Holy Multi-tasking
Lots of transactions take place during the sermon, many of them sacred. On ocassion I get to watch.
David Hansen
April 1, 2003
Some people nap regularly, but Thurman nodded off only when my sermon deserved it. When his attention wilted, I knew to check the temperature of my rhetoric. Thurman was my thermometer. One of those thermometers hanging on a doorpost on a barn; a red alcohol glass tube, black numbers printed on a rusty-edged white steel back, advertising a feed business that died in the fifties. If Thurman's eyelids dropped, I knew my sermon had cooled off dangerously. Soon the congregation would pass from open-eyed catnapping to cold-cave hibernation. Even I was bored. I need some homiletical friction. My notes aren't bad, they just aren't all that hot. I don't need something nuclear. I need to be more clear. I may be preaching too much story without a point, or too much point without a story. My reasoning may be thin or my illustrations may be fat. I may need a whopper illustration to materialize in my head while I wave my arms in thin air. I fast-forward through my notes looking for the place to light a match. Serendipitous illustrations come to me in mental pictures. If I decide to use one, the words will just have to come. When a sermon picture arrives in the middle of speaking a sentence, I continue the sentence while I evaluate the idea. Evaluating and shaping metaphors and illustrations is complex business and often takes days of rumination during preparation. While I'm preaching I may have ten minutes to one second. When the instant arrives that I must use it or lose it, I leap over the edge grasping it like a parachute or I drop it on the ledge and walk away—while I'm preaching, of course. Sometimes small adjustments make a big difference. Think ahead. If a ten-verse Scripture quotation is dead ahead, cut to the three verses that really ...
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