THE SUN WAS JUST ABOUT TO BREAK over the ridge of Turkey Feather Peak as we rode toward the edge of a large meadow ringed with aspens turning orange and gold. As if on cue, we heard the eerie bugle of a bull elk in full rut.
“Get down,”I whispered to my companion. “We’ll sneak up on him from here.”
“What the (expletive deleted) was that noise?” yelled the fat man on the horse behind me.
“Shut up!” I whispered as loud as I dared. “It’s what you came here for.”
What about Bob?
Over twenty years ago, I was guiding elk hunters for an outfitter in New Mexico’s remote Gila Wilderness. At 8,500 feet above sea level, our fingers were numb from the cold, though it was only the first week of October. My dude for this five-day, trophy-bull hunt was Bob, an accountant from Pensacola, Florida.
We had picked up Bob and four other clients in town the day before. During our trip to camp, two hours in the truck and two more on horseback, I discovered that grumbling Bob had never ridden a horse, slept in a tent, or fired the gorgeous Ruger Model 70 rifle he had purchased for the trip. As we talked about his liabilities, Bob repeatedly stated, “But if I can just get one decent shot, I’ll be happy.”
Though it was almost dark when we got to camp at Turkey Feather Park, we managed to sight Bob’s rifle in. After supper, I explained a few rudimentary facts about aiming for a clean kill. He limped off to bed, already saddlesore: “All I’m asking for is a shot. Just one good shot.”
I smirked at Alex, my boss. “You’re going to have your hands full with that guy.”
The next morning, Alex took a father and son from Dallas down toward the East Fork trail; Chuck took two Border Patrol officers from El Paso on a big circle back toward Willow Creek; and I, chicken little in the pecking order, was stuck with Bob.
Well, all he wanted was a shot.
I knew the whereabouts of a nice, five-point bull near the top of the mountain. I’d been planning to save him for myself; my tag was for the following week of elk season. But after less than twenty-four hours with Bob, I was ready to make sacrifices. I’d get him an easy shot and then he could sit in camp the rest of the week and nurse his sore behind.
That’s how we ended up on the mountain that morning.
One decent shot
I had already dismounted and tied my horse. Bob was entangled in his reins, lead rope, camera, binoculars, canteen, and thermos—all tied to his saddle horn and rattling together as he tried to get off his horse. He finally swung his right leg over the horse’s back, put it on the ground, and fell flat on his back, his left foot still in the stirrup. His mount, old Buford, looked down at him in disgust. Had it been any horse in the string besides this gentle senior citizen, Bob would have been stomped into a mud puddle, and I could have ridden back to camp in peace.
I managed to get his foot loose, certain by now the elk were somewhere in Arizona. Bob ran around behind Buford and jerked his rifle from the scabbard. He then opened a saddlebag and started slinging sandwiches, Twinkies, toilet paper, and a first-aid kit, digging out a box of .270 cartridges from the bottom of the bag. He jammed shells into his bolt-action rifle, shaking and mumbling, “Just a shot. I just want a shot.”
I was about ready for a shot of something myself.
Finally, we started creeping up to the meadow. Amazingly, the bull bugled again and was answered by another bugle. It looked like we might have ringside seats for one of nature’s grandest battles, two massive bulls battling for the love interest of an ugly and largely disinterested cow elk.
I could see our quarry thrashing some saplings on the other edge of the meadow. I tried to get Bob down on his hands and knees, but he just didn’t bend that well. We finally got behind a deadfall fir tree. When I peeked over the log, the adrenaline rush almost took off the top of my head. There, just over one hundred and fifty yards away, stood a massive six-by-six bull. His antler beams must have been as big around as my forearms. When he threw his head back to bugle, his symmetrical tines reached his flanks. This one might make it into the Boone-and-Crockett record book.
I looked at Bob. He was watching another bull edging into the meadow from the south. Smaller, but still a keeper, he was raising his rifle to shoot when I pointed out the big daddy. Bob grinned and shifted around to face the big bull, now standing broadside to us. Bob steadied his rifle across the log, laid the scope’s crosshairs on that little swirl of hair just behind the front leg that points the way to a clean heart-and-lung shot, took a deep breath, held it for an eternity—and squeezed the trigger. Click.
He’d forgotten to put a bullet in the chamber.
Bob cursed and jacked the bolt of his rifle, putting a cartridge where it should have been in the first place. Both bulls looked our way, threw their heads back, and trotted off into the thick brush that covered the west side of the ridge. We’d seen the last of those two.
I was so enraged I couldn’t speak. Keeping my mouth shut was not due to any innate self-discipline; it had mostly to do with the fact that this guy had paid my boss a thousand dollars to be here, and I wanted to keep my job. I knew of a couple of other places where we’d likely see some elk, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of a repeat performance. I wasn’t going to waste my effort on someone who would blow a gimme shot like that.
We rimmed around the mountain, largely avoiding prime elk habitat for the rest of the day. After ten hours in the saddle, I hoped Bob would be so sore he’d beg out of tomorrow’s hunt.
After supper that night, around the campfire, two of the other hunters shared their success stories while I stewed. Everyone else talked about what they had seen and done that day, and Alex finally asked the wrong question, “Bob, how did your day go?”
Bob didn’t tell the group what an idiot he was. He just scowled at me and responded, “I’ll be happy if I can get just one decent shot.”
It’s a miracle I’m not serving a life sentence for murder.
Cynics anonymous
Until I got into ministry, I thought hunting guides and dude ranchers were the most cynical people on the planet. My buddy Bob has many friends, and they all want to go on a western adventure. It can be hard for people who have spent their entire lives around horses, mountains, and guns to tolerate the relative incompetence of those who will pay so handsomely for the privilege of being cold, wet, sore, and hungry. The misery of pleasing an aggravating client is eased only by the chance to tell the story to one’s peers.
It may not be much different for pastors. We’re well educated. We’ve spent a good part of our adult lives in study. We attend conferences to keep sharp. We can spend hours in prayer and reflection if we so choose. And on a frequent basis, we are asked to be a spiritual guide for people who, without benefit of our background and experience, can blow the simplest spiritual challenges.
So we gather at the Monday lunch meeting of the ministerial association.
Tales of prima donna musicians, rebel teachers, and perennial soreheads are shared before the salad is even served. Black humor comes with dessert, piping hot with no cream or sugar. “Just blowing off steam,” we say. “Just laughing to keep from crying.”
But there’s a deeper cynicism, the suspicion at our soul’s core that the sermon we prepared and delivered with such hopeful anticipation went largely unheard. Maybe the big joke of the universe is they’ve all gone largely unheard.
I was so proud of my first inductive sermon. I built the tension throughout the message, painting the congregation into a spiritual corner from which there appeared to be no escape. Finally, in the nick of time, I brought the Word of God to light in a way that, brilliantly, in my opinion, made the sanctifying work of Christ make perfect sense.
On the way home, my wife, accustomed to and happy with my usual deductive, linear approach, said, “I couldn’t follow you very well today. What were your points?”Perhaps her comment was payback for the times she spent a good deal more time than usual on a special meal or on redecorating a room, and I failed to notice. But such comments make us stop and ask, Does preaching really matter?
Sometimes the doubt comes and goes like a mountain spring shower; other times cynical moods settle in like a gray, claustrophobic Chicago winter. In spite of the “nice job”and “good message” heard at the door, sometimes you look around and wonder, Is anyone’s life being changed around here? Are we really making progress?
Even if there is evidence of change, is preaching really a part of his transformation? Or is it mostly because of his twelve-step group? You know good and well that most people would rather lie like a rug than hurt your feelings.
It’s not hard to reach a toxic level of cynicism. I can come to believe that I am preaching to fools who just don’t get it. Worse, maybe I’m the biggest fool for wasting my life preparing messages that don’t make one slight bit of difference in the lives and hearts of people. While I’ll never breathe a word of such doubt to a soul, that is my deepest fear, my greatest insecurity.
As I read the first few verses of Ecclesiastes, I realize I’m not the first preacher to fall into cynicism. “Meaningless!” says the preacher. “It’s all meaningless!” Even when I read his conclusion—”Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”—I don’t get the sense he has purged cynicism from his soul. To me, he sounds like someone who knows the right answer and says it, even though his mood is still foul.
Fools all around
If preaching is pointless, then all preachers are fools, and I am their king. That much from the apostle Paul can be determined:
The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.… God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe … but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. (1 Cor. 1:18, 21, 23, niv)
Who can dispute that the people with whom we share the Word can act in ignorant and foolish ways, much like hunter Bob? In 1 Corinthians 2:14, Paul says, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned”(niv).
Why then hike deeper into the wilderness of preaching when you’re pretty sure that, given another opportunity, people will repeat their foolish mistakes?
I had been in a sermon series entitled “Moving Toward Maturity” from the book of James for seven weeks. In just 108 verses, James uses the imperative verb form more than fifty times. I believe the sermonic form should take its cue from textual form, so this series had all the subtlety of the proverbial ton of bricks.
A lot was going on in my life during that period of time. My grandfather had just died. I was battling some chronic health problems. Our most godly lay-leader was dying of brain cancer. A young couple in whom we had invested significant emotional energy had just left the church in anger. The church had recently paid off a major debt, and the almost inevitable loss of steam occurred—growth and giving dropped far more than the normal summer slump.
Then there was the ecclesiastical equivalent of Chinese water torture—the chronic drip of gossip and malfeasance from a handful of members who had crippled the church for decades. I’d been confronting, working with, and praying for the parties involved for some time, but trying to find the headwaters of the latest rumor is a more perilous adventure than Lewis and Clark ever undertook. My expeditions always led back to the same three or four people, but they would neither admit their guilt nor express even the slightest remorse over the hurt they continually caused.
Fatigue, unresolved emotional pain, and an extended season of conflict had ganged up on me, and cynicism had free reign. Preaching had become a bore and an exercise in futility.
The text for that Sunday was James 3:1-12. In my study that week, you could smell the stench of apathy. I could not get into the spirit of study. You’ve heard of the sinner’s prayer? Well, I prayed the cynic’s prayer: Listen, Lord. If persistent, personal confrontation hasn’t stopped the flow of gossip around here, do you really think anyone will listen to a sermon? Come on. Everyone will just think I’m talking to someone else anyway. Don’t you think I could better spend my time doing other things? Besides, it’s Labor Day weekend and everyone will be out of town anyway.… Tell me. What’s the point?
My prayer faded away as my thoughts turned to the big team roping event taking place thirty miles away. After years away from the sport of rodeo, I’d been given the opportunity to compete again. Fact and fantasy merged:
I’m a better roper now than I was fifteen years ago. I’ve got a great horse, talented partners like Joe, Ray, and Terry. I’ve got a winning streak going in our roping club. Who knows? I might rope well enough to win one of the trophy saddles being given away.
My daydream was interrupted by a phone call, but my priorities had been set. The sermon was to be hacked out, then I would be free to rope all day Saturday, Sunday afternoon, and all day Monday, Labor Day.
The message was entitled “The Biggest Little Troublemaker.”The lack of motivation and creativity coerced me, with only the scarcest bit of regret, to fill in the blanks of a simple outline lifted largely intact from a Warren Wiersbe commentary: The tongue has the power to direct, the power to destroy, the power to deceive.
A few personal illustrations about people who had lifted me and people who had crushed me with their tongues. A nice quote from John White’s The Fight:We gossip because we fail to love. When we love people, we don’t criticize them. If we love them, their failures hurt. We don’t advertise the sins of people we love any more than we advertise our own.”1
Major emphasis on point number two, with cross references to all the verses in Proverbs that lambaste the gossiper. Close with Psalm 19:14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” That was it, I was done. Three hours prep time, max.
Sunday came. I preached. After shaking the hands of the sparse crowd, I ran home, changed clothes, hooked up my trailer, loaded my horse, and drove eighty miles an hour to get to the roping on time. Thoughts of the sermon, those who heard it, and any consequence it may have had never caught up with me. The carelessness of it all still frightens me.
Today, looking back over the manuscript and listening to the tape, I can say it was a mediocre, lackluster sermon. Not the worst I’ve ever preached, but certainly nothing to send in to Preaching Today.
Monday I went back to the rodeo arena with thoughts only of my partners’ catching three consecutive steers by the horns, so I could rope the hind feet of those same three steers as fast as possible. Ray and I were sitting in third place after two head, waiting our turn for steer number three. The two-hundred-plus teams in our division had dwindled; just twenty or so were still in the running.
I was counting cattle in the chute, trying to figure out which steer would be ours, hoping it wasn’t the big, blue-brindle steer that dragged his feet so bad. Jim Wilson hollered at me from across the arena, “Hey, preacher! Your wife’s looking for you!”
I rode out to look for Susan amid the catcalls of “Oooh! You’re in trouble now, preacher!”
I found her car. She was obviously upset. I quickly noted that she and the two kids appeared to be fine. Dang it. I’m just one steer away from possible fame and fortune. This better be important.
“What’s up?”
“It’s Ruby. She had a massive heart attack this morning, and they don’t think she’s going to make it.”
Numbness. Fear. Guilt. More fear. Adrenaline surge. Ruby was the undisputed queen of gossip in our community. My God, was it …?No, no way. This had nothing to do with that sermon. Just coincidence. Wasn’t it? I saw in Susan’s eyes the same questions.
Someone yelled at me: “Ed! You’re up! Get in there before you forfeit!”
I loped back to the arena while building a loop, backed my buckskin into the box, and nodded at my partner. Off we went. A perfect head catch, nice easy turn, smooth rhythm. Perfect. I fired, and missed, sticking my rope in the dirt.
“Sorry, Ray,” I muttered, too much in shock to be embarrassed. I loaded up and drove to the hospital.
I wonder how Peter felt after Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead following his confrontation in Acts 5? Verse 11 says, “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”In our small town, word spread like head lice about the sermon and its apparent effect. Later that week at the Donut Shack, one of the old, whiskered coffee hounds walked over to my booth and said, “Hey there, Pastor Ed. Whatcha preachin’ about this week?”He leaned close and winked at me. “I don’t want to be yer next casualty!”
Ordinarily, I would have given it right back to him, but I couldn’t laugh. Ruby was still in critical care.
I spent much of my study time that Tuesday on the floor on my face, trembling. For the first time I had a visceral understanding of the biblical phrase “the fear of the Lord.” God could have chosen to smite me instead, as a visible demonstration of the dangers of handling holy things with nonchalance. He could have made an example out of me for my lack of faith in his ability to sanctify his children.
When I stood to preach the next Sunday, I was still shaking. I’ve never encountered such an attentive audience. We continued our way through the third chapter on James, wanting desperately to pretend that last Sunday had not happened the way it did. Yet we had seen the hand of God, and we were sore afraid. That message might not have been a great homiletical masterpiece, but I can tell you this much—both preacher and congregation were fully engaged that Sunday. We had seen something in our midst that convinced us that preaching had power.
Unlike Ananias and Sapphira, Ruby lived to gossip again. Amazingly, she seemed to be the least affected, at least spiritually, by what had happened. But a lot of the rest of us thought twice about passing on a juicy bit of news, even under the guise of a prayer request.
Not everyone, though: After one couple left the church, word on the gossip chain, er, prayer chain was that their leaving was because of “what Pastor Ed did to Ruby.”
I wouldn’t call what happened next revival, but there were some subtle changes over the following few months. Attendance picked up again. I had numerous conversations about spiritual matters with people who had previously revealed little spiritual bent. Two people with whom I had been sharing Christ came to faith in those weeks. Wednesday night prayer meetings took on a new tone of seriousness about the task of intercession as a few newcomers started attending and a few old-timers quit coming.
Giving increased as well. James 5 was coming up, and perhaps no one wanted to be in my sermonic sights when we got to the subject of stewardship! Following a well-attended world missions conference, our Christmas missions offering was the largest in the history of the church.
We celebrated the season of Advent that year, a radically new idea for our decidedly non-liturgical community of faith. A community Christmas Eve service saw our church packed to the rafters. We finished the year strong. God finally had our attention.
Or should I say, God had my attention.
My wife doesn’t remember that sermon as a pivotal point in the life of that church. Maybe the only real change in the congregation happened within me. Maybe it was mostly a time of personal revival. Some unconfessed pride and ambition were exposed and rooted out. Ever since, I’ve preached with more of a passion, with a faith in my task that has seldom wavered.
Witness to power
I used to laugh when Barney Fife told someone that his hands were registered with the FBI as lethal weapons. I really wonder if preachers should register their Bibles, their notepads, their pulpits. Nothing has fueled my passion for preaching more than the profound belief that preaching really matters. God can use the sermon to bring about an incredible transformation in the lives of his people. Now when cynicism begins to seep into my life, I recall when I’ve seen lives changed, and more importantly, I recall the times God has used the sermon of another to bring about a change in my life.
More than anyone, Paul knew the power of the sermon. In his introduction to the Romans, he wrote, “That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome. I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes …” (Rom. 1:15-16, niv).
Amen and amen. Cynicism loses its grip on the preacher who has witnessed the power of God move as a result of the sermon.
Then to the Corinthians: “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power (1 Cor 2:4-5, niv).
Not long after these events, I wrote these words in my journal:
Come, Holy Spirit. Demonstrate your power again and again, that my faith might rest in God and not in my puny attempts at wisdom and persuasion. Change lives through my sermon. And begin, right here, with me.
Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell
