Preaching and Truth-Telling

I remember meeting a Presbyterian minister when I was at my seminary for a study week a few years ago. He was telling a story to those of us sitting around the table one night about a small group of ministers who gathered each week to eat, talk, pray, cuss, and sometimes drink. He said that once somebody came up with the idea that each of them would prepare and preach a sermon for the others like no other sermon they had ever preached. This sermon, for the pastor’s group only, would be what they would like to preach if they felt free to do it. Each minister prepared for their day. And, as this minister told us, his face glowed. You could tell this had been an experience that was very deep and dear for him. He said that the sermons were amazing. He said the first minister to preach really opened the door by just laying himself out there, with brutal honesty, and glorious mercy. As the minister tells it, at times they all laughed so hard, the sermon had to stop; and at times a couple of them cried so hard, the sermon had to stop for a minute. Each sermon by each minister was an act of freedom and grace and trust and courage. There were admissions made that would never be shared outside that group. There were cuss words said, there was anger expressed, there was love, there was real flesh and blood human life shot through with the grace of the living God, and there was ecstatic praise of God. It makes me think about the relationship between preaching the Gospel and telling the Truth. It is hard to tell the truth in public. It is hard to tell the truth unless you have the security of a powerful trust. When you can really tell the truth, amazing things happen. You are able to tell things that you didn’t even know about until you hear it coming out of your mouth.

Maybe the secret of life is finding a place where you can risk telling the truth of your life. My guess is that love is that place, and love is trust or it isn’t love. Sometimes you have to take the risk in order to find out if the love is trust, which is to say, ‘sometimes you have to trust someone before you are really sure they are trustworthy; otherwise, you will never know.’ Most of us figure out how to do this a little at a time, but there comes a time when you have to either stop and go the other way, or take a leap of faith. Maybe true preaching is like true love – it isn’t discovered without taking those risks, those leaps of faith. When you take risks, you may find out you have relied on those who are unreliable, that you have put your heart in the hands of those who do not care; but, you may also wonder in joy after you have taken the risk: “why didn’t I take this risk years before!!”