Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Of Wrestling and Sermons


Almost thirty years ago, when I first sat down at the UUA with Joan Kahn-Schneider to  explain why I wanted to leave social work and become a Unitarian Universalist minister, she offered me a stern lecture on preaching.  She flung out the prospect of weekly preaching as if it was a hurdle that most people would never surmount. 

I've never forgotten what she said, or the fervor with which she made her argument. In fact, I now have over a quarter-century of experience to fuel my own thoughts about preaching.

Somebody, somewhere compared preaching to Jacob wrestling with the angel.  It seems an apt analogy.  The story in Genesis 32: 22-31, recounts a contest that took place in the dead of night.  (We'll skip over the part the reveals Jacob to be a polygamist.) Suddenly, Jacob finds himself fighting with a man.  When it looks like he might prevail, the mysterious man touches his hip and throws it out of joint.  As morning comes on, the two continue to wrestle. The angel grants Jacob a new name, Israel.  And, after the angel refuses tell Jacob who he is, Jacob names the angel Peniel - which means "the face of God." Before departing the angel blesses Jacob. Jacob declares that he has done what his faith tradition told him was impossible - he saw the face of God and lived.

For myself, and I think, for all sermon crafters, writing a sermon requires wrestling with our better selves to get at the truth of our own responses to a topic, an issue, or a question. We want to name our experience as Jacob sought the name of the angel. Sometimes we limp, as if with wounded hip, toward the conclusion of thinking and writing. The blessing we seek is a finished sermon...twenty minutes of monologue that explores one person's interior life and finds expression as something that can be more widely understood. The blessed sermon might make of one person's inner struggle something that could be universally understood.  

That is what makes writing sermons three to four times a month so daunting. It requires deep personal engagement and broad public sharing.  A song that holds out the experience of singer-songwriters asks questions that echo my own:  These nights, are they sent her to amaze me, maybe bury, maybe praise me? ...These nights, am I blazing, am I bleeding, are my secrets worth repeating?  And, the things that I uncover every time I hold my heart up to the lights?*

Then Sunday morning comes, and with it, the blessing of having finished and delivered another sermon.  In twenty-four hours the wrestling begins again. These nights...


* David Buskin and Robin Batteau, These Nights on the album "B&B"