By Amy Butler
One mark of a healthy church is a community in which people regularly and intentionally listen to each other. In Baptist polity, we might even say this quality of hearing each other is critical for us to corporately recognize the voice of God speaking to us.
A potential handicap to creating this quality of community is the common church practice where the preacher gets up every single week to speak while everyone else listens. I’m not bitter, but perhaps a bit fatigued.
I knew weekly preaching was part of the gig when I took it. It’s just that sometimes it feels like the folder closes on one week’s sermon and there’s no down time at all before the search for meaning and profundity begins all over again.
While aware I’ve been well-trained (and am paid) to do this, I can’t help but think some weeks that I should just sit down and listen.
Just last week, for example, I was preaching on the lectionary gospel text from John’s Gospel, where Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with her hair. It’s an important text, as it bring us closer to the last week of Jesus’ life and gives us a glimpse of what it might have been like to walk through that time trying to follow him.
I must say, however, that I don’t really like this passage. For one thing, the whole perfume/hair situation is a little awkward at best. Even my most creative efforts yielded nothing really meaningful about that part of the story.
Then there’s Judas, whom John (and all of us, of course) clearly doesn’t like. In this text Judas brings up that Mary’s actions are excessive and wasteful, and that they could have used the money she spent to help the poor. I know Judas was a crook and all, but I have to say that in this case he has a point. So what exactly does the preacher make of that?
Then Jesus chimes in with his troublesome comment about the poor always being with us. “Mary, Judas, Jesus,” I asked with growing frustration. “Can someone please give the preacher a break?”
Yet Sundays come with startling regularity, and as far as I know there’s no liturgical allowance for the preacher to get up on Sunday morning and say: “I know I’m the preacher, but today I’ve got nothing. I think I’ll pass. Let’s take 20 minutes of silence.”
And so, preach I did. I pinned this text to the mat as best I could. I shared some contextual details about the passage. I talked about Mary being a disciple. I tried, briefly, to make some sense of Jesus’ baffling comment.
But this was one Sunday when I sat down after the sermon with the vague sense that I just didn’t quite say what needed to be said. This week, I suspect, I should have been the one listening instead of talking.
Later, after the service, I was sitting in my office talking with a church member who said that Sunday morning worship had gotten him thinking — especially about that Gospel passage.
I may have groaned internally. Then he said a most profound thing about that difficult passage. In just a few words he crystallized some deep and wonderful ideas from that very same passage I struggled and struggled to tame all week long. (No, I’m not going to tell you what he said. That’s going into a folder for the next time this text rolls around.)
Hearing his beautiful words about that difficult text, I was startled to notice one more time the incredible gift of Christian community, where we are all trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus together.
I remembered that what I can see is not all there is to see. And I heard another voice — a voice besides my own — speaking eloquent words about something I couldn’t seem to articulate no matter how hard I tried.
I needed the reminder to listen up. Wise and faithful voices are all around me, inviting this preacher to listen and listen hard.