Words Not Purchased in the Marketplace of Ideas
When we go to church on Sunday morning, we’re hungry. We may have stopped by the Pancake Pantry or the Whistle Stop Café for breakfast on the way to worship, but we are still hungry. The belt may press tight on our belly or the pants may look like we were poured into them, but we are still hungry. There is an aching lurking somewhere at the edge of our consciousness that drives us to seek a holy place.
What is it that we long for? Why does the soul groan with hunger pangs? Why is something so universally present in creation so hard to describe? Something is missing. Even with soccer practice, driving kids to band, picking up groceries and running the dog to the vet — there is something missing. We are still hungry. There must be something more.
I began to get a glimpse of that hunger when emptiness invaded my life with a vengeance. I lost my life partner to death, my children married and left the nest, I changed professions from pastor to professor and the city I called home faded in the rear view mirror as I moved north. As the layered losses that accompany each of these changes began to reveal themselves, I realized how empty I was. Hunger gnawed at my soul. I discovered a longing for something that I could not find.
And what I hungered for was an indescribable “something” that would reduce my fear, my anxiety, and my terror that rose in my belly as I balanced on the edge of an abyss. As the order of my life collapsed, the chaos that had been hidden by the roles I played began to intensify. I became vividly aware of that creeping clock which carries away the hours and days and propels us all toward that eternal unknown. I longed for something to nourish my soul so that my courage would overcome the rising fear.
But, when we go to church, we often discover the words cooked and served from the pulpit do not ease the hunger. It is as if the preacher believes that ideas, reasonable thoughts, can feed our souls and that we will not be afraid. In many churches there seems to be an excessive confidence in the power of words to fill the aching void. If people just understand they will not be afraid. There is confidence that the fear of the unknown chaos that hovers close by will go away if the preacher can just give us enough powerful answers to complex life questions.
I know a young women whose father was killed in a tragic accident. She has been overcome with sadness and despair. She struggles with her fear, her loneliness, her terror, her sadness, her anger and guilt. These all manifest themselves in the fundamental question, “Why? Why did this happen to my daddy? Why did this happen to me?” Something about the human heart wants to believe that enough information will free us from fear. We want to believe that we can endure the attacks of meaninglessness and fear if we just have the right way to think about what is happening.
And I confess that there is some help in having information. Cognitive Therapy works with clients to help them reframe the way they see events around them. They operate on the assumption that seeing the world differently will change our feelings about the world and our behavior toward the world. Changed perception changes feelings. Information that helps change our vision of what is happening can ease the anxiety for a while. People often need some immediate help in getting clarity in who they are relative to what they understand God to be.
If this is what people hunger for, then one of the jobs of the preacher is to give information to help people reframe their thinking. And to do this, the preacher can go just about anywhere for ideas to share in a sermon. They can go to the market place of ideas and create a sermon that hands out good ideas. If people believe that answers to the hard questions of life will change them from fearful and anxious people into courageous and peaceful people, then the preacher’s task is done when he or she gets the right ideas and declares them as true.
This may be the thinking behind the minister and the congregation I heard about recently. The preacher said to me, “I get my sermons off the Internet. I have to do that because when I preach my own sermons, the people hate them. When I preach the sermons I get from the megachurch website, they love it.” The assumption is that truth can be bought at any supermarket and that the hunger of people for information to understand their world can be satisfied with these products.
The market driven culture we live in fuels the fires of these expectations. Happiness can be purchased by having the popular products that other people have. More products will make us less fearful. The more we can get what others have, the happier and more meaningful life will be. More information will save us. We feel there is hope because there are 3,690,000,000 entries to explore when you type the word “information” into Google. Surely there is something that can answer the spiritual questions of “why.”
And there is no lack of energy and time expended to get at the information. At 7:00 a.m. I left the hotel in Chicago to go to Starbucks. There was a long line outside the Apple store. I asked one of the people at the head of the line, “What’s going on?” “We are waiting to buy the new iPhone.” When I finished my coffer and walked back, the line was even longer. Later in the day the line was longer still. Everyone wants the same thing. They will sacrifice time and money to get the latest technical tool of communication and information. They will belong to a growing community of people connected by Apple.
Living in a culture shaped by the multiplication of products that are faster and better leads us all to trust the products that everyone else has. I think this is also what many members of our congregations think will satisfy their hunger — products (answers) that will back us away from the abyss of unknowing. But, I believe that this kind of preaching is more like driving through the drive-through lane at Wendy’s and getting a hamburger to eat on the road than the nourishment that comes from eating a slow cooked meal at a table covered with an old tablecloth and surrounded by conversation with people who know and care about us. Fast food sermons ease the stomach’s immediate hunger. But, the complex feeding of the body and soul that comes through shared and broken bread and lives does not happen. “Food is food is food”. Not really!
But, I am not sure that the deep spiritual hunger that drives a church member to leave the Pancake Pantry full and go to church where there is a table with a single cup and a plate with a single loaf of bread can long be satisfied with clear and concise answers on how to live the good life. Because life is more a mystery to be lived than it is a problem to be solved, I think that the hunger of the human heart may be more about needing relationships than about needing answers.
When Alzheimer’s strikes in a family, answers to “Why” do little to ease the terror and fear that comes from going into the abyss of unknowing. Answers to the scientific questions do not assuage the agony that lumbers through the heart of the diseased or the family member as they disappear from each other.
Instead of seeking an answer to “Why is this happening,” I think the question that reflects what humans long for most is the one Jesus asked in his darkest hour, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is not about information — it is about absence and presence. When we are most fearful and when we are facing the awful unanswerable questions of life, what matters most is to know that we are not alone. If we want to be transformed from persons who are fearful and anxious into persons of faith who move with courage into the unknown, presence is the more powerful spirit.
When my wife Deborah and I were on our honeymoon five years ago, I discovered how life could be transformed by presence. We were snorkeling, I for the first time. The beautiful waters off the Caribbean island of St. John were clear and the fish were a rainbow of colors. I had a hard time enjoying them, however. It seemed that every time I went under to examine the beauty, my mask would fill up with water. Finally, Deborah gently asked me, “Dan, are you afraid?” “NO!” I replied defiantly. (The very idea! I know how to swim). But, after few more frustrating attempts to see under water, I confessed, “Well maybe a little anxious.” Deborah then said, “Here, give me your hand.” She held my hand as we explored together and after a few minutes, I let go and never had any more problems. It was a beautiful experience. Presence changed my perception and my experience. Fear subsided and the water stopped coming into my mask.
If this is what the human heart is hungry for, then powerful and transformative preaching is not as much about the information we can communicate as it is about the presence that we can facilitate. If the heart is hungry to feel it is not alone, that it has not been abandoned, then preaching to heal the hungry heart is that which evokes presence. Words which do this are words which conjure from the soul and memory the awareness of power and energy. It is spirit that lives in the bone marrow, in the body, below the cognitive awareness. It is a spirit that grows in the garden of real people in real relationships. It has the homegrown taste and touch of flesh.
Music is one of those means of communication that evokes presence in the heart and connects people to lives of others who might nourish their hunger for companionship. When my mother was in her last days in this life, she had a very difficult time communicating. What she wanted to say would get stuck and she could not share her feelings or desires. She soon fell, exhausted, into silence. Knowing that my mother had been a church organist for years and loved church hymnody, my wife made her a CD of many of the great hymns of the church. We took them into her room at the nursing home and began to play them. Her face, sometimes filled with distress, relaxed into a place of peace and pleasure. Her fingers fluctuated between playing an imaginary keyboard and a steepled prayer. In the midst of the loss of her self, the music evoked in her the lives of the saints with whom she had sung and shared in a community of faith. She knew she was not alone.1
Preaching that transforms us is that which evokes the presence of healing, loving, and powerful resources from within us. If we are creatures of the divine, we have resources within our created being that can reconcile us to the one who loves us and whose grace overcomes our propensity toward sin. Words from a sermon that offer us lasting strength for the living of love and grace are words which evoke the presence from within us.
This is true because it is the presence of other people that is more likely to change us than the presence of disembodied ideas. The people we love and who love us call forth from us dimensions of ourselves that we may not recognize if we were simply alone. Being in the presence of someone who judges us pushes us into ourselves and causes us to hide. Sharing comfortably with someone who accepts us as we are opens us up to the multiple dimensions of ourselves and allows our multiplicities to be known by us and by others. When we are relating to persons whose grace exceeds their critical judging, the experiences and people who inhabit our memory, our soul, our contemporary world and our future have a chance to come into our presence and empower us. Since God is one who comes in creation, then the presence of God can be known and experienced over and over again when words that we hear evoke these multiple characters within our lives.
This transformation happens because evoking presence puts the listener within a spiritual matrix which holds, forms, and reforms her rather than simply giving her information and challenge to act differently on the basis of that information. In the midst of my losses, there were people who told me I ought to get on with my life and quit languishing in the past. And I knew I should. But, what was most helpful for me was knowing that in my pain and in my future, I was not alone. Within me was nourishment. I needed to taste words that evoked the presence of an incarnate God who was as powerful as my pain and as loving as my love. I needed to be relating to a God who was as ferocious as my fear, not a God who could be controlled or manipulated by my will. I needed a God who was strong enough to stay with me and loved me in my doubt and despair, not a God obsessed with the petty details of who loves whom and how they show their love. I needed to devour words that evoked the presence of a God who knows how awful love can be and how awe-filled it can become in new life. I wanted the words I swallowed to go all the way down to my soul. I wanted words that had grown up from the soul of the preacher. I wanted to run my fingers through the soil in which the ideas had grown; to smell the rain that nurtured their bloom; to taste the humus of loss and decay that fertilized the words; to know that the preacher shared some sense of what it was to live my life. In those words, the spirit of divine presence was evoked with in me and my healing was facilitated as I was in the presence of those words.
And the words which are most likely to do this are not ones which have been purchased in the global marketplace of ideas. They are ones that have the power to evoke the persons from within our memory; ones that are home grown. They are words which are spoken by one whose presence embodies the truth of the words that we share. They are words that can connect the experience of the listener with the experience of the people being introduced in the sermon. They are words that have a local flavor.
My wife and I love farmers’ markets. We get up early on Saturdays during the summer and go buy green beans from Jan at the Sheridan Farms booth, peppers and beets from Greg at Organic Farms, herbs and onions from Fred at Wingate Farms, corn from the back end of Daddy’s truck. Now, we could get peppers, garlic, corn, green beans and herbs from the supermarket. They would be washed, shrink wrapped, and ready to go. But, the fact is, they are not the same product. They may look the same and cost the same, but they are not the same. The farmers’ market product has the taste of the soil of the local farm and the soul of the local farmer. Along with the product we get the relationship. Along with selling us beets, Greg gives us a recipe for how to prepare them. He listens to us and what we like and then he knows how they can best be prepared and served to meet our particular tastes. Along with the relationships that we develop with the people who sell the products, we get a chance to see our neighbors and visit with their pets. Some of the venders even let us taste the fruit before we buy it. The vegetables and fruits we get at the farmers’ market are communal products, not simply pepper, beans, corn or garlic.
This is the way good, transforming preaching works. The pews of our churches are peopled with souls hungry for something to nourish their lives and give them courage to live more fully and abundantly. Fear of being alone, of being abandoned as they face the chaos that accompanies changes, prevents their energy from being spirited by divine creative courage. Words from the pulpit that can help people get in touch with the relationships of healing and hope within assure them that they are not alone — that here will be courage to accompany them in their journey into the unknown. These are words that embody real human stories and relationships from the local gardens of life. They are the sensual and tactile ones that come from the soul of the speaker who knows how the hungers of the soul are manifest in the particular people in this particular church.
So next Saturday stop by the farmers’ market and pick up some homegrown stories, some folk lore, some ideas from the soil, and some hints from the soul of the land. Go back home and cook it up with some herbs and spices that come from our own pantry of life, and serve it on Sunday morning. People will find that when they partake of that feast, the hunger hiding under.
