As a preacher of sermons, I often find myself caught between desperation and dread.
In my church tradition, the “prayers of the people” precede the sermon; in some congregations, a microphone is passed, and joys and concerns begin to pile up immediately and directly. Because the sermon follows so closely on the heels of the prayers, it can often feel as if the sermon is meant to be a response to the requests, adequate to the immensity of what has been shared.
Hearing the requests means that I am dimly aware of the sort of pain that is being held by the people who are present: difficulty finding work, cancer diagnoses, wayward children. I feel desperation, and the impossibility of the task. In the face of these concrete longings and losses, what can a preacher possibly say?
The prayer time also places the concerns of the congregation alongside the tragedies and injustices of the wider world. Often, as I move towards the lectern, the voice in my head goes something like this: how dare you? While we remember that many in our world go hungry, while we lament our inability to displace wickedness in high places, while we mourn another mass shooting, while we hold so many quiet desperations tightly in our chests, how dare you? In a world that so often feels abandoned by God, how dare you wound with these words of hope? How dare you speak “peace, peace,” when there is no peace?
At the same time, and paradoxically, I also feel a kind of dread. I fear that my sermon will simply function as a priestly transaction, a speech act to legitimize the status quo. As I prepare to preach, I sometimes wonder if I am expected to show up and say: “Good morning. Everything you believe is basically right. We are right. We are on the right side of history. For the next twenty minutes or so, let me remind you of just how right we are. Thanks be to God.”
It is hard to fault the impulse. The world is full of pain. Most of us are just trying to survive; perhaps we are less concerned about being right and are just hoping we will be ok. But in either case, we aren’t looking to make any major changes; we aren’t looking to hear someone say: repent, turn around, change everything.
Do we really want to hear the Word of God, to submit to the double-edged sword that discerns “the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12)?[1]
In the midst of these thoughts, I sometimes recall the passage from Buechner in Telling the Truth (1977), the best book about preaching I have ever read:
The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on his lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?[2]
Buechner’s next sentence is the one that echoes in my heart as I stand up to preach:
Let him tell them the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. [3]
The first lesson in telling the truth, Buechner teaches us, is learning to respect the silence. This means we must shun platitude, refusing to speak too quickly, too glibly; we must resist the temptation to fill the anxious gaps with cliché. There is truth in silence, in refusing to speak. Buechner points out that in response to Pilate’s question “What is truth?” Jesus just stands there. He just stands there. His silence, and his presence, is the answer to Pilate’s question about the truth.[4]
I have a friend who told me that if he ever gets a chance to preach a sermon, he will stand up and say, “It’s complicated,” and then sit back down. I think I rolled my eyes when he told me that – does it really illuminate to state the obvious? – but his point was less about the message and more about the refusal to speak. He was attending to the truth that lives in the silence, in refusing to name the unnameable, as if reality could be made more manageable through linguistic conquest. It would be better, my friend thinks, to acknowledge the irreducible complexity of existence, and then to sit together in the silence.
But the problem with silence – as with acknowledging complexity – is that most of us cannot bear it for very long. To sit in silence often leads not towards solace but towards self-accusation, the sort we find in the psalmist’s desperate cry: “How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” (Ps. 13:2). In my case, to sit in silence before the sermon is to be tossed back and forth between desperation and dread. As Buechner continues:
The preacher is not brave enough to be literally silent for long, and since it is his calling to speak the truth with love, even if he were brave enough, he would not be silent for long because we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.[5]
Few of us can sit in silence for very long. We cry out in prayer because we long to know that there is something, someone beyond the silence, present to us in it. We long to hear a word that comes from outside ourselves; we long to hear a voice that tells us what we cannot tell ourselves.
And unlike Jesus, who can just stand there, presenting himself as the Truth, the preacher must point away from himself, offering a “frame of words around the silence that is truth.” The sermon does not deny the silence or the complexity; rather it places both in a larger story, so that the silence can be experienced in terms of the good news of the gospel rather than all of the other stories we are always telling ourselves.
Out of the silence let the only real news come, which is sad news before it is glad news and that is fairy tale last of all.[6]
With this sentence we get a glimpse not just of Buechner’s philosophy of preaching but also of his account of “the truth.” The only truth adequate to the complexity the world, to all the reasons for our silence, is a truth that makes space for our deep sadness, but also opens the way to deep gladness, through stirring up our hopes that the story could somehow be better than our best imaginings. In other words, the truth that preachers are invited to speak in love – the truth that all believers are invited to tell, is the truth of the gospel.
This is not a simple task. Like my friend, we may wish for silent (or at least shorter) sermons because we have heard too many sermons that make us feel “preached at” rather than “preached to.” Preaching is a precarious business, Buechner writes: “People who preach sermons without realizing that they’re heading straight for Scylla and Charybdis ought to try a safer and more productive line of work.”[7]
But the gravity present in preaching is only different in degree, not kind, from the ordinary gravity of telling the truth in ordinary life. Few of us regularly stand before a congregation to preach a sermon. And yet, most of us find ourselves sitting with friends and loved ones, aware of the longings and losses that live just beneath the surface of everyday life. A child struggles to find his place at a new school. A coworker tragically loses a parent. A friend is waiting on their results from the oncologist. Is there anything to say?
Perhaps we say nothing, respecting the silence, allowing life to unfold in its messiness, without trying to manage it with our words. But there may also come a time, in the midst of the silence, when we are invited to speak, to offer some words of comfort or counsel. We begin to speak, aware that we are charting our own path between desperation and dread, between Scylla and Charybdis. But there is no one else, and it is our moment to speak. What will we say?
We will tell them the truth. We will tell them in a way that respects the truth in the silence, that offers a frame for the silence, but that also points to the possibility that there is Another, just standing there, offering himself: the way, the truth, the life (John 14:6).
Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust—
there may yet be hope.
(Lam. 3:28-29)
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Works cited:
[1] All Bible quotations of from the King James Version.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: the gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), p.23.
[3] Ibid, p.23.
[4] Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: daily readings in the ABCs of faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p.395
[5] Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.23.
[6] Ibid, p.23.
[7] Buechner, Beyond Words, p.365.
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