PCA Conversations

by Joshua Seth Anderson

I am a young preacher. Ordained in August of last year, I have proclaimed the word of God to the people of God as a minister of the gospel only about a dozen times. Add in my supply preaching as a seminary student and intern and my lifetime of sermons only totals about twice that number. So I am a young preacher, still unpracticed at the task to which I have been called.

Thus these notes are presented as thoughts gathered at the beginning of a journey that will hopefully result someday in a mature understanding and expression of the mystery and difficulty of confronting my congregation with the Person and Work of Jesus using nothing more than mere words.

I am increasingly convinced that what I am called to as a preacher is to bring God’s people (as well as any interested onlookers) into a confrontation with God as he is revealed in his word, and most especially as he is revealed in his Son, Jesus Christ. In other words I am called to alert them to the tension that exists already between their own lives and the reality of the biblical text—to somehow locate our communal lives in their proper context within the unfolding of God’s plan and force a confrontation of some kind between all of us and Jesus himself, both in the record of his historical actions as the incarnate Messiah and his present status as the glorified and living physical king of all things.

What I mean is that I’m learning that I shouldn’t care as much about how many of my non-alliterative points my congregants commit to memory, but rather what it is that actually happens in their hearts and minds in that half hour between nine-thirty and ten on a Sunday morning. That is the only moment that matters, because I am not a professor, or a motivational speaker. I am a preacher and there is no test for the subjects I discuss except the test that is the daily test of our lives.

This is a difficult and strange task, and I’m really only stammering at it when I find myself in the pulpit, praying that preaching is something like riding a bike or shooting a free throw—something I’ll get better at with more time and practice, and even if I never ride in the Tour de France, at least I can go for ride on a nice day without running into something.

I’m learning that the first corner to turn for a young preacher is the ability to resist becoming a neurotic mess every Saturday night, to begin to fight back some of the narcissism, insecurity and need for validation that is inherent in anything as public and vulnerable as addressing several hundred people for a half an hour straight (when else, outside of a college classroom or a presidential speech does such a thing occur any longer in our culture?).  I believe that one of the first lessons I’m learning as a young preacher is that the task is difficult, but for the task to become manageable, it must first become normal. To whatever extent that is proper or possible.

This past fall I realized that several of my sermons (including one or two I liked) had mistakenly not been recorded, and now had ceased to exist, except in my notes and my head and whatever memory of them was left in those who had listened (or only half-listened?). I was confronted in that moment with the tenuousness of preaching.  I was reminded that a sermon is, in the end, like life (according to Solomon)—only vapor, a moment in time that is past almost as soon as it has begun and its impact or memory cannot be controlled or measured or even perhaps understood.

After all, a sermon is really only just a string of words: a conversation between my congregation and myself that is not much unlike any other conversation.  Some things are remembered, but most is inevitably forgotten. And I cannot control any of it. Because of this, I’m learning to cast my bread on the waters when I preach and trust that whatever good comes of it is the Lord’s business, not mine. I say this, not because it is pious, but because it is only way that any of us (preachers or not) can really live with any sanity or hope.

Perhaps it is because the poetry student that I was eight years ago still lives inside me, but I’m also learning that preaching is, more than anything else, a craft. Whatever else they are, sermons at least should be artful and intentional, because their subject is the mystery of what it means to be human in God’s world, and their heart is the beauty of the story of God’s work in that world. Preaching is a conversation, but it is a conversation where words should not be wasted or misspoken or spent on insubstantial things. The stakes are too high.

One of the best guides in my first year of preaching as a vocation has been the Presbyterian pastor and preacher Fredrick Buechner. I consistently turn to Buechner’s sermons to remind myself of what it is that I should be doing, and even if I don’t do it half as well as he does, at least I remember something about the task.  In his book “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale,” Frederick Buechner sums up, better than I know how, what it means to preach.

“So the sermon hymn comes to a close with a somewhat unsteady amen, and the organist gestures the choir to sit down. Fresh from breakfast with his wife and children and a quick runthrough of the Sunday papers, the preacher climbs the steps to the pulpit with his sermon in his hand. He hikes his black robe up at the knee so he will not trip over it on the way up. His mouth is a little dry. He has cut himself shaving. He feels as if he has swallowed an anchor. It if weren’t for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon be somewhere else…

“The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the 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 everyone 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?…

So let [the preacher] use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have the words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions. Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting.”

This is the task to which I have been ordained. I am inadequate. I am young. And I am learning what it means to pray using the ancient words: “O Lord open thou my lips. And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.”

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Josh Anderson is the Assistant Pastor of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO.