11/8/23

Driving through Alexander City on the Monday after Rachel Gullatt’s wedding, I thought about Harper Lee and the novel she researched there in the 1970’s. It was to be based on a notorious local  case that  had the makings of a fine true-crime novel; a “reverend” had collected insurance money on various relatives who died under mysterious circumstances, and then he was shot at his stepdaughter’s funeral  – who was also one of his alleged victims! Lee stated that the research for her book, which she planned to call The Reverend, produced “Enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament.” She finally decided she could never get to the truth, so Harper Lee abandoned what would have been her second novel. 

In a 1981 letter to Gregory Peck, the actor who played Atticus Finch in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee wrote that with her first novel, “Nobody cared when I was writing it,” but “now it seems that my neck is being breathed on.” She complained about how her “agent wants pure gore & autopsies” and her “publisher wants another best-seller,” but all she wanted was “a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.”

That should be the goal of any writer, teacher, speaker . . . and especially preacher: “a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.” 

I take what I do very seriously and spend a lot of time studying, researching and planning. Why? Because I believe it’s important. Vitally important. And it goes to the root of who I am and what I’m called to do. 

Now, when I was growing up in our home congregation (this was also true in several of the congregations I’ve served), we were lucky if we heard more than one or two verses read in a worship service. From those two verses, the preacher might latch on to a phrase or even part of a phrase as a jumping-off place for his sermon, and that phrase would serve as a pretext to ride whatever hobby horse was en vogue. 

By the way, one of the first lessons I learned in school was that “a text without a context is a pretext.” To understand what a text is saying, you have to look at the verses around it . . . but I digress.

I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I’m at that age where I repeat myself: When I was in high school, the person who filled our pulpit (notice how I worded that?) was a big fan of certain TV preachers who preached that God wanted his people to command him to do things.  

The (pre)text was Isaiah 45:11 in the King James Version, “Thus saith the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.”  At one Wednesday night Bible study, I decided I’d heard that enough. At the time, there weren’t that many options when it came to Bible translations; but, someone behind me had a Living Bible, which I borrowed. It read: “Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel, Israel’s Creator, says: “What right have you to question what I do? Who are you to command me concerning the work of my hands?” Even though the Living Bible was a paraphrase and not a translation, it captured the sense of the passage pretty well. God was saying the exact opposite of what they were teaching: it was not “you command me” but “how dare you command me!”  

So I raised my hand, he called on me and I read the passage out loud, saying, “This contradicts what you’re teaching.” Now, I was a sophomore or junior at the time, so you can see I’ve always been like this. The person who filled the pulpit sputtered around a bit before giving some sort of answer I don’t remember. What I do remember is he never preached or taught that again! 

I knew a preacher in Ohio who literally preached from the local newspaper each Sunday. I’ve known preachers who preached from best-sellers, TV shows, and movies. I’ve also known more than one who freely stole their sermons from podcasts (one even bragged about it). For a time when I was in high school, we would watch a certain TV preacher on Sunday morning while we got ready for church, and we’d hear that same sermon again later that morning from our church’s pulpit. I knew of a retired lady in a Florida church who delighted in using her computer skills and her free Sunday afternoons to find her preacher’s sermons online. And she did. Weekly. For months. 

AND there are packages available for churches that include sermons, song suggestions, atmospherics, etc., all designed to increase giving or persuade people to volunteer or whatever the preacher is after. 

I suppose it would be easier to do these sorts of things. But the problem is that it goes against the charge I was given when I was ordained:  “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and exhort, with great patience and instruction” (II Timothy 4:2 NASB). As I get older, the patience part seems to be going away . . . but I still take that charge very seriously.

Now, I write all this, but I also insist on you doing your own work. Don’t just take my word for anything. My goal is to be honest with the text and “not defraud the reader,” but remember that Paul wrote to the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil” (I Thess. 5:20-22). There’s a certain amount of reading and thinking for you to do as parishioners! 

I did have someone tell me years ago, “I’m not interested in all this history stuff; I just want you to tell me what to believe.” 

That’s a dangerous attitude to have! 

I want to be trustworthy, but I don’t want you blindly trusting me which is why I’m also big on you all learning to do what I do. That’s one of my goals of our Wednesday night Bible studies: to help you learn how to slow down, pay attention to what’s on the page, and ask the right questions. I want each of you to be able to “rightly handle the word of God,” so no matter what situation you may find yourself in, whether it’s reading a book, a Facebook post, a podcast, YouTube video, visiting preacher or just a well-meaning friend’s comments, you can weigh what they say against the Word of God for yourself and have the confidence to know whether or not it aligns with the scripture. 

And not only that, but I want you to be able to read and understand the Word for your own spiritual benefit. So . . . read attentively, ask questions, and listen carefully. Feel free to challenge me, if you feel the need, knowing that no matter what I do, my intention is to do it with “a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.”