Eavesdropping on sermons is a peculiar discipline. At least it isn’t as bad as the cartoon above. For the last 4 years I've eavesdropped on a community in Kansas City--Jacob's Well. It just isn’t the same as being in that community and participating in the conversation. These days I’ve been contemplating the communal nature of the preaching life. This preaching life is often relegated to the pastor. I know why it is. But the preaching life involves more than the preacher. It also is intimately connected to the life of a community. So eavesdropping is great but there is more.
As I lived in Korea I enjoyed the podcasts that intersected my life. They were at times my life line. Sermons and other programs often engaged me in ways I couldn’t find in my local community. So I’m a huge fan and forever indebted to the church communities who post their weekly sermons online.
That said I also knew that listening online wasn’t the same as listening from within the community. Eavesdropping on an unknown people through their pastoral mouthpiece isn’t the same as participating even if in small ways in the life of that people. Mp3’s cannot recreate a sanctuary full of people reciting Paul’s opening statements to the church in Philippi. They can’t create the space of communal prayer. Nor do they make room for those awkward but beautiful moments of unplanned silence where often the Holy Spirit descends on a people. Those are edited out in most podcasts anyways. Mp3's don’t serve communion. They certainly don't reach out to hold your hand for the communal benediction song. That would be weird. Even more importantly they don’t allow us to KNOW anything of the lived out community life which creates the context and content for the message.
I’ve been so grateful for the very small ways I’ve been able to engage the preaching life of Jacob’s Well in my first month in the USA. I still know very little of the community but I know more in four weeks then I did in four years of eavesdropping. Yes, I’ve been in the sanctuary to hear the preached word. But I’ve also spent a little time with people who are in some ways helping to create that word. I’ve shared honest conversation with a group of women who like me are wading though tough life issues. I conversed with my “Second Saturday” work crew and found others who are trying to figure out what real community looks like. A new couple to Jacob’s Well blessed me with their hospitality and connected me with strangers. Of their own volition they seek people out for lunch and help people know what is “happening” in the community. I’ve conversed with people from my past in the pews and over lunch and found that we are looking to our future asking some of the same questions. The part of me that intensely misses international community found a place like home as I shared conversation with people who care about Africa and people who are African. Hallelujah! I’ve been in the USA for one month and I’m just grateful for the small ways I’ve been preached to in person.
I’ve been reminded this month that preaching is always to a people of a place; it is contextual. Sermons even those on the world wide web are inspired not only by God at work in the text or minister but also by the same God who is at work in a people called out of a location. What makes Paul’s letters so hard to read and understand, for instance, is the particular people and location of which he wrote. When we read Philippians we too are doing a form of eavesdropping. We do the best we can as we "eaves-drop" into these ancient texts but we don't get the full human story creating the texts themselves. It is unfortunate that we are not a part of the preaching life of that community. Just think what Paul’s letter to the Philippians would be to us today if we were engaged with the struggle the Philippians experienced. What did it feel like to work out their salvation together in their specific context? Did they have the same questions as we do? My hunch is "yes" and "no".
We strive to know what our sacred text has to speak into our lives today. Yet maybe we don’t have to long to be flies on the wall in Philippi because we can engage our own local preaching communities. God is inspiring life all around us. I’ve seen it in very small ways this month. I’m reminded that preaching is an event that comes out of a community’s life but also takes on community life and moves beyond it. It is an ongoing embodied conversation that requires a past, a present and a hope for a future together.
No comments:
Post a Comment