Some of our July
Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian
July 31, 2022
Finding a Good Sermon is Hard to Do
For the past year or so I’ve been re-reading sermons by Frederick Buechner on Sunday mornings with “Spa Music” from Alexa quietly humming and a candle burning across the room. All of us, whether we consider ourselves “religious” or even “spiritual” could use a good sermon each week by the time Sunday rolls around. Life is not easy. But, of course, as you know only too well, we have to be careful here in finding that sermon that actually doesn’t feed the beast of our incurable need to sit up and fly right and so get our lives together to meet the demands of the Approving One, whomever that may be. A good sermon does not bring hope by giving us the correct formula but rather by breaking us apart and then we realize, when we open our eyes, that we are still there. There is life after all. Now. Not Later. That is what I call resurrection.
I was a Christian Preacher by trade for 39 years and Sunday morning was hard work, and the rest of the week prior as well, not least because God would not let go of me but rather kept me in a tight grip so that I would give everything I had to not demand and oppress but rather promise and liberate (this, to say nothing of the demand of running a small business with shrinking market share and social, economic, political and cultural pressures outside of the control of even any prudent organizational management). I don’t know how successful I was overall in that endeavor of delivering the Promise. I do know there were days that I know the score was zero and there were days when I felt it was a ten. And, I do know this. Reading, and re-reading (I’ve had this book for some time) Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark – A Life in Sermons, one at a time, on Sundays, does me a world of good. Here’s something good from “Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain” that caught my attention: “I don’t think it is always necessary to talk about the deepest and most private dimensions of who we are, but I think we are called to talk to each other out of it, and just as importantly to listen to each other out of it, to live out of our depths as well as our shallows.”
All of which makes me think of what I try to share here in these weekly or so “Field Notes”: I like a good hot dog with mustard on it at a ballgame as much as the next person but I like as well a good confession that I cannot and will never trust God but that God nevertheless will not take “no” for an answer.
I'm back from a break in July. I'll do my best to talk and listen out of and into all depths.
