Four Things I Learned About Preaching After I Graduated from Theological College

This is my presentation to be given on Feb. 26th.  A whole sneak pre-view for those of you who are not in the preaching class attending the Symposium.

 

2015 Aitkens Symposium AST:  (Feb. 26^th, 2015)   - presentation as panelist -   Rev. Dr. Kimberlynn McNabb

Four Things I Learned About Preaching After I Graduated from Theological College

            Before I share four things that I have learned, it would be beneficial for you to know that I am a Lutheran pastor and currently serve at Resurrection on Windsor St. in Halifax. This is my 17^th year of ordained ministry: 11 years here in Halifax and my previous call was in a rural two point parish in New Denmark, NB.  My first sermon was delivered when I was 16 in my home parish in Owen Sound, ON, as part of a regular Sunday morning worship lead by the youth.  It was hand printed on lengths of 10cm wide strips of box board from cereal boxes…colour coded in pencil crayon to mark specific ways to speak a section or phrase.  Throughout seminary preaching gigs included rural and urban congregations in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and internship in Sault Ste. Marie, ON, where I preached a couple times a month.

Four things I have learned about preaching:

1)       In seminary it was made quite clear that pastors and particularly those that preach need to speak, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, “with the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” …although after coming out of seminary I found out that the words are also attributed to Karl Barth. Anyway, I knew, to be a good preacher who was attuned to the Gospel and the world, the Bible and the newspaper were necessities; what I didn’t know was how much more “reading” was required.

To be a good speaker of any kind, one needs to take in 10x the amount they output. Ten times!  I don’t remember where I read or heard that, but, it has dramatically affected my preaching ability. I incorporate in sermons my wrestling with texts, use illustrations from movies or plays, and reflect on novels from a theological perspective.  There is something else though, the more reading I do – that is -theological books, magazines, newspapers, historical fiction, and yes a good share of “trashy” or even “steamy” novels, the less time I spend staring at a blank screen when it comes time to prepare a sermon.  The writing of others, their combination of words, expressions, articulation of thoughts, choice of movement -  all contribute to patterns being created in the brain of the reader that facilitate the imagination and writing process for the same. A diversity of reading allows the reader a wealth of styles from which to re-create text, Gospel, and vision for preaching.

2)      I had the pleasure of having Eduard Riegert as my homiletics professor.  One of his books is here at the AST library – entitled “Imaginative Shock: Preaching and Metaphor.” Although fairly tiny in stature, Ed captivated an audience.  I heard many professors and now colleagues say that they could have listened to Ed preach all day. That was my impression too.  The reason for this, I believe, was the way in which he used his voice – words were specifically chosen and said with thought/feeling.  It was also his tone and cadence.  Ed, although if you hadn’t had him as a professor you would never know, had a significant hair lip as a child. He spent a lot of time in speech therapy learning to talk, to pronounce – through his life he had to think about every word he said before it was spoken.  Needless to say homiletics classes had a component of practicing speech exercises.  Blah! 

However, this many years later I have learned that no amount of speech therapy will help with some tics or stutters.  When I write sermons there are specific words that I avoid because I have continued difficulty with them; I think some of it comes from stumbling over the word once in a nervous situation and since has stuck in my head, or perhaps my tongue just doesn’t work right.

Every time Matthew 24: 38 comes up in the lectionary, I sweat… “For as in the day before the flood they were eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage.”  Can you tell which word I avoid in sermons? Marrying, which also means carrying, burying, et cetera are also no goes. And I also have trouble with words that end in “d” with “ed” after because often I stutter:  forwarded, rewarded.  You get the picture. Instead of kicking myself, being embarrassed or extra nervous, I simply find other constructs to say that which I wish to say.

3)      I have a colleague who is not 5’ tall. In Lutheran circles preaching can take place from various places, however, more often than not in the Canadian context you will find yourself at some point in a position where you pretty much have to use the pulpit. Many of our churches were built before 1974 when women entered into ordained ministry; pulpits are for tall men. My less than 5’ tall colleague carries with her an old fashioned wooden Coke-a-cola box to every preaching gig. She places it in the pulpit before the service, that way when she gets up to preach she can see not only over the lectern, but, also, above the often fixed podium light. People see her and not a disembodied voice.

I am fairly tall and could make most pulpits work, but, I have learned to be comfortable, confident, and to make it appear as if I am not reading (or even referring to my script) that I need to adjust the podium height.  Believe it or not most old pulpit podiums move 4-5 inches, sometimes it takes a little banging to get them to move; don’t be shy - just show up a little early for the service so people don’t think you are wrecking their furniture.  In my experience it is better to have the pulpit too low than too high. If it is too high it is in one’s face and you always look like you are reading from something, further away it is more conversational.  Always be ready for a surprise…once I arrived to preach in a place where the pulpit was ridiculously low… I fixed that by slipping off my high heeled shoes.

Generally I preach from the pulpit, sometimes from the aisle, or the steps of the nave. Since seminary I have learned that the pulpit has added benefits – more than people not seeing my knees shake and more than as the symbol of the importance and high standard given to the Word – parishioners who have hearing difficulties or have trouble with accents of preachers, have shared that they prefer pulpit preaching because they are guaranteed to see, and thus read, the lips of the speaker.  In my present congregation I have a number of people who sit in the first few rows under the pulpit for that very purpose.

4)      On the day of my ordination I had a lifelong pastor, who was close to retirement, tell me never worry about an ill-prepared sermon, so long as it is ill-prepared because you were busy loving your people. He wasn’t suggesting that that could be an excuse used often, he said that because he knew how hard I would be on myself that first experience of running out of time and energy. It was four months into my first call, I was called to the manor because a 64 year woman was dying after struggling for decades with MS and a bout of breast cancer; her family wanted me there to do vigil until she passed. Hers was the first death I witnessed and the first funeral over which I would preside. Less than a week after her death, and four days before Christmas Eve, I am called because parishioners, a husband and wife in their 70s, had been killed in a car crash where an infant died in the other vehicle. As small communities go, lots of people were related, lots of people grieved, lots of pastoral care was given; three funerals in seven days, one of them a double, with Christmas preparations in full swing.  I was 25 years old, prepared, but not. Sunday came, the same day the first funeral would be in the afternoon, I had a funeral sermon but nothing for Sunday morning.  I decided to read a story, someone else’s story, “Some of My Best Friends are Trees.” –even reading it as a teacher would to her class, showing the pictures. The theme is about hope in times of darkness and paired nicely with the reading from Isaiah about hope in the desert. What I found is that the words “hit the spot” so to speak and people welcomed the style and the story – and not one complained or commented that I had failed to do my job as a preacher – because I had loved my people first.

What I continue to find is that the Word will always surprise me!   The Spirit has a way of taking whatever I preach and between my mouth and the ear and heart of the hearer, the Word changes, speaking directly to that person.  I can’t count the number of times people have said, “Pastor I appreciated when you said…..”, when I know full well I said no such thing – and I have a manuscript to prove it.  I have also found that the Word is heard despite the giver of the Word; on my worst Sundays, the days I think and feel that the sermon has been dreadful, those days I receive some of the best feedback, especially from those who rarely comment.  For this I am grateful. It is grace to know the Word when proclaimed acts in mysterious and marvelous ways.  I also take comfort that, should the preaching fail, within standard Lutheran practice the Word can still be heard and experienced on any given Sunday through the Sacrament of Eucharist.