No Matter What

Rev. Chloe Specht

When I opened my text messages and read: “I love you no matter what” I knew something was off.

The family member who penned those words doesn’t usually talk to me that way, which says everything about our haphazard and strained relationship.

Three dots bubbled on my phone screen, signaling another text message in the making. This time the text simply said: “I heard your sermon.”

Now my heart was racing. Anxiety gripped my throat.

Just a few months earlier, I had never even heard of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I was searching for an open and affirming congregation and found my way to Woodland Christian Church by accident. In retrospect, perhaps it’s slanderous to the Holy Spirit to call it an accident as I imagine She must have had a hand in all this.

After a cold email to the pastor, I found myself pulled into the embrace of a small-but-mighty congregation who had been embodying an open and affirming ethic long before we called it that. So, for the first time in my life, I came out as queer.

And I was at peace.

I had never felt such warmth and acceptance before. I soon began interning with Woodland and was preaching and teaching again. I fell back in love with ministry. I thought that I had let that dream go for good, but the Spirit brought it back to me at the moment I became free to be fully myself.

But then this trainwreck-by-text happened. And it didn’t feel like the serendipitous moment I had experienced before. This was a colossal disaster.

One of my family members had overheard me preaching on Woodland’s livestream. They had heard me say that God loves LGBTQ+ people without reservation or condition. They had heard me say that I was queer.

None of this was supposed to happen. I felt myself spiraling.

This was not what I had planned. But here I was — accidentally coming out to my conservative family by preaching a super gay sermon in a super gay church.

And I don’t have a picture perfect story to tell about how my family rallied around me and changed their hearts and their theology to love me better. It’s still a work in progress.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit was using Her sense of humor to make a hard situation a little easier for me to bear. I mean, surely it must have been Her who contrived a circumstance where one of my family members, a pastor in a conservative tradition whose sermons I had to listen to for years growing up, then had to listen to me say loudly and proudly from the pulpit the truth about who God loves and who I am.

She’s mysterious, as we all know. But She’s mischievous too. The Holy Spirit is quick to remind me of the ways God shows up with us in the process. I think that God must prefer the messy, holy in-betweens because that’s where I always seem to find Her.

In this internet age, a preacher’s “congregation” is perhaps more ambiguous and unpredictable than ever. It’s hard to say where our words are going once they leave our lips. I think the Holy Spirit is having some fun with that. She’s taking the good news that She sent through us to people we never intended them for, making holy messes and rattling dry bones again.

And through our buzzing phones She pings us a little message through unexpected voices: “You know, I love you,” Holy Spirit says, “no matter what.”

Lessons from (Beyond) the Pulpit

Rev. Michael E. Karunas

I distinctly remember being a new preacher and feeling pressure to pack everything I could into the first sermons of what would become a six-year pastorate. Having been a sole or senior pastor for the entirety of my career, weekly preaching has been the cornerstone of my life in ministry. In that very first year especially, there wasn’t a nuanced reference from the commentary that didn’t make it into my Sunday sermon. There was just too much good stuff to pass along. Who cared if connecting the points required a parallel degree in Tetris or Sudoku? It took months before realizing “Oh, right, I’m going to have the chance to preach on this passage more than just once.” 

Twenty-five years, and over 1,100 sermons later, I still struggle with self-editing. Taking ideas out of a proposed message is always harder than finding more things to add. Similarly, wrapping up the message is never as easy as finding creative ways to begin it. Even though I understand that “Act III is really written in Act I,” I often feel at the end of the sermon like a marathoner stumbling their way to the finish line. 

If I have grown as a preacher over these two-and-a-half decades, it would be the result of two primary practices I have incorporated into my preaching life. The first was the decision to preach from beyond the pulpit and without notes 10 years ago. I had experimented with this off and on during my first two pastorates, before fully embracing it at the beginning of my third. I still draft a sermon in written form. I simply deliver it without notes. While this method may not be for everyone, it has made me a more conscientious preacher. The delivery becomes far more conversational, which is something I enjoy; the eye contact more intentional and consistent; and because of this, I feel more accountable for the words I’m saying. Preaching beyond the pulpit helps underscore in my mind that I am never preaching to the congregation but with them. I am a fellow traveler on the way and the words I speak in the sermon are as much for me as they are for anyone else.

The second was reciting the scripture for the day from memory (in our worship, we typically focus on one reading per Sunday). I was first introduced to memorizing scripture during a preaching class in graduate school and in my early preaching years, I would recite the Passion Story from memory every year as the sermon on Palm Sunday or Maundy Thursday. Years later, I memorized the entire Gospel of Mark and dramatically recited it as a solo performance during the Lenten season. In recent years I have worked with a film professor to learn how more effectively to move with meaning. And on a recent sabbatical, I chose 30 of the better-known psalms and memorized them as part of my own spiritual practice.   Memorizing makes the Word come alive for me in a way that simply reading it does not allow. It naturally engages my imagination and offers a connection to the emotions of the writers of scripture, as well as to their world and context. I still read commentaries and other writings about the text for the week, and though self-editing continues to present its challenges, memorizing scripture and preaching from beyond the pulpit help me recognize what should be included in the message and what can be edited out of it.