We all gathered around the blanket and held it up like a flag is held over a coffin. I poured the pieces of paper that contained their “fear nots” on the blanket while I repeated the Scripture story in Luke again. When I read the words, “And the angel said, ‘Fear not,’” we all dropped the blanket and those slips of paper. I rolled up the blanket with the papers in it and stashed it away in my office.
A month or so later, I had to move the blanket, and when I did, all the slips of paper fell out on the floor of my office. I saw that one of them had opened and I became curious. I took the papers home and read them. What fears do people bring to the sanctuary every Sunday? I was stunned. The comments included:
Harm to the earth, loss, hate and gossip, illness, nuclear war, college and adulthood, people with opposing opinions in my personal life, depression and anxiety, despair, trouble breathing.
I kept all those slips of paper in the room I use for study and prayer at home. Before praying, I look at one or two of them, remembering those who wrote them and asking God to help them fear not.
The people in the pews want something more than a fine sermon. They want to know the preacher cares about them and the things they carry in their hearts. When I looked long and hard at each one of those slips of paper, I realized their fears and needs were so much more important than my being admired! When people come to church, they are looking for a place where they can lay their burden down and listen for a whisper of good news. For years after coming home from services, I have collapsed in my chair, exhausted. Why? I didn’t think standing in front and preaching for twenty minutes should wear me out.
But when I saw the contents of that blanket, I realized when I come home from a worship service, I am carrying in my heart the hardest questions people face. I am humbled to stand up and speak a word of good news during such basic, deep, human concerns. And I have found out I cannot do that unless I scrape around in the dark places of my own heart and face the darkness that dwells within me, too.
I worked for years in jobs where I was always wanting to move on up. Not anymore. This journey isn’t up, it’s down. Down to the places where we hide. The questions we dare not ask. The moments when all that really matters is whether I will care more about the people than the excellence of a sermon.
1. Baxter, Reformed Pastor, 1620.
Chapter Three
Solo Flight
It has been said speaking in public is one of the greatest fears human beings can face. A fear even greater than dying. I was often reminded of that fear when I preached funerals in my early years. In those days, the preacher was perched over an open casket. It was a bit like standing at the edge of a cliff, suspended between the person who had died and the people who were very much alive and waiting for me to speak to them. I tried to keep my eyes facing forward into the crowd, but occasionally I glimpsed the dead person lying at my feet. Then I would catch myself with a start and try to resume my public speaking with some semblance of dignity.
Morgan described the experience of preaching in front of people as “solo flight.” In those early years, when I walked up front, the first thing I noticed was I was alone up there. If I dared to take a moment to gaze at the faces, I realized I wasn’t only alone up there, but these people were waiting for me to say something. What, I wondered, would I say today? The only way to take off in this solo flight was to forget I was alone, forget all those people who were sitting there, and just start talking as if I were speaking to a trusted friend about the most important thing in the world. In Isaiah 40, we are told those who “wait on the Lord will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run and not be weary. They will walk and not faint” (Isa 40:31). Most Sundays, as I walked to the front to preach, I would say in my heart one simple prayer, “O Lord, please help me to walk and not faint. O Lord, please help me to walk and not faint.”
In my second year of seminary, before I preached my first Sunday as pulpit supply minister, Morgan and I laid out the ground rules of our work together. We would meet every week. I would bring a draft of the sermon I was working on and we would talk about it. We would also talk about how the prior week’s solo flight had gone. Since Morgan wanted me to be three weeks ahead on my sermon writing, I had to write three sermons before my first Sunday of preaching in front of people.
“You need to get ahead on sermons,” he said. “After all, what if some emergency demands pastoral attention and your sermon isn’t written on Saturday night?”
The practice of being two to three weeks ahead on sermons served me well during all my years in ministry. Sermons that were already written sat on the back burner of my mind and were peppered and seasoned with the events that led up to the Sunday each one was delivered.
But I was still clinging to the manuscript.
“The development of a preacher is the work of a lifetime,” Morgan said to me one day.
Thank God for that, I thought. At this rate, a lifetime won’t be long enough.
I never actually read a sermon from a manuscript after my conversation with Robbie Sevier. Her kind and piercing words had made that impossible. Instead, I rolled up the manuscript in my right hand, walked down to the floor (on the level where the people were) and preached. Usually I forgot at least half of the sermon. When that happened, I just kept talking until I found my place in the manuscript. Looking back on those two years, I am eternally grateful people still sat there, listened as best they could, and shook my hand when it was all over. Preachers owe a huge debt to the people in the pews. A debt greater than they will ever know.
Each week, Morgan and I met. Each week I told him I could not let go of that manuscript. It would be like being cut off from the mother ship, left to drift in space. Of course, I was already drifting in space when I held the manuscript in my hand. But I still had that piece of paper I could open and read, which I felt was a much better option than running out of the sanctuary.
After hearing me tell him week after week that I was incapable of letting go of the manuscript, Morgan wrote down for me his thoughts about preaching without notes. His encouraging words helped me to imagine myself as a courageous preacher, able to look at the faces of the congregation and utter words from my heart.
Morgan’s Reflections on Preaching Without Notes:
In my final year at Princeton Seminary, the senior homiletics course was taught by the dean of the faculty, Edwin Roberts. The goal of his class was to have all of us try to preach without dependence upon the manuscript. Two students would preach at every practice preaching class. The requirement was that we stand in the middle of the chancel behind a microphone (wireless microphones had not yet been invented) and deliver our sermon.
One of the books that we would read for the class was Preaching Without Notes by Clarence E. Macartney, the distinguished pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. Macartney had recently retired but came to preach on one special evening in the seminary chapel. It was an unforgettable experience. Every pew in the chapel was filled as we watched this prince of the pulpit stand in the middle of the chancel (just as we had been required to do in our class, but without a microphone) and deliver a sermon entitled “Bring Up Samuel.” I can still hear that sermon and its piercing conclusion. Macartney was a living example of his book’s title.2
Dean Roberts realized that we might not choose to preach without notes when we arrived at our first church. I have no way of knowing whether the rest of my classmates thereafter tried to preach without dependence upon a manuscript, but for me the choice was simple: I would never again preach from a manuscript for the remainder of my 41 years of ministry, as well as during my additional 6 years of interim ministry . . . and I still don’t today upon those few occasions when I am invited to preach at a church.
So, why is freedom from a sermon manuscript so important? The answer lies in the definition