“And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” – 1 Corinthians 2:1
A few Sundays ago we had a guest preacher. She was a college campus minister and missionary, and she had come to give us an update on the work of which she is a part. Our services tend to be shorter, particularly for an Assemblies of God congregation, so I gave her the entire sermon time to share. Whenever I do this, I always encourage the speaker to give us a sermon alongside their missionary presentation. She obliged, and gave us a good word.
Preaching, if you didn’t know it, is hard work. It’s fun work, too, of course. You will hardly find a minister who doesn’t like to do it, or who will turn down the opportunity if offered. But the ease with which many preachers–especially the famous ones–do their job can be misleading. The relaxed presentation of the greatest public speakers is a hard-earned ability. Preachers have worked all week, in most cases, on the messages we are hearing. What ends in the pulpit begins with a prayer and a book report. Hard thinking and hard praying are often involved. Pastors may be the only people most of us know who regularly thumb through dictionaries and find it interesting.
But I don’t say any of this to garner sympathy or respect as a preacher. I say this in order to also acknowledge another important fact about preaching: Sermons are, often as not, dull to listen to, and can be difficult to get something out of.
Even the most dynamic preachers can drone on, especially if they write and preach a brand new sermon each week (rather than preaching only occasionally, as many famous preachers do, or recycling their best sermons as traveling evangelists do). The regular preacher’s delivery can become predictable. Their hobby-horses eventually start to come out.
“Wait, I feel like he said something like that just a few weeks ago.”
“She always talks about this.”
Illustrations get recycled over and over. And add to this the fact that, statistically, most of the folks in the room probably skipped breakfast, and sitting through a sermon starts to really be a chore. This is where the grace of the hearer comes in.
When I had the chance to hear this young woman preach a few weeks ago, she did a wonderful job. But I began the time as a terrible listener. (We preachers are often the worst at this.) First, my mind was wrapped up in the flow of the service. Then I thought about her presentation, her cadence, and her body language. Was she assuming too much of her hearers? Too little? Was her delivery–developed speaking to students–really the right tone for a mostly older congregation?
It took me a bit to stop and actually listen–to let the word of God be for me, too. She was the vehicle of the message that morning, after all. God’s message through her was, therefore, also for me.
As I sat under her word and was fed, it dawned on me in a fresh way how much grace my people have given me over the years. From the early encouragement–when I likely thought I was a better preacher than I was, or am–to now, decades later. How many times have they heard the same version of some illustration? What’s it been like when I waxed philosophic on some topic of life they understood better than me? How many times have I lost my place over the years, or preached a sermon that ultimately made very little sense? And yet my people sit under me still, supporting me. Listening. Hungering to hear the word of God preached.
Their kindness and grace as listeners has been every bit as important–if not more so–than my own homiletical grace.
Which leads me to think about the apostle Paul. When he preached to the Corinthians, he spoke to them in fear, weakness, and trembling (1 Corinthians 2:3). When he brought the gospel to the Galatians, in was in the context of his own serious illness (Galatians 4:13-14). The weak and the foolish, Paul said, are those who hear the gospel the best. It passes right over the strong and the wise. Perhaps this is, in part, because of the grace being shown by the hearers.
The incapable and the overlooked are often not as turned off by the inabilities in a speaker, I find. The wise and the strong (or those who see themselves, or desire to see themselves, that way) usually want to be impressed. In this age of the internet influencer and the online personality, we are less accustomed than ever to give an imperfect presentation our time. We demand that our attention be grabbed, and consider it almost a right not to be bored. Even the “authentic” people we follow online offer usually a curated, “just so” kind of authenticity.
Mikael Ivaska 