Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-03-29
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
Friends,
On Preaching The Easter Sermon
An Open Letter to my Preacher-Friends
and Congregation . . .
Matt Matthews
If you’re like me, as Holy Week approaches, you’re working hard pulling together four very big services. You expect from yourself better-than-usual sermons. The liturgies all bunch up with close, rapidly-approaching deadlines. Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter. Throw in a funeral or two and an Easter Vigil, and you have a pressure-cooker-week ahead of you.
I don’t know the agony of Jesus, but, like you, I know the special agony preachers often feel this time of year, particularly this single week. I’m writing to say be encouraged. God will speak through you, regardless of you. That is not to say your efforts don’t matter. Jesus is coming, but row away from the rocks.
I told our friend Jim Freeman once that I felt TREMENDOUS pressure to hit a home run on Easter Sunday. Jim shared the metaphor he learned from his dad: The preacher doesn’t need to hit a home run. She only needs to get the ball in play. Even though I could NOT get the ball in play against a professional pitcher (I rather like to think of slow-pitch softball), it relieves enormous pressure to know that I don’t need to whack it out of the park. Really, all I need to do is stand up and read the gospel. Every time, God hits the home run.
My ego is so giant I need to be reminded of this. I need to be reminded that all of Western Christendom does not rest on my eloquence or lack thereof. I need to be reminded that it’s not about me or what I can or cannot deliver. But still—and you preachers know what I mean—when one stands up to preach and you see all of those expectant eyes looking at you, and you know some of the backstory of those faces, and you see how lonely and afraid they are, how expectant and hopeful, how smug and thoughtless (and seasonal), how they’ve been hurt and betrayed, and how they’ve done things to others from which they will never, fully, recover, the preacher doesn’t want to let them down. You love them, and you love the God who loves them. That’s why you’re in this gig. What wondrous love, indeed.
On this Easter, I want to preach resurrection in such a way that my lone sermon untangles all difficulties of modern life. I want to solve racism and matters related to gun control and violence. I want to touch the untouchable with the grace of God. I want to turn the focus of human society from demanding the rights of “I” to embracing the wholeness of “we.” I want to encourage the flock where they feel down and out, and tired, and forsaken; and I want to correct the flock where they have turned inward and sour; and I want to do those two things with perfect balance. And while I’m at it, I’d like all religions to form a circle around the world with its beginning and terminus in our sanctuary so we can sing a verse of Kum By Ya. Non-preachers would think I’m joking. But you preachers know how serious I am.
I want to hit that kind of homerun. I’m swinging for the most distant of fences.
It’s not wrong to try hard, of course, to spruce up on your T.S. Eliot quotes and to look up a Hebrew word or two, but it is wrong to confuse ourselves into believing that we, actually, can hit that kind of homerun. With God, yes, all things are possible. But we have limits. Holy Week reminds every preacher of his or her limits, brokenness, vanity. The preacher is not God. I, for one, need to be reminded.
But still.
I suspect we preachers have always wanted to point to the faraway stands, like the Great Bambino (Babe Ruth, not Baby Jesus), tap the bat on the dusty plate, and coil heroically in a photogenic stance ready to uncork the mighty swing that will knock the cover off the ball. And our aching flock will get at least a momentary charge, a spark, a thrill as that ball sails over the high wall to which we had just pointed. If we could do that, they just might adore us.
But that’s idolatry, a definite no-no for those of us who suppose themselves to be biblical preachers. We don’t preach to get the love. We preach to share it.
Even if we could hit exactly such dramatic homiletical homeruns, that would not be good enough. Our flock rightly wants and needs more, even if they don’t know it. They don’t need a cup of water, even a cup overflowing, they need to be reminded of and directed to the spring from which Living Water flows. They don’t need resurrection so much as they need a relationship with the resurrected one. Everything else, by God’s grace, follows.
They certainly do not need oratorical homeruns.
They hunger for Gospel.
They (and we) need to be invited into the story. They need to find their place. Some are the doubters, the widows at the treasury, the blustery Peters, the women at the well with five ex-husbands living with her boyfriend, or the Pharisees. Some in our pews are the ones chained by troubles, subsisting in caves, wild with dis-ease. Some are the crowd who slurred ‘Crucify Him.’ Some are in the crowd who denied Him with mumbles and such flat denial it was and still is wholly believable. All of them and us have been those in scripture who have cried out, ‘How long, LORD, how long?’
We preachers ask our flock: With whom do you resonate in this text? Whom do you despise? Where are you in this story? Are you even on the page or have you and your ilk been left out? The forgotten are characters, too. Sometimes, like the Prophet Nathan, we hold up the mirror and our beloved flock sees a reflection of themselves as red-handed practitioners of the sins they, themselves, deride. We say, I can’t be guilty. The preacher says, We sure can be guilty. And we often are. And only then can we say, look at me—a sinner in a Geneva preaching robe with the butterfly stole my mother gave me before she died, pretty on the outside, rotten in the middle.
We preachers—crooked saints, all—are privileged to stand up each week, even under the enormous pressure of Easter Sunday, and point to the one who says, Leave your baggage behind. Shuck your dirty clothes and put on the light. And members of our flock, sometimes with our help and sometimes not, find themselves in the throng of disciples, astonished and glad and muddling after the one who says it and means it: Follow me.
I’m thinking of you preachers out there, sharpening your pencils, writing those second and third drafts of your sermons, tearing the page up with rewrites and eraser-holes, pacing your carpet threadbare.
I am including you in my prayers.
Do me a solid, and include me in yours.
Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD.
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Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church
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Holy Week Services…
Maundy Thursday, April 1
7 PM Live Stream and In-person Worship
Good Friday, April 2
7 PM Online Worship (We will be joining the Methodist Church.)
Easter Sunday, April 4
9 AM Online Worship
10:15 AM In-person Worship
Online worship and live stream are available at FirstPres.live.
Preregistration is required for in-person worship.
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TUESDAY EVENING “VIRTUAL DESSERT” MARCH 30th
Please join the Nurture Committee for conversation and sharing of your Easter Traditions. Sunrise services, foods you eat or special memories. We look forward to being with you and enjoying a favorite dessert or beverage.
Join Zoom Meeting Tuesday evening at 7 pm to share…
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Lenten Daily Devotion from “The Presbyterian Outlook”
Monday, MARCH 29, 2021
JOHN 13:1-17
The Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples features a foot-washing — a symbolic act that conveys both the nature of discipleship and the significance of Jesus’ death as a sign of his love for his disciples and of his humiliating death on their behalf. Two interpretations of the foot-washing are presented: the first asks us simply to receive Christ’s act of hospitality (verses 6-11), the second to extend it to one another (verses 12-15). The first tends to be overlooked, but receiving Christ’s
gesture of love and accepting it fully precedes and grounds extension of it to others.
Practice: Read the story slowly and prayerfully at least twice and
imagine that you are part of this scene. What do you see? What do you
feel? Do you identify with Peter’s deep discomfort? Do you find it easier to
receive or to extend hospitality — and why?
Journal: Sense the movements of your spirit and the emotions they
evoke as you reflected on this story – both movements toward God and
away from God – and note in your journal what emerged.
