August 28, 2018 jathan

What It Feels Like To Bomb Your First Sermon

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I preached my first sermon at seventeen. I almost never got the chance at a second.

Some time after acknowledging to my father that God had called me to preach, he went out on a limb and lent me his pulpit on a Wednesday night.

A few hours later, he wished he hadn’t.

This is not because his decision making process was unsound. Due to much smaller crowds and much fewer visitors, midweek services are normally prime time slots for practicing preachers.

In other words, if (when) the rookie preacher bombs his or her sermon, there are fewer casualties.

It’s simple arithmetic, really.

For some reason known only to God, however, this midweek was different.

Not only was the crowd much more robust than normal, there also happened to be several groups of visitors that we’d never seen before.

Normally this type of crowd spike on midweek service would see the pastor brimming with excitement.   

But having a young preacher delivering the Word for the first time is anything but normal.

This young preacher proved to not be any different.

Unfortunately, yet quite predictably, when I got done with my hour-long, incoherent ramble through the Bible, those poor visitors never darkened our doors again.

Before you judge me too quickly, however, take my word for it, getting started as a preacher is not as easy as it may seem.   

Even though my father didn’t give me a free pass on my unskillful handling of the word of God that night, deep down I knew he didn’t hold it against me too much.

I’ve got the recording to prove it.

Why Don’t You Come Up Here and Try It Sometime

Our family has an old cassette tape from the early eighties when, under one of my father’s earlier pastoral assignments, my uncle preached his second sermon ever. And boy, did Uncle Jimmy blow it.

The story goes that my uncle had done a wonderful job preaching his first sermon just a few weeks prior. Evidently he got all mixed up and thought preaching was easy. As a result, according to legend, he didn’t prepare quite as rigorously his second time up to bat.

He swung and missed.   

It was painful to listen to my uncle fruitlessly try to connect his thoughts and make some kind of connection between God, the people, and himself. Mercifully, he finally gave up and shut the sermon down.

At about the fifteen minute mark he just stopped cold turkey and with that all-too-familiar defeated tone said, “Well, that’s it, folks. I’m sorry. I guess I just didn’t have it tonight.”

He then gave the mic back to my father who quickly sprang into action.

Dad said to the congregation, quite tersely, might I add, “Bro. Jimmy did a great job tonight. Y’all need to make sure and encourage him. Come up and shake his hand and hug his neck. Pat him on the back.”

He then paused, as a lion might just before launching onto its unsuspecting prey, and delivered a line that every preacher only dreams of uttering.

Dad raised his voice and said to the congregation, “If you think preaching is easy, why don’t you come up here and try it sometime!”

Then, as they say, he dropped the mic.

Just because it wasn’t the most polished thing to say at the moment, doesn’t mean it wasn’t true, however.  

I could write another book altogether about the manifold challenges of preaching in general, but I’ll limit my comments here to the challenge of preaching one’s first few sermons.

The only way I can describe it is that it shares several similarities with having a head-on collision.

Concussion

Have you ever seen those scary video replays of football players who sustain concussions after a violent hit to the head? Sometimes, when they get up, they’ve no idea where they are. They don’t know who they’re talking to, what planet they’re on, or what millennia it might be.

Sometimes, they even try to get up really fast and run off the field, only to find themselves having sprinted to the opposing team’s sidelines.

I’m too skinny to play football, but when that microphone touched my I might as well have been a concussed middle linebacker.

It was like magic. Black magic.

When I saw all of those people out there staring at me, everyone and everything, including time and space and gravity, got all messed up.

Although that next hour of my life took place in a complete fog, I do remember a few things quite distinctly.  

First of all, I remember making the tragic mistake of NOT consulting my notes

I had worked really hard that week to prepare several pages of notes from Exodus 33:16-18 (“show me your glory”). For the life of me I’ll never know why I chose to provide a running commentary of every randomly disconnected thought that passed through my mind instead of reading through the thoughts I’d actually prayed over and written down on paper.

Instead, I thought it would be a much better idea to pace back and forth across the stage, and literally summarize the bible starting with Genesis and ending in Revelation.

I’m sure I burned four or five-hundred calories as it took me a solid hour of pacing to finally get   John to the Isle of Patmos.

All of that pacing didn’t help my delivery any, but it did produce my second vivid memory of that sermon.  

The second thing I remember was that squeaky platform board.

As I paced rhythmically, and with an even gate, everytime I stepped on a certain spot, about five feet from the pulpit, stage left, there would be a faint “squeak.”

Apparently, however, the squeak wasn’t quite as faint as I thought it was. After service I found out that by the time I got halfway through my sermon, people in the audience were predicting the next squeak down to the microsecond.

At least it kept them from falling asleep. Thank God for His providence.  

Although the sound of that squeaky board wasn’t enough to bring me back to consciousness, the C chord that my aunt struck on the keyboard was.

And that’s the third thing I remember.

Being shot out of the air like a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain.

That’s right, my dad, realizing that I was never going to land the plane, decided to send the minister of music in to shoot it down.

It worked.

My aunt Marty, playing through the refrain of “Shout to the Lord” a few times on the Roland D-50  was the smelling salts I needed.

Mercifully, the melody gradually made its way from the far reaches of my mind to my consciousness enough for me to shake myself from the fog, blink a few times, and give some semblance of an altar invitation.  

A few kinds souls headed to the front, while our distinguished guests headed for the exits.

We never saw them again.

Not in church, anyway.  (Word is that they were spotted at the local bar later that night.)

My dad has been known as a trainer of young ministers. And boy, did he get his money’s worth in training me that night after church.  

As soon as we got into his red Z-71 pickup truck and turned onto Highway 437 toward Applebee’s, he said something along the lines of, “Son, what in God’s name were you doing up there tonight? You can’t preach the whole Bible in one sermon!”  

Thankfully, our Spanish pastor was in the vehicle with us to serve as intercessor. Before I was able to say, “Oh, yeah, Dad? Well, you’re wrong because I totally just did!” she stepped up and said, “Now pastor, it wasn’t that bad”. Give him a break, it was his first time. He won’t always preach that badly.”

Depending on who you ask, it’s debatable whether or not I ever made good on her last statement.

But I am thankful that I didn’t quit trying. I hope the multitudes of people I’ve preached to over the years feel the same.