Planning: Day 11

Today’s Song: Be Thou My Vision as sung by Pedro the Lion

A good sermon, to me, is one that I walk away from feeling convicted or called. In the same way that I can look at a memory and think, “This was a happy time” or “This makes me feel sad” or “I am proud of that moment” or “I am ashamed”, I can remember certain sermons over the course of my life that gave me this godly feeling, something pushing and purposeful. 

Two sermons this summer have given me that feeling. One I almost walked out on forty-five seconds into the sermon (the pastor mentioned Israel-Palestine and I don’t listen well when someone preaches to me about that topic) and one I was prepared to dismiss out of hand (the sermon series was titled “Free Love and Other Gospel Truths” and I rolled my eyes real hard at that) but both ended up rumbling my soul. This past Sunday’s sermon wasn’t one of those. And that is fascinating to me.

It had all the parts of a convicting/calling sermon: stories about the youth group and growing up, a new perspective on a familiar bible story, the opportunity to help, a call to prayerfully consider action, an acknowledgement of the things that we as Christ’s body promised to do on this earth. The post-sermon hymn was even “Here I Am, Lord”, a hymn whose number I have know by heart partially because it’s a great hymn and partially because I memorized the lyrics so I could still sing it while my eyes blurred with tears. My stomach lurched when I saw that hymn in the bulletin. But partway through the sermon, I realized that this was a call, but it wasn’t for me. I mean, I already work with the youth group. Whether I’m the best counselor I can be or not is another question entirely, but this sermon wasn’t meant for me. It was a weird experience. 

Listening to a sermon that didn’t call me was helpful in understanding myself. It’s like doing experiments on Mars. Hear me out. When we’re doing an experiment on Earth, there’s a whole host of variables and conditions that are specific to our planet- the force of gravity at your location, the atmospheric pressure at certain points, the presence of a basically uniform magnetic field, the composition of the atmosphere. If you do an experiment on Mars, all of those things are different. It’s a completely different lab space with different conditions. It gives you the opportunity to study something new even if you’re performing a familiar experiment. Hearing this sermon was like that for me. I could listen to it and see how the different initial conditions changed the outcome. I could observe what was happening without participating. I could think, completely objectively, about what I was hearing. 

My idea of God is intensely tied to my idea of religion and the ideas I learned growing up. And while I know plenty of facts (Methuselah is the oldest person in the bible- he lived 969 years according to Genesis) and have plenty of ideas of my own (mostly about God and the existence of a plan for all of us), I haven’t studied as deeply as I’d like, seeing as my faith is supposed to be a guiding factor in my life. 

I want to have this complete trust in God. I want to believe in a good God, who cares for people. I want to revel in stories that prove God’s providence and love. I want to believe that at the end of the universal day, everything is going to turn out for the best. But I have to consider both sides. I have to acknowledge pain and suffering and desperate prayers to the heavens. For me, it’s important to think about the efficacy of prayer and the truth of the faithful comforts we tell each other. If I get tripped up on believing in the existence of a good God, maybe seminary isn’t the place for me. 

All of this is bigger than a week of posts, but I’m going to tackle some ideas during our Jesus Week this week, taking ideas and running with them and doing some deeper thinking than I have in the past. It’ll be good practice- I think getting a masters of divinity is basically three years of thinking deeply about what you thought you believed- and it’ll help me solidify the jello of my thoughts. If the thought of talking about Christianity for a week turns you into a giant squid of anger, I’m going to recommend that you come back next week, when I’ll be talking about teaching and education and the world that I have waded into over the past four years. 

And I promise, no matter how much I may want to, the music selection this week won’t be entirely composed of traditional hymn tunes. Just a couple good ones, sprinkled here and there.