Preaching

Gospel reading: John 10:1-10
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Some of you know that I've spent more of my life as a carpenter than I have as a priest. The career change was pretty stark for me. I went from wearing a tattered Carhart canvas jacket to wearing a cassock and surplice at work.

It's hard to imagine two careers with job descriptions that differ more than priest and carpenter. But I think preaching has been the bridge between the two for me.

My sermons begin as written documents, and I don't stray from my text beyond a sentence here or there to clarify a connection or make reference to something that has happened between printing and delivery. And that document satisfies that part of myself that needs to see a made thing result from my labor. But it's a pleasure that's not complete until it's shared.

The first carpenter I worked for was a very literate guy named James Fish. I joined his framing crew in a small town outside Tacoma. After I had moved back to Arkansas, he moved to Eastern Washington and began building traditional timber frame houses. These are the old post and beam structures that last for centuries, their great timbers joined by elegantly carved joints drawn together with oak pegs.

I once received a letter from James written entirely on a fir shaving like the one curling from the plane in the picture at the top. A timber framer needs first rate planes, and he needs to keep those planes tuned. So the message of James's missive was very much in (not just on) the medium. The shaving thin enough so as to be translucent, and it was at least two feet long.

His letter was sheer gloat. And I loved it. Because I knew of the labor it came from.

Sermons are like that for me. There is something very solitary about their making. But in making them, and then in delivering them, I find some of my most intense connections to the lives of the congregation that is forming me as a preacher and as a human being. It's in searching for that intersection between the stories of scripture and our stories that I lose myself in a task I love, but also realize that somehow the whole of that task is wonderfully contained within the life of a people who say their prayers at Capitol and Scott Sunday after Sunday.

The longer I'm here the more clearly I feel like I think James did. He spent hours honing the edge of his planes. Many more hours perfecting his technique. And when he watched that lovely, delicate sliver curl from his work, it pleased him. And he sent it to me, thinking, "Scott will get a kick out of this."

A sermon is like one of those slivers. To most people one may look like a curiosity at best, something to be swept up with the rest of what falls to the floor in a workshop. But because it has emerged from shared things - our scriptures, our stories, our lives - I know Christ Church will get it, or at least get some kind of kick out of it. Even when my thoughts fail to coalesce and when I stumble in their delivery, somehow, over time, Christ Church gets it. Christ Church is getting me. Because Christ Church is getting into me.