|
When every day brings another horrible example of injustice and suffering in the world, what is a preacher to say? How do we keep going when we are afraid? How do we keep loving when we are furious? How do we speak in a way that starts a sacred conversation rather than ending it? Will the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart get me exiled from the church that trained me to speak up in the first place?
Dear Preachers, I hear you and I add my own questions to yours.
What can a person hear in church that they can not hear anywhere else? Their time and yours are precious. Overwhelmed by shallow content posing as news, seduced by AI slop, by some miracle, the truth still breaks through with a tragic story that pierces our hearts in divine devastation. As a preacher, will you recap the news from multiple points of view, quoting endless experts or cut to the chase of Christ’s compassion? What will you use your few minutes to say?
Why isn’t the progressive voice of Christianity louder? When White Christian Nationalism is worn like a cheap costume by a political bully in a bully pulpit, whose false God is portrayed as a superhero on the side of bullies, why doesn’t Jesus’ counter narrative show up more often in the news, from real churches like ours? Trust me, it isn’t for lack of trying; so much so, that it keeps me awake saying the serenity prayer about the things I can and can not control.
Keep preaching, anyway, pastors, with the power of being where you are. You are not hired guns dumped into communities you do not know. You do not bark orders at strangers under the cowardly cover of a mask that is not worn for health but for harm. You preachers know your people and your context, and you stand before them as a neighbor. You preach God’s word without anonymity but clothed in the armor of God and the love you have for your people and the knowledge you have of your own context and culture. I could no more tell one unique pastor what to preach than I could tell a jazz singer how to improvise an old tune into a once in a lifetime musical moment, but I trust you both. Keep singing. Keep preaching.
Keep posting, if you can, because in the massive mess that is social media, I still see you and you give me hope. Lord knows, there are so many forces that are silencing and shutting down hope at this moment in history. We are barraged by the hysterical histrionics of a president who presses for power like only a theologically thin man (whose belief in a higher power turns out to be belief in himself) can do. But week after week, in churches, I hear other voices in real time, more powerful in truth than saffron Ceasar’s bluster.
Just last Sunday I worshipped with the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a UCC church featured in The Black Utopians, a book that has been a lifeline of hope for me in recent months, connecting me to the history of the mighty cloud of witnesses, some of whom were at church last Sunday at the Shrine, and the preacher Rev. Kandia Milton didn’t feel obligated to remind me of the news, but in a deft introduction, he simply assured me that he had heard it too. From that point on the focus was on the call of Jesus to put the community before the individual. What came next was like many powerful sermons I hear but can not possibly describe, when, by worshipping something other than ourselves, in community, suddenly we all stop investigating scripture and allow the scripture to investigate us instead.
That day, the passage from Mark 6 about Jesus preaching in his home town to a hostile crowd and then coaching his disciples to go out and preach the gospel of Christ’s love anyway, spoke to me in my ministry more than any brilliant opinion piece in the news or any of the books I read about religion. But as good preaching always does, it asked more questions than it answered. When Jesus told the disciples to preach, shake the dust from their feet, and move on, was that spiritually, geographically, emotionally, physically or all of the above? As I said, preachers, I hear your questions and add my own. But what I received in church that day was the comfort of knowing I was not the first generation to ask the questions and to hear a word from Jesus back, and here it is, for what it’s worth:
Preachers, I know it’s hard out there.
Travel with others. You are not alone.
Pack light. You are not your stuff, your resume or your pulpit.
Preach like you don’t have to be perfect. You are called as you are.
Preach in place. Pastor, you know your context.
Preach to the moment. God knows our words are not permanent.
Preach like you believe that God is still speaking.
And it might possibly be through someone else this week!
Keep preaching anyway.
Preachers, I hear you.
After church at the Shrine last Sunday, in a Detroit double header that took me to Fellowship Chapel for an afternoon program on Bonhoeffer, I felt that same Holy Spirit jolt me again when Dr. Reggie Williams told us about a time back in Germany when a small man trying to “make his country great again” in the worst possible way, was aided and abetted by church leaders lapping the poisonous milk of institutional respectability, who may have survived politics of their day but not the history of this one. I didn’t need a recap of today’s newsfeed that day. The history of the resistance of the confessing church in Germany, as told in a Black church in Detroit, told the same story I had heard earlier that morning in the gospel of Mark. Keep preaching, keep praying, keep protesting and most importantly keep singing, as a choir of angels sings with you.
| 
