Will Campbell, Preacher Man. Kyle Childress

our Episcopal priest friend, Jack Koepke, to join us at the Wine Gallery and we do stand-up comedy. Our act is called “A Rabbi, A Priest, and A Preacher Walk into a Bar.” You wouldn’t believe the amount of reading required to prepare a fifteen-minute comedy skit.

      Preachers are the last generalists on the planet. That means our reading lists require us to sit, hat in hand, before all the other disciplines. A preaching professor once told me that I should be reading six books from six different disciplines at all times. The year was 1978 and I took him literally, because in 1978 I took everything literally. Hell, I even still read newspapers—The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Dayton Daily News.

As a preacher, the most helpful genre of reading is novels and short stories, especially short stories by Southern writers. Reynolds Price claims that the novel comes closer to being a truly Christian form. In its attempt to elicit understanding of and mercy for all creation, the novel teaches mercy and forgiveness for all creation. As Allan Gurganus puts it, “There are those who believe that the sermon is the primary literary form of American life. From Cotton Mather’s surreal visions of hell to Hawthorne’s allegories of American guilt, to Whitman’s promissory hymns, to Twain’s biting moralizing satires, to Dreiser’s Aschcan School of Social Darwinism, to Faulkner’s postlapsarian South, to Flannery O’Connor’s godless modernity vs. ancient mysteries, to Marilynne Robinson’s watery, postmodern version of heaven and hell in Housekeeping, we feel the sermon’s lash and balm in every great American book.”10 It is this connection between fiction and preaching that led me to the practice of having my homiletics students read a short story for every class during the semester. I hold up the story as the form the sermon takes.11 When our sermons can be compared to the parables of Jesus, we will know that we are touching the hem of the garment of the greatest preaching possible.

Preachers are apprenticed to reading. Only by reading are we able to train our minds to receive the word that may come from God. Harry Crews, Southern novelist, said that he got his practice of sitting at the typewriter every day for three hours from Flannery O’Connor. He speaks of what we write as a mystery, knowing that we can’t explain where we get the stuff we write. Crews quotes O’Connor: “I go to the typewriter every day for three hours so if anything comes, I am prepared to receive it.”12

      Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life inspires my own reading to this moment. He also taught me that the best writers/preachers have larcenous skills. I try to teach my students to at least steal good material and to have enough preaching sense to know good material from so-so stuff.

Pat Conroy says, “Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. I’ve never met a word I was afraid of, just ones that left me indifferent or that I knew I wouldn’t ever put to use. When reading a book, I’ll encounter words that please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song. I dislike pretentious words, those highfaluting ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence.”13

I work hard to turn my students into word sleuths. A few more nuggets from Conroy: “I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish.” “I hunt down words that have my initials branded on their flanks.” “Words call out my name when I need them to make something worthy out of language.”14

Working with words is a long, patient apprenticeship and preachers have the privilege of serving them. And the place words hang out are in the hundreds of books you are reading and will read. So when I ask you, “What are you reading,” I am not making small talk. I’m asking you the most significant question in the world. I have a Pat Conroy saying printed and sitting on my desk: “To be boring is not just a sin; it’s a crime.”15

8. Hauerwas, Working with Words, 86–87.

9. Ibid., 87.

10. Quoted in Ketchin, The Christ-Haunted Landscape, Kindle ed., loc. 5354–55.

11. Ketchin, The Christ-Haunted Landscape, 394.

12. Ibid., 339.

13. Conroy, My Reading Life, 86.

14. Ibid., 87.

15. Ibid., 42. Conroy reports that the saying is from his high school English teacher, Gene Norris.

      Preaching Is a Sacrament

      Rodney Wallace Kennedy

      I will stand at my watch-post,

       and station myself on the rampart;

      I will keep watch to see what he will say to me,