Читать книгу Mentoring with Morgan - Karen Schlack - Страница 14

It has been said speaking in public is one of the greatest fears human beings can face. A fear even greater than dying. I was often reminded of that fear when I preached funerals in my early years. In those days, the preacher was perched over an open casket. It was a bit like standing at the edge of a cliff, suspended between the person who had died and the people who were very much alive and waiting for me to speak to them. I tried to keep my eyes facing forward into the crowd, but occasionally I glimpsed the dead person lying at my feet. Then I would catch myself with a start and try to resume my public speaking with some semblance of dignity.

Morgan described the experience of preaching in front of people as “solo flight.” In those early years, when I walked up front, the first thing I noticed was I was alone up there. If I dared to take a moment to gaze at the faces, I realized I wasn’t only alone up there, but these people were waiting for me to say something. What, I wondered, would I say today? The only way to take off in this solo flight was to forget I was alone, forget all those people who were sitting there, and just start talking as if I were speaking to a trusted friend about the most important thing in the world. In Isaiah 40, we are told those who “wait on the Lord will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run and not be weary. They will walk and not faint” (Isa 40:31). Most Sundays, as I walked to the front to preach, I would say in my heart one simple prayer, “O Lord, please help me to walk and not faint. O Lord, please help me to walk and not faint.”

In my second year of seminary, before I preached my first Sunday as pulpit supply minister, Morgan and I laid out the ground rules of our work together. We would meet every week. I would bring a draft of the sermon I was working on and we would talk about it. We would also talk about how the prior week’s solo flight had gone. Since Morgan wanted me to be three weeks ahead on my sermon writing, I had to write three sermons before my first Sunday of preaching in front of people.

“You need to get ahead on sermons,” he said. “After all, what if some emergency demands pastoral attention and your sermon isn’t written on Saturday night?”

The practice of being two to three weeks ahead on sermons served me well during all my years in ministry. Sermons that were already written sat on the back burner of my mind and were peppered and seasoned with the events that led up to the Sunday each one was delivered.

But I was still clinging to the manuscript.

“The development of a preacher is the work of a lifetime,” Morgan said to me one day.

Thank God for that, I thought. At this rate, a lifetime won’t be long enough.

I never actually read a sermon from a manuscript after my conversation with Robbie Sevier. Her kind and piercing words had made that impossible. Instead, I rolled up the manuscript in my right hand, walked down to the floor (on the level where the people were) and preached. Usually I forgot at least half of the sermon. When that happened, I just kept talking until I found my place in the manuscript. Looking back on those two years, I am eternally grateful people still sat there, listened as best they could, and shook my hand when it was all over. Preachers owe a huge debt to the people in the pews. A debt greater than they will ever know.

Each week, Morgan and I met. Each week I told him I could not let go of that manuscript. It would be like being cut off from the mother ship, left to drift in space. Of course, I was already drifting in space when I held the manuscript in my hand. But I still had that piece of paper I could open and read, which I felt was a much better option than running out of the sanctuary.

After hearing me tell him week after week that I was incapable of letting go of the manuscript, Morgan wrote down for me his thoughts about preaching without notes. His encouraging words helped me to imagine myself as a courageous preacher, able to look at the faces of the congregation and utter words from my heart.

Morgan’s Reflections on Preaching Without Notes:

In my final year at Princeton Seminary, the senior homiletics course was taught by the dean of the faculty, Edwin Roberts. The goal of his class was to have all of us try to preach without dependence upon the manuscript. Two students would preach at every practice preaching class. The requirement was that we stand in the middle of the chancel behind a microphone (wireless microphones had not yet been invented) and deliver our sermon.

One of the books that we would read for the class was Preaching Without Notes by Clarence E. Macartney, the distinguished pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. Macartney had recently retired but came to preach on one special evening in the seminary chapel. It was an unforgettable experience. Every pew in the chapel was filled as we watched this prince of the pulpit stand in the middle of the chancel (just as we had been required to do in our class, but without a microphone) and deliver a sermon entitled “Bring Up Samuel.” I can still hear that sermon and its piercing conclusion. Macartney was a living example of his book’s title.2

Dean Roberts realized that we might not choose to preach without notes when we arrived at our first church. I have no way of knowing whether the rest of my classmates thereafter tried to preach without dependence upon a manuscript, but for me the choice was simple: I would never again preach from a manuscript for the remainder of my 41 years of ministry, as well as during my additional 6 years of interim ministry . . . and I still don’t today upon those few occasions when I am invited to preach at a church.

So, why is freedom from a sermon manuscript so important? The answer lies in the definition of what a sermon is meant to be. A sermon should be a simple and loving conversation between the Christ in you (the preacher) and the Christ in them (the congregation). That being the case, a sermon is not something you do, but instead something that is done through you. Let’s enlarge upon that definition.

The conversation between the Christ in you and the Christ in every other life is happening all the time, not just when you’re standing in the pulpit. It is something that God, in Christ, is doing all the time as the Christ who is incarnate in every life is continually seeking recognition. This conversation does not depend upon our effort, but upon God’s intention. This may not be apparent; many people appear to have no awareness of Christ’s presence in the depths of their life. Still, in the most unlikely of lives, Christ is still present. As Paul Claudel once wrote, “In the heart of the meanest miser, the most squalid prostitute, the most miserable drunkard, there is an immortal soul with holy aspirations, which, deprived of daylight, worships in the night.”3 Although most of the human family may be unaware of Christ’s deep and inner presence, Christ is still there. It does not depend upon their recognition, but upon God’s intention to be present in every life. Whether they know it or not, everyone wants to find Jesus; He is the one for whom, beneath all their superficial desires, they’re really seeking. Everyone is saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 10:21). We can become a part of their search for Jesus, and of God’s search for them. What all of this means is that we need to “get out of the way” or, as we read in John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Nothing must block this universal search for Jesus.

For starters, get your sermon manuscript out of the way. Have you ever noticed that as you read the story of Jesus in the gospels and hear him speaking to groups large or small, it is impossible to imagine him reading from a manuscript? The same is true of Paul as we hear him proclaiming his message on the Areopagus (Acts 17:22). You simply cannot picture Paul speaking from notes. As we reflect upon the preaching of either Jesus or Paul, we always see them, eye to eye, delivering their message from the heart. If we’re tempted to reply that, after all, they were intellectual giants, it is clear, at least in the case of Jesus, that there is no suggestion in the gospels that Jesus received a formal education. He was a plain man of the people who functioned with the same mind as ours. And in the case of Peter and John as we hear them preaching in Acts 4:13, those that heard them “realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men.” So, we have no excuse that allows us to be dependent upon our manuscript. Besides all that, as Canon Charles Raven once observed, if we’re going to read “word for word” from a manuscript, why not have it printed and distributed to the congregation, allowing them time during the service to read it by themselves, after which we can respond to questions?4

It is also necessary to get our desire to perform out of the way. One of the perils of preaching without notes is that we will be tempted to enjoy our performance. When people see that you are preaching without dependence upon a manuscript, they will tell you how wonderful your preaching is in comparison to those other preachers who mostly read their sermons. This kind of praise will tempt you to make your sermons a performance, and you will begin to enhance your delivery with dramatic voice and body language, with a high-volume voice and big gestures. Your sermons will cease to be a simple and loving conversation. After all, many of us remember proposing marriage to a beloved life mate by looking into her eyes and saying, “I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you.” We didn’t need a manuscript to make such a heartfelt proposal, nor did we resort to a big voice and dramatic gestures. When you learn to preach without notes, remember that preaching must never become a performance.

The flip side of this temptation to perform can be the fault of lapsing into sloppy conversation. Some preachers think that preaching without notes is the kind of delivery in which we “wing it.” Preachers who make this mistake think it’s O.K. to allow their delivery to be interrupted by the habits of casual conversation, pausing between sentences with an “uh” or “er” as though they are trying to form or remember their next sentence. Such shoddiness is not the aim of preaching without notes. Good preaching is the result of a carefully prepared manuscript which the preacher has studied and revised before entering the pulpit.

And then there’s the pulpit itself as a temptation. Henry Ward Beecher is reputed to have said that the pulpit is an instrument of the devil because it comes between the preacher and the people. Even if he didn’t say that, there’s an important truth in those shocking words. It’s rather amazing that, although we trace our origins from the man of Nazareth who never preached from a pulpit, we build sanctuaries with high and magnificent pulpits. Shadyside Church in Pittsburgh had such a high pulpit that I finally abandoned it, and delivered my sermons standing in the middle of the chancel, just as I had to do in my senior homiletics class. The high altitude of the pulpit can create a high attitude in a preacher. We can begin to think of ourselves as somehow higher than ordinary people, when the truth is that we are as ordinary as every other human being. The people who sit before us on a Sunday morning, as well as the people who never enter our sanctuaries are as close to Christ as we are. The cosmic Christ is pursuing every human life, and we are no exception to this loving quest. We are no holier or closer to Christ than anyone else on the face of the earth. Our prayers receive no more of God’s attention than those of some wretched soul who cries for help from the gutters of human experience. We must never be deceived by the high altitude of our pulpit.

After about six months of preaching while holding my sermon rolled up in my right hand, I walked to the front empty-handed. I didn’t feel free from the manuscript. But I noticed I could use my right hand while preaching. I’m not sure anyone in the congregation noticed. It wasn’t the breakthrough I had anticipated. But it was a step. I continued to preach without a manuscript the following year.

As seminary was nearing an end, I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I had put my resume online and had interviewed at a couple of churches, but two of the churches in which I was most interested had turned me down. In the Presbyterian denomination, a person cannot be ordained until a church calls them to be its pastor. Then my birthday rolled around. My classes were done, graduation was in two weeks, and I was treading water with no sign of employment in sight. Trying to keep my hopes up. Knowing nothing was certain. On the day of my birthday, Morgan called and asked if I would meet him at the student center. I sat down in one of those familiar chairs where Morgan and I had met to talk about sermons. Then I saw Morgan and Nora coming to the door. They had a birthday cake! I didn’t even know Morgan knew it was my birthday. As we celebrated with students who passed through, I took a breath. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I could even be a pastor. Yet, surrounded with all these unknowns, we celebrated. It was one of the kindest gifts I had received in a very long time.

Two months later, I had a call to a church in Indiana and Morgan moved to Florida. I called him and asked, “Can we continue our sermon conversations?”

He said yes.

2. Maccartney, Preaching Without Notes, 148.

3. Predmore, “Poem,” 104.

4. Raven, Wanderer’s Way, 123.