Some people nap regularly, but Thurman nodded off only when my sermon deserved it. When his attention wilted, I knew to check the temperature of my rhetoric.
Thurman was my thermometer. One of those thermometers hanging on a doorpost on a barn; a red alcohol glass tube, black numbers printed on a rusty-edged white steel back, advertising a feed business that died in the fifties. If Thurman’s eyelids dropped, I knew my sermon had cooled off dangerously. Soon the congregation would pass from open-eyed catnapping to cold-cave hibernation. Even I was bored.
I need some homiletical friction. My notes aren’t bad, they just aren’t all that hot. I don’t need something nuclear. I need to be more clear. I may be preaching too much story without a point, or too much point without a story. My reasoning may be thin or my illustrations may be fat. I may need a whopper illustration to materialize in my head while I wave my arms in thin air.
I fast-forward through my notes looking for the place to light a match.
Serendipitous illustrations come to me in mental pictures. If I decide to use one, the words will just have to come. When a sermon picture arrives in the middle of speaking a sentence, I continue the sentence while I evaluate the idea. Evaluating and shaping metaphors and illustrations is complex business and often takes days of rumination during preparation. While I’m preaching I may have ten minutes to one second. When the instant arrives that I must use it or lose it, I leap over the edge grasping it like a parachute or I drop it on the ledge and walk away—while I’m preaching, of course.
Sometimes small adjustments make a big difference. Think ahead. If a ten-verse Scripture quotation is dead ahead, cut to the three verses that really count. Do my notes contain a series of precise theological statements? Read the points slowly. Don’t repeat. Move away from the pulpit, sometimes when my body leaves dead center, my mind begins thinking outside the box. I pray. “Lord, make something out of this. Help at least one person here.”
If my best shot at corrections and repeated elbows from his wife don’t wake Thurman, I start thinking about lunch. Odd as it may seem, when I fantasize about nachos while I preach to the finish line, without fail, someone who rarely makes a comment tells me the sermon meant all the world to them.
Of course it happens. After all, we serve “the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17).
Taking the family portrait
During worship, before preaching, I can’t help but check the turnout. It’s all ego and it has nothing to do with preaching. I spent many years preaching to crowds of twenty. A difference of four people impacted my ego. What a waste, then and now. The Word of God remains the same regardless of the numbers.
Once I’m preaching, the numbers mean nothing to me. While I preach I take stock of the congregation in a way that glorifies God and blesses the people. Most pastor-preachers attest to this phenomenon. I call it “taking the family portrait.”
While I speak the notes and adjust the message to the response, I’m taking mental snapshots of the congregation, which merge to become a family portrait for that Sunday. On Monday I couldn’t list who was present, but if I am asked “Was Bobby Stockbottle in church on Sunday?” I can tell you, and I can give you a rough idea of his attendance for the last year.
This ongoing picture of the congregation is vital to pastoral work. Because it’s a picture and not a head count. I remember their demeanor as they listened to the sermon. I remember if they squirmed or amen’d, wept or smiled, listened to every word, or looked bored to the core. I remember what year they stopped looking uncomfortable in worship and “got into it.” I remember when they left early and I remember wondering why.
I remember this information about each person for years.
When I move to a different congregation, the pictures from the past parish lose focus as I build a new album. Most preachers can supply this kind of information about their congregation, and we all gather it the same way—while we are preaching. We learn so much about our people while we preach!
Essential, unexpected things happen in people’s lives while we preach. On occasion we get to watch.
Unexplained weeping
When I was eight years old, doctors diagnosed my youngest sister with a life-threatening neuromuscular disease. Not long after this my father began weeping in church every Sunday. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t buckle in two with his face in his hands. His tear glands flowed and his voice cracked when we sang hymns. I never asked him why he was crying, and I didn’t know what he was thinking. I still don’t. But something important happened inside him during worship.
This went on for several years and tapered off. My sister is now a wife, mother, and special education teacher.
In 1989 my wife Debbie got Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In three weeks her life changed from being a graduate student and an adjunct professor to plowed in bed with a low-grade fever, severe short-term memory loss, and barely enough energy to take a shower. Still, somehow, most Sundays she made it to church.
During worship she sat and wept, the same way my father had some thirty years before. I figured the same thing was happening inside her that was happening inside my father. The Spirit was praying from within. Unutterable changes were occurring.
Debbie is well now and is a school psychologist.
Patricia was undergoing intensive counseling and prayer ministry for her split personality engendered by years of sexual abuse as a child. Attending worship was a miracle. But God had more for her. During worship the Spirit prayed through her as she reached for the hem of His garment. She wept those Sundays, just as my father and Debbie had.
Now she is one person.
I’ve seen the same thing many times. Now and then I know what the problem is; often I do not. When I see a person crying in church, I don’t ask them about it. It’s probably not my business. The person is crying involuntarily. They are not choosing to tell me anything. The Spirit is working but I may not be welcome or helpful in the matrix. They know I see them crying.
Sometimes they ask for help by apologizing for crying during the sermon. That’s my invitation to enter the conversation. Invariably they do not know why they cry in church. To them it feels like spontaneous combustion. I tell them it is the work of the Spirit inside of them praying prayers they cannot pray for themselves.
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Rom 8:26-27).
That it happens over years proves that it’s not about my preaching. The Spirit is working, and I watch and wonder while I preach.
What Thurman sees
It was a cold Montana winter morning; sunny, windless, temperature somewhere in the 40s—below zero. Jack and I wore coats and gulped hot coffee as we looked out the single-pane picture window needing caulking. In walked Earl, with more energy in his eighties than I had in my thirties.
“Good morning, fellas, how do you like this morning? She’s cold out there, I tell you. Those mother cows were glad to see me this morning. Is the coffee still on?”
So I asked obligingly, “How cold is it at your place, Earl?”
“Well, Dave, I’ll tell ya. The thermometer’s hit bottom, and it’s pullin’ on the nail.”
We laughed.
That was twenty years ago. Some-times Thurman reminds me of Earl. One time I saw Thurman pray in church with eyes as cold as death, as if the Spirit was pullin’ on the nail.
I think I’m preachin’ hot. I glance at Thurman. He’s payin’ me no mind. His head is pitched up. He’s looking over my head beyond the walnut cross, beyond the cream colored bricks, beyond the street and even the sky. His powder blue eyes, usually waterless and pointed, are dilated, liquid, and melancholic. God is pouring something into him and pulling something out of him from far, far away.
I’m verbalizing my content, manifesting it with my body, analyzing my illustrations and Scriptures two points ahead, taking a family portrait—and here’s Thurman looking like Jesus praying on the night before he was betrayed.
This is homiletical multi-tasking.
My frontal lobe finds a few lazy brain cells in a canyon in my cerebral cortex and puts them to work watching Thurman. I can preach and I can watch him, but I can’t figure it out. I didn’t ask him about it later. You didn’t ask him about things like that.
A month later Thurman went in for a regular check-up. They found cancer all through his body. I called on him in the hospital. The diagnosis surprised him but he accepted it.
Not self-revelatory by nature, he surprised me when he said: “I had no idea this was coming, but just a few weeks ago, for the first time in a long time, I felt very lonely. I told my wife, ‘Honey, I miss mom and dad. I think I’d like to see them again.'”
Given this opening, I told him I’d seen him gazing into heaven in church.
“Yes,” he said, “I felt very sad that morning. I was praying, but I didn’t know what I was praying for. Now I know.”
He said it so matter of factly, I realized that I had seen a rare physical manifestation of Thurman’s normal prayer life. The circumstances forced this exceedingly modest man to break open for a few short minutes.
I looked at Thurman lying in bed and said, “You are a man of God.”
“Well, thank you,” he laughed, “but I’m no different than the rest.”
“No, you are different,” I rejoined. “I know lots of wonderful Christians, and I love and respect every one of them, but you are special, you are a man of God.”
With a humble smile he gave in to the truth. “Thank you,” he said, “It means a lot to hear you say that.”
I suppose God wanted Thurman to hear who he really was. Or maybe God wanted me to see what a man of God looks like.
Normally we assume that our souls open up to one another in one-on-one or small group conversations. But openings occur in worship and during preaching that may exceed what a person can choose to reveal in person.
Reading unclear signs
Are some congregations easier to read than others?
It seems like an overtly emotional congregation would reveal more than a quiet one. But in fact, quiet congregations are quiet and noisy congregations are noisy. It’s all quite normal in either case. But in a noisy congregation when we see a man worshiping soberly, like the people in quiet churches whom he thinks aren’t really worshiping, something’s happening. When a man in a quiet church weeps and flushes red, like the people he considers too emotional in noisy churches, something’s happening.
Pastors notice the anomaly, the supernatural in the preternatural.
But when a person cries in worship for the first time, it’s hard to tell if it’s the sermon topic, their teenager, or their portfolio.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell what’s going on, and it hurts real bad. When I preach on divorce and a person still raw from a divorce starts crying, I know why and I feel horrible, too. On the other hand, even with an obvious connection between the topic and a person’s outburst, I don’t really know if they are sad, mad, embarrassed, or feeling conviction. Nevertheless, when I think I’m hurting someone’s feelings in a sermon, my first reaction is to soften my message.
So I examine my content. Am I preaching the Scriptures or legalism? Have I inserted ideas I’m not sure of? Are my illustrations too strong? Am I overstating my case to crank on people I’m mad at?
Usually I leave things as planned. Sometimes a scriptural, carefully illustrated sermon causes reactions that look like hurt feelings, but may be just the opposite.
When Robin ran out
I’m an expository preacher who preaches books paragraph by paragraph. That means preaching sermons on God’s sovereignty. I’m preaching just such a sermon and near the back sits 19-year-old Robin, whose 55-year-old father just died of a heart attack.
She tears up, that seems natural. Near the end of the sermon, she stands up, turns her head and rushes out of the sanctuary.
My heart liquefied. I barely finished the message. I was not done. The second service cometh.
During the half hour between services, I greeted people, but I was agonizing over the sermon. Should I change it? I thought and prayed through my outline, looking for places where truth may have degenerated into insensitivity.
At 11:30 I rose in the pulpit, committed to preaching the full content of the sermon, but sadness grayed my soul as I preached. I anticipated an annihilated spirit Sunday afternoon, agonizing over a hurt sister. Nevertheless, the sermon preached powerfully.
That afternoon, at home, as we sealed the morning’s activities with our post-worship nacho ritual, I expressed my angst to my wife. She responded brightly. “Oh, yes, Robin found me during the second service. She told me to tell you that she loved the sermon. The reason she left early was so she could drive home and bring her mother to church because she needed to hear it, too. Unfortunately she was too tired to come.”
Robin’s mother had cancer.
Longing for nachos
I’m preaching the second sermon; I’m tired. I don’t know where the sermon is going. I don’t remember what’s coming next. I can’t change anything. The family portrait will be blurry this Sunday. I wouldn’t notice a soul astir if Thurman stood up and announced the end of the world.
Halfway through the sermon I see a picture in my mind: a cookie pan with hot cheddar cheese oozing over corn chips. I tell myself: In ten minutes I’ll be done. We’ll eat nachos and I will fall asleep on a football game. Tomorrow I’ll go golfing. Where will I golf tomorrow? Hmm. I haven’t golfed at Sharon Woods for a while—
I’m preaching the Word of God, filled with the Spirit, and I’m tired beyond words. But thinking about lunch and my day off isn’t self-centered. My pre-sermon, congregational ego-count is self-centered. My fear that the sermon will bomb and I will look bad is self-centered. My reluctance to step on toes is self-centered. But looking forward to a lunch with my family and a good nap is nothing more than a Hobbit longing to return to the Shire.
How can it be wrong to desire rest on the Sabbath?
I yearn for the end of the spiritual warfare of preaching. I don’t like watching people cry in church. I tire of wondering if I’ve torn someone’s heart out. When I preach I want heaven more than any other time—even if the deepest longing of my heart comes to me as a mental picture of cheese melted over corn chips.
Multi-tasking comfort food while preaching may be a vision of the land of milk and honey. Who said we can’t receive openings from the Spirit while we preach?
I hope I didn’t drool.
David Hansen pastors Kenwood Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
