Making Sense To Others

This Friday is the big Coffeehouse.  We have two a year.  This one--youth only--has always been the largest in terms of both participants and audience.  There is an art show attached to it as well.  The visual artists display their works and we keep them up for Reformation Sunday, which is also a big day in our church that includes worship, a "pageant" (about Olympia Brown), D&D, pumpkin carving, and the Jack-O-Lantern competition.  Anyway, Friday is an important day for some of the kids and they work pretty hard to get the weekend going properly.

It has always been interesting to watch the youth prepare.  As young artists they are learning a variety of "languages" they can use to express their inner thoughts and feelings.  It is a challenge for them.  We all want to be understood.  We also all know that our audience--our "public"-- will fall short of fully comprehending our message.  Still, we try to get it right, don't we? To be fully human we have to try. A song--a painting, a poem, a photograph--comes from deep inside us.  As artists our hopes are high.  However, it helps to keep our expectations more realistic without also crushing that dream we wanted to share in the first place.

I know how the kids feel.  I have struggled to be understood in a variety of media over the years.  However, the one I care about the most is preaching. I will never be a great (or even good) musician.  My photography doesn't get much past the "pretty picture" phase.  In pottery class I once made a 4-foot tall unbalanced black vase which may have been the ugliest thing ever offered up at a school art exhibit. I admit that I abandoned it.  I walked away. For all I know it still sits there by the door to the North Yarmouth Academy teacher's lounge collecting cigarettes and dust.

Preaching, though, I care about doing well.  I feel it when I don't quite hit the mark.

Yeah, preaching is an art.  At least it is sometimes.  It falls into the same category as chairs and benches. They can be built just to keep your bottom off the ground or they can be built to also elicit a feeling or a thought.  I bet they--chairs--can even inspire action.  I can go to the Museum of Fine Art to see (and sometimes sit on) a wide variety of items, or I can sit at my computer to get my emails done.  One chair is not better than the other.  They just have different purposes.  One is a practical item that helps support our daily living.  Our bodies and our backs are grateful for its presence.  Another is all of that plus art. It makes us look up, out, down, or in.  Even though we may be physically stationary we are, in fact, moved.

Sermons should fall into that second category, even when people do not notice the "soul" within it. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who work in professions where talking is part of the job.  Politicians and lecturers (the good ones anyway) often use some of the techniques of preaching to improve their own work.  Others believe there is no difference between a good lecture and a good sermon.  Those folks are wrong, of course.  You can give a fine presentation, but performing it in church doesn't necessarily mean you have come close to touching the sacred.

After all, I can make a witty, informative, entertaining, motivational talk using the tools I am teaching those teens in my public speaking class. However, I still fail to preach sometimes.  I have done it before (sadly) and I will do it again.  The fact is, to create art one must dig deep.  A good sermon--just like any of the offerings at our coffeehouses--requires a bit of personal exploration. It requires a moment of connection to the great "out there". In the moment of creation and interpretation we find that part of us and/or our world where normal conversation fails.  Then we try once again to articulate it.

As the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels and have not love, I am but a noisy gong or a clanging symbol."  Finding that love (here used in its broad, theological sense) is the task of any artist--and we are all artists.  The preacher tries to find some small glimmer of it each week to issue an invitation and offer up a path for people who hopefully feel drawn enough to walk another mile along the way.  

Preaching, like any art, requires discipline.  We grow into our voices and into our "vision".   Whenever you hear a sermon, you are listening to the product of hours, days, and years of prayer, meditation, and study focused into a tiny window of mere minutes.  Sometimes it stinks.  Sometimes it just isn't your bag.  That said, have faith at least that the preacher is working hard. The colleagues I have met who didn't accept the preaching moment as a sacred one are all doing something else with their lives now.  Leading worship isn't something you do without love.

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​When I think of the kids getting ready for this weekend, I think of this process.  I hope and pray that in their important and necessary playing around they find what they need to build a life of deep spiritual expression.  I hope they find something that motivates them and makes all the steep lonely hours of practice and study worthwhile.  The world of hard matter may never give them a measurable reward for their efforts, but maybe they will find that reward where they keep their souls and spirits.  Maybe they will reach others through the foggy chaos of their existence.

Then--maybe--they will make us all a little less broken.