May 2008


In conclusion, is only the conclusion of the rants that I have collected over the years, written on various book covers and cast off materials.  I haven’t felt free to write in such an obsessive way for a while.  I have been trying to be less rant-y and more “emotionally and spiritually healthy.”

I have been under a doctor’s care.  Well, it says doctor on his door and business card and the skin on the wall, but he is a physiologist.  He does, however, seem to have the power to prescribe some medications…so.  Anyway this was all part of the terms of my returning to work at the church—my re-employment (it does seem like a ploy).  Before I re-entered (re-mount, re-turn to) the pulpit I had to under go a month long inpatient program and participate in weekly sessions with Dr. Percy.  As a result I have been convinced of the necessity of actually accepting the world as it is and making a healthy choice to participate in it with out critique, to embrace it and its ways.  “Because, after all,” Dr. Percy is fond of saying, “If the rest of the world needs to change for you to feel O.K. your chances don’t look good—easier to just change yourself.”

Yes.  Easier?  Well, I have been working at it.  I have developed a strategy.  Whenever I start to feel disconnected from this culture, when I look around and vacuous ness is all I see—I find the nearest line I can get in to buy something.  Whether Cinnabon or powerball, Joel Osteen or Hot Pockets, what ever is closet, what ever line I see first.  By the time I am done with the transaction, I feel a little better.  At least I am reminded of what it means to be a part of something bigger than me.

Lately, however, this has not been working as well.  My posting all those old rantings about preaching is, I think, a symptom of a gradual slipping, slippage, sliddage….

How to Preach Real, Relevant, Relational and Revolutionary Sermons

In Conclusion: Don’t Tell People What to Do

Don’t tell people what to do.  Tell people what the Gospel says.  Tell People that God loves them.  God likes them.  Point to Jesus.
Preach the Good News you find in the text that fate has handed you by the way of the Lectionary.  Preach the questions you have found in the text, whether you have found the answers or not.  Embody the text.  Use everything in your bag of tricks to communicate the Good News in a way that requires people to listen.  Preach for Wednesday.  It doesn’t matter if people leave the church on Sunday wonder what the hell you are talking about—it is better then them not remembering anything you said.  Preach so it sticks in their mind, heart, craw, gizzard, liver, spleen.  That way their liver keeps working it out until on Wednesday out of the blue some epiphany pushes it’s way into the conscious self and ah ha can happen.  Wednesday is a good day for ah ha.
What ever you do, do not apply it to people’s lives.  Let them do that.  They are as smart as you are.  God some how was able to reveal God’s self to you.  You were some how able to hear that God loved you in such a profound way that you were filled with a desire to love God back.  If God could do this with you, chances are God can do this with other people.  If you could hear the great revelation of God’s Good News, chances are other people will be able to.
When you preach create the space for revelation.  Strive to create the possibility of epiphany.  Preaching is an act of worship.  Worship is not a set of instructions given to the people by the preacher.
Don’t tell the people what to do.  Let them figure it out.
Preach grace.  Let them apply it to their lives.  Grace stays with people longer than instructions do.