Truth-telling

Submitted by Executive Direc... on June 25, 2008 - 7:50pm.

Twenty years ago this morning I put on a white starched backwards collar for the first time. I struggled to attach the thing to my new clergy shirt, and I was intent on getting it right. I figured that new collar had something to do with my new authority as an ordained person. I quickly learned it didn’t.

Authority, of course, isn’t bestowed by a degree or a title, or even the bible handed me that day by the bishop with the words “receive this Bible as a sign of your authority to proclaim God’s word.”

Authority comes with truth-telling, consistent truth-telling. Authority means, as the Latin roots show, not power, but trustworthiness. We grant authority to the one who tells us the truth, whether it’s about our car’s engine, our medical lab report, or the reasons to wage war or drill for oil. We grant authority to the one who listens for the many facets of truth and interprets them in the light of reason. That’s the job of the preacher. That’s the job, I pray, of the politician worthy of our vote and the high calling of their honorable profession. That’s the job of any one of us engaged in public life and public service.

We live in a time when plain-spoken truth is “rare in the land” a time not unlike that of the prophet Samuel. And so we are listening, as it says in the first book of Samuel, for something that will “make our ears tingle.”

In the earliest days of my ministry, I was urged to stay close to the truth by a prophetic bishop, Dan Corrigan. Dan was one of the courageous bishops who ordained the “Philadelphia Eleven,” those women ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1974, two years before the church officially approved the ordination of women.

The key to being a prophetic, truth-telling preacher, Dan said, is this: “If, when you get up in the pulpit on Sunday morning, you leave out the most important thing that happened to you during the previous week, you are lying.”

I’ve always tried to follow Dan’s lead. Sometimes “the most important thing” has been something particular to the congregation, or deeply personal to me, the daily deaths and resurrections that mark all our lives. Sometimes it’s been the headline news. The best preaching, I figure, is always informed by both. Sometimes the most important thing is explicitly named in the sermon; sometimes it is shaping the preacher’s heart. But it’s always there.

I believe most preachers do pay attention to those personal “important things” that come up in the course of a week, from the latest crisis in the church office to the death of a beloved member. But sometimes we miss the headlines. Sometimes we steer clear of them.

So, in the interest of truth-telling and in honor of the authority granted to pastors and preachers by trusting congregations, I’m adding “Headline Words: (Unavoidable Contexts for the Text)” to the Preacher’s Post. I hope we all have tingling ears in the days to come.

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