Another line from "The Church's One Foundation" claimed that "with a scornful wonder men see [the church] sore oppressed, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed."  Something about that "scornful wonder" struck me, perhaps for its vaguely oxymoronic quality, partly perhaps because I'd never witnessed too many juicy heresies that elicited scornful wonder from anyone from outside my congregation.

Ideally, of course, the church should elicit some more positive form of wonder from the world, and I've heard tell of a couple such spectacles lately and I find them encouraging.

The first came via a New York Times theater article that noted a recent phenomenon taking place at a good many performances of the Broadway revival of Horton Foote's play The Trip to Bountiful.  This time around the cast is largely African American, led by Cicely Tyson.  At one point in the drama as her character makes her way back to her hometown of Bountiful, she sits next to another woman in a Texas bus depot.   As part of their conversation, at one point she stands and bursts out in a hearty rendition of the old Fanny Crosby hymn "Blessed Assurance."   To the startlement of many New Yorkers, it turns out that large portions of the audience have joined Ms. Tyson in singing the hymn, word-for-word, note-for-note.   The "fourth wall" briefly totters as people in the audience join the stage drama--in a completely unforeseen way--in singing this song.

The theater critic of the Times seemed merely flummoxed and so approached on the street one of the people he'd seen singing along.   I am paraphrasing here but in essenece the reporter asked this woman "How is it you know that song?" to which she in essence replied "How is it you don't!?"  I guess in this case the "scornful wonder" was, as it were, on the other foot vis-a-vis the world!    But the world took note of this and felt its own more positive sense of wonder of all these disparate theater-goers sharing some common language of faith.

Then last week I spent a few days in Toronto to meet with a group of Ontario pastors.  They told me of another phenomenon that took the secular world and the secular press by surprise and that, again, elicited wonder.   Following the disappearance and then terrible murder of a Christian Reformed man from the Ancaster, Ontario, area, the many congregations of the CRC in Ontario banded together like one giant extended family.  On a designated Sunday morning not long after the murder was discovered, all those congregations sang, as though with one voice, the victim's favorite contemporary hymn "In Christ Alone."   Newspapers and reporters took note, wondering aloud where this "family" came from, just who these Christian Reformed people were, and how it was that they loved each other despite hardly actually knowing each other at all.   As several of the pastors said to me, "You could tell that people were just totally taken aback by our mutual love in Christ."

Fanny Crosby shining the light of living faith on Broadway, Keith Getty and company pulling together all of Ontario: I like this.    This is the kind of wonder I'd love having "the world" see more of.   This is the kind of witness--so simple, so lacking in airs or pretensions or any form of manipulation--that the church needs to provide more of these days and always.   In its own way, these are their own "sights that dazzle" and the wonder they produce is blissfully free of any scorn.  It's just, well, wonder-full.

True, the variety near the small lake where our cottage is situated is much better than closer to the city.   My wife and I remarked on the fact that prior to getting that cottage a dozen years ago (at which time we lived in a parsonage and so owned no property) we had never before seen the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak who now frequents our feeders constantly.  This weekend, as was true over the past several years, we had a brief visit by a pair of migrating Orchard Orioles, who appear to have a nest near the bedroom window.  The Sandhill Cranes were making that gloriously startling chortle they generate (and that can be heard for over 2 miles).  Not long after seeing their long, sleek bodies fly over, we found 3 of the huge birds standing in a newly plowed field.   I could go on and list the other birds we saw--quite a few varieties--but will stop for now lest the eyes of all non-birding readers glaze over more than they already have.

But there is something refreshing about immersing oneself into the intricate splendors and many-dappled varieties of God's good creation.   There is so much to delight in, so much to soak in, so much to learn if we simply have what Juergen Moltmann once called "Geistesgegenwart" or the ability to have your spirit be fully alive in the present moment (leave it to the Germans to coin a single word that takes a whole English sentence to explain!).  Or it's what Sallie McFague termed "attention epistemology," or that which you can learn about God, creation, and their relation just by paying attention to the goings-on in your own backyard.

In the United States we just observed the Memorial Day weekend, which as everyone in these parts knows is the unofficial kick-off to summer (a too-short three month season that will unofficially shut down on the corresponding Labor Day weekend in September).   So it's summer around here and it's time for all of us who believe with Colossians 1 that the whole created order of things was created by our Savior and now hangs together and makes sense only in that Savior--it's time for folks who believe these things to get our spirits engaged in the moment, to pay attention, to see what's out there in that shrub, what's fluttering in that tree, what's crawling away on the ground or swooshing through the skies overhead.

You can do it at any time, of course, but in this part of the world the summer season provides its own peculiar way to praise the God, from whom all blessings and splendors and patches of beauty flow.

My dad-in-law was 88--an age of sufficient decades and years that it tempts those who hear of his death to do what we all tend to do: we say or think, "Ohhh, wow, 88, hmmm" and what we mean by that is "Well, what did you expect?   That's an age at which people die so maybe we can blunt our sadness a bit."  I know I've thought that and so have resisted for some years asking too quickly "How old was your mom?" because I don't want to cash out even a little of people's deep grief.   In the case of Dad Apol, he was indeed 88 but was independent, active, vibrant, and profoundly happy to be alive (as he had been basically every one of his 32,300-some days).  Spiritually Dad was as ready to meet his Savior as any believer could be.  Physically . . . well, as he said to me after a brief illness a couple of years ago, "If the Lord were to ask me, I'd say I'd like to order up ten more years if it would be all right!"

Somehow given who Dad Apol was, the surgeon's words about his condition being "not compatible with life" struck me because for all of the nearly 27 years I have known him as first his daughter's suitor and then her husband, Dad Apol has been profoundly compatible with life.  You'd seldom meet someone who took joy in every oak leaf, thrilled to even the most common of birds at his feeders, and enjoyed his every meal with great good gusto and gratitude (and when it was my privilege to indulge my hobby of gourmet cooking and really whip up some good victuals for Dad, his reaction was identical to any kid in the ice cream shop being handed a cone: his eyes shined with delight and anticipation).

How can anyone like this end up in any way, shape, or form being "not compatible with life"?  Well and of course, it happens to all of us physically eventually, even as through the cruelty of others it happened to our Savior on the cross.   But if there is anything to those intuitions that so many people have had--the intuition that the uniqueness of human life itself argues for there being more than just the few fleeting years we spend on this earth--then that intuition was surely validated by someone like Ike Apol.  He was exceedingly "compatible with life" every moment of his 88-and-a-half years and if his lower extremeties caused a surgeon to declare otherwise last Thursday morning, that says nothing about the soul or spirit of the man.

That soul or spirit is what, after all, had all along been so very, very compatible with life.  God knows this.  That's why he had this plan called the Gospel.   Through our grace-given compatibility with the Savior, we each of us remain deeply compatible with life even though we die, which is pretty much what Jesus said to Martha in John 11 at her brother's tomb.   "Those who believe in me will live, even if they die."

That is the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.   And on this rainy and stormy April morning in Michigan the day after Dad's funeral, it is the Word to which we cling in the sure and certain hope that our God-given compatibility with life goes on and on in our Father's bright kingdom.

Take last week: I met with a peer learning group of pastors for a day of conversation about preaching.   They had given me ahead of time a list of questions, most of which dealt with preaching to contemporary culture and what forms of the sermon worked best today (as opposed to preaching styles that may seem outmoded to folks in the pews now).   So I talked to these preachers about things we teach at the Seminary and some aspects of preaching that I believe to be vital.  Among the things I often emphasize is that too much preaching in the last quarter century has morphed from a proclaiming of Good News to a Dr. Phil-like dispensing of Good Advice (how else to account for sermon series about "Six Ways to Raise Successful Kids" and "Five Ways to Grow Your Business" and "Seven Ways to Realize Your Dreams"?).   I also talked about why avoiding moralism is so important and thus the need to avoid sermons that forever and again end with "To Do" lists of things people need to do in the week ahead to stay in good with God.    Moralism is not only not the Gospel of Grace it rather routinely props up the closet legalism that far too many people schlep with them into church every Sunday as it is.

The pastors in this peer group listened attentively, asked good questions, and helped create a lively conversation.   But then a couple of hours in, one pastor had the courage to ask the question that burned on all of their hearts when he said, "I agree with everything you have said but what are we supposed to do given that the very preaching you and the rest of us would deem to be bad is exactly what people seem most to want today?   We're all seeing people leave our congregations--sometimes in significant numbers--to join the popular mega-churches in our area where the preacher does nothing but trendy 'good advice' sermons that always end with checklists of ways to be more virtuous.   So what are we supposed to do to keep our people in our own congregations?"

The pastoral pain of these people was obvious.   Their question was not only a hard one to answer, it was fraught with disappointment and disorientation.   I wish I had an answer.   The one thing to say is that as a preacher you cannot, of course, compromise yourself or give in to people's "itching ears" without losing integrity and self-respect.  And, of course, we talked about ways to liven up preaching and pondered practices that all preachers could nurture in their sermons that would keep those messages inside the bounds of respectability but that might succeed in maintaining listener interest via what I wrote about on The Twelve two weeks ago in terms of letting narratives be vivid and engaging.   Will such advice staunch any outflows of members?   Maybe and then again, maybe not.

Probably it counts as something of a tired cliche to point out that the more Jesus preached the message of sacrifice and the cross, the smaller his crowds got, too.   And, of course, the sum total of Jesus' preaching--including all those parables we now love so much--succeeded in getting him crucified.   It's true.   Jesus never promised his under-shepherds a life filled with success as the world defines it (and this, too, loops back to recent blog posts here by Steve Mathonet-Vanderwell and yesterday from Jeff Munroe).   It's just that in a good bit of North America we've been raised to believe that hard work and faithfulness do always pay off in visible ways, and in the church, that usually means in growing congregations.

Thankfully, of course, many times that happens, too.   Many growing churches are doing so under the preaching of very faithful proclaimers of the Gospel.   It's also a point to grant that not everybody today yearns for the kind of trendy and moralistic preaching of which I've written here--there are still plenty of people who know true biblical and theological and pastoral substance in preaching when they hear it and they prefer it, too.

Still . . . being a faithful preacher is no guarantee that church members won't leave for what they perceive to be greener pastures.   Every pastor winces to see people leave.  Preachers today compete with so much else in the culture and from the entertainment industry and from the better-known rock star preachers as well.    Those on the front lines of ministry need a lot of prayer from the rest of us.   It's not an easy job but when it is done well, it remains God's favorite way of nurturing and sustaining (and generating) the faith of his people.

Hassler wrote many delightful novels including Staggerford, The Love Hunter, Dear James, and others.   My own favorite is North of Hope and so when I stood in line to have Mr. Hassler autograph a book, this was the novel I had with me at the time.  As he signed it for me, I said to him, "I loved this novel.   I hated to see it end.  In fact, for days after I found myself missing Frank and Libby" (who were the main characters in the novel, of course).    At this Mr. Hassler looked up and without guile and with no small amount of wistfulness he said, "Yes, Frank and Libby.  I think of them from time to time and I wonder how they're getting along . . ."   He then gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders, finished the autograph, and handed the novel back to me.

He clearly had not been kidding.   Frank and Libby were in some fashion real to him.  True, he made them up out of the whole cloth of his narrative imagination.   And also true: Mr. Hassler did not have a mental disturbance and would acknolwege fully and freely if pressed that of course he was aware that these two people did not now exist (and had never existed) in the real world.   Still . . . he wished them the best.

Talk to writers long enough and you'll hear them talking about their characters as real people, sometimes expressing absolute surprise at what a certain character said or did.   "I had no idea he was capable of that" a novelist of my acquaintance once said of one of his own creations.   "Her reply to that insult really took me aback" I once heard yet another writer say.   What I want to say back to these people is, "But you wrote those 'surprising' things yourself because you invented the whole scenario.  How can you be surprised by something you yourself thought up?!"   Actually, I have said that to writers in the past but in response these writers have not said "Well, you know what I mean--I was just kidding you.  I was just using a figure of speech."  Nope.  They testify that their own characters quite literally take on a narrative life of their own and if it's true that the whole shebang of the story singularly belongs to the writer, that somehow does not prevent the story and the people who populate it from taking some unexpected turns.

Personally I find this both wonderful and weird.  It requires a certain suspension of belief on the part of writers to claim this about their characters--much less to wonder years later how they are getting along as Mr. Hassler did--but in many ways that suspension of belief is no different than what we all do whenever we read a great novel, watch a movie, or see a play.   We both know it's all staged and fictional and orchestrated and that it's somehow very, very real in ways we want to get caught up in.  When a story is told well--even a true story that we've all heard a thousand times before--we are able to enter into that story and let it surprise us, stimulate us, instruct us all over again as though for the first time.

That's one of the great powers of story and of narrative.   And we need a lot more of it in the Church and especially in preaching.   In his new book Imagining the Kingdom Jamie Smith does a great job making the case that we are all storied beings, "narrative animals" to borrow a phrase Smith quotes from David Foster Wallace.  Smith applies this to worship and liturgy generally but in a book of my own I am working on for preachers, I turn it directly to sermons.   Preachers have at their disposal a Bible that is rich with stories that are chock-full of intrigue, deceit, surprises, grace, and all kinds of other narrative wonders.    The key is to let those things shine.   Instead of drearily working through a story or dissecting the narrative to the point that what started as a story ends up being reduced to a bullet-point list of propositions, preachers need to draw in listeners by making them interested in and invested in the characters.   We should want to know what comes next (even though we already do) and have enough tension and drama built into the re-presentation of the story in the worship service and in the sermon that we eagerly tune in for the same reasons we re-watch movies or re-read stories or re-tell the great stories from our own families over and over.   That we know how it all turns out doesn't matter.

Someone once said that the best stories are both surprising and inevitable.   But when it comes to stories and characters we know well, we can reverse that: the story is both inevitable (because we know exactly where it's going in that we've heard it all before) and yet is surprising because if it's an engaging story told well, it takes on a life of its own in our imaginations and we are then caught up in it all over again.

Those are the stories that quicken our pulses.  Those are the stories that bring us joy all over again.  Jon Hassler didn't let their non-existence lessen the reality of Frank and Libby for him.  Good stories create a kind of reality in which one can immerse oneself.   But if that is possible in the fictional realm, how much more so with true stories of the faith?   Our knowing how they all turn out is no excuse to not let those stories live in our imaginations--and in our worship--in ways that properly startle and delight us every single time.

It was intriguing stuff and so perhaps we can all be forgiven for not spending as much time last week on another elevation of sorts when Fuller Theological Seminary announced its new president, Mark Labberton.  I suppose Mark can henceforth refer to his presidential announcement as having come in a highly historic week!   I've had the chance and privilege to know Mark a bit these past few years and congratulate him on his new post and the honor that rightly accrues to him by achieving this.

But I note Mark's appointment on this blog because I see this as a curious trend of the last few years.  It began when Western Theological Seminary named Tim Brown as its president some years back and this was followed in 2010 by my own Calvin Theological Seminary naming Jul Medenblik as its next president.  Since that time Princeton Theological Seminary hired Craig Barnes after Iain Torrance retired and now Fuller has named Mark Labberton to succeed Rich Mouw.

The trend of which I take curious note here is that each of these four would likely self-identify as much as anything as a preacher, a pastor.   True, Brown, Barnes, and Labberton have all taught at the seminary level and Medenblik was an active member of, and then president of, the Calvin Seminary Board of Trustees for many years.   But if you look at the careers of all four, they made their biggest marks not in academia per se but in the church where the four have collectively many decades' worth of preaching experience.   Medenblik came to his presidential post directly from 16 years of being a church planting pastor of what is now a large congregation in Illinois.   Brown initially went to Western to teach preaching following also his long tenure as preacher at a very large Michigan congregation.   Barnes pastored several congregations over the years and was still serving as preaching pastor at a congregation in Pennsylvania when Princeton hired him.  And Labberton--although he has been teaching preaching the last nearly four years--spent the sixteen years prior to that as the preacher/pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Berkley, California.

Four such appointments may not constitute a statistically significant trend, and both Western and Calvin are modest-sized seminaries in the grander scheme of schools in North America.  Still, might the appointment of longtime and highly experienced pastors/preachers signal an overt desire to convey to students a desire to focus on the practicalities of ministry?   Again, each of the four men I have highlighted here have academic credentials beyond an M.Div.: Brown has a D.Min., Medenblik a J.D., Barnes and Labberton both have Ph.D. degrees.   But they are people of the pulpit more than of the classroom, pastors who walked with people through life's varied valleys more than scholars who have devoted themselves to colloquies and meetings of this or that academic guild.  (But please note: I have nothing against career classroom teachers or academic guilds of various stripes--we need those people and those entities too.   Nor in noting this trend do I in any way wish to convey the idea that past presidents who were not longtime pastors did not also have a concern for ministry preparation for their students.   I am casting no stones here, just pondering these developments!)

As my own seminary has been going through a re-branding process, it is clear that seminary students today really do still want a top-flight theological education, and a student would indeed receive such formal training very well at all of the schools I've mentioned.   But when talking to students and prospective students, it becomes clear almost immediately that they hope to meet up with teachers of many different backgrounds but including those who have walked the talk by having been pastors themselves and who know what it takes beyond the formation of the mind to form the heart for active ministry in this hurting, broken world.   Especially in Homiletics, students gravitate toward those who understand from the inside the grinding hard work involved in making new sermons every single week, including in the same congregation over a long haul of ministry in which most preachers eventually worry "I think they've heard everything I have to say by now!"

Time will tell whether this trend continues as well as, I suppose, how the appointments of pastors/preachers as presidents shape these various institutions.   As someone who cares deeply and passionately about the preaching that takes place in the church today--and as one of great throngs of people who know keenly how much this world needs sensitive pastors to minister to people's hurting hearts these days--I am hopeful and optimistic about this "trend" such as it is.   And I hope the Lord will richly bless and keep blessing the presidential ministries of Tim, Jul, Craig, and Mark and many others beside as we and they all together keep on letting the Spirit use us to equip women and men for ministry in Christ's Church.

Aside from that . . . well, aside from that Mr. MacFarlane was crude.  Some loved it, especially the legions of MacFarlane fans who somehow find equal delight in his other work where women are routinely insulted for their size or height or where various female body parts are referred to the way middle school boys would talk.   As the evening wore on, Mr. MacFarlane's stock-in-trade humor and way of speaking about women clearly took hold as late in the show a staff member for the satirical newspaper "The Onion" let fly with a Tweet that referred to the 9-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis with a sex-related word so awful I won't even obliquely refer to it here.   (It should probably be illegal to refer to a minor that way.)

Call it bad comedy momentum.   Or call it what it really is--and which is the only reason I am writing this particular blog--bad cultural momentum.  The next day "The Onion's" CEO released a letter of apology and, like many people, when I read it, I wondered "Is this a joke, too?"   When you spend your life crying wolf (or in this case making crude wolf calls at women), then when some day you want seriously to address a problem, well, it's hard for others to take you seriously.

Mr. MacFarlane's brand of humor--and the Academy Awards knew full well what they'd be getting when they signed this person--is so relentless in a certain direction that after a while it's no longer a joke.  It becomes the way people--especially young men--think.  Sure, they can still get their buddies at the bar to crack up when they use MacFarlane-esque language to refer to women but just below the giggles is a sadder truth: they no longer know any other way to talk.

Humor is a great gift--I would argue it is a great gift of God.  The Bible has more humor in it than we typically notice.   Used well, the human mind can make puns, spy irony, or give some situation a quarter turn that will bring legitimate mirth to other people (and laughter really is the best medicine a lot of the time).    But always there is that warning from Paul in Ephesians 5:4 about how in the Christian community there should be no "obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking" because, Paul says, these things are simply "out of place."   They have no proper place among God's people recreated in the image of Christ.

These days it becomes harder and harder to say to someone "You're out of line."   There is a sense of entitlement in our society that can be seen on most every Comment stream following articles in the NY Times or on CNN's website.  People let fly with any old thing they want to say on Facebook postings and the comments on such postings and to tell these people that their comments are "out of place" or that they themselves are "out of line" would likely incur just a blank stare.

I wonder if in the Christian community we can take Paul's injunction on coarseness in our humor seriously enough so as to do a thorough assessment of whether it's right to let children--or to let ourselves as adults--watch MacFarlane fare like Family Guy or his crude movie Ted.   I wonder if we have the courage to say that many things are not only not funny they are so far out of place among us that if we don't draw some boundary lines, our own young people (and our own young men in this particular case) will arrive at the day when they find they can speak about some people or about women in no way other than out-of-place ways.

And maybe, despite my 35 year run in watching the Oscars, if they keep getting hosts like MacFarlane, I will need to turn that off, too.

It had been a long while since I got an immunization for anything but when the nurse sunk the needle into my one upper arm, I could still see the scar from a vaccine I got back as a child in the early 1960s (probably small pox).  This, in turn, reminded me of the amazing revolution in medicine that came about when Jonas Salk and others figured out the highly counter-intuitive fact that the best way to get our bodies to ward off certain diseases was to give our systems a taste of the real deal--not enough to make one sick but enough to get the antibodies to say, "We'll be more than ready some day if this disease comes knocking big-time."

Years ago--in an article and also sermon that many readers of this blog will remember--my friend Neal Plantinga pointed out that when Moses lifted up that bronze serpent in the wilderness as a paradoxical cure for snakebites--and when Jesus centuries later told Nicodemus that the lifting up of the Son of Man on a cross was going to be a similar spectacle for no less than the scourge of death itself--the very principle of immunizations/vaccines was being evoked.  Somehow like cures like.   Israelites got inoculated by God's grace by looking at an image of the very serpents nipping at their heels.   And in the longest possible Gospel run we all get inoculated against eternal death by dying with Jesus on the cross.  Jesus took death into himself--and in baptism gives us a portion of that death--as a way to immunize us against the death that is otherwise the wages of our sins.   Through tasting and passing through death, we find life.   When in this Lenten Season we cast our gaze upon the crucified Savior, we find once again God's ingenious way to rid his good creation of death once and for all.

Lent, of course, is not the only time in our Christian lives or in the life of the Church that we can or should ponder the great mystery of what happened to God's Son at the Place of the Skull two millennia ago.   But it is a mystery so profound, so strangely wonderful, that it is most assuredly worthy of as much joyful and awe-filled pondering as we can give it.  

If everything is working right--and I surely hope it is!!--something really quite astonishing has happened in my body since those four serums were injected into me a couple of weeks ago.   But in my soul and thanks to the power of the Spirit in my baptism, something far, far more amazing has been happening and continues to happen as the crucified and risen Christ now lives in me.

As the old hymn puts it, such wondrous love as that deserves . . . well, it finally deserves my all.

One theme we circled back to often had to with the use of social media in the preaching event.  Increasingly pastors are using Facebook and Twitter to promote conversations about a given sermon before the sermon is preached--soliciting questions or thoughts about the upcoming Sunday's preaching text--or after the sermon as the conversation continues.   Some pastors are, of course, doing both.  Many of us who were at the consulation had been pastors of congregations in the past and we admitted to each other that it's an odd thought to ponder someone in a pew Tweeting about a sermon even as we are delivering it.   I have been out of parish ministry for going on 8 years now and seeing as back then--and even up until just a few years ago actually--something like Facebook or Twitter was non-existent, real-time interactions with my sermon in such formats was never something I pondered for two seconds when I was preaching.

But now preachers are pondering it and wondering how best to tap into the social media phenomenon/explosion.   Part of me is much intrigued by this.  All  of us who preach have an interest in having our sermons reach as many people as possible with the Good News.   So if a Twitter feed or various Facebook posts drove more people to check out online recordings of our sermons--much less ended up attracting some actually to attend and maybe some day join the congregation--then there would be much to celebrate in all that.

And of course part of me feels vaguely wary of all this, too, and makes me wonder about the church's ability also to be counter-culturally critical of some of the ways by which people relate and communicate today.   If in the church we embrace sound-bite Tweets of sermons on a par with what celebrities observe as they Tweet from the Golden Globes ceremonies or what this or that commentator Tweets about the Super Bowl as it's happening, does this change the preaching event in ways we have perhaps not yet thought through?   Honestly, I am raising questions here to which I have no answers.   But there is something about the segmentation of our communication that social media has brought about that makes me wonder if slicing and dicing also sermons into status updates and Tweets might not over time influence both how preachers craft their sermons and how people listen to those sermons and I wonder if that influence has as much potential to be negative as positive.

Again, positively I see vast benefit in the pastor's using Facebook and the like to bring the congregation into the sermon-making process before the sermon is written and then to continue a lively conversation with people after it is delivered.   There are even pastoral care possibilities here that may be pretty wonderful.  What's more, we preachers need all the help we can get most of the time and should never want to be isolated from feedback or input.    But as users of Facebook (and to a lesser extent perhaps Twitter) know, the ease with which status updates can be made and the swiftness of the average Tweet has also contributed to the idea that everybody is equally an expert on most every topic and that there is no opinion or snap judgment that should not be put "out there" for all to see whether it's particularly informed by due consideration and deliberate thought or not (and let's face it, a lot of times it's the "not" that rules the day).

Preachers who have grown up with "the new homiletic" have long known that the day of the "sage on the stage" whose authority was absolute and unquestioned is long gone.   Fred Craddock's landmark book title "As One without Authority" said it all in terms of the need today for preachers not to assert top-down authority but generate authentic authority for the Word preached by appealing to listerners as a fellow disciple whose messages experientially appeal to our lives together in ways that create community.   So my wariness about instant sermon Tweets or Facebook posts that could question what was said in a sermon does not stem from a desire for me as a preacher to be the sole voice of authority in all this such that no one else could possibly have anything to contribute.

No, but I do still see preaching as a Spirit-led exercise done by people both trained and gifted for this very specific, very vital task in the life of the congregation.  So in our day of "everyone's an expert" in which Facebook posts ballyhoo and reject the careful opinions of scholars and authors and--perhaps increasingly--also preachers and theologians I wonder if there is a possibility that something of the sacred, event-ful character of preaching could be eroded as the preacher's thoughts, too, could become easily dismissed or caricatured.

Again, I have questions and no answers.   But if upon reflection a given pastor or congregation decided it was well to suggest that the worship service was a great time to switch off the Twitter and unplug from social media generally so as to listen to the Word of God in the community gathered, would that be the worst thing a church could suggest?

Of course, it is fully possible to waste lots of time on computers.   Facebook, YouTube videos, emails from family and friends not related to the job, and games of all kinds apparently do chew up scandalous amounts of clock time for many employees, yielding in lower productivity for some companies than would otherwise be the case.   However, I will freely confess to playing solitaire now and again while I am in my office or when I am working from home but oddly enough for me--and I wonder if others have ever experienced this--sometimes doing that is clarifying and helpful in ways I am not certain I can explain.

That's why a few years ago I was gratified to read something similar written by Mike Graves in his helpful book "The Fully Alive Preacher."    The book's subtitle tells us that this is a book about "Recovering from Homiletical Burnout" and as such, the book offers lots of practical tips for how to keep the pastor's batteries fully charged and his or her mind and heart fully engaged in work that can become draining due to the constant need for fresh input and fresh, creative output week after week.  Graves notes that most preachers (and probably anyone who engages in creative writing) know that sometimes the ideas in one's head jumble and jostle and seem actively to resist coming together.   This is the moment of intense frustration when you know that something is brewing in your head but you can't quite get it down right.

At such moments Graves suggests the following: "In those moments of frustration, I have found that Handel's Messiah often helps.  You've probably heard those studies about classical music stimulating thinking, 'the Mozart effect.'  The results are debatable, but for me, Handel makes a difference.  So does a quick game of solitaire on my computer.  The spatial arrangement and sequencing required in solitaire often stimulate my thinking in new ways" (p. 122).

Honestly now: I am not making up an excuse for those times you may catch me in my seminary office playing solitaire or hearts!   But like Graves, I am often struck by how playing a few games really does dislodge for me whatever has gotten stuck in my head.   (A good brisk walk can have the same clarifying effect but it's not always practical to do.)   I don't know why exactly, and maybe it wouldn't work for everyone.  But when I am stuck in finding the right image or story or when I am flummoxed as to where to go next in a sermon I am writing, somehow doing something different for a few minutes works.  After a few games of solitaire--after several losing games typically--the image comes to me.  The transition that had been lacking becomes clear and so I can now add it to the in-progress message.   Like the proverbial shaking-out of the mental cobwebs, solitaire and the like helps.

The human creative process and the wiring of our incredibly complex brains are a constant source of wonder to me.  So the idea that the Holy Spirit might just be able to work through something as trivial as a brisk game of solitaire should perhaps be no surprise--our minds are fearfully and wonderfully made and the Spirit is endlessly nimble.   Still, the idea that solitaire can help me in writing sermons is surprising to me, but in a most delightful way.

Now if only I could win more than about 2% of the time . . .