What Happens When You Stop Preaching

Some thoughts on being out of the pulpit...

For twenty-four years, I was a preacher. I was sort of a writer, but mostly what I wrote was sermons. And then spoke them. Sunday upon Sunday, year after year after year.

And then I stopped. Ten months ago, I just stopped.

Since I retired last May, I have started writing other things—essays, creative nonfiction—but I have not done this: The discipline of living with the three scripture lessons assigned for that Sunday (Old Testament, Epistle or some other piece of the New Testament, and Gospel) and chewing on them, and debating with them, and arguing with God, and hunting down books and blogs and anywhere someone else might have unpacked some meaning out of these texts, and looking at the original Greek sometimes to see of one of those funny looking words had something to offer, and going down rabbit trails, and sometimes just surfing the Internet instead of sermonizing, and wrangling both the text of Scripture and the text of my own halting words into some kind of shape that made sense, and that proclaimed the good news of God’s boundless love for the world. And then editing, and re-editing, and reading it out loud to see if it made sense, and then kind of just “combing it”, I called it, there at the end … smoothing it all out into one piece of a thing.

And sometimes thinking, “well, that’s all I’ve got,” and trusting God could do something better with my words than I could. But also, sometimes knowing in that deep Spirit-filled way, that the words were exactly right for the task ahead. “That’ll preach.”

The most startling news now is: I don’t actually miss it. I thought I would. I thought this was such a core part of my identity. But I preached one time last fall for a friend who had been out of town and didn’t have time to get a sermon together for Sunday. And I got up in that pulpit and said some words, and it was fine, but it turned out that it was not necessary. Apparently, I truly am a Former Preacher.

I still read Scripture and argue with God — I read the daily lectionary, which means three different hunks of Scripture every day to chew on with my morning coffee. But the pressure, the living, daily energy of “what the actual hell am I going to say on Sunday?” is gone. It was powerful, that pressure. And most of the time I loved it, feeling like a hunk of coal that was hopefully being squeezed into a diamond, week by week. It was a particularly potent part of my spiritual life, that ongoing conversation between me and God and the people I served, the three of us gathered around ancient and often completely inscrutable words, seeking some kind of hope and direction contained within.

But I just read back through the last six months or so of sermons that I preached at All Saints before I retired. And I realize what I miss about preaching is the meaning-making part of writing a sermon. I miss bringing this screwy world, and the struggles of my congregation, and my own doubts and fears and convictions to the desk, to the laptop, to lay them out in the searching light of Jesus’ life and teachings. And to find, at the end of all the wrestling, that there really is good news. There really is good reason to keep going. God never fails. Love is stronger than hate. You can give your life away because you get it back a thousand fold. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it truly does bend toward justice. Limited resources do not limit the power of God. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad. God loves you.

I need to hear those messages myself—just as much as anyone in my parish ever did. As a preacher, the process of writing them down, then speaking them from the pulpit, made them live for me, made me believe it too, helped me to keep going.

So what does a former preacher do, without that discipline and without that process?

Well, I have found a church to worship at, with a preacher whose sermons help me believe and help me keep going. I’m getting better at listening (not saying to myself … well that’s not what I get out of that text…well that’s not how I would put it …) and learning how to let Jesus in through my ears, letting another person take me—in a couple thousand words and fifteen to twenty minutes’ time—to the heart of the gospel.

And I have turned my attention to other ways of struggling with words, trying to make sense of this world and my life, to make a kind of art of it, writing things that may never get published, and even if published…probably not read (the places that publish my work are pretty obscure). I wrangle with the words and try to create a thing in a weak homage to the Creating God in whose image we are all made. And sometimes it frustrates me, and sometimes it pleases me. And I hope the struggle and the product please God, because Lord knows, God is about the only one who cares that I have anything particular to say.

It’s a different kind of writing life, a different kind of discipline. But there is grace. And there is that companionship at the keyboard that has always been there. I write in silence, but I do not write alone.