Except I Didn't Say-- — And here's why

I’m pretty practiced in multitasking while public speaking. Years in the planetarium will do that for you. When your hands are used to watching the dome, the screen in front of you, the audience, and the exits all while your mouth is explaining something you know by heart, watching the congregation during the preaching moment is practically second nature. So of course I clock it when a congregant rustles around behind the sound booth, stands up, and begins making their way toward the door to the hallway, up by the chancel. I assume that they had gotten a message, either from family or from nature, and need to leave the service early. Instead, they stop before reaching the door, turn to me, and begin to speak over me.

“I’m so tired of this.”

A whirlwind of responses flash through my mind: nervous laughter, incorporating these words that actually fit quite nicely into my sermon into some teachable moment, signaling to someone in the congregation to help, just letting them talk. In the time it takes for these to circle through my brain, though, the congregant begins again.

“I’m so tired of this self-centered—”

Hold on. What?

“Political—”

Oh no.

“I came to this church because it was about love and mercy. And look at us now. Where is—”

Oh no oh no.

On the Friday after this Sunday, I would talk to this congregant’s spouse, who thought that they, inspired by my activism, were doing their own protest during the sermon. They were angry and exhausted and they had reached their limit, so in front of God, the congregation, and the livestream, they decided to speak out.

I’m frozen behind the pulpit. No one says anything, except for this one-person protest. I give all my attention to this congregant, my eyes turned away from the rest of the congregation. The music director, an ally I know I can trust, is completely out of sight, the piano behind me as I turn to face my protesting congregant. I listen as I do a brief tactical analysis. Could they be armed? Possible, but unlikely. How many seconds would I have to shift to a defensive stance if they decide to charge me? Two at best. If I approach them physically, will they back toward the door? Is anyone in the congregation able to restrain them if needed? Can I redirect them?

When it seems like the congregant has paused, I take in a breath. The sermon was about manna. It was about God providing for us when we’re exhausted and tired and angry. It was about receiving strength for the journey. It would, I truly thought, speak to the need I was hearing in what my congregant said. This sermon was the culmination of a couple of months of laying a foundation for engaging with the world outside of the church based on Jesus’ witness in the gospel. This was the end of the series, the breathing point to say, “Yes, I know this is hard, but we’re not alone. God is with us. God will hold us and carry us through. We can do this hard thing.” I breathe in, intending to affirm my congregant’s anger and frustration and to ask them to sit down and give the rest of the sermon a chance.

My congregant sees the breath. They hold up a finger and wave it at me. “Don’t talk down to me!” they yell, taking a step toward me. My mouth closes with an audible pop. They go on.

After church, I would call my District Superintendent and explain the situation. I wasn’t sure that healing was possible. There was a break in trust, I felt. My church and I were on different paths, I felt. I could power through until Christmas, I felt, but with the election and whatever might come after… I didn’t feel like I could stay in this placement. I hated to do it, I would say. I hated to leave my second congregation, I would say. I know these people have good hearts, I would say, but I didn’t feel like I could stay. My DS would agree.

I would present the same argument to church leaders over the course of the week. They would agree, too. The congregant shouldn’t have yelled, of course, but what they said was important. No one should act like that in church, but they did have a point. COVID amplified our divisions, so it made sense that this congregant had been pushed to their limit. if I felt that I couldn’t live out my call in this setting, I should go pursue work elsewhere.

When I check in with them next Sunday, my congregant would explain that the candles and the sound system are their ministry and they want to keep doing them. They would talk about how important this church was to them. I would nod. Services would go on.

They would never apologize.

My hands are folded in front of my waist, the posture I take when waiting to process into and out of the sanctuary. My face is emotionless, except for my eyebrows, which are stuck in the half-raised position they had assumed a minute or two ago. I listen. I wait. When my congregant has said their piece, they look around and then they leave.

I breathe.

I ask the music director to turn off the livestream. She gets up and takes two steps before tapping the tablet’s screen. I turn to the congregation and step away from the lectern.

We breathe together.

Then, I put words to the ball of hope and fear growing in my throat. “Does anyone else feel the way they feel?”

I hear an audible yes and see several head move up and down.

No one disagrees.

No one stops me to ask if I was okay.

No one joins me.

I nod.

I would rage about this moment in the church parking lot as the music director and I aired our frustrations to one another, shivering in the December air. I would show all the anger that grew out of the hurt of this moment, shooting an eye at the trailer on the property beside the church, hoping that our renters couldn’t hear me as I ranted. We would rehash all the discussions since this pivotal moment in my ministry and wonder what could have been.

Standing on the sanctuary floor, down from the chancel, I say something about talking to the Staff-Parish Relations Committee and to our District Superintendent. I say something about how I can’t in good conscience preach differently than I have been, but I also see that they need something different than I can offer. I sit down on the steps to the chancel and lead us in a pastoral prayer. I get as far as, “God…” before I start crying.

I’m not sure that I’ve let myself fell the full impact of that moment even now, more than sixteen Sundays down the road. I’ve spent hours thinking about what led to this moment, analyzing how I reacted, vacillating between being certain that I should have been more assertive and being just as sure I pushed too hard. I should have demanded an apology. I shouldn’t have been so provocative in the first place. I should have waited until I knew my congregation better to preach so boldly. I shouldn’t have waited so long.

You can read the Sermon That Started It All, if you’d like. It’s here. But if you’re looking for incendiary content, I don’t think you’ll find it. This is the version I cleaned up for the website, careful to scrub the mentions of my depression in the introduction and any allusion to the reality of oppression faced by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in the United States from the manuscript. This is the nice version, the “Except I didn’t say fudge” version, of what I had intended to preach. It’s funny. You can take out the material that had offended my congregant, and the sermon still works. Somehow, that feels like an indictment.

I’m sure I’ll continue to think through all of this in the days and months and years to come. There are lessons here, I know, works of wisdom that God will bring about as I process and reflect. Moments like this are hollow point bullets to the psyche— they fracture and embed themselves in the tissues of your heart and mind, making cleanup complicated work. No way of knowing you got all the shrapnel until things have slowed down enough for you to do a full scan and believe me, pastoral ministry during a pandemic is anything but slow.

But I didn’t want to leave all these sermons here without comment. All this homiletic work, months and months of it, written for specific people in a specific place, sharing with them the words I was convinced the Lord wanted them to hear, only to find that they saw this work as sermons for someone else, someone concerned with the things of this world, someone that wouldn’t quite fit in at their church, the church that had a reputation for caring for people. I bottled up this rejection for thirteen Sundays and preached anyway, but goodness, looking back, how it stings.

As of December 31st, I don’t have a pulpit to preach in or a congregation to write sermons for. There’s a blessing here, but a whole heap of sadness and hurt too. I’m hoping to pick things back up and use some of my creative juices for something other than congregational church work, but I’m not sure what that looks like yet. For now, what I have to share is an archive, a year and a half of preaching, along with some other writing. I’ll do my best to convince myself it’s enough, for now, and I’ll come back soon with something more.

Hopefully.