By Roger Ferlo

For years I have thought about rifling through old sermon files to see whether there is a book lurking there somewhere. I suppose that publishing a book of sermons is every priest’s fantasy, after preaching week in and week out year after year. Surely there must be something valuable and permanent to make up for all that Saturday night angst and sweat. But sermons are by their nature ephemeral, or at least they ought to be. Permanence and preaching have always seemed to me contradictions in terms. Besides, it’s hard to imagine a vast reading public out there waiting to snap up a full volume of published sermons. For most people outside the churches (and not a few in them), the very word “sermon” smacks of pedantry and sanctimoniousness. Hey, don’t preach to me!

Preaching is by its nature of the moment. That’s perhaps its saving grace. When a sermon is good, it’s closely attached to a specific text, a specific time, a specific place, and most of all to a specific and particular group of people with whom the preacher is in some kind of continuing relationship, rocky as that relationship sometimes can be. It’s been years since I wrote out my sermons word for word. I am always a little shamefaced to admit that I preach from notes, and sometimes even without them. I tend to be at a loss about how to respond to requests for printed copies of a sermon I’ve preached, or even worse, requests for a tape. It usually means I have to go home and reconstruct what I said, which sometimes varies considerably from the notes I’d prepared in advance. It’s what my wife calls chewing your cabbage twice. I’m daunted by that character in Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead, old Reverend Ames, who estimates that in a lifetime of preaching to people week after week in the same little country church, he has accumulated thousands of sermon manuscripts, now stowed away in crates in the attic. What I’ve got is three thick manila files stuffed with piles of notes, carefully sorted into Year A, Year B and Year C—that odd preaching calendar of scripture readings that Episcopalians and like-minded liturgical Christians have long held dear. Not a very promising start for assembling a best-selling book.

Nonetheless, now that I no longer preach regularly, having left parish ministry after almost twenty years to teach in an Episcopal seminary, I’ve decided it’s time to take a second look. There won’t be any sort of systematic theology emerging from this material any time soon, which should come as a relief to a worried public. If there is a book submerged in this stuff, it won’t be the book I imagined when—earnest and naïve—I started preaching two decades ago, writing out every paragraph, reading the manuscript aloud word for word. Thank God that obsessive behavior didn’t last. But the upshot is that my surviving notes provide less a well-worked out theology or a consistent scriptural hermeneutic (a word I would try never to use in a sermon), than an oddly inadvertent and sometimes comic record of my life as a parish priest, and of the three or four congregations that have patiently put up with me.

That’s what happens when you preach in the moment—the moments come back to haunt you. There are the baptism sermons, where I seem to have taken great pains to incorporate the names of the about-to-be-baptized-babies into the text, only to discover that now, twenty years later, I have only the vaguest memory of who those children are or what their parents looked like. Then there’s the sermons about money—I know they’re about money because the notes tend never to mention the topic directly, an occupational hazard for Episcopal clergy in my generation. I served for several years in a tiny progressive parish in Pittsburgh, a diocese both then and now notorious as a hotbed of evangelical schism. There’s some censorious attention paid in these sermon notes to Episcopal church fights, again mentioned obliquely, but I suppose the message was clear as day to those who knew the score. And I find more than a few sermons that begin by describing incidents from my Italian Catholic working class childhood—memories of candles burning in grottoes in front of a whole line of life-size plaster statues, or of that cleverly wired confessional box where a green light over the door signaled that the coast was clear to enter. The light turned red when you knelt down inside, and then turned green again when you got up to leave—shriven, forgiven, green light good to go. My memory is that people enjoyed stories like these, which crop up often in my notes, but to listeners who had not grown up Catholic themselves I must have come across like a messenger from an alien planet.

The notes I am most interested in are the most recent ones, though, the notes of sermons I preached in New York in the months and years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, just twenty short blocks from the parish where I served. Like many of my colleagues in New York, in the immediate aftermath I found it hard to find words equal to my own deep sense of loss and fear and anger, and then, in the months that followed, equal to the mounting sense of frustration at the growing vindictiveness and xenophobia that have since proved so toxic in our public culture. I was out of the country, on a long sabbatical, on the day of the attacks. For complicated reasons, my wife and I didn’t return to New York until Halloween. My first sermon was at a parish baptism on the feast of All Saints. As I look at these notes, I realize that I was functioning in two worlds at once. In the pulpit, I was trying to shape the complexities of people’s pain to the promise of the Gospel; in my own inner life, I was trying to make the Gospel somehow answer to my sense of loss and fear. I suppose that any energy that preaching had derived from the struggle between my preacher’s vocation to let the Gospel speak to people’s hearts and my own heart’s deep sense of anger at my own inadequacies.

I always meant to reconstruct those notes, but discovered one Sunday morning, while I was browsing in a Washington bookstore, that someone else had beat me to it. It turns out that one of the authors of Killing the Buddha, a kind of po-mo anthology of post-Christian writing, had been in my church that All Saints Day in New York. Without identifying the preacher, he had reported my sermon almost verbatim in the first chapter of the book. Coming across the book by chance, I felt angry and violated, as if someone had eavesdropped on an intimate family occasion and blabbed about it to the world. I’ve calmed down since then, and am even grateful to that writer (whose account of the sermon, I had to admit, was both accurate and sympathetic) for doing what I never really have had the wit or courage to do—to share with others that remarkable moment of grace that allowed me to reconnect to my parish in those dark days in late 2001, a moment of grace that offered room to those of us gathered there on Hudson Street to reconnect, however tentatively and skeptically, to the hope of Christ that was in us.

Maybe reconstructing those twenty years of sermons is not such a bad idea after all.

The Rev. Dr. Roger Felo is Professor of Religion and Culture, Associate Dean and director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary.

By Greg Jones

"Remember Jesus Christ – raised from the dead – a descendant of David – that is my Gospel for which I suffer hardship."

Paul wrote these words to remind the faithful that the Gospel is for real. That Jesus is for real. That God's power to give life, even to the dead, is for real. Paul wrote these very real words of life while he himself was in chains a prisoner of the Romans. Do you think Paul knew when he wrote this letter that he would suffer an even harder fate than mere chains? Do you think Paul knew he would also suffer death for his witness to the love of God in Christ?

Of course he did. Paul knew that witnessing for Christ can get you hurt – and even killed. He knew it, because he used to track Christians down in his former life, and we know he helped to kill at least one.

Paul knew that testifying for Christ was costly, but he knew it was worth it. He tasted the fruit of New Life that the Resurrected Jesus gave to him, and he knew it was worth giving his life in witness.

In Greek the word for 'Witness' is actually the word "martyr." For centuries the word 'martyr' literally just meant somebody who bore witness – like in a courtroom. Jesus used the word to commission his disciples – he said, "You will be my witnesses." He said, "You will bear witness to my love, to my cross, to my resurrection." Jesus commanded his disciples to be his witnesses – and he gave them the power of God to do it well. And they did. And they spread that Gospel all over the Roman world with a rapidity and tenacity that is still astonishing.

And the price the apostles paid was death. The most powerful witnesses to Christ faced crosses, fires and swords – and by doing so changed the lives of thousands who were made strong by their sacrifice. Because of the way they served God as witnesses to Christ, the word 'martyr' changed meanings also. Over time the word martyr took on the connotation of someone willing to pay the price for the sake of their witness.

If you've been following the news, you've heard that the Congress is trying to pass a resolution about the Armenian genocide which happened some 90 years ago. Or perhaps you've heard tell of the Armenian taxi driver slain in her car by an Australian security company doing business in Iraq.

These stories remind me of my Great-Grandfather, the Rev. James Perry, who was a missionary over there – in the Near East – doing humanitarian work for the sick and suffering. He spent years in various parts of the old Ottoman Empire doing relief work. He had a young wife and two infants, but nonetheless he worked to bring help to the suffering in the name of Christ in the face of great danger.

In February of 1920 – as Turks were massacring thousands of Armenian Christians in the city of Marash – my great-grandfather, another American, and two Arab Christians drove toward the city in a relief truck filled with supplies to help the victims and survivors. They were slain by Turks with orders to kill any Christians on the road. The story was front page news in America – from the New York Times to small town papers everywhere.

I can't wait to meet my Great Grandfather. I know I will because he has died with Christ and now lives and reigns with Him. But, I'm not counting my days until then. Because Christ wants me – and you – to focus on today ... to live today ... to endure today ... to praise God and witness to his saving love to this hurting world today. Our work as Christians is not to sit still or to wait or to quibble over words or to serve ourselves – but to give our lives for Christ.

God wants to transform our lives into the life of Jesus Christ for ministry in this world.

I understand if folks don't want this transformation into Christ – witnessing is dangerous. It is costly. But if any want to live eternal lives, we must remember that eternal living starts in the here and now. And eternal living is birthed by doing one thing:

"Remember Jesus Christ – raised from the dead – a descendant of David."

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") became a member of Christ's Body at St. Columba's in Washington, D.C. He is husband of Melanie, father of Coco & Anna, rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004). He blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Roger Ferlo

About 50 new seminarians showed up here at Virginia Theological Seminary last week, three weeks before the start of the regular term. They’re here to get a head start on their required courses in Hebrew and Greek, and to undergo the time-honored training in the oral interpretation of Scripture that the seminary underground still refers to as “Read and Bleed.” Half of the newcomers seem to be in their twenties and early thirties, continuing the youthful swing we have experienced here in the past several years. (You have to admire these young people, committing themselves to a lifetime working in a church that too many people in my generation seem intent on tearing apart.) As to the other half of the class, a large number seem to be newly retired, in the way we baby boomers retire in our mid-fifties. There aren’t too many people in their 40s. My seat-of-the-pants demographic theory about this is that if you are going to go to seminary in these parlous times, you are more likely to try it either in your twenties (when you are still relatively free of commitments, except, of course, for that sizable college debt), or in your late fifties, after you’ve sort of completed the trajectory of your first career, maybe seen your kids through college, and sense that you now have permission to do with your life what you’ve always known you wanted to do.

I changed careers pretty dramatically in my early thirties, so maybe I’m projecting. To be fair, the best part of working in an Episcopal seminary is that you never really can predict where people might be coming from, or what brought them here. In their first session together last week, one guy introduced himself to the group by looking at his watch, and then declaring that it was now almost exactly 72 hours since he retired from the military. A woman of a certain age marveled that the student sitting next to her was young enough to be her daughter. Several people identified themselves as recovering lawyers. One of the youngest men wore a T-shirt that revealed an amazingly elaborate network of tattoos on his right arm—perhaps setting a new trend in clerical dress.

Whatever the case, here they are, part of our lives for the next three years, God bless them all. Their nametags dutifully hanging from their necks, they gathered yesterday with the rest of us for a Eucharist in the chapel at 8:10 in the morning. I suspect that they were too distracted by a looming pop quiz on Hebrew verbs to listen closely to the sermon, which might have been just as well, as I was the preacher, and it was St. Bartholomew’s Day, and St. Bartholomew does not provide you with the most inspiring of sermon texts even in the best of circumstances.

It was those nametags that set me going. I hate wearing nametags. Maybe that’s why I’m always attracted to the unnamed people in Scripture, like the anonymous woman who washes Jesus’ feet in Mark’s version of the story, or the unnamed young man who runs away naked to avoid being captured by the police who are arresting Jesus in the garden (did he too wear tattoos on his arm?). I think of St. Bartholomew as part of their company. He didn’t really have a name, at least any name the gospel writer cared to record. Roughly translated, Bartholomew just means “son of Tolmai.” No real claim to fame there, nothing really to put on a nametag. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention him only once or twice. John, on the other hand, seems never to have heard of him. As usual with mysterious figures like this, legends have accrued, the most persistent one being that he was flayed alive somewhere in Armenia (“read and bleed” with a vengeance), and that his body washed ashore on the Italian island of Lipari (a long way from landlocked Armenia), where a cathedral still stands in his honor. Colorful rumors, but not much to hang a sermon on.

This being the case, I decided to keep to that ancient principle of Episcopal homiletics--when in doubt, start with the collect. Whoever wrote it knew the score. The collect repeats all we know of Bartholomew—that he had the grace to believe and the courage to preach (and even the latter is only an inference from the scarcest of scriptural data). This being the case, we are made to ask not that we would love and venerate Bartholomew (it’s hard to love and venerate a relative cipher), but that we would “love what he believed and preach what he taught.” The feast of St. Bartholomew thus becomes a feast of holy anonymity.

I more or less said all this, and then looked out on that crowd of newly washed seminarians. I thought about my own ministry through the years, and realized that if what was said of Bartholomew could one day be said of us—that because of what we said or how we acted or who we were, others could be brought to love what we believed and to preach what we taught—well, then, maybe this priesthood thing would mean something in the end, long after our names were forgotten. The priestly life can be such an ego-trip—witness the clash of prelatial egos now bedeviling our common life. “I came among you as one who serves.” Bartholomew knew this about Jesus, and about himself, and acted accordingly. In spite of the occasional need for nametags, a little dose of this holy anonymity in love’s service might do all of us a world of good.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Susan Fawcett

One of the worst sermons I've ever heard was in the seminary chapel. Several weeks before, the school administration had asked preachers at Morning Prayer to keep their sermons to five minutes or less, in the interest of getting everyone out in time to get their obligatory coffee before 9:00 classes started. And on this particular morning, it was not a student but a professor who ascended the pulpit to speak. The service itself had already run long, and he preached...and preached...and after twenty minutes of discourse on The Faith of Abraham, we were finally released, grumbling about being late to class and missing coffee.

The sermon wasn't bad because of the content, per se. It was bad mostly because it was long, and disrespected our time (not to mention the Dean's request of five minutes or less). The absolute length of it overrode its message.

I come back to that sermon when I'm thinking about writing my own (as I am today, Thursday, without a clue as to what I'll be preaching on Saturday evening). That preacher had written a sermon that made a great deal of sense to himself, and yet he failed to ask himself what kind of sense it would make to the listeners, or whether they'd be able to listen to him with charity. Where is the line between communicating a message that you feel called to speak-as that professor clearly did-and communicating well? And where does sympathy for the listener fall in there?

I myself am one of those people who tend to think in the abstract and have read far more theology than is good for the average person, and so my natural tendency in sermons is to wax theoretical about an idea, tying together words and images to make some sort of emotional and psychological sense of a biblical passage. I like to think that I have been disabused of that tendency over the past few years: my husband is an engineer, a concrete thinker, and a painfully honest critic. We have spent quite a few Saturday nights revising my sermons, and we've got a running list of his typical responses:

You're dancing around an idea but you haven't nailed it. What's your take-home point here?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't speak church. What are you talking about again?"

"I'm getting kind of bored. Can't you tell a story or something?"

"You aren't going to just stand in the pulpit and read that from the printout, are you?"

Far from being offended by these remarks (ok, most of the time), I appreciate someone being honest. Most of my parishioners are so kind that they'll tell me they loved a dead-boring, high-theory sermon when most of what they loved about it was the chance to drift off into daydream land. So this article here isn't really an article: It's a plea for comments about what makes a great sermon. If you preach, what makes you feel good about your sermons? And how do you gauge it for reception? If you regularly listen to sermons, what keeps you tied in? What engages your mind and your soul? And what is it that you wish you could find a kind and charitable way to tell your beloved preacher?

The Rev. Susan Fawcett keeps the blog This Passage. She serves a parish in the Diocese of Virginia, and supports the work of the General Convention publication The Center Aisle.