Lectionary reading: The FIFTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME - September 13, 2009

Psalm 19

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

ENGAGED IN FOLLY by Larry Patten

T.S. Eliot began his poem East Coker with “in my beginning is my end” and concluded it with, “in my end is my beginning.”

When I read Psalm 19, I try not to hurry to the end, but I usually do because it’s my beginning.

Yes, all the words before the final verse are powerful and eloquent. And, as with all 150 Psalms, I am forever amazed at how these ancient phrases, written thousands of years ago by persons in a vastly different place with daily experiences alien to my twenty-first century world, speak to me. The Psalms are like fingers wagging in my face, hands slapping my back, arms enveloping my shoulders, palms pressed together in prayer, fists threatening my complacency, shouts waking me up, and silences urging my attention to the movement of the Holy. What of just these sampled words from Psalm 19 . . .

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;

The commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eye.

Rejoice. Enlighten. Indeed!

Still, with Psalm 19, I hurry to the end. I act the child, waiting for the mail to arrive with the promised gift from a grandparent. I am the marathon runner, finally passing the twenty-six mile marker.

In the time before my call to the ministry, the pastor at the church I attended used the nineteenth Psalm for his sermon’s opening. Every Sunday, every sermon, there it was: a prayer spoken, a pause interpreting the Gospel or sifting through an Old Testament text or (as we preachers love to believe we do on our very best days) comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. At some point, when I was ordained and sent forth to declare the Good News, I borrowed my friend and mentor’s Psalm-infused opening prayer.

Did I start using Psalm 19’s end on my first sermon? My fiftieth? I don’t remember. But now I can’t remember not praying that way before I do the most foolish activity of my life.

And preaching is foolish isn’t it? Come on. Be honest. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a seminary-educated purveyor of exegetical insights or took a wrong turn and plopped down in the back pew for the first time in your life. Both could give the same answer: preachers are fools, engaged in folly.

The commandments of the Lord are clear, enlightening my eye, we might declare from the pulpit . . . and yet our interpretation will be riddled with confusing words and mixed metaphors and our ordained eyes are forever diverted by the world’s seductions. Who are we kidding? Can we really make it to the end of the sermon with a straight face? And if that fellow in the back pew, only there because he wanted to get out of the rain or his wife badgered him into coming, would be laughing out loud before the homily’s second paragraph if he hadn’t been raised to be polite.

How dare we say anything is God’s word, will, or way!

At my first church I remember being called into the senior pastor’s office. He wanted to show me something and opened a cupboard door near his desk. There, on the bottom shelf, spanning more than the length of my arm, were manila file folders. They stood upright, stacked tightly together. The senior pastor gestured toward the files and mentioned that a few days before a clergy colleague’s widow brought them to him. They represented forty years of sermons from her spouse. She asked him: Would you like them?

He couldn’t say no to her. Of course he took them.

He asked me the same question: Would you like them?

He asked in jest. And yet not. He had no interest in preaching another’s mistakes and magnificence. Neither did I. But I thought then, and I think now, what does it matter that one Sunday tumbles into another, that the file folders—paper or digital—add up and a life’s accumulation of good news, bad news, honest news, boring news, life-affirming, life-afflicting news all find a final resting place on a shelf about the length of an outstretched arm?

Does it matter, this thing we do? Do the “words of my mouth” make enough difference in the world?

This summer, over three decades since I was ordained, I guest-preached at a nearby congregation. Their new pastor hadn’t arrived and my district superintendent asked me to fill the pulpit. And so for a handful of Sundays I preached to people I didn’t know, in a church that wasn’t “mine.”

I have no sermons on file. I wonder if I suspected, when that cupboard door opened, how much it would influence me? Early on I decided I wouldn’t accumulate old messages. I didn’t want to look back on enough hoarded paper to cause a bookshelf to sag in the middle. And—fool that I am, fools that we all are who claim the pulpit—I wanted each message to be new. To be a today; to be a beginning. Do I retell stories? Sure. Have I ever preached a sermon rerun? No.

However, looking at those folks I didn’t know, I knew them. You would’ve too. Before me was the man in the back pew who didn’t want to be there. The grandmother who’d sat in the same spot for fifty years. The fidgety kid. The woman wondering if she should leave her husband. The middle-aged man still unsure if he’d come out as gay. The mother scheduled to see an oncologist tomorrow. The college student failing her classes. Before me was . . .

And so I said the opening prayer. Psalm 19 settled me down. Psalm 19 helped me remember. Psalm 19 ended and a new sermon began.

The words of my mouth; the meditations of our hearts.

Thanks be to God.

in Peace,

Larry Patten

(written on August 25, 2009)