There’s a lot of manure to dig through in the average sermon.
God busted me some years ago (when I was at Bethany before) when I was getting down on sloppy preachers. I didn’t want to listen anymore; I did my Greek homework. Then God told me, “I anointed that guy, and I put him in that pulpit. You listen to them.”
Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke was about an optimist who was cheerfully digging through a giant pile of horse crap. The punchline: “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!” So in some sermons (thankfully not most of them) I gotta go look for the pony. I can’t argue with God; I figure he’s teaching me patience or something.
This was one of them. You know the type—he says he doesn’t want to do the usual sermon and altar call. So what he does is something that’s not a sermon; it’s a sloppy string of tangents and it goes overtime. He does something that’s not an altar call; people have to stand up and confess something, and everyone else has to gather around and pray for them. (At my home church, we usually do that around the altar.) We had to pray for the people on this campus who feel lonely. What good did that do? They’re prayed for; but did anyone invite them out for coffee?
I’ve been racking my brain today trying to figure out where the pony was.
He did point out that there were millions of twentysomethings not interested in church. I knew that already; I work on some of them. He pointed out that God can do things in spite of the sloppy way we handle things. I knew this already; God has done lots in spite of me. He encouraged many people to change their majors if God wants them to. I already did that. So…
Dangit, every other time I could find the pony.
Maybe I’ll think of it tomorrow.