The clergy of the Central District are going to be gathering at Suttle Lake April 22-24. The focus for our learning this time will be the hardest and most important thing clergy do: preach. Emmett Shortreed will be leading us. He is uniquely qualified. Be prepared to hear an even better than usual sermon on Sunday, April 27. (Or maybe you should wait until Sunday, May 4 when your pastor will have had a full week to prepare!)

     I am convinced that the Holy Spirit helps us with our preaching. And I am convinced that if we wait until Saturday night to start preparing, even the Holy Spirit can’t help us much.

     I have had so many experiences of reading a text, despairing over what I would say that week, and then watching almost as if I were a spectator as a sermon takes shape that is far beyond my own abilities! I don’t mean to imply it was quick, easy, or painless. I don’t think there are any shortcuts to good preaching. It takes work. But I believe God partners with us in that work, or at least God will if we will allow it.

     I’m well aware that we preachers typically think we’re better at it than we really are. Good preaching requires that rare combination of humility and confidence. Without humility, we won’t open ourselves to God’s help. Without confidence, we won’t trust that God can help us and we will settle for too little.

     It is an amazing thing to hear God’s voice speak to us (and then through us) as we study God’s Word. At first glance, it’s just words – words that are likely either so familiar we can hardly pay attention or so arcane we can hardly wade through. But then in an attitude of prayerful receptivity, little by little the text comes to life. We see what we swear wasn’t there before, but it was there all the time. We just missed it. And if we missed that, how much more is God trying to reveal to us through this text that we are still missing? Maybe this was what Karl Barth had in mind when he wrote this:

            We should not try to master the text. The Bible will become     more and more mysterious to real exegetes. They will see all the depths and distances. They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon. The true exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files.