Preaching and Living

I got my Christian Century (Feb. 08, 2011, pp. 10-12) in my mailbox tonight. I was reading it at Amy’s house, for Sue and I went there to eat. There is an article called Learning to Preach written by William H. Willimon, United Methodist bishop and teacher of preaching. He shared that when he was with the U.S. Army, he was forced to jump from a parachute tower. At the base of the tower, he explained to the sergeant that he was afraid of height. He got yelled at and being dragged up the stairs. Over the edge of the tower, he got pushed and fell down in a pile of sand. Then he said, “There, that wasn’t so bad after all.” Public speaking is not easy. Persuasion is no easy task. “Preaching is so difficult that no one can do it without being summoned. Few of us preachers mount a pulpit on Sunday morning because we are naturally good at it and enjoy mouthing off before a crowd. We got put there,” he said. But at the end of the day, “There, that wasn’t so bad after all.”

When he was a student at Yale Divinity School, he confessed to his professor: “I was self-conscious about my thick southern accent, which everyone in New Haven seemed compelled to note and ridicule." The professor said, “You can make good money in Texas with that accent.” He said he had no intention to preach in Texas. I can totally identify with his self-consciousness. I thought that that self-consciousness would go away someday. I now realize that there are certain things in life I need to live with instead of living without. I can’t preach without that self-consciousness. I either treat it as an enemy or Iearn to be friend with it. I choose the latter. My life experience enriches my preaching; my preaching life gives me an angle to understand my life. After each sermon, “There, that wasn’t so bad after all” echoes in my mind.

After the conversation, the professor lent him some tapes and said, “Listen to these, they are some of the greatest preachers of our time.” He spent the rest of the day to listen to these sermons and found out that all these preachers didn’t possess a great voice—“all of them had odd speech quirks and vocal weaknesses.” But they made him want to listen to them as if they had something very important to say to him. He thought: “I got the point: as in the Bible, God tends to call the ‘wrong’ people, without a surfeit of gifts, to do God’s work.” 2 Cor. 12:9—“…My power is made perfect in weakness.”

Since my resignation, here and there I’ve spent some time to think what my theological compulsion is under which I preach. In my study of John Calvin lately, I came across Rom. 10:14—“And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” It’s a simple verse that loads with intense theological implications.

I start to be friend with myself and my time. I start to be thankful for this precious period in life that I don’t have to live under any compulsion. It’s an art to live under this current condition, though.