Greetings bloggers!
It’s a joy to be able to dust off the old blog again and get some writing out! Life has been in a big ole series of transitions. I started this month officially as the Pastor at Laboratory Presbyterian Church in Washington, which is an interesting transition from Associate Pastor under the best of circumstances, and just a roller coaster when you’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Fun times!
There are any number of things that are different in being a solo pastor in a small church than my time as an associate in a large congregation. One that caught my attention this last week has to do with preaching, and how I approach it.
When I was an associate pastor, I usually only preached once, maybe twice a month in the contemporary service. Trips upstairs to the pulpit in the sanctuary were even more rare, maybe 2-3 trips a year. Because my brain constantly works in metaphors, I had a tendency to think about baseball in these moments. I was abjectly horrible at baseball when I was a kid. I got on base exactly two times: once I was walked, and once I was hit by a pitch, so it’s a little odd that my brain heads in this direction. But when I had the opportunity to preach, particularly when I had the pulpit upstairs, I tried to imagine myself in the batter’s box. I tend to preach from the lectionary, a weekly collection of scriptures that are suggested for pastors to work with to keep us from repeating the same sermons again and again. That, combined with whatever was going on in the larger culture, from entertainment to politics to media, felt like the pitch to me. Sometimes I got a really sweet set of verses that perfectly met the cultural moment, and allowed me to swing with all my might to “hit the sermon out of the park.” Other times, I would get texts that I had no idea what to do with, or how to make them sing in the broader cultural moments. I totally loved that challenge too! It worked my brain in a way that I didn’t usually, and often produced some of my more interesting sermons. Some of them may have been foul balls, but some of them were pretty decent base hits.
This metaphor carried over to the handshake line after the services I preached. Folks would critique the delivery of the sermon first and foremost. There were always those who complimented me in a way that suggested that they were surprised that complete sentences came out of my mouth when I spoke, those who told me they really enjoy my preaching, and those who would tell me, in these exact words, that I hit it out of the park. The whole mode of my preaching was that when I got in to the batter’s box, I’d better make sure I’m swinging for the fences.
Things are a little different now!
The thing that changed my attitude toward this came my second week, when I preached a sermon about (among other things) politics. This is not recommended in any of the pastoral books I’ve read by the way, to spend your second week in a new congregation speaking about politics, in the midst of an election year no less. As I was standing in the back of the sanctuary and greeting folks (still no handshakes these days), folks were telling me how they were engaging with the sermon, not so much it’s delivery. Suddenly the metaphor switched in my mind. I’m not in the batters box any more. The congregation is. I find myself more on the pitchers mound. It’s not my job to make contact with the ball any more, it’s my job to help my congregation get a hit. My job isn’t to wait for the right pitch, my job is to make sure I’m delivering the right pitch.
Truth be told, this is a shift I should have made a while ago. Who cares how I’m “performing” in the pulpit. Church is absolutely at its worst when we as pastors turn it in to a show. What we ought to be doing is walking life together, and trying our best to engage with scripture together in the context of worship.
If you’re one of the crazy ones who have made a career out of preaching on a regular basis, what do you think about when you’re in the pulpit? And if you’re a member of a congregation, what kinds of things most help you engage with a sermon?