32 FEATURE
‘ Do you enjoy preaching?’
Almost every time I preach, at least away from home, someone asks me if I enjoy preaching. The question generally comes just after the service and I always deflect it. I’ m too raw just then to talk seriously about the call, and in any case it is usually a polite enquiry; others have more urgent issues to discuss. So I say yes, I do enjoy preaching.
And that is true, if slightly misleading. Of all the stages in the homiletic process, the actual preaching of the sermon is the one I enjoy most often. Sometimes I can see God’ s Word doing its work in people’ s lives as I look at their faces. Often there is that wonderful, powerful, dangerous, sense of being completely present in the moment, at once totally in control of all that is happening and totally controlled by the inevitability of the preaching event. Yes, I enjoy preaching.
But preparing to preach hurts. And having preached hurts. And that’ s where the‘ enjoy’ question becomes more complicated.
THE PAIN OF PREPARATION
Preparing to preach hurts – for me, at least. It hurts in two different ways. One is a good sort of hurt: every worthwhile sermon has cut the preacher’ s heart before it goes near the congregation. The other is just pure pain, as we rip ourselves apart to find something to offer to our people.
Every time I prepare a sermon properly I find the message confronts and convicts me before it ever goes near my people. The text warns against idolatry, or commands humility, or whatever. I wrestle with it in the study( or, often enough, on the train to somewhere), struggling to make the connection: how does this text speak to my people? And then, of course, it hits me. And I mean that it hits me. Like a club. With spikes.
Here is the idolatry or the pride that needs condemning. Right here. Rooted deep and flowering abundantly in my own heart. At that point, I confess, I usually run away, hide from the text, look for another message to preach. God is brutally merciful, however, and after a while I get back to the text, put the sermon aside, do some repenting and reassessing, and then return to my preparation, far from perfected, but now able to preach the sermon that needs preaching.
That’ s the good sort of hurt.
The other? An old line suggests that‘ preaching is truth communicated through personality.’ To preach, we need to give ourselves to our people. To preach well, we need to give the depths of ourselves to our people. And – for me – that hurts.
I teach homiletics, and I teach my students the old neat lies about first doing your exegesis to find a message, and then writing your sermon to communicate it. I teach them like that because I don’ t know how to teach the chaotic realities of sermon preparation. I don’ t tell them about the mess. But there is a move in that mess, a move from finding something to say( even if you keep refining it all the way through) to finding a way to say it( even if that was never absent from your thoughts from the