So. It is July. Eleven Sundays have come and gone since I was a weekly preacher. About seven weeks have passed since I wrote anything about the practice of preaching. And I'm going to be honest--it feels good.
It feels good not to be under the gun right now, not be constantly checking the status of that 168 hour countdown that a weekly preacher does, not to be desperately trying to squeeze something, anything out of that lectionary passage this week. There are a few reasons for this, some complicated, some not so complicated, but I think it's fair to classify all of them under the "I Was Burned Out" category. So, I decided to become un-burned out by letting go of weekly preaching.
A few weeks ago, though, I was invited to preach at a mentor's church when she had to go out of town. It was an easy gig--all I had to do was show up with a sermon and preach it. No prayer-writing, no music-picking, no children-sermon winging, just focusing on the Scripture (which was requested to be from the lectionary...easy-peasy). And so, I worked on the text, touched base with the worship leaders, liaised with the pastor to make sure my direction would jive with her preaching and the congregation's experience. It was a smooth, leisurely experience of sermon prep. Until about 18 hours before I would be preaching when I actually sat down to write.
This has always been a problem for me: a 18-paper is due on Monday morning? I'll research it for a few weeks, then write the whole thing the Sunday evening before it's due. My 500 words on the city council meeting is due at midnight? I'll sit down to write at 11:03pm. My sermon is to be preached at 9:30am? Saturday at 5pm seems as good a time as any to be writing.
It's not that I don't prepare...I spend weeks researching, mulling over, and conversing. But when it comes time to sit down and actually write? I'm terrified. I just can't get myself to do it. Or, at least that's what I thought.
Now, when I do sermon prep, I count on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. A mundane chore becomes a sermon illustration? Spirit. I stumble upon research that delves into the exact word I have been wrestling with and it's not 35 years old? Spirit. But for some reason, I was surprised to find the Spirit show up when I was procrastinating from actually writing the sermon. But it did, in the form of a link on social media to a post by Kate Baer. "When You Are Tightly Wound," was the title, and so obviously, I clicked on it. Because, have you met me? Tightly wound is a pretty accurate description of my resting state.
I read the article, but more importantly, I actually heard it. (Thank you, Spirit.) And so, at 4pm on the Saturday before preaching, I actually took 5 minutes to unwind. At that moment, it meant closing my eyes and sitting in my own silence, imagining a bubble of calm surrounding me in the busy coffee shop I had parked myself in. I listened to myself. I released my anxiety about the message. And then, when the 5 minutes was up, I wrote the 2500 word sermon in about an hour.
I'm not saying that every experience of sermon writing is going to pop out that easily, that all the words will be waiting there like apples to be plucked off the tree. But I did realize that I often tried to wedge my writing time into spaces that didn't allow for me to unwind. And it was impossible to allow the Spirit to speak when I was still reverberating from a bedtime battle with my toddler, or the discussion in class about pneumatology. It wouldn't speak if I was counting down the minutes to the next meeing, next class, next place I needed to rush off to.
So, I'm working on the art of unwinding. I think part of my unwinding process is not preaching every week for now, which makes it easier to swallow. But I'm also learning how to unwind in smaller ways, in simple ways, in ways that keep me lose and half-listening, ready at any moment to catch the whisper of the Spirit I know is there, that I know is waiting to be preached.
