by J. Ellsworth Kalas If you’re a preacher and you get your sermons from the internet or some similar agency, you need read no further. But if you depend heavily on your own creative instincts and what you hope is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I want as your colleague to confer with you for a moment.
Let me say first what you already know, that working with the Holy Spirit and your creativity is a perilous business. The Holy Spirit is dependable, but seems to cooperate only to the degree that we allow. If we are in a receptive mood (which is not the same as a desperate mood), God’s Spirit speaks easily, in a generally bright and inspiring voice. But if your mood is distracted, presumptuous or just plain dull, the Spirit may seem elusive. I can’t solve this problem for you. I’ve struggled with the problem often enough to know some of the answers, but the issue relates so closely to the particular state of one’s own soul that it isn’t fair for me to generalize from my experience.
But let me talk with you about a closely related matter, something reinforced for me by my reading of The New York Times obituary of the poet, Ruth Stone. Ms. Stone was a fine poet, winning the National Book Award in 2002. She was 87 years old at the time, which indicates that you need never stop growing and creating.
The preacher’s point of interest in Ms. Stone comes in this quote from her experience: “I was hanging laundry out and I saw all these ants crawling along the clothes line. Well, I just dropped whatever I was hanging and ran upstairs in the house to get a book and write it down. Never keep a poem waiting; it might be a really good one, and if you don’t get it down, it’s lost.”
The stuff that goes into sermons is like that, too. Sometimes it’s a full sentence; I urge you to grab tight hold of it before it flees from you. Sometimes it doesn’t yet have the shape of a sentence. No matter; take it and hold it close to your soul until the embryo takes more hopeful shape.
Insights are hard to come by. That’s why most sermons have so few of them and why preachers settle instead for irrelevant stories that don’t illustrate and for jokes that distract. But insights fire up the soul of the preacher, and in turn light a fire in the souls of the hearers. The Holy Spirit is really quite generous with insights. Our problem is that we don’t stay close enough to God’s Spirit to hear, and that when we hear we sometimes keep hanging out the laundry when we should be running to our iPad, our recorder, or some good old pen and paper.
Take it from our spiritual ancestor, Charles Wesley. He was known at times to leap from his horse at some Methodist home and before saying, “Hello,” or “God bless you,” to shout, “Pen and ink! Pen and ink!” Then, after writing half a dozen verses of a hymn that had come to him along the way, he would greet his waiting friends. If it weren’t for Charles’s sense of urgency, who knows what, might have happened to “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” or “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”?
