August 1, 2007
I've found myself mulling over these words put to page by one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner. I can certainly see how the words may challenge or anger you. But then again, they may encourage you as you've been allowing (or at least thinking about allowing) a little more flesh-and-blood into the pulpit as a preacher:
Sad to say, the people who seem to lose touch with themselves and with God most conspicuously are of all things ministers ... there is precious little in most of their preaching to suggest that they have rejoiced or suffered with the rest of mankind ...
Along with much of the rest of mankind, ministers have had such moments, we can only assume, but more often than not they don't seem to trust them, don't draw on them, don't talk about them.
Instead they keep setting them aside for some reason - maybe because they seem too private to share or too trivial or too ambiguous or not religious enough; maybe because what God seems to be saying to them through their flesh-and-blood experience has a depth and mystery and power to it which make all their homiletical pronouncements about God sound empty by comparison. The temptation then is to stick to the homiletical pronouncements. Comparatively empty as they may be, they are at least familiar. They add up. Congregations have come to expect homiletical pronouncements and to take comfort in them, and the preachers who pronounce them can move them around in various thought-provoking and edifying ways which nobody will feel unsettled or intimidated by because they have heard them so often.
Ministers run the awful risk, in other words, of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives of a living God who transcends everything they think they know and can say about him and is full of extraordinary surprises. Instead they tend to become professionals who have mastered all the techniques of institutional religion and who speak on religious matters with what often seems a maximum of authority and a minimum of vital personal involvement. Their sermons often sound as bland as they sound bloodless. The faith they proclaim appears to be no longer rooted in or nourished by or challenged by their own lives but instead free-floating, secondhand, passionless. They sound, in other words, burnt out.
-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 36-38
Posted by Brian Lowery at 10:36 AM on August 1, 2007
