a confession: i am a full-text preacher who ignores her manuscript a lot; or: "Why isn't there anything on this page???"

Preaching is one of the great joys of my ministry, and one of the biggest mysteries.  As much as I want to be the next Barbara Brown Taylor (minus the rural living), I have to admit that sermons a more an event than a text for me. I've been repeatedly chastised by those who want a copy of my work - I'm happy to hand over my text, but frequently the "best" or most memorable parts of the sermon are missing. When I was writing, I just didn't think of them. 

It's odd, then, that I'm a full-text preacher. (Here, if you have ten minutes, is a video of me explaining just how I figured that out for myself.) I need to figure out all my moves, from introduction to conclusion, and I need to delete, delete, and delete to get myself down to a reasonable Episcopal length (for me, this is 11,000-15,000 words, to yield 12-16 minutes of audio). I work on a sermon off and on for a whole week - from text study, commentary review, the odd conversation with a parishioner, to whatever I'm watching on Netflix. A full draft takes me about 45 minutes to write, but it's the result of hours of thought - and it'll need another few edits to be ready for primetime.

And then. Still. The sermon inevitably changes on its way from the page to my mouth. Maybe there's someone in church that day who I know just enough about to know I have to get something out of the way before they can hear the sermon. Maybe I thought of a better joke. Maybe the processional hymn's words opened up a new way for me to consider the text's central metaphor. 

And maybe there was a mass shooting - or two - overnight. 

This past Sunday I had a neat sermon on discernment. I mean "neat" not in a slangy way, but tidy. It was tight, to the point, and the metaphor really worked. (Also, I only had one metaphor - which means I was following my own advice for once.) As I always do these days, I opened up Facebook before service, explicitly to make sure I hadn't missed anything huge. There, at the top of my feed, was a discussion among young clergy women about how much attention to pay to the latest carnage. Including a comment from one woman which I find devastating - "If I were to preach about every mass shooting these days, I'd never preach about anything else." There were litanies, prayers, and other resources linked in the comments, too. 

I very honestly didn't know what to do, and didn't have enough time to figure it out before the service started. At the top of the sermon I took a very deep breath, and took a little longer to pray than I usually do. And then I delivered a weird mash-up - about 50% of my original text, and about 50% of entirely new material. Instead of a dopey example about discernment, I talked about my decision to not be armed in the pulpit. I told them that I was more comfortable laying down my own life than I was laying down my morals to harm another human being, perhaps fatally. And I told a congregation that I very much loved that while I would do anything in my power to protect them, they could not ask me to forfeit my beliefs for their feelings of safety. (Preaching off the cuff meant I didn't have the statistics in front of me, but the likelihood of being shot accidentally is another huge reason I won't arm myself in the pulpit or allow guns in my home.) People cried. I almost cried. And then it was over and I couldn't transcribe a quarter of it if you asked me. (But, I do have a very rough audio file.)

So I don't have very many sermons uploaded on to this page. The ones I do are mostly ones which I've had to publish, which means someone else has forced me to edit them. They're sermons I've  preached, and then sat down with again to wordsmith. They're sermons I like well enough, too - but they never quite seem like "the real thing." Words on a page just don't replicate the preaching experience for me. (Though I do love reading others' homilies!)

Like many of us in the Church today, I'm not terribly well-versed in opening myself up to the intervention of the Spirit, let alone talking about it. I'm a little embarrassed about my more weird mystical experiences. But every Sunday (or weekday) when I preach, I do feel something enter me that I'm pretty sure is the Holy Spirit herself.  And without that, I don't think I'd ever be up to the task. Thank God my "best" bits aren't on paper - thank God they're barely even "mine." And thank God for my tiny little audio recorder, lest I never be able to recapture any of my best work!