Always, Something for Us to Say

In my early years of preaching I had a recurring nightmare: I ran out of things to say and couldn’t write a sermon! In fact, the dream seemed to come true, because I came to feel that I had preached everything I knew, everything I had learned in seminary. What was there left to say?

Fortunately a mentor pointed me back to Scripture, and the nightmare went away. In fact, I discovered that as long as I stayed in Scripture, more sermons came than I could preach in a lifetime. Even if the lectionary pushed me back into the same texts every three years, new sermons came as I heard God’s Word out of a different context and found new conversation partners who showed me what I could not see on my own. I learned to listen and heard the texts speaking to one another.

While I am still concerned that I might not capture God’s Word fully or communicate God’s Word in a way others can hear, I have never again worried about running out of something to say, something to preach. On those days when I feel empty, when I am certain I have nothing to say to what is swirling about, when I wonder if God has anything to say to me or to the world, I turn to Scripture and am never disappointed.

The truth is that when I am reading Scripture, God’s Word is reading me, measuring me, showing me that I need to listen, teaching me to lean into what others hear in a world where there is a variety of conversation partners:

      Voices of scholars of the past and present

      Voices of God’s people around the world

      Voices from all areas of the church’s life,

      Listening together for God’s Word today.

May that Word continue to read our lives and lead us and all creation into life abundant and life eternal through Christ Jesus, the Living Word.

Laura Mendenhall