduct of relationship. All of these questions were touched upon in the Bible (more than touched upon in fact, we’ve got a couple thousand pages minimum of source material to go off of) but I felt I needed to continue exploring what these things meant by reading, watching movies, writing, playing video games, talking, and questioning. This curiosity about the divine nature of things could not be silenced.

But what does this mean? I did not suspect it as a beneficial practice until these past few years. To inquire about God seemed a noble endeavor, but to make a judgment on something I cannot determine seemed sinful, like a practice that did not put faith in God’s goodness and ability to make decisions for me. However, through studying the Bible in my second half of college and first year at divinity school, I have determined that to put ultimate faith in the Bible as I have described and to abandon or hamper that curiosity which strives to know God is the true error.

Questions of the Bible’s make-up have led me to question its true authority. A book, compiled over thousands of years from the pens of numerous authors and missing so much from the destruction of time, not to mention its somewhat arbitrary (in my mind) canon selection made me question its importance at all. How could such a thing be authoritative, let alone infallible? But to discount the Bible in such a fashion is to discount the curiosity of millions from the past, a curiosity which I  continue to experience and better understand because of my studies.

After regarding the shortcomings of both practices, relying on individual curiosity and on the infallibility of the Bible, I have come to the conclusion (thus far in my life) that one must do both. To take either alone is to discount the importance of the other. To rely on an individual and personal connection to God without the Bible is to open one’s self to individual desire and fickleness. To rely on the Bible is to pursue a similar course of action, to rely on one’s own interpretation and to apply the thoughts of ancients to the (in many but not all cases) radically different present. To rely only on the Bible is to discount the power of God in present, but to abandon it is to abandon perhaps the greatest source of guidance for a confused and lost Christian.

But I qualify this partnership of real-life experience and curiosity and the Bible with the most important aspect for refining both: community and relationship. Ultimately, that is what Christianity is about. We are in relationship with the Trinity and with those around us, with Christians and non-Christians, with our multiple selves. It is through discussing and living and experiencing these relationships that we refine our theologies, our true understandings of God. It is these relationships which prevent us from using the Bible as a weapon of hatred and from groundlessly believing foolishness. Thus, in my head, our spiritual lives are balanced upon legs of scripture, prayer, and community. From our relationship with tradition, with God, and with our fellow brothers and sisters. Without any one of these legs, we risk losing ourselves to perdition, to succumbing to sloth, complacency, hatred, error, and at worst, incompleteness.

But to be human is to be incomplete. To believe that even these three things can perfect our lives and understanding is to underestimate the complexity of the real world. There are questions that may never be answered, despite how much time, effort, pain, and love we put into these questions. I will likely never truly understand why cancer exists, why disease cripples us and robs us of the relationships which define what it means to be a Christian.  And we must simultaneously and paradoxically be fine with and accepting of this fact, that we can’t understand everything in our reality and outside of it. We must accept our finitude and inability while celebrating and exercising our initiative, autonomy, and ability. I firmly believe that all goodness comes from God, but that humanity too can create goodness through what we have been given.  We attribute thanks to God, but God has endowed us with our own creative ability. It is this that lets us love one another, drink into the night with companions speaking of life, to put on plays that capture life’s brutality and reality and hope and goodness, to read scripture and be enraged or given life and hope.

Life is too complex without theology, it is too complex to not allow curiosity. So let me say it proudly, I know God because I have lived Him, because I have explored Him. And while there is much I don’t know and don’t understand, I do know that I am closer to God and His truth because of my own thoughts, prayers, endeavors, and relationships.