34 FEATURE
Maybe I suffer here where others don’ t. I score very high on the‘ introvert’ side of the Myers-Briggs test. But plenty of preachers are introverts, and plenty of extrovert preachers have their limits in selfdisclosure, and so I assume I am not abnormal. I suspect, in fact, that the index of pain in preaching is not introversion; it is pride.
I find writing sermons an exercise in self-torture, and I think I can describe that reality: to preach well – to speak the truth in a way that will awaken recognition, and so conviction, in others – we have to expose the good pain I have already talked about, to allow our people to see the truth of our own failures. We have to expose our brokenness, we have to move from speaking the words of God to sinners to speaking words of confession and repentance as a representative sinner, we have to show our own brokenness to our people. To write a sermon worth preaching we have to plan all that self-disclosure in exquisite detail, and then follow through. And that hurts.
There’ s a line in a song that goes,‘ I will offer up myself, in spirit and truth …’ I do that, every time I preach properly( to my shame, there are other occasions). I offer up myself. Not the person I would like to be. Not the person the people listening believe me to be. But myself. If I had no pride, this would be release; in reality, it is excruciating.
But it is also powerful.
I speak here only from my own experience, but the sermons that have cost me the most have been the most effective. I think of a sermon I have preached many times; preaching on prayer, my preparation has – always – led me to weep for my own prayerlessness. In my delivery I have, by God’ s grace, often been able to speak as one convicted by this word, even as I speak as one speaking conviction, and, always, the response has been powerful. I find that exposing my own brokenness with honesty brings healing to the brokennesses of others. By God’ s( severe?) grace, I am multiply broken, and so, by God’ s grace, my honesty can bring healing to many.
But it hurts – how it hurts!
THE PAIN OF HAVING PREACHED
And then there is the pain of having preached. The sermon is over; in some churches, a final hymn is being sung; in others, prayer ministry is being offered; where is the preacher? If she is anything like me, she is, in the quiet of her own heart, suffering, regretting, repenting. 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.
We know, if we understand what we do, that we have failed. We know what the Word of God can do, and we know that, in our hands and mouths, it has not done that. Maybe we saw that our arrows of application were aimed at the wrong targets. Maybe, in the moment of preaching, we drew back from something risky we had planned, and so never fired the arrow. Maybe we just missed the target. Whatever; we sit down knowing that we just had a chance to do something of eternal significance, and we did less than we could have, less than we should have.
And we feel like that after the best sermons. I remember once, a conference platform, a congregation of several thousand, a dream text( Esther 4:14,‘ for such a time as this …’). I preached; Juliet Kilpin, who is just better at this stuff than me, did the appeal after the sermon. She did a great job, making up for some of my deficiencies. I sat on the platform, watched the aisles fill( I discovered the next morning that 271 people had come forward in response); I looked at the folk still sitting in their seats.
It was a good sermon – I’ ve preached it several times since – but it was not a perfect sermon. A joke was misjudged; the beginning was not right; I lost courage and pulled the ending slightly. It was a good sermon, but it could have been so much better. A couple of hundred people came forward. Several thousand people did not respond. It was a chance missed.
Another sermon, a few weeks back, to a congregation of perhaps thirty, students this time, with their lives ahead of them. I thought I knew what was needed; I got it wrong. Another chance missed. Could a life, or five, or ten, or even thirty, have been turned to Christian service? Of course – that is the power of the Word. Was one? No. That is the failure and the pain of the preacher.
What we preachers do matters. It matters more than anything else. More than election results. More than medical treatments. Certainly more than the academic stuff I give most of my life to. That is the privilege of preaching – we all know it, when someone responds, when a life is turned, in a moment or over many years. But that too is a part of the pain of preaching, when someone doesn’ t respond( even if others do), and we know that, under God, we could have done better.
To preach is to suffer. This should be no surprise; we serve a crucified King. To not preach is to suffer more, for those of us called to the task( Jeremiah spoke for us all: the Word is like‘ a burning fire shut up in my bones’ – Jeremiah 20:9, NASB). I wish we were more honest with each other about the pain, though; in the body of Christ, our calling is never to suffer alone.