We are always preaching to the lost. Even those who insist they are among the saved are just as lost as they can be. Not lost to God, as if that were ever possible, but they don’t know where life is going. Maybe when they were young they had a clear sense of purpose and direction, but one of the great marks of maturity is to realize that we are all just wandering around through life.
Perhaps the best metaphor for the life of faith is found in the biblical story of the exodus. As the Hebrews passed through the Red Sea, so we pass through the waters of baptism to begin our journey to the promised land. But before any of us arrive, we spend much time in the wilderness where we discover that our parched souls are actually thirsting for God.
It is easy to get lost in the wilderness. Some who sit in the pews are lost in great crises. Others are lost in fleeting moments of happiness that will not endure. Most are lost in the overwhelming ordinariness of life.
This is where the preacher enters. We are never more, or less, than wilderness guides.
Like most pastors I am tempted to think my job is to get people to the promised land. In earlier years, my preaching offered a lot of advice as if there were short cuts through the desert. Nothing could be more dangerous to the souls of those who listen to our sermons. They are in the desert at God’s invitation, and I cannot rush them out of this place where they will discover the sufficiency of divine grace.
Besides, offering religious prescriptions for getting ahead in life is dishonest preaching. I’m certainly not getting ahead as I wander around in the wilderness called church. My most common experience as a pastor is deja vu. I just keep listening to the same tired debates in the congregation, and in the lives of those who have not finished their fundamental argument with God.
I could lament the fact that after all these years we don’t seem to be making progress. Or I could help my fold of lost sheep see the mystery of walking with God through another day in the unpredictable wilderness where anything can happen. The point of walking with God is not to arrive, but to walk with God.
As we trudge along, we discover God is making a way by providing water in the desert. I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (Isaiah 43:19). The Hebrew here is not exactly clear. Some translations say “rivers in the desert,” and some say “streams.” It’s a small thread of water. Just barely enough. But it’s all we need to continue the journey another week.
If the desert wilderness is an enduring image of the frightening place where we must go to find the future, the stream along the way is the persistent image of God’s grace that saves our lives while we meander our way toward that future. It’s a stream for which we yearn like deer thirsting for running water.
The preacher is the voice crying out in the wilderness, pointing the congregation to that stream.
When preaching on loneliness, for example, the temptation is to present the community of the church as an easy remedy to the problem. But that would be a shortcut that violates the need of the lonely heart to rest in God. So it is more helpful to guide their loneliness into solitude in the presence of God, where they must remain for a while. Until a person is content to live with only God, he or she will never be free to love others without turning them into failed saviors.
Similarly, mission sermons need to focus not on rushing to conquer the promised land, but on participating in the mission of Jesus Christ, who finds those lost in the wilderness of failed missions. And sermons on faith can never do more than invite people to drink from the thin stream of God’s faithfulness that they feared was only a mirage in the desert.
Pointing out the stream of grace that runs through our lives is not the same as getting a congregation across the Jordan. That will come in God’s own timing. Our calling is to direct their thirst toward God.
M. Craig Barnes is pastor of National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., and editor-at-large of Leadership.
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership.
