Psalm 8: 4-5; John 16:12-14

Not much more to say

Dear friends,

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  No, that’s not me talking, that is Jesus.  Could these words reflect my own feelings in a strange way with two to three Sundays left to go?  Is there still much I have to say that you cannot bear. No, actually it is the exact opposite.  I have pretty much said everything I have had to say to you over the years, and probably more than once.  I never listened much to German popular music but there is this great line in a seventies song by Gerhard May which rhymes beautifully in German: “Alles wass ich noch zu sagen hatte dauert eine Zigarette.” It translates simply: all I had left to say lasts merely as long as a cigarette. In my case maybe a half-smoked one.

            Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner, in one of his later and lesser known books entitled” Speak what we feel (not what we ought to say) has taken the title from King Lear. It is a book about four writers. He writes in the foreword:”…I have long since come to believe that all our stories are at their deepest level the same story, it is my hope that in listening to these four say so powerfully not what they ought to say but what they truly felt, we may possibly learn something about how to bear the weight of our own sadness (p. xi).  This paragraph resonates with me, because my criticism of much preaching is that it is too much about what we ought to be and do. This does not mean it is incorrect preaching, but it doesn’t address people’s sadness and other feelings and as such they cannot address their deepest connection to God. I hope that over the years I have said what I ought to say by talking about what you really felt and what you were carrying with you into the pews.

 Eugene Peterson in his book “The Pastor,” tells of his son visiting a church in Colorado to see if he might want to attend that church. He reports to his father that he decided against it because the pastor “Hasn’t found his sermon yet.”  Could it be possible that pastors really only have one sermon in them? Billy Graham kind of did.  I think realistically there are about 12 themes a pastor returns to again and again, not always consciously. I can point out two of my themes in Buechner’s book right off the bat.  First he says echoing Irish poet Gerard Manley-Hopkins that the “profane is not always the antithesis of the sacred, but often the bearer of it.” (p. 19) What this means is that we can find God’s presence and God’s voice in the everyday, that the mundane can be sacred.”  Another theme that speaks to me is what Buechner says when he talks about Shakespeare. He says that we assume that life is either tragedy or comedy and that we must choose which one it is, while in fact life is both tragedy and comedy at the same time. This means that there is always something to laugh and cry about at the same time, there is deep sadness but also everlasting hope in the human story with God.

Today’s texts bring up a number of themes. They have to, because it is Trinity Sunday. This means we much talk of God as Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit, a head scratching multidimensional concept at best as we have just been reminded.  The Psalms give us another of my favorite themes: that God has taken human flawedness and made it wonderful through God’s love. I have probably done about ten sermons about that team over the years.

Friends, there is one theme from today’s texts that I want to leave you with and that is that all speakers and thus all preachers at one point are going to run out of new things to say.  They reach the end of their words. I think you and I have reached that point. A thousand plus sermons should do the trick, don’t you think?  That’s plenty listening to one guy. I like to think that I have things to say to other people, although I doubt it will be a congregation.  And for you there will be other pastors with new themes and new ways of explaining which will stand before you in the years to come. The text from proverbs talks about wisdom and how it is always here.  As people eventually run out of words, God is speaking still and always will, always finding new voices to break the silence. Thanks be to God. Amen.