Saturday Morning and I'm Not Preaching Tommorrow

The few of you that read this post have probably woken up by now on Saturday morning or will pretty soon. And, for about all of you "it's Saturday morning and you're not preaching tommorrow." I have spent 20 years waking up on Saturday morning, and turning my thoughts towards the sermon I am going to preach the next morning. Some weeks, I was about ready; some weeks I hadn't even gotten a start. But, I have always gotten up and worked on the sermon on Saturday morning. Normally, I think on it during the week; even writing out notes on two or three prospective sermons. But, Saturday is when it has to start coming together (not to say I haven't started from scratch on some Sunday mornings).

This process of sermon preparation is a very personal process and a process that I realize has helped my life over the years. But, over the past twenty years, I didn't really think much about what preparing a sermon was all about, I just did it. It wasn't until I started having Sundays off from preaching that I realized what it was about. And, I have to admit that I really miss preaching when I am not preaching. I don't miss it too much on Sunday morning as much as I miss it on Saturday morning. Like I am missing it this morning. But, what is it I like about knowing I will preach the next day?

Part of it seems to be that there is something about it that is just deep down who I am, and when you are involved in doing something that is deep down who you are, it renews your life. When you are involved in something you feel is in a sense part of your good destiny, then it takes the burden away from you, and makes you feel like you are floating on the current of something much greater than you.

Part of it has to do with the challenge of "making sense of life" to yourself and to others every week, by looking to ancient scriptures, seeking an experience of the Holy One in the present, and trying to put that into words. Sometimes what I am putting into words in the sermon is simply the experience of trying to make sense of life in this process, even if I am not too successful in "making sense of life" that week. The struggle to do it, to understand and experience the deepest in life, is a holy and good struggle, even when you seem to come up empty. So, part of it is that the process of working towards a sermon is a deeply human struggle for meaning in a world that often drains us of meaning. It is like going home each week, and the way back to home each week is never too easy or direct, and I never know which way I will get there, and sometimes I don't really get there. More Sundays I am standing before the congregation talking about the dark and twisting path of faith and the hope of getting back to a place where there is energy and peace and purpose. But, there are those Sundays, when I find my way - when it all comes together - just every once in a while. And, when you get there in a sermon, people get there with you. It's hard to describe it unless you have been there in a service. And, believe me, it is not very often at all when I seem to get there. And, I don't know it ahead of time; it is just like somehow, our struggle together is blessed by a gracious and beautiful presence - it is like for a few minutes, sometimes only a few seconds, we experience together that God is completely beautiful and gracious and good - sharing a goodness with us that awakens the joy in living that we thought had died 100 times over.

As I look towards tommorrow, I wish there was some way that others who are not preaching could share in this experience of preparing for the sermon that I have gone through for the past couple of decades. There have been times, when I was so empty that I just had nothing at all to say, and sometimes a word came and sometimes it didn't. There have been times when I have just thought it was crazy that I was going to stand up and try to say anything about God and life and faith. At the depths of my experience has been the experience that whatever has come to me in life, I have to make sense of it all again week by week, and that the sense I made of it in the past is never enough, and that the only real sense I can make of life comes from beyond me, comes from a word that I can never hear until everything in me is at an end, in silence, in confusion, or in peaceful nothingness. There is an experience of disorientation at the heart of true orientation in life - the disorientation comes of our human struggle, the orientation comes as sheer grace - true orientation comes in ecstatic joy at just being alive, sometimes it comes in the most difficult of times. It comes from God.