Finish Well

    The end of the year is bittersweet. We are completing one more circuit around the sun and for the preacher, that means asking ourselves whether we have proclaimed the Son, who, being lifted up will draw all men to Himself. These few days between Christmas and the new year are an opportunity to review, to take inventory, and plot a course for the next several weeks. This may seem like dull stuff after the rush of decoration, preparation, execution of Christmas. It has been busy and as that busyness passes comes a brief time to get our bearings. Bearing getting is not a visible, laudable thing. It is a set of behaviors designed to recalibrate and refocus our energies so that we continue to be effective preachers going forward. It is solitary work. It is early-morning, candle-burning, spade-turning work. It’s not fancy. Many in your congregation would not understand it if you explained it to them. But they’d know if you neglected it because you would be less prepared if you avoided it altogether. Some would sympathize because in their own jobs they take inventory, audit the books, and write annual reports. Preaching is the Best Job in the world. To do the “big J” part of it well means that we must attend to the “little j” part of it also. It is a job as well as the Job.     

    So, get your files in order. In the old days, when I broke into the ministry that meant manila folders, hanging files, and room in the file cabinet. Take the time to label your materials for the coming year. Do it in one sitting if possible. If you have some bored teens around your house, enlist their help. You likely have some cruft leftover from last year. Go through your materials, discard what is unsalvageable and refile what is usable for the next year. 

    In 2021/22 this process is, for the great majority of us, electronic. It takes a good, solid morning's worth of work to create a file folder structure for all your preaching and teaching this year. And it need not be drudgery! This is a chance to go over the big picture of your whole preaching calendar yet again and fix in your mind the course you will navigate during the coming year. You will have stuff that you filed with 2021’s materials and you’re going to want to move it to this year. Most of us have folders that we keep rolling forward year after year, removing materials from them as needed. 

    As you go over those files, inventory your resource needs again. What books are you preaching from and when? What resources do you have, and what do you need? Do you need to save for particular materials? When do you need to pull the trigger on a major resource purchase so that you have enough time to read it before drawing upon it for sermon preparation? 

    If you have piles that have piled up—un-pile them! I’m going to. There are three bowl games on today but no football pileups until I untangle and un-pile the pile just to my left. Start the new year with a clear plan, clean slate, clear desk. 

    Get your statistics, structures, and systems in order. Are you happy with your note-taking methods and tools? Is there a new program you want to try? Perhaps you can download, test-drive, and decide before you really need to know it and roll with it in 2022. Perhaps you received new electronic toys tools for Christmas. Learn how to use them this week. Things will get busier after the new year gets rolling. Learn about your new phone, computer, watch, tablet while you’re sitting there watching the 242nd bowl game between two 6-6 mid-majors who were just thrilled to get out of the Midwest for the holidays.

    Have you gotten some encouraging cards this year? A note from someone who appreciated some aspect of ministry? Re-read them, file them away, and forget them. As you go over your calendar and task/project system you will likely see some misses. Chuckle and move on. You will also notice the hits. You will be tempted to relive every satisfying second. Don’t. Chuckle and move on. Our ultimate audience, our “Boss”, our supervisor is God. Don’t let the naysayers have too much power, and don’t let your fans give you a big head. Keep your nose to the grindstone and continue with the mission. 

    Some of you are thinking, “Wow, Bob did not have much to talk about, ranting and raving about filing, and preparation and stuff to do while watching football.” I beg to differ. This “stuff” which seems insignificant piles up when we avoid it. Eventually, you are going to sit down to do exegesis, plan a sermon series, write newsletter copy, or prepare for Sunday School and the “pile of the un-did” will become a lid on your jar of possibility. Like Sisyphus, you will push, and push, and push eventually finding that your personal pile of past possibilities has become the obstacle to getting the rock of ministry over the hill. 

    It is Wednesday, December 29, 2021. Today I’m going to take some time to begin this process of putting 2021 to bed and waking up 2022. Loose ends will be tied up. I will check under the bed of my mind for discarded socks, match them up, wash them, and put them away. I will get rid of some stretched-out plans and replace them with fresh-new ones for the coming year. I kind of look forward to it. It does not always seem productive, but in 3 or 4 weeks I will be glad I did it. 

    I invite you to join me as we finish 2021 well and begin 2022 with a plan and a purpose which will advance the Kingdom in the place where God has called each of us to service.

Oh, Holy Night 12.22.2021

    My Christmas Eve sermon is complete. My Sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, December 26th? It is finished too. That means, barring a tragic holiday death or an unanticipated holiday wedding my preaching work for 2021 is very nearly complete. All that remains is the blog post you are reading and another to wrap up the year sometime next week. The next sermon I will write will be the first for the calendar year 2022. 

    I am more sentimental than you might imagine. When I think of Christmas I think of my mother and father, who are both gone. I think about driving across Southern Illinois from Salem to Fairfield to my grandparents’ house a family of 7 singing Christmas Carols in a big blue Buick station wagon. I remember going to church on Christmas Eve. I remember what it was like to be mastered by the mystery. 

    I also remember how I felt when as a young single minister, I had to wait until after Christmas Eve services to drive home to be with my family. That was a different kind of formative memory. Those kinds of circumstances tested the resolve of a young preacher. Tested the resolve of my mom as well! (In today’s world I would throw in a lol there). The next phase of the process was after marriage. Now the decision to be with my congregants for Christmas Eve not only impacted me but also set the parameters for how my wife and children would understand and come to appreciate Christmas. At various times we lived close to her hometown or mine, and we still got to see family after my pastoral obligations were complete. 

    I have participated in Christmas Eve services that were stunningly beautiful and I have participated in Christmas Eve services that were staggeringly bad.  Most of the time I was responsible. One just does a thorough debrief, catalogs mistakes, files away the hits, and puts one’s head down, always looking forward to next year, but first, next week. 

    There is nothing I like more than a warm study in the gloaming of a mid-December evening, listening to Bach or George Winston’s December while preparing a message which may be the first, last, and only sermon that someone hears this year. What a privilege to stand behind the sacred desk with such an opportunity for impact. 

    If you are not a preacher, I hope you understand the peril and promise for your preacher during the Christmas season. We are in an ever-escalating arms race with the Worship Industrial Complex. Too many believers and seekers are searching, not for a holy, silent, and intimate night but for shallow, whoopee cushion worship, that does not speak to their mind or challenge their heart, but that increases their amusement. The mystery of the incarnation is many things. Amusing is not one of them. If you think that Christmas Eve needs a bang-up production with live animals, trapeze artists, and professional actors you have missed the point, need to repent, and consider yourself scolded. If you join us for worship at Grayville First Christian Church the room will be lighted with candles, it will be silent as a stable, and our hearts will be submissive to the Word made flesh. 

    Let me say something to you, preacher. God shook hands with our history on Christmas. Jesus particularized all the promises of the Father and took upon himself the vulnerable flesh of an infant. Scripture tells us of His relationship with the Father before the singing-star concert of creation ever began. The Gospels also tell us the rustic story of His historical, physical, wearied, wandering, pilgrim parents. Once a year He bids us stand up and ask, Like Linus Van Pelt for the lights to be dimmed, so that we may remind historical, physical, wearied, wandering, pilgrims that the Word has spoken. The light shines. The night is silent. The Lord has come.

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like...

Like the song says, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. If you still have school-age children at home, they will soon be dismissed to their Christmas vacation. This, during one of the most intense times of ministry for preachers. Even if you no longer have children at home, you are feeling the pinch of the extras of the season. Extra gatherings, parties, dinners, caroling, and worship services. Along with wanting to put our best foot forward during a time where we might engage more visitors, we are trying to complete the work of one year whilst putting the finishing touches on our plans for the next. The time of Advent and Christmas is truly exhilarating and exhausting. 

    It is not a time to let your focus on preaching slip. It is not a time to lose concentration. It is not a time to phone it in. This is particularly tempting because the passages which routinely surface during the Christmas season are familiar. You have likely preached them before. People are filled with the joy and enthusiasm of the season and probably do not remember what you said last Christmas Eve when you preached from Luke 2. So, this year use that text on the Sunday morning before Christmas, tweak the introduction and conclusion, throw in different illustrations, and voila! Sermon complete, time saved, you’re the hero. Till next year when you will have to make some of the same choices. Or 10 years hence when you’re still wrestling with “new things” to say at Christmas. 

    It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Again. It comes every year at pretty much the same time. Some years will be busier than others. Your Christmas preaching needs to be fully embedded in your preaching plan. This is one of the reasons I constantly harp on the need for fully planning a year in advance. After years of ministry, some of the easiest things begin to become more and more difficult. Christmas and Easter come every year. They arrive with certain expectations of what will be preached, and those sermons generally come from a restricted number of texts. If you approach this significant season as detached from what you are preaching through the whole year you will likely end up in one of two places. The rut of repetition or innovation escalation. Let’s examine these two pitfalls of the looming Christmas preaching season.

The Rut of Repetition

    I alluded to this pitfall above. It is tempting to say the same things about the Nativity every year. And while it is true that some Biblical truths need constant reinforcement, that process should be creative and engaging. After years of studying the processes of preaching, I am convinced that the best way to avoid redundancy is by incorporating Christmas, and other seasonal preaching into a year-long thematically organized preaching calendar. 

    And tell people! There is no reason for this process to be a secret. Explain to people that you have invested a lot of time and thought into preparing a 52-week plan for preaching and teaching scripture. Give them a preview of the year and include a glimpse of how the important seasons of Christmas and Easter are embedded in that larger plan.

    As is often the case I can hear many of you ask, “Why?” Longevity and freshness.  After years into the annual cycle of preparing to preach, you must beware of the twin problems of a bored preacher and a bored congregation. There is nothing like sitting down to prepare a Christmas sermon from an unfamiliar text, or a familiar text being applied in a new fashion. It keeps you fresh and involved. It will provoke new questions from those old texts and perhaps even evoke some new intertextual conversations. You may discover that when this Christmas Eve or Christmas Sunday sermon is finished that you have a list of new sermon arcs that will be useful for many years to come.

Innovation Escalation

    The second pitfall to be avoided is innovation for innovation’s sake; innovation escalation Once this process begins the preacher engages in a difficult cycle of trying to find new ways to convey old messages that are not firmly anchored to the text, or that rely on novelty. 

    Much of the material provided online is topical at best. Some of it is so driven by popular trends that it is just a passage of scripture away from being nothing more than culturally driven holiday encouragement. Often these messages provided turnkey from independent vendors, practically require all of the secondary and tertiary materials provided to engineer the fully conceived effect. Videos, handouts, cards, programming materials, dramatic readings and plays, children’s programming, and so on. It is possible to prepare these kinds of materials in-house, but there is clearly an arms race and even when not buying it is often easier for a harried and unfocused preacher to just copy or buy the work from others. Then the real trouble begins. After a big hit this year, after something memorable and moving, the pressure will escalate next year to do something even more innovative. And the next year. And the next. This sort of non-biblical process is just as exhausting as trotting out the same old thing every year, except it costs more and relinquishes more and more control of your pulpit to the worship industrial complex.  

Conclusions

    You, the preacher, are in charge of what goes on in the pulpit. You can either do your work with excellence or you can farm it out to the expectations or products of others. Why would you want to do that? If you have been called to preach that means you are called to prepare. You are called to use your gifts to the best of your ability. You are called to envision not only weekly sermons but a program of preaching. You are called to see the work not only tactically (week by week) but strategically (year by year by year). 

    You are called to preach. By the time Christmas is coming, you should be itching to preach those Christmas sermons which have been percolating in your planning process. You should be excited to tell old, old story in a new and engaging way, as a part of a long-term sustainable process. When you get done with this Christmas Eve sermon, with this year’s Christmas season you should already be planting the seeds of next year in your sermon garden. 

    God called you. I trust you and I will do everything in my power to encourage you and equip you to be the best preacher you can be.

12.8.2021 Normalizing the Abnormal

    The Christmas season is different. It is a culturally significant holiday. The Christmas shopping season has a disproportionate impact on local and national economies. We drag shrubbery (sometimes fake, even Avant-Garde) into our homes and decorate said shrub with colorful baubles and an increasingly sophisticated array of luminaries. People who are insular throughout the rest of the year find themselves filled with good cheer whispering…nay shouting “Merry Christmas!” to total strangers. Gifts are fretted over, purchased, hidden, and ultimately given. 

    I love it! It was awesome as a kid, of course, and like many, there was a time in early adulthood when it lost its luster. Twenty-somethings are always rediscovering what the elders have known for years. It’s one of those phases we all go through. Then, when raising children Christmas is transformed. As parents, it dawns on us that we are responsible for their (the kiddos) magic. And Christmas becomes a stressor. Don’t even get me started on some of the histrionics Mrs. Beckman went through to ensure that each child was treated with equitable magic. As one settles into middle age it is possible to embrace the magic again for its own sake. 

    Let’s face it though. How we behave during the Christmas season a.k.a “Advent” is not exactly normal. A fictional alien intelligence, if asked to summarize how we behave during Christmas might say something like this: “They blow their budgets, destroy their diets, and wreck their homes.” The same observer might also be led to add: “They pursue all of this out of the ordinary, abnormal behavior with a remarkable amount of good cheer.” 

    In other words, during the Christmas season, we have learned to normalize what would otherwise be pretty abnormal behavior. People have houseplants, yes, but non-native fake trees with blinking LED lights?  Putting pretend antlers and a red nose on a perfectly content dog, all so that you can take photos of the poor animal to post to social media or to send in cards to friends? Again, not normal. Why do we behave this way and what bearing might it, perhaps, maybe, have on how we apply the Gospel the rest of the year?

    Rightly or wrongly, Christians have the reputation of being outside the cultural norm. Yet, Christmas is a distinctly Christian celebration which has become culturally normative. To talk about Jesus during Christmas is not considered abnormal by our culture anymore. Sure, Jesus now must compete with Rudolph and Santa, but He is more than holding His own. 

    Our fallen culture is waiting for Christians to embrace their abnormality. The world needs us to proudly take our place as a “third race” defined not by race, culture, social standing, or economic status, but defined by our allegiance to Jesus. Fallen people need hope. Fallen people need encouragement. Fallen people need compassion, grace, goodness, and love. In its infancy, the Church functioned that way everywhere it was planted. Christian behaviors, attitudes, and actions that should be our “normal” are viewed as “abnormal” by the culture. And that is OK. It is the most normal thing to be imagined. Peter seems to have understood this when he wrote the following

“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (1 Peter 2:11–12 ESV)

Because typical Christian conduct is not what the world expects it will not understand why we do what we do and Who it is to Whom we answer. The key is faithful perseverance which elicits a faith response from those who feel the impact of our deeds and who are blessed by our words. 

    A real key to this process of normalizing what our culture considers abnormal is that we cannot define our behaviors by the strategies or tactics of the world. If we do, we will be rightly viewed as hypocrites who do not believe the peace-making mandate of our Gospel. Maybe the reason the world questions what we say and do is that we have abandoned Peter’s mandate to keep our conduct honorable. When we are no different from the world when their normal is our normal, the first to notice our fecklessness are those who need our message the most.

    The power of the Christmas season is unleashed when we, the Church, remember that every season has been transformed by Christ. The culture may latch onto our coattails during Christmas, that just increases our visibility and expands our opportunities. Christmas will soon give way to the Easter celebration of Resurrection—the most outlandish and abnormal of all the claims which lie at the heart of our faith. How we conduct ourselves largely determines how we will be heard. 

    Christmas is a season of Joy. Be joyful! Christmas celebrates the Prince of Peace. He requires of His people that we be peacemakers. So, make peace. Christmas is a season of hope. Be hopeful. Christmas proclaims God’s love for all mankind. Love all mankind. Some will think these behaviors peculiar, even abnormal. We who wear the name of Christ call it faithful living.

Reading to Grow as a Storyteller

    This is a second stab at a blog post for this week. I had a first draft completed but in retrospect decided to hold it in abeyance as an idea which may possibly be developed into a larger project. I am preparing to preach from the Johannine Literature in 2022. I will preach from John’s Gospel, John’s Epistle, and John’s Apocalypse. I am pumped about next year’s preaching calendar, but more importantly, I am deeply involved in my preliminary research for the same. I have also made the decision to do the preliminary work with a view to future publishing, so I am trying to be extra careful in storing and preserving the fruits of my research. 

    I ran across this little gem whilst finishing up the Introduction to D.A. Carson’s commentary on John. I will quote him and address an important issue which he mentions.

But these comments may also be necessary because many young preachers (and some not so young!) find it relatively easy to preach from an epistle, but find little to say when they turn to the Gospels. 

                                Carson, D. A. The Gospel According to John. PNTC. Accordance electronic edition, version 2.5. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

I’m not Don Carson but I have also sensed that many preachers find Gospels harder material to preach than the Epistles. I want to address this difficulty and make some suggestions for how you can become not only more comfortable preaching Gospel materials but get better at preaching, what is the largest group of material in the New Testament.

    First let’s consider why Epistles, in the big picture, are “easier” to deal with than Gospels. Three primary reasons:

1. Length

2. Structure

3. Form/Genre

    The longest epistles are half as long as Matthew, Luke, or John and roughly the same size as Mark. The Gospels, while as highly structured as the Epistles, manifest that structure in a different genre incorporating several different forms each contributing to the overall structure of the book. That means more work for the preacher. Preaching Gospel materials requires working with longer pericope’s which can make it hard to mirror the “outline” of the text into a preachable sermon outline. 

    The Gospels narrate events from the life of Christ and draw practical and theological conclusions from them. It is easy to become untethered from the text and fall into the trap of facile moralizing. In short, preaching the Gospels requires us to hack a clear path from the structure of the text to the story we are telling in the sermon. The brush we are hacking back can be external to the preacher and internal. The external brush is all the material we must study to make sense of the text. The internal? Some preachers are not comfortable with the openness of storytelling.

    Just a quick example. Many are uncomfortable looking over Jesus’ shoulder while He speaks with the woman at the well. Some of us would have been harder on her sins and more explicit in encouraging her to repent. Other preachers look at the text and focus on details of adultery, true worship, and the nature of revelation. The fact of the matter is that Jesus leaves many issues unresolved, even up in the air. (Did she ever go get her live-in to meet Jesus?) What we preachers find problematic is that this is a great story but makes for hard preaching. 

    Let me make a couple of suggestions for how we can combine the organizational and structural components of good preaching with the narrative and creative components of good storytelling. It begins with (to return to a previous blog topic) promiscuous reading. And some of that reading needs to be fiction. New and old novels. The classic and the forgettable. Pure fiction and historical fiction. Read the new narrative journalism which sprang up in the late 20th century with a focus on the storyline of factual material. Biographies and histories. You are surrounded by good storytellers. Take the time to read and listen to how they tell their stories. If you don’t have a favorite author outside of the Biblical and Theological disciplines, you are probably not reading enough. Now, I know when you are a preacher, everything is a potential illustration. However much of what you read should prepare the preacher as opposed to preparing sermons. Voracious, promiscuous reading enriches your intellect, firms up the muscles of your mind, freshens your perspective so that when you look over Jesus’ shoulder during His awkward conversation with that lady by the well you understand the dynamics of His conversation with her and how brilliantly John has captured the pathos of the situation. 

    This is where your writing process can be improved as well. As you are putting your sermon together, moving from exegesis to final sermon outline think through the material asking yourself the question “what is the point of this text?” This is analogous to the question “what is the point of this story?” If all that you have is information to give but no story to tell your congregation, they may be informed but not transformed. 

    Much of the material in the Bible is oblique; it comes at you sideways or sneaks up on you. Our propensity to classify and analyze without conceptualizing our finished product as a transformative story told by a creative author robs the Bible of much of its emotive power. We replace the inspired and creative voice of the author with additional illustrative material or interject emotion into our presentation through voice or gesture. We believe the Bible to be inspired but we often force it into molds of our own making and wind up wondering why people are not impacted by it. Creativity is just as hard as analysis, and it takes a lighter touch.  

     It is nice if people like the Bible. That is not really the job of preaching. The job of preaching is faith leading to a rightly formed fully transformed life. In the pulpit you make the redeeming story of scripture come alive. Much of what we read in the Gospels will not be easily reduced to three points and a poem. Don’t punt just because it’s hard. Improve. Get better. Read more. Don’t just study harder study with the purpose of becoming better at telling the Old, Old Story of Jesus and His love.