Preaching - Treasures
Preached at the retreat for final year Readers in training, September 2004
Luke 15 1-2, 8-10

An important ecumenical church was setting about the serious business of choosing 3 new pastors.
The appointment panel asked the RC candidates for the post to say Mass. The best one got the job.
The panel asked the Free Church candidates to preach a sermon. The best one got the job.
And then for the Anglican candidates... to organise a jumble sale.
The moral of the story, told to me by a Methodist minister, is never ask Anglicans to preach. Hmm.

But perhaps you've wondered why we have sermons? I bet you have.
Especially when it's your turn to preach!
And what do we expect from a sermon?
Something about God and about 5 minutes?

I wonder whether you are the sort of people who have sermon survival techniques?
Do you keep hidden supplies of sweets?
Do you pass the time reading the smallest details of news on the pew sheet?
Or finding your favourite hymn in the hymnbook?
Or counting the windows, the pews, the tiles on the floor.
Checking for damp patches in the roof.
Even guessing how long the preacher will go on for - anxious to be away, back in the real world.

Anxious... wasn't the word. She was desperate.
There were definitely 10 coins and now, no matter how much she counted them, she could only make 9 appear.
Would her landlord understand?
Would her husband beat her? He'd slaved for those 10 coins.
And how could she stretch 9 to feed the whole family?
So she swept and swept; searched and wept....

I guess you know that there are 2 common words for this bit of the service.
The one often used in more 'catholic' churches is 'homily':
originally meaning a lecture or talk explaining what the Bible passages were about.
The more familiar word is 'sermon'. This comes from the French word 'sermonner' meaning to tell off.

A chance for the cleric to tell the people off for whatever wayward behaviour you've been up to during the past week
in the days when the parson knew all and heard all and saw all - and was supposed to set the moral tone in the parish.
The word has many negative overtones: to sermonise, to preach, to correct, to exhort, to put people right.
To show you the error of your ways.

Sermons have changed their form and meaning over time.
When John Wesley was training his ministers, they were told to break open the word of God so that 'men' may apply it to their lives.
And when Baptist preachers were being trained they were told to shout loudly if their argument was weak at any point.
A device still used by many evangelists to this day....

But all of this begs the question, for the modern preacher, of what one is supposed to do in this curious space called sermon.

Do people come expecting to be morally admonished - or just bored?
Should the preacher seek to offer some serious teaching in the 5 or 10 minutes before people starting reaching their attention span?
Is it an opportunity to convince or to convert the listener?
Should I have visual aids, or ask you to stand up and be involved in some cringe-worthy way?
Would it be a good idea at this point to break up into small groups and discuss the Bible readings and,
in the light of Luke's Gospel, work out our strategy for evangelism:
searching for lost coins in the streets and houses of our neighbourhood?....
0r is it in fact an opportunity to entertain?
No that would never do. Serious Anglicans never laugh in church!.........

Laugh wasn't the word either. But the relief was enormous.
Her neighbours could read it on her face as she ran to tell them.
Again she counted them and again twice more - before she put them away.
Her treasures of the darkness; her riches hidden in secret places.....

My theory is that the sermon is the place in the normally very familiar service
when the congregation might just be persuaded
to raise their eyes from the page
to step outside the memorised words and actions of the liturgy
and think the unthinkable. To think new thoughts and contemplate the possibility of being other than they are.

But, since they never want to do this, the preacher has to be cunning-creative and have a touch of the poetic
in order to get under people's skin, to make them itch mentally
and, in scratching their heads and hearts,
open up a chink in the armour of their religious routine.
To use their imaginations which, they always have trouble realising, is the part of their nature which comes closest to God's.
The part of our nature which comes closest to God's. Our imagination.
'Just imagine!', we say.
The opening of a fairytale? A prelude for daydreams?
Or the start of a conversation with God?
A prayer; a moment of encounter -
when that divine power which holds us in being
(creating us- we know
re-creating us - we trust)
calls us
each and all and any who will
out, up, forth and beyond ourselves;
drawing from us the treasures of our darkness
the riches hidden in our secret selves,
opening ourselves up,
to all that, with love, might be.

Just imagine how she rejoiced;
how her neighbours
nodded knowingly
sharing in her joy; feeling it in their guts,
knowing exactly how it might have been for them
if their landlord, husband, children had counted only 9....
Just imagine....

But surely we too have coins of our own;
coins gifted to us when yet in our mothers wombs
treasure come our way through diligence, care and nurture;
urged and coaxed and dared from us
brought hesitantly from darkness into light
and offered
for the flourishing and blessing of others
in his name, in his time, in his ministry,
in his church and beyond.

Treasures of all kinds;
rare and exquisite
envied and desired by many
and then some quite ordinary things
hallowed by being opened up for others.

Good preaching is all about opening up:
a space for poetry in a 'world flattened by prose',
a time-aside from daily speech, where nothing is normal because everything is possible,
a risky place, precarious,
a place for the unexpected,
where words and images tumble around each other and refuse to make just one sense....

A place for catching just a movement, a glimpse,
like the glint of a coin beneath a dusty cupboard,
a flash of the hand of the divine
as it moves among us,
bestirring us, recreating us.....

A place for hearing echoes of a strangely familiar voice recalling us to some half-forgotten purpose
to our ponder our deepest desires and to speak out and to share what treasures we have.......

A place for testing out and tasting those extravagant kingdom recipes
passed down to us in the stories of the God who in Jesus fed thousands......

A place for believing
and for allowing the spark of the divine to rekindle in us
a flame and a passion and a longing to proclaim, in a needy world, the stern justice and gratuitous love of the God
who is always creating and recreating us into flourishing and blessing

A space for answering YES! again and again and again in the silence of our hearts
and for realising that, however little we might feel we are and have to offer,
God really is there for us... Always and forever and forever....

And how she and her neighbours rejoiced!

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