And you have treasures hidden within you—extraordinary treasures—and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small. — Elizabeth Gilbert
The basic prerequisite in execution is to write the sermon. This condition is so important that a thorough argument in its favor seems to be needed. To be sure, a sermon is a speech. It has to be this. But in this speech we should not leave it up to the Holy Spirit (or some other spirit!) to inspire the words, no matter whether we have an aptitude for speaking or not. Instead, a sermon is a speech which we have prepared word for word and written down. This alone accords with its dignity. If it is true in general that we must give an account of every idle word, we must do so especially in our preaching. For preaching is not an art that some can master because they are good speakers and others only by working out the sermon in writing. The sermon is a liturgical event. It is the central act of Protestant worship, closely related to a sacrament. Only a sermon in which each word is fully accounted for is a sacramental act... Each sermon should be ready for print, as it were, before it is delivered. A sermon is more than a lecture, a Bible lesson, or a confirmation class, and we must conduct ourselves accordingly. It is part of the sanctification of the preacher to feel bound once for all to this rule. This demand is an absolute rule for all. — Karl Barth
In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. — Lewis Hyde
I wonder if we really believe the stuff we preach. Based on the standard operating procedure of many sermons, it sure feels artificial. When I tell people about my wife or kids, I don’t read from prepared remarks. Only the anxious exegete a love letter, cutting up every phrase, declension, parsed verb, trying to figure out what it all means. According to Heschel, “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” If you have been through an earthquake, you know how hard it is to explain the experience. “It was like the whole house sneezed. It was like the ground kicked back against my feet.” But none of that is quite right. Instead, you could show them what it was like. “Here, stand on this table while I go get my sledge hammer.” There is a whole world of untapped potential in our sermons. These pages will explore some of these resources. Facial expressions, tone, gestures, props, space, crowds, science exper-
iments, and that pulpit many of us hide behind. I am advocating for a wilder practice of preaching. More risk, less control. I suspect that, while the manuscript has its place, it can become a crutch that closes down imaginations. The following is sure to offend those of you who have developed a theology of the “Word,” birthed out of a deep study of the logos and the influence of speech throughout scripture and tradition. If manuscripts were good enough for Barth, then by golly, that’s good enough for us. Nothing is quite as foolish as disagreeing with Barth, but let’s be honest... the very act of preaching is a fool’s errand anyway. Might as well lean into the thing. So grab a red squeaky nose, and let’s see what we can crack open.
Using What You Have Most preachers have one prop they carry with them into the preaching moment: the printed manuscript. The first few years of a young preacher’s training focus on hiding this one prop. Don’t staple the pages or you look like an accountant flipping through the thing, reading an annual report to the city council. This is bad. Don’t lift the individual pages too high when turning, or the congregation will see the manuscript, and the magic is gone. Learn to keep your eyes up as much as possible. Don’t lose your place. Don’t forget a page. Store the manuscript in the hidden compartment of the pulpit. Walk up empty-handed, slide it out inconspicuously, preach, then hide it again and walk away. Abracadabra.1
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
— Flannery O’Connor
Have you ever danced behind the pulpit? Try that. No kidding. When no one is in the building, blast some Prince from the sound board (we are all contractually obligated to mention Prince’s music once a week as a sign of respect and to prove our Rather than throw out the manuscript right away, let’s ease into music credentials), take off your shoes, and dance in the same things. Even the most restrictive preachers have more than just place where you preach.3 the manuscript with which to work when they preach. You have your physical body. You have your voice. And you have that Voice. Contrast and juxtaposition are your friend in this purpiece of furniture called a “pulpit.” suit. Don’t yell the whole time, or people will assume you --missed a career in middle school football coaching. Don’t just Body. Use it. Get as comfortable in the preaching space as you whisper either, or every octogenarian will heavy-breathe advice are on the toilet when the door is locked and no one is home. at you for five minutes after the service. Go listen to some good You know what I am talking about. Sometimes you have a job black preaching, with a mastery of the poetic delivery. Listen to do, and propriety hinders the movement. Start by taking up for the crescendo. Recognize how aware the preacher is of the more space. It’s like the advice that if a mountain lion happens congregation’s feedback. If you are white, you might not want upon you while hiking, you should spread out your jacket to to whoop though. It will sound like that time Chris Gaines put make yourself bigger.2 Here is the same wisdom from a differout a rock album. But learn from this dynamic grasp of voice. ent direction: 1. There is an art to this process, to be fair. Some of the best preachers I know have mastered it, and the published echoes of those sermons push all of us to be better. We are careful with language because of great manuscript preaching. All great art knows its boundaries, and those limits can be a catalyst for creation. But there is also the false boundary, which is subtly imposed and rarely trespassed. You don’t want to anger the ancestors. Or your mentor. 2. Mountain lions don’t like to eat big things. Then you can pet the gentle beast, and probably get a leash on it. Voilà. Now you have a mountain lion companion. I could be wrong about the specifics here, so read more about this before you go hiking. 3. We actually did this on the first day of a preaching class, as a way of exorcising the demons of seriousness. It was awkward, but so is preaching. Get used to this feeling. You should always be a little off balance.
The Furniture. You know that guy who keeps wearing his clothes from college, even though he is in his mid-forties and carrying an extra 50 pounds around his waist? Those clothes used to make sense, but now they are a reminder that he doesn’t know what time or place he is in. Some pulpits are like that. They made sense for a different time and place, with their imposing form and lack of subtlety. The pulpit is a piece of furniture. It is a standing desk. Someone built the thing back in the day, probably embracing modern aesthetics, and then it was carried into the sanctuary and settled down in its forever home. It’s not bolted permanently to the floor, because everyone knows you can’t have a pulpit out during the Easter cantata. But if you move the thing to make space for something else in Sunday morning worship, God help you. Unless you were the pastor who commissioned it, you are wearing another person’s clothes. It is healthy to acknowledge this dissonance. But maybe you love the thing. It serves as a reminder of your elevated role. Some pulpits are even up a spiral staircase, which made sense before the days of microphones. Or it provides cover for the eye-daggers shot out from the congregation every Sunday. Having a standing desk in the middle of the worship
space can serve good purpose. You have to set your water glass somewhere. You need something to slam your fist into when making a brilliant point. If the tall desk is not going anywhere anytime soon, make good use of it, and for more than an expensive countertop for your preaching paraphernalia. Tap around on it and learn its different frequencies. Knock on it like a door, and see what you hear. Now slap the side and listen. The hollow sections bellow, which could be useful when telling a story about thunder. If you stomp your foot hard, the desk will hide your motion, and the sound will be a surprise. Use that. If it is tall and slender, step to the side of it and address it like another person in the space. Enter into a dialogue with it while preaching. If it is wide with expansive wings, there might be enough space to map segments of time or space onto its surface. If it is made of thick clear acrylic, I am so sorry. You are going to have to “accidentally” knock it over on a weekday when no one is around and hope it shatters into a hundred shards of faux-glass. But always remember, the pulpit is not the preacher. Before you placed your Bible and manuscript on it, gripped its sides and gazed over the top of it, the thing was just a standing desk sitting on the middle of the sanctuary. Do with it what you will.
You Have More Than You Realize When I was 12 years old, I was given a creative writing assignment. I didn’t know how to start, so I stared around the classroom. Then I saw it on the teacher’s desk: a small wooden rocking horse figurine. I wrote a short story based on that figurine, and it was brilliant (ask my mom). The world is full of trinkets that will open your mind. And if those trinkets make it to the preaching moment, they might work in ways your words cannot.
Go into your garage/attic/basement/resource room and see what you find. Take a mental snapshot of the randomness. If you are creative, that junk might make a great sermon visual. Useful items: old pipes, chains, breakable anything, bags of sand, a life-sized Jesus cutout (!), sticky notes, a megaphone, costumes... you get the picture.
Other PVE I have used: a slingshot with a small Bible for ammo, old plumbing pipes, mounds of sand, huge whiteboards and In an effort to free preaching from restrictive forms, it is often graffiti markers, bowls of water, rocks, chains, empty chairs. useful to leverage the power of the physical visual element PVE I want to use: bones, blood, a live chicken, fire, a forest for (PVE). a sanctuary.
Experiment Your preaching text is Exodus 7, the plague of blood. On the chancel you have two tables with two glass bowls. One is full of clear water; the other is full of blood (preferably not human blood). Already I have lost some of you. “There is no way in hell I am bringing blood into God’s house of worship! Who would do such a thing!?” Stay with that emotion, because you are experiencing the potential in the PVE. The whole idea of the riverturned-to-blood is one of life-becoming-death. It is creation in reverse. Blood is a sign of life, as long as it is in the veins. Water is a sign of life, as long as it is flowing. Egypt is the place of notlife, where all of creation’s abundance gets clogged up at the source. It poisons the land, and threatens to poison the world. This point is not one that you should only comprehend in your mind. You need to feel this in your bones.4 One last PVE: a living, beautiful clownfish in its own bowl between the two other bowls. (I chose a clownfish because who doesn’t love a clown fish? Don’t choose a catfish or alligator gar, otherwise folks will not care near as much about its fate.) You have placed a visual tension into the service, and into the sermon. The PVE will pull you in as you preach. It will extend its emotional energies into your words and gestures. “The fish in the Nile died, and the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians could not drink its water. Blood was everywhere in Egypt.” That will preach.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus frequently taught using the stuff at hand. There was the time he doodled in the dirt while instructing a crowd to set down their violent shame-rocks. Another time he saw a stingy fig tree, and for his lesson put a hex on it, like you do. After that he preached a sermon on economics at the Temple, using the PVE of overturned tables. That teaching was so effective, his enemies placed a bounty on his head. Sheep and goats and shrubs and the sea and the Temple and the dead. It all made it into his sermons. And of course there was the time he presented his gospel thesis by becoming the teaching itself. “This is what the kingdom looks like: me right here abandoned and alone, bleeding actual blood and ripping actual skin. Don’t look away, because there is a lesson even here.” Brief words spoken about forgiveness and loneliness and paradise, but mostly visceral visuals that told their own story.
4. We talk about the Bible like we believe that it matters, but we also know that the stories within it are hard to hear. Thousands of years of sanitization stand with us in the pulpit. We have to make the words wild again. Sometimes that means telling the truth with a bowl of blood. We have a thousand bloody hymns, a cross whose only original purpose was to drain the blood from a victim, and yet we shy away from the visceral nature of things? Tell the truth. Show the truth.
Unlikely Mentors
We all love Fred Craddock. If we could snap our fingers and preach like him, we would, even if it meant losing a foot of height. Charles Spurgeon, Billy Graham, Barbara Brown Taylor, Oprah. We all have our favorite preachers.5 Yet it is often helpful to look outside the field to help unsettle our familiar practices. During the height of his stand up career, Steve Martin took to some wild acts. He was merging comedy with reality, and inviting the audience to become part of the show in insane ways. Could comedy exist without the punch line? For instance, one time he led an audience of around 300 people to a McDonald’s, and ordered one fry. Another time he led a college audience out of the theater, and found an empty swimming pool. They all got in the pool, and he then “swam” across their outstretched arms.6 All of the arrows-through-the-skull gags, bunny ears, false noses, balloon animals and random outbursts, they were the genius of a professional fool. Martin’s early stand up career was built on unfulfilled expectations, which was the gag all along. Comedy ex nihilo. He realized that some people wanted to laugh, to let the floor fall out under their minds, to set aside reality and embrace the absurd. Today Martin is seen as a comic legend, easily accessible to a wide demographic. He tours with a bluegrass band, writes novels, and lectures on art criticism. But for a brief period in the 1970’s, he dismantled comedy, held up the pieces, and waited for the world to crack up. They were in on the joke—in fact, they were the joke. He invited them into the world, where they became a walking comedy show. One biographer from Rolling Stone magazine called this “the thrill of taking a risk. Most of us fear the thought of being an asshole; maybe the best way to overcome that fear is to act like one.” What a fool.
5. One of mine is Rob Bell, who I know makes some people happy, and others less so. That’s why I put his name in the footnotes. If you read this, you are likely going to continue to give this booklet until the end. While you are here, go read Bell’s article on preaching, “Crafting an Experience,” from http:// www.preachingtoday.com/skills/themes/preachingthatinspires/200401.19.html 6. This entire concept was built around Martin’s inability to end a show properly. He would often wander around the audience shaking hands and saying “goodnight,” but couldn’t break the act, so he invited them outside to keep it going.
Reggie Watts does more in a 20-minute show than most will pull off in a lifetime. I have watched a lot of his material online, and still am not sure if I have seen the “real” Reggie Watts, whatever that means. He bobs and weaves in and out of characters so fast, your brain gets whiplash. He will beatbox, sing, rap, feed all of that noise through a series of machines that loop and distort the sound, then just at the crescendo, he will turn the nobs to zero and morph into a British professor caught in mid-lecture about about string theory. Also, he does all of this extemporaneously. But for our purposes, I want to focus on his collection of tools. Reggie has pared down his touring kit so that all of the various digital tools fit into a standard backpack. These tools become elaborate filters for Reggie’s voice, expanding and contracting words and sounds into something new. The key to all of this is the loop. Feed a piece of sound into the machine, and it will spit it back out in repeated intervals. Speed it up, slow it down. Change the pitch. Layer it over other sounds. Endless potentiality. When preaching approaches an art form again, these types of experiments will seem less esoteric. And God said let there be light and God saw and it was good. And God said and God saw and it was good. And God said and said and said and said and said and........................... .....................................very good.
A Warning
There is always a danger in conflating stand up comedy with preaching, as if they are the same task, only one is baptized. Successful comedians are brilliant in front of a crowd, and there is much preachers could learn about technique and timing from them. We are not after theology peppered with punchlines. That is cheap grace. The sort of humor that matters to preaching is the kind that tells the truth, only slightly askew. One time when my brother and I were young kids, we found ourselves in a situation that was heartbreakingly sad. Someone had died, or found out they were going to die. The room of people was so heavy and tense with the news. But then it hit like a sneeze: nervous laughter. Why did God make us like this, laughing when the sky falls in? Louis C. K says, “Everything that’s difficult you should be able to laugh about.” When did preaching get so serious? You know who was serious? Pharaoh, Congress, Herod, and Job’s wife. So is that one church member who let anger and sadness take up residence in his soul. He stares at you every sermon, never smiles, never budges. The Bible is absurd. God is a mess. So be free from the demon of seriousness. It’s time to wake up. Time to tell the truth. Time to drop the act and lean into the limp God gave you when you went toe-to-toe on the mat.
Be Not Afraid, But Be Very Careful Many pastors have anxiety about screens and images in worship. Certain churches loathe anything that smacks of the megachurch down the street, especially things that can be misconstrued as entertainment rather than worship. “If I wanted to go to a movie, I would have skipped church and seen Transformers 14.” After years of apprehension, and with great fear and trembling, I began integrating projected images into sermons. I eased into it, and eased the congregation in. There is an old story about the minister of music who was fired for moving the piano across the stage between Sundays. After they fired him, the congregation promptly moved the piano back to its proper place. Years later, the church had a reunion and all of the previous members returned. This music minister walked in to the sanctuary, and was shocked to find the piano now sat where he tried to move it. He asked the current staff how they were able to move it and not incur the wrath of the congregation. They answered, “One inch at a time.”
it with ease, seeing how each idea moved to the next. I try to internalize as much content as possible. The simple images and words forced a distillation of the ideas. Several minutes of content can be navigated with one or two slides.
There is a lot of emotional freight attached to screens in worship. I imagine this was the case with all new technologies. Surely the pipe organ was a travesty of hedonistic culture for many years, until the church forgot to be offended anymore. Many churches are nervous about new technologies, and for good reason. Preachers have been clumsy with slides in worship. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I can wear flesh-colored leggings in public, but my wife tells me that I should not. It is too easy to make a slideshow these days, which makes it easy to create a bad one. The goal is illumination, not distracting, kitschy sermons.
Try to diagram or draw as much content as possible. This doesn’t just make for memorable slides, but it also embeds the sermon in your own memory. When preaching, it will be easier to retrieve the intent of a sermon movement.
The Good Depending on your process, organizing a sermon using slides may feel intuitive. I was able to replicate the process of making flashcards for every large movement in the sermon, then digitize the content. Once I created a slide deck, I could rearrange
The Bad Screens are selfish, and demanding. In a battle between a screen and a person, the screen always wins. Any preacher who does not take this into account will forfeit a battle they did not even realize was being waged. When the screen comes down
Feedback from the congregation was mostly positive, with many saying they liked the ability to “see the scripture.” Now that most people do not carry a physical Bible on Sunday mornings, having the words on a screen reconnected them to the words as a visual medium. (This has an obvious downside too.) With a screen, you can integrate images and video. There are some stories that are more powerful if you can show the original content. Even without screens, you can still integrate audio in this way. I have used clips from podcasts or music in sermons. Listen to Radiolab or This American Life for a skilled example of this.
People listen in different ways. A manuscript-driven sermon will connect with a certain segment of the congregation, but others will be left out. Can the sermon be preached like a math proof? Can it be rendered in data visualization? Can it be preached with words on a screen, with no accompanying speech? How much can be said with how little?
and the lights dim, everyone lifts their heads and may never look at the preacher again. No matter how bad the content is on the screen, it steals attention. Imagine preaching while a clown juggles on a unicycle just to your left. It is something like that. The slides lock you in, with little room for adaptability. The next slide is the next slide. If you want to move a set piece in the sermon based on subtle congregational clues (i.e. audible snoring), you can’t. The slides dictate the unfolding sermon, not the preacher. If you aren’t careful, you may become a tool in the screen’s sermon. Good preaching relies on improvisational elements, yet a screen complicates this dynamic.
from your spouse that is accidentally shared with everyone. Are you terrified now? Good, you should be. Years ago pastors had to make sure their microphones were muted while they used the bathroom or gossiped about that SOB deacon or cried into their trashcan before worship. Now things are more dangerous. Technology magnifies our idiocy. Respect your context. Some churches will only allow a screen in worship over some dead bodies. And people take a while to die, with no regard for our future preaching dreams. There are some fonts that should be deleted from your computer. Never use Papyrus. It does not make things look ancient. The same with Comic Sans (i.e. Dan Gilbert’s sick burn), Curlz (the “z” should be a clue that it is an abomination), or anything that looks “unique.” Keep it simple with your fonts. And be consistent. Do not have more than one or two font choices in your slides. Using a bunch of different fonts is like preaching in a bunch of different accents. Don’t do that either.
Technology is as unreliable as a squirrel in traffic. I am a millennial in my mid-thirties. I know how to link a tablet to a computer to a projector. I know how to coordinate the lighting cues and the image changes without disrupting the flow. I am the master of the robots, I think. Yet when I am relying on the screens for guidance, I am anxious that a glitch would leave me helpless. It was saying to me, “If I break, you are lost and alone. You should start sweating and praying to the wireless gods. And did you Limit your words. A picture is worth a bunch of words, so don’t charge me last night?” show the pictures and all the words. That is redundant and gratuitous and annoying and repetitive (like this sentence). Tips for Screen Usage Charge all batteries. Batteries never die when you want them Ask a designer/artist to critique your slides. It will be brutal. But to, like during a phone call with a creditor. Half of all presenta- it will make you better. tions I have witnessed ended in someone fiddling with a power-cord they had all along. Why didn’t they start with the thing Never use sound effects for slide transitions. Also, never use plugged into the outlet? Maybe running a presentation off bat- visual slide transitions, except maybe a subtle cross fade. Steve tery power is the most risky thing they will do all month. Jobs could pull that off. But you are not Steve Jobs, which is why black turtlenecks make you look creepy. Test all of your hardware multiple times. Have a backup plan if --some part of the chain breaks. And it will one day. See above. Be aware of the complexities, and the competitive nature of screens. They can be a useful tools in your chest. Preaching Understand how computers work with projectors. Nothing is needs to be freer to experiment, to fail, and to learn from the worse than a pop-up alert appearing on the screen, announcing process. A screen might help with that, or it may ruin everythat your rash cream prescription is filled. Or an intimate text thing. Try it out and see what happens. I bet you survive.
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1. Translation of Galatians 5:16. The verbs are not both imperatives. 2. A list of “thou shalt not’s” constrains the imagination. 3. The fruit of the spirit opens up reality. 4. When the Civil Rights Act was passed, the sin that bred racism simply went into hiding. The law can only do so much. 5. My walking path from the bed to the fridge in the middle of the night. In a new house, as your body learns to move in the dark, the path is full of dead ends and bumped corners. But after a while, the path straightens out and becomes second nature. 6. When anything falls off a counter, I instinctually try to catch it with my foot. My reasoning is that, while a glass is breakable, my foot will only suffer a bruise. This is so instinctual now, that I have accidentally tried to catch a falling knife with my foot. 7. The image of joy is often paired with something being (ful)filled. How are joy and desire related? 8. Go listen to the Radiolab episode “Bliss,” and the opening story of Aleksander Gamme. 9. Desire rightly ordered. 10. When desire loses the plot. 11. Why do we assume that joy and suffering are mutually exclusive? 12. Full quote: “Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can -- if it is allowed -- come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.” From A Grief Observed. 13. “Laughs” by Everynone. 2.39 minutes of joy. 14. The impatience of Cain. 15. That time in a sermon I showed a GIF of John Goodman’s face shaking in rage. 16. The impatience of the exodus and the golden calf. 17. The impatience of Jonah. 18. The prophets warn religious folks to not hurry along the day of the LORD. It might be fire and fury, turned toward those who think they are on the right side of God. 19. The impatience of the wicked servant. 20. We are patient because God has been patient with us. 21. A midrash on Exodus 14. 22. Goodness is a contagion too. 23. The Rich Young Ruler. 24. Living water. 25. Damming up the gift.
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1. Matthew 25:14-15. 2. Matthew 25:16-18. 3. Matthew 25:19-30. 4. There are two masters in the parable. 5. Each servant experiences the master they imagine. The wicked servant has a scary master who controls a scary world. 6. The faith that finds a steady place to stand, and a faithful God to lean into. 7. Fidelity presupposes a promise. 8. Qualifications on Ecclesiastes 4. 9. Fight. 10. Flight. 11. A third way. 12. Where virtue leads. 13. Context. 14. Two-steppers in AA. 15. You cannot pretend at a fruitful life. 16. Alex is a bouncer at a club in Ibeza. His wisdom for dealing with anxious or angry situations: “We just keep calm. The calmer one is usually the stronger one.” 17. To be at home in your skin. 18. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. 19. We all have a marshmallow calling to us. 20. You know that thing where a kid is being wild in a restaurant and the parents just want a moment of peace so they pull out a screen and hand it to the kid so they will leave them alone long enough to finish a sentence? That silent kid has not learned how to calm himself. 21. Psalm 131. 22. In Hebrew, the word for “soul” is nefesh, which is related to the root for breath. The most central of our physical rhythms offers us the space to find peace. 23. We might be running our whole lives. 24. Julie Moss finishes her first Iron Man, changing the sport forever. 25. The life of faith is not automatic. It is a slog, where sometimes you will not be running at all. Rather you are crawling on hands and knees, soiling your shorts and crying from pain. The cruciform life is not easy.
Permission Granted There are lots of conversations going on about the need for institutional change in the church. Everything changes. That is, everything living changes. Water must keep flowing and cutting new paths, or the rivers turns into a dead sea. Even still, fear is understandable. There is the fear of the unknown. There is the fear of looking like a fool. If you fail, the church might blame you for their own insecurities, and destroy you for exposing them to their demons. Demons must be exorcised, starting with our own. The institutional church is stuck in lots of broken systems. It is too much to tackle all at once. Start as you would when eating an elephant, with small bites (never eat an elephant!). Start with that 20 minutes on Sunday morning, with that 30 square feet of space around the pulpit. Let the dysfunctional deacon body be for now. Let the stained carpet stay ugly and maroon and smelly. Let the marquee sign committee do its thing. Leave those for another day. You can risk your sermon.* Shake loose the chains and cobwebs. Lean out over the edge of your comfort. The wind will whip by. The rocks below will make your mouth dry. You will want to retreat to safe territory. But how will you learn what your voice sounds like in the wild places? No compass but the shadows cast on unfamiliar ground. No assurances that this will work. Time to jump. 3...2...1...
* Some of you might need permission to try something new. Which is why I have included a permission slip with this booklet to take back to your church. It is signed by a workshop presenter, so you know it’s valid.** **(Footnote on the footnote). I opened this booklet with a quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic. I am still in the middle of reading through it, and it is brilliant. I finalized these pages, including the Permission Slip on the opposite page, and sent it off to have a proof printed. Then I woke up the next morning, made a cup of coffee, and read Part III of Big Magic. Her entire thesis on creativity and mystery crashed into my own creation of this book. Go read her book, then come back and laugh at the irony of this permission slip. To quote Gilbert again, “[i]n the end, it’s all just violets trying to come to light.”
Postscript: The Weirdest Thing I’ve Done Yet, and One Thing I Will Never Do When anyone has a defiling skin disease, they must be brought to the priest. The priest is to examine them, and if there is a white swelling in the skin that has turned the hair white and if there is raw flesh in the swelling, it is a chronic skin disease (Tzara-at) and the priest shall pronounce them unclean. He is not to isolate them, because they are already unclean. — Leviticus 13:9-11
around it. Can you viscerally feel the story in your bones? When you read about rotting flesh and becoming an outsider, can you enter that text?
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will When I was in high school, I learned how to do stage makeup, in- speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; cluding realistic wounds and injuries. So when I happened upon and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they Leviticus 13 as the preaching text, I knew there was a rare oppor- will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.” — Mark 16:15-18 tunity to engage the text at a strange level. In Leviticus, the skin disease, usually translated as leprosy, was most troubling in the social realm. The person who exhibited symptoms had to leave The rationale for the cultist lifting up serpents is not to venerate them, the community for a period of time. It was like they became ra- but to conquer the evil which they represent. The rationale of the institutional steeples for lifting up the serpents of culture is that they are dioactive. sacred and should be celebrated. I have known for a long time now I went to the local craft store and found the tools needed to cre- that each time I participate in an organized, structured, institutionate festering wounds. Liquid latex created a second skin that alized, big-steeple religious service I have a far more deadly reptile could be ripped and flayed. Makeup in skin tones and hues of red by the tail than my unlettered brothers and sisters have in handling through purple created the rashes and bruising. Petroleum jelly rattlers and copperheads. And I have known for a long time that my made the wound ooze. It was gross. Once I had a rotting arm, record in conquering that evil is not so impressive as theirs. — Will Campbell I went to the mall and walked around. (Tip: anytime you need people to give you a wide berth, apply rotting flesh effects to your skin. They will steer clear.) I was avoided in obvious and awkward I am not about to pick up a cottonmouth during a sermon (or ways while walking around the mall. People struggled to stare ever), but there is something to the insistence that the images of Scripture matter. We speak of fire, but are scared to light a match. without staring. We talk about living water, but won’t risk spilling anything on If the mall had a high priest, he would have thrown me out. Not the chancel. We talk about carrying a cross, but keep the thing one person asked if I was okay. For a moment I was untouchable, mounted to a wall or cross-stitched on a pillow. We can do better. unapproachable, like one from whom people hide their faces. We can show more. When preaching about an idea, it helps if you can get your arms
Here are some books I revisit to get my thinking straight, or to unsettling my practice. Preachers should read widely, and these are good resources. However, at some point it is time to set down the books and commentaries and blogs, and go outside into the world. Beware the temptation to camp out in the library, snuggled up tight in the safety of other people’s opinions. The mind is nurtured by knowledge accessed by the body. Reading a hundred books on “How to Be a Great Kisser” will only make you creepy. Sometimes you just have to go for it, fumble around for a while, and hope the risk is worth the experience.
John Jay Alvaro is the pastor of Spring Creek Baptist Church. He has a background in art and architecture, and trained for ministry at Duke Divinity School. He is married to Corrie, who is an artist and teacher. Together they are raising their kiddos, Judah and Ruthie. He is on Instagram and Twitter as @johnjayalvaro. His sermons and visuals can be found at springcreekbc.com/sermons/