THE LIMITS THAT MAKE US FREE [Sun, 6-18-23]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE LIMITS THAT MAKE US FREE [Sun, 6-18-23]

 

The Episcopalians made a big difference in the preaching of this Methodist, even though I never preached in an Episcopal Church.

I’ m going to tell you about that, but first I want to note that I am aware that only a few of the readers of this column were/are preachers. In old age, though—and from time to time before we get to old—we need to reflect on whatever it was that we did with our “productive” years. Homemaking, teaching, business, writing… we learned about them as we did them. Sometimes we got better at our work because we came up against barriers and limits that made us be more focused. That’s what the Episcopalians did for me… through “Selected Sermons.”

Throughout most of my career, there were quite a few periodicals for ministers that printed sermons. I’m not sure there are any today. Preaching is not a high value item for publishing anymore, or anywhere else, for that matter. But preaching was a major focus of my ministry. Many of my sermons were published, starting when I was still in seminary.

I did not know about “Selected Sermons,” of Seabury Press, the Episcopal publishing house. But they knew about me by reading my sermons in “Christian Ministry” and “Pulpit Digest” and such. They asked me to write for them.

That was a nice compliment. I agreed. Then I found out I wasn’t free to wheel and deal, the way I usually did in the pulpit. [My printed sermons were usually done after the fact, my secretary transcribing them from a tape.]

“Selected Sermons” were for a specific clientele—Episcopal Lay Readers. These folks fill in when a priest is not available at a church. That’s sometimes true permanently because the church is too small to pay a priest, or for a few weeks or months between priests. Selected Sermons were designed for Lay Readers to take into the pulpit and read the sermon.

So, the editors of Selected Sermons told me: No first-person stories. No big words. No running either short or long. No variations from the Lectionary. No quotes. No cute asides. In other words, none of the usual stuff I did in a sermon. They even sent me special paper, with every line numbered, and strict margins.

During the 20 or so years I wrote for them, the editors and I became such good friends, because I always ranted and raved and railed against their restrictions, but I always met them. They said I was the only writer that they never edited. Whenever they got in a bind, because some other writer failed to meet the deadline, they’d call me in a panic and ask me for a week or month worth of sermons, preferably by yesterday, and I would bail them out. [They sent me a big supply of the special paper.]

I thought my pulpit preaching [as differentiated from written preaching] would be diminished by trying to stay within such strict parameters. Instead, it got better. The barriers and limits that my Seabury editor friends put upon me made me sharpen my focus, eliminate stuff that distracted, think about how each word would be understood or misunderstood.

Limits sometimes make us free.

That’s the way with aging. As we face new limits on energy and thinking, we are free to listen for the Spirit.

John Robert McFarland