FEATURE 33
IN ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT BOOKS ON PREACHING, WILLIAM SANGSTER COMMENTED THAT THE PREACHER ALWAYS SITS DOWN AFTER THE SERMON THINKING,‘ NEXT TIME, I SHALL PREACH!’ THAT IS THE PAIN. beginning). And in the finding a way to say it, in communicating truth through personality, you’ ve got to put your heart and soul on the line.
And that hurts. It hurts because it is an act of self-disclosure that is inevitably humbling and shaming. I grew up listening to Pink Floyd. I remember 1979 when they released The Wall. In the dystopian vision of the album, the final indignity, the ultimate sanction, was to‘ be exposed before your peers’, a sentence achieved by the tearing down of‘ the wall’ that protects us from the rest of humanity.
Every worthwhile sermon I have ever preached, in nearly three decades of preaching, has been an act of selfexposure, a tearing down of‘ the wall’ of personal protection, a tearing down of‘ the wall’ of respectability and competence, a deliberate act of exposing my own sin and my own failure before people I desperately want to like and respect me. For me that’ s where‘ the pain of preaching’ really lies.
I have a journal from two decades ago in which I wrote about the feeling of writing a sermon. I described it then as reaching down inside myself to grab handfuls of my own viscera, ripping them out and arranging them on a plate to serve to my people in the hope that they would approve. Open-heart surgery meets
Masterchef, with the twist that we get to dissect our own hearts, with blunt instruments, and without anesthetic, and then to present our raw wounds daintily for criticism.
I may not have been in a good place when I wrote that, and it was certainly never intended to be shared. But, two decades on, if I am honest, it still rings true for me. To prepare to preach well hurts, still, just like this. Prepared, prettified self-exposure is what is needed, and it costs me – it really costs me – to offer it.