It’s Sunday afternoon, and so I’m now just patiently waiting for my body and spirit to go through the wave of post-service ‘stuff’, back to some sort of equilibrium. I’m aware that I find it almost impossible to stand in front of any group and not speak passionately from the heart and invariably find myself exhausted afterwards. I can’t do anything different.
On the occasions where it’s possible to stay awake afterwards and not have to go to bed on a Sunday afternoon, I find I can potter about with a few things before picking up something more relaxing like reading that would lead to sleep anyway in that state. We put Sunday morning sermons on Youtube, and editing them is just about the right kind of productive activity to keep me going. If I have a snooze later, it’s always better once I’ve settled again.
It’s this wee editing time where I hear back what I just said and have chance for reflection myself. Sometimes I check if the messages makes sense, because I often weirdly come away without any sense of what has just transpired. Don’t ask me what I’ve just said – I won’t be able to tell you!
Hearing the recordings back puts everything into proportion after the ‘surely that was a garbled bundle of nonsense’ feeling, or the ‘I’m sure that was about as deep as a dried out puddle’, or ‘where was the Holy Spirit in that one.’ Most of these thoughts, I’ve discovered after years, are not the kind of constructive evaluations you might have with yourself to reflect on your ministry practice, but from the enemy who wants to discourage, deflate and confuse. The most vulnerable few hours are the ones after the last ‘Amen’.
There is a mystery in preaching. It is not, as some suggest, a monologue. Sure, perhaps one voice is audible, but my experience of standing up there is not monologue. Every Sunday morning, I am at the same time having 60 dialogues with every person sitting in the room. More than that, God somehow speaks in the midst, and so the conversation becomes three-dimensional across the room. It’s a mystery, as I say.
I can see the smiles, the sighs, the heads go up or down, the ears go up, the ideas ‘ping’, the tear in the eye, the laughter, and hear the amens and groans. You see the Spirit move here and there, but not over there where the message is just too close to the bone for a particularly closed heart today. Somehow, the opening of God’s Word has a multi-dimensional power – the only explanation for which can be ‘God’. I shut my mouth, pronounce a blessing, and then I need to trust that it’s God’s job to do what only God wants to do.
It’s a fearful thing. Who in their right mind would do it?
Andrew S M Clark 