Homecoming: How one Sunday in the pulpit may have changed everything

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I was a brilliant seminarian, dashing off student sermons at the speed of light, and stunning my listeners with my wit and whimsy! Actually, that's not true - I stunned myself, as well, by my wit and whimsy! The student sermon is a pretty daunting task. You're there, using the Big Bag of Preacher Tricks, the same bag that each of the other seminarians gathering to hear you preach have stowed beneath their pews. It's like a gathering of jazz musicians all listening to a performance by another jazz musician and they've got your number at the jump. In seminary, I preached to earn my colleague's esteem and my professors' approval. And maybe that's why my first instinct was to say "no" when the priest at my current church asked me to do her a large and sub in for a Sunday. But, I said "yes", and grabbed my pen and pad and started writing. 

When I write a sermon, I like to have the "hook" - that jumping off place from which the rest of the sermon can flow. I was scheduled to preach on the Sunday before the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the readings for that Sunday included the 1 Samuel text where Samuel answers God's call, and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians where he blows up the Platonic separation of the body from the soul, and exhorts the church at Corinth to see themselves as part of the body of Christ and to maybe cool it on the sins of the flesh. Let me say this now - it's hard to preach about Martin Luther King, Jr. There is so much complexity to the man and his message that it's easy to write a sermon that sounds more like a history class. And so I wrote the first draft of the opening of my sermon. And then I wrote the first draft of the opening to a SECOND sermon. And then I did this two more times. 

And then I stopped writing and went walking. In the horror movies, when people are being haunted, they tend to stay, but I wasn't trying to sell movie tickets, I was trying to figure out what was wrong, and it was the ghosts of student sermons past. I was still concerned with what people would think and I needed to be concerned with what the scripture was saying to me and how the Holy Spirit was moving me and moving in the lives of the people around me. I had to face how afraid I was to preach from a deeply personal place - how afraid I was to preach about race to a church filled with people who were not my race, but who had become my spiritual family. For the first time, almost 20 years after my first day at seminary, I felt as if I had something to say, something true.

Here is a link to the sermon.