blip : Beefcake Living In a Poof :

Every time I know I have to preach there are two passages that come to mind and I get freaked out, one from Dom Sebastian Moore and another from Ralph Waldo Emerson. First the quote from Sebastian Moore:

“Anyone who talks of the divine encounter without at least wishing he could write poetry is talking about nothing at all. He is guilty of the supreme conceptualism, offering something apparently alive, which is worse than offering something manifestly dead. He is opening up before the thirsty wanderer the mirage that is the final exacerbation of thirst.” (God is a New Langauge ,143-144)

That is a threatening word, a warning that makes me think long and hard about how my preaching speaks life—real life, not well-worn cliches. It is so easy to listen to all those voices about what the gospel is supposed to mean and go down that safe path without ever letting the Word penetrate my depths and stir up something new, a living word that pierces my soul in such a way that makes me explore with my words long enough to capture that new life birthed from my pulsating wound. Father Moore calls me to know the water of life I claim to pour forth in my sermon to others. There is no time for posturing, for elequent manipulation, for security. I preach because I must; the Word compels me, it shoots through me like a bolt of lightening and I get up in front of people with my hair sticking straight up. And, Yes, I’m usually embarrassed—always suffering from a bad hair day.

The other quote is from Emerson’s famous Divinity School Address. In this passage Emerson gives a description of the typical preacher:

“he had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it…. Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet there was not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.”

To make my life speak, to speak of my life—Emerson is the “thirsty wanderer” of Sebastian Moore’s passage. And I don’t think Emerson is unique here. I dare to say most of us feel the desire he describes. We want to hear another life speak; we long for a human connection, to know that someone else feels like we do and knows how to make the gospel speak in that feeling. The theology may be right, but we want a living theology—one that we can see breathe and gesture (and sweat?), a preaching that moves within the dynamics of life, bearing witness to the holiness of contingencies, the way our finitude can speak of the divine. In Emerson’s passage I hear the hunger, that deep human hunger, to feel the tender caress of the Father in the everyday. And I want to say that preaching should train us to see all the ways Jesus Christ trasfigures the diversity of creation into the hopeful new life of the gospel.

Yet, those passages from Emerson and Moore make it really difficult for me to see how on earth I can proclaim a truly living word to thirsty wanderers. I’m no poet. Even though I never imagined myself as a preacher, I have to preach. My church makes me. I really don’t like getting up in front of people and talking. I worry about my fly—whether or not I remembered to zip it up. All the attention makes me sweat. Nevertheless, I get up there because I am told to, and now I am starting to discover all the reasons why it’s good for me to do, and it seems folks connect with the gospel I proclaim.

But I don’t think any of my preaching experiences have prepared for me to preach at the Murdoch Center. That’s where I am serving my internship this academic year. It’s a state facility with 600 residents and 1,600 staff. The residents all suffer from profound (that’s actually a technical term) developmental disabilities and mental retardation. Most are non-verbal and depend on staff to push them around on wheelchairs. Communication is a struggle. I try desperately to understand what folks try to say to me, but I never quite get it. Speech is always mumbled—tongues stiff and twisted…mouths dripping with saliva. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for the residents to have something to say and not be able to say it in a way that makes sense to me. The trouble for me now is that I have no way of knowing what a word without cliches would sound like for them. I have no easy access to their imaginitive world. Usually conversations help me understand what aspect of the gospel people need to hear—their voices echo in my head as I read the Scritpures given for me to preach. At the Murdoch center I have a hard time traveling into the depths of the persons sitting in the pews because conversations seem like dead ends (at least on my part). How do I open up the gospel in ways that gush forth living waters into these ineffable souls? How I am I supposed to let their mumbled speech guide my reading, my formulation of the gospel? Their voices are so strange that I have trouble registering them on my horizon of intelligibility.

All this to say, I have to preach in the Murdoch Center’s Sunday worship service next Sunday and am quaking in my shoes.