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PREACHING SKILLS
Backdraft Preaching
You've got to reignite the flames Sunday after Sunday
Mark Buchanan

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I love preaching. I hate preaching. The best description is Jeremiah's: it is like fire in the bones. It is holy work and dreadful work. It exhausts and it exhilarates, kindles and consumes.

On Mondays, I am charred remains. The hotter I burned on Sunday—the more I preached with fiery conviction and bright hope—the more burned to the ground I am on Monday. I'm restless, but I don't have initiative to do anything or, if I do, the energy to sustain me in it. I'm bone-weary, suffering what the desert fathers called acedia: an inner deadness from the hot sun's scorching.

Worst of all, Monday is lived with the knowledge that I am called to do it all over again next Sunday. Mondays are the days I would rather sell shoes.

But then Sunday comes, and the bones burn again. I am once more a firebrand freshly hot in the hand of God. If I don't preach, I am left with an ache like sorrow. I chafe worse from not preaching than from preaching. "But if I say, 'I will not mention him or speak any more his name,' his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary holding it in; indeed, I cannot" (Jeremiah 20:9).

So I love it, and I hate it.

The surprise is that ten years of preaching has not diminished this. It has, instead, heightened and sharpened it. Every Sunday there's the passion if I preach, the aching if I don't. On Monday, either way, there's a daunting road both too long and too short that I must walk to next Sunday. Preaching is not a job. It is fire.

How shall we live with this rhythm of fire and ashes and fire again?

Backdraft refers to the phenomenon when a fire subsides because it's burned up all the oxygen in the room—then, if somehow the room is breached—a door is opened or the roof bitten through by the fire itself—oxygen-laden air rushes in and sparks an explosion. Fresh wind meets a dying fire, and all again is fiercely ablaze. That's a backdraft.

Backdraft is a good metaphor for the preaching call. It is exactly what I have described: the fire that burns the insides out and almost burns itself out; then, the fire meets fresh wind and breaks out anew. Knowing that this is the shape of the rest of my life, I have become desperate for disciplines to help me live with it. Here are three.

The Sermon has the hypnotic power of the seductress. It woos me, commands me, compels me. "Come and be with me," the Sermon whispers. When that fails, it gets surly: "Come here now! Or else." It often inhabits my sleep, a vague anxiety scrabbling at the edge of my dreams. Uncontrolled, the Sermon becomes an obsession.

I have no great tale of personal victory to relate here. The best thing I've found is to practice trusting God with my time.

Jesus was always being interrupted—by blind men, lepers, Pharisees finding him at night, desperate fathers with demonized or dying children, sinful women caught in adultery or pouring perfume on his feet. And he was always interrupting others—tax collectors counting money, fishermen mending nets or hauling them up, persecutors riding to Damascus. Much of his life-changing ministry came via interruptions.

Too many of us who preach are the priests and Levites in Jesus' story of the good Samaritan: we're so grimly focused on our temple duty that we miss what God has for us at the roadside. The only cure I know is daily and deliberate commitment to look for God in the interruptions. (As I wrote this, God brought three interruptions into "my schedule." Two were phone calls, one from a man at the edge of saving faith and needing a little extra attention, the other from a man of another faith interested in doing some work for the church. The third was a woman seeking bread. She and her children had nothing to eat. "I came to you hungry," Jesus said. "Did you notice?" In my busyness, I almost didn't.)

Living a theology of interruptions opens my soul to the fresh wind that reignites my fire.

There is a beautiful line in Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln that describes Lincoln's early years and the secret of his later strength: "In wilderness loneliness he companioned with trees, with the faces of open sky and weather in changing seasons, with that individual one-man instrument, the ax. Silence found him for her own. In the making of him, the element of silence was immense."

Our world is not like Lincoln's; it is cluttered with image, clattering with sound, ceaselessly busy. Wilderness has dwindled away and sanctuary has been crowded out. Now, those who wish to keep silence must seek it out.

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