Saint Chrysostom
Dean Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
January 29, 2008
When I was first ordained, I served for a year as the chaplain to the Bishop
of Los Angeles. Don’t get excited: I was essentially his secretary
and driver. In that job I also served as his liturgical chaplain at every
parish visitation and diocesan event. On one occasion—I think it was
the annual ECW Eucharist with a cathedral full of several hundred active
church women—the preacher failed to turn up. Bishop Rusack turned to
me, during the gradual hymn, and said, “Guess what? You’re preaching!”
At that moment, my mind turned to the words from today’s Gospel: “So
make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give
you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand
or contradict." [Luke 21] I certainly was obeying Jesus by failing to
prepare in advance. I got up and said something, precisely what it was I
don’t remember. But I do recall that it was not as difficult as I had
thought it would be because instead of relying on any of the learned stuff
I had tried to fill my head with in seminary, I had, on this occasion, actually
listened to the scripture lessons as they were being read.
As I remember my time in seminary, one of my great anxieties and obsessions
involved worrying about having the right words to say on any occasion. One
of my motives for working and studying as hard as I did was to try to fill
my head with an anthology of the right thing—the doctrinally right
thing for the pulpit, the pastorally right thing for the sick bed—to
say in any occasion which the ministry would deal out to me. As critical
as I am of CPE as an institution, one of the things it did teach me was that
being present to the person meant a lot more, ultimately, than having a head
full of ingenious and perspicuous remarks. And 30-plus years of life as an
ordained person has only deepened and extended that learning.
As Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel demonstrates, you and I spend too
much time worrying and thinking about what it is that we are supposed to
say. And on the day when we as a community commemorate John Chrysostom, the
great preacher of the Eastern Church, the occasion almost seems to demand
a treatise on preaching. But as I listen to the readings this morning—both
Jesus’s caution against overpreparation in Luke and the account of
the prophet’s call in the first chapter of Jeremiah—it seems
that the homiletical secret might reside less in what we say than in what
we hear.
Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to
me,
"Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant." [Jeremiah 1]
Yes, clearly, Jeremiah’s call is a call to speak. But the words spoken
come not from Jeremiah’s own ingenuity but rather from the One who
put them there. Before it is a call to speak, the call to prophesy is a call
to listen. If we presume to speak for God as an exercise in our own creative
ingenuity, we are speaking really only for ourselves. We are, of course,
asked by God to use ourselves (and our ideas and feelings and convictions)
in God’s service. But we do not achieve that by obsessive overpreparation.
We achieve that by listening.
A couple of weeks ago I watched the DVD of the recent documentary Into Great
Silence, a film about a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps. Most of
the movie proceeds in total silence. I remember one beautiful segment where
we watched one of the monks cutting celery in the kitchen for what had to
be at least five minutes of absolute quiet, the only sound being made as
the knife hit the cutting board. The monk did not wear an i-pod. He wasn’t
working on his Blackberry. There was no TV broadcasting CNN updates in the
kitchen. A bunch of monks were not gossiping about order politics or interpersonal
relations. It was just, simply, quiet. And if you watch Into Great Silence
all the way through, you get the deep sense that it is this quiet which provides
the brothers in that house with the space in which they can listen to what
God is saying to them.
And, I believe, it is only when we have listened to what God is saying to
us that we can presume to say it to other people. Preaching, after all, is
an audacious act: a finite, limited human being ascends into a privileged,
authoritative space and dares to say something on behalf of God. Sometimes
that something we preachers say is a word of judgment. Sometimes it is a
word of comfort. Sometimes it is only framing the questions which, together,
we ask of the One who is under and above and around and within us and our
creation. But whatever it is that we do say, it is only finally of God if
it proceeds from a process of deep listening.
We inhabit a world where, increasingly, people are not present to their own
experience. We are distracted by the little machines we carry around with
us. We worry about things going on everywhere but in our own immediate orbit.
Jesus had it right: when you are called upon to speak, worry less about what
you are going to say than what God wants you to hear. And Jeremiah understood
that the hard words he was about to utter came not from his own intellect
but from the mind and heart of God. If we would aspire to the eloquence of
John Chrysostom, let us, like Jesus and like Jeremiah, attend to the One
who is always with us trying to get our attention. If we make the space and
listen for and to God, the words will come to our hearts and our minds and
make their way into and out of our mouths.
Preaching is not finally about what we say. It is about what we individually
and collectively hear. And we can only hear God if we listen. Amen.