Preaching in the sacred liturgies of the church is a sacred task: to break open, to reveal, the meaning of the sacred symbol-words, and to encourage, to inspire, their embrace. It is not the time to exercise ego. Indeed, as the essay that proceeds this pounds out, any thing, any minutia, that saps of ego is desecratory of the sacred. One may need briefly to relate the chosen text to the present time. One may summarily note the anxiety of sequestration due to a pandemic as an introduction into addressing the anxiety felt by the disciples after the execution of their leader, but it is not the time to prattle on about your missing of travel, family, or outings. Preaching is never the time to talk about oneself. If one wishes to share with one’s fellow congregants and spiritual charges from among the details of one’s life, the time to do so is in some social setting, not the sacred liturgy. Where in scripture do we read of Jesus nattering on to the crowds about how he feels? The Apostle Paul is not shy about details of his life, its blessings and woes, but Paul is writing letters to congregations, not engaged in sacred ritual.
If one cannot resist the urge to talk of self, of one’s talents, hobbies, family and friends, travels and travails, then one needs to resign one’s position as preacher. If one can do neither, then cut out your tongue, open your skull and rip out your cerebrum, and lest you be tempted to sign something, cut off also your hands, for you have disserved the sacred task given you. While I will grant that you well might be a good-willed, pleasant, and personable sort, when it comes to the execution of the sacred task entrusted to you to open the Word of God to the people of God you are as dense as and as dumb as a cabbage. Go! Slither away, useless, tiresome servant. I cannot sit silent while the church of God is assailed by ignorami and the ignominious.
If one is to open the Word of God, one needs to begin with opening it, uncovering it. It is an act of revelation. What means the symbol? It is only here, in the midst of proclamation and celebration, in the midst of the enclosure of sacred time and space, that the Word can be so dis-robed and elevated without either secularization or desecration. Two items come here into play. There is a need for some degree of exegesis. The scriptures emerge out of a society and culture foreign to the present in both time and temperament. In this regard one needs set the sacred words in a context wherein culture can speak to culture. This exegetical exercise gives way to the second item necessitated: the uncovering of the depth meaning of the sacred within the sacred terms. One cannot in preaching talk of Jesus’ dying for sin, rising, and ascending into heaven as literal or historical events. They refer to spiritual realities, psychic truths, and have, therefore, never been literally true or historical happenings. One needs to explain the psychic, the religious, the spiritual reality pointed to by such terms as propitious death, resurrection, ascent into heaven, sitting at the right hand of God, and the sending of God’s Spirit upon all flesh. These terms, when untethered from literalism, release their potential to speak of the soul’s suffering, its hope, its faith, its capacity to open itself to creativity, to the integrity of creativity’s thrust. To preach one must explain the words of a culture foreign to the present, and one must explain the symbol-words of a psychology, a spirituality, a soul-science to the present. One must then inspire openness to that summoned spiritual journey both in inner reflection and community life.
The breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup are sacred symbols that replicate this sacred breaking open of the Word and the sharing of its Spirit. No minister would dare speak of self in rehearsing the words of institution or in the distribution of the consecrated elements. Why then is preaching taken as a ground for the entertainment of one’s own ego and the literal hiding away of that Spirit which is the essence of meaning? The entirety of the sacred rituals is to open man to the meaningfulness of creation, of the life we share with, not simply this world, but the cosmos. The soul is not the ego—and we are all delinquent here of confusion even to the point of wanting not so much soul to have life eternal as for ego to go on forever. Soul is something we are given, something in which we share. It is life. Ego is something we make up to navigate us through life. We are answerable for ego, for what we make. We are more answerable for that with which we are entrusted—life, and its manifest in us, the soul. Ego is merely one facet of what we make of soul. Indeed, we even dishonour soul by speaking thusly, as if it were something we have and can manipulate. Soul makes us, intends to make us, and thus we speak of God as the father of souls, as Soul, as Spirit. If we heed not within the voice of soul, the voices of soul, for God himself speaks of self as “Us”, then we get lost in the everyday world (the “flesh” as scripture would say), and confuse soul with ego, id and shadow with sin, super-ego and anima with grace, and in that drag heaven into the mud, the dust and tears of man thinking he can be like unto God without honouring, without living the harmony intended for man with man and man with nature. Life is intentional, that is, freely creative. It is not a matter of pitting good against evil, you against me, we against them. It is about finding the propitious way forward gracefully—be it toward a symbol-notion of a Jerusalem, a Sion, a Pentecost, or more simply a creative and caring way to make today and tomorrow resilient, livable for all. In the founding narrative creation proceeds one day at a time by Spirit and speaking Word, by empowered and undisclosed word. Creativity is always in abeyance, always hovering above the dark and chaotic, unless meaning, meaningfulness, is disclosed: “Let there be light!”
Let them that preach in the church put aside self, and preach simply the truth of both the Spirit and the Word entrusted to it as its life, its soul, lest creativity find another body to enliven, and the church suffocate in the “flesh”, in the tomb of literalism it has failed to open.