Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2011, Page 14

human, and very few of us have not “borrowed” extensively from another
preacher we admire, at least once. I think it’s one of those experiences a
preacher has to have, actually: you have to know what it feels like to preach
what is not yours. You have to cross the line before you see where it is. It’s
like an adolescent, waking up the morning after the party, with a headache
and a heartache and a terrible feeling in his gut that he went too far, last
night, because that isn’t who he is, to act that way or say those things; that
isn’t who he is, to let himself be swept along by the crowd. It’s a hard thing,
to stand in your own life; every teenager knows that. It’s a hard thing to
stand in your own sermon. We have to keep practicing, because we aren’t
going to do it every week, not without a lot of work.
So please: don’t take these questions as a fmger-pointing moment: No,
no, bad dog! What I hope we can do is start a conversation that I think we
need to have, as preachers, about the particular challenges that have crept
up on us, in the last ten years. Because it isn’t just that the internet tempts
us to plagiarize, and so compromise our ethics. No, the internet tempts us
to trade access for interpretive freedom. And when you give up your interpre-
tive freedom as a preacher, you give up your sacred calling to be minister
of Word and Sacrament.
You know, I think Charlemagne would love the internet. It is the mother
of all homiliaries. It can give you any sermon you want, anywhere, anytime.
And you don’t need a Master’s degree to work it; you just have to know how
to read. Click a few keys, and you can find advice about the most efficient
and successful way to preach the gospel in any conceivable situation. It’s like
having your own personal court of advisers, if you don’t mind that they all
say the same thing. Because here’s what the internet can’t do: it can’t mediate
wisdom, or faithfulness, or love. It can’t interpret information. It just spits
it out. Which makes our interpretive job bigger than ever, because now we
have to sort through the volume to find the value.
Rick Warren says he would like to help with this. Subscribing to his
sermons, he says, can save time and money and souls, because truth is the
same from age to age, and the numbers in his church testify to the truth
in his sermons. The problem is that he becomes a sort of Charlemagne
for us: the Saddleback homiliary is not very different from the Holy
Roman Empire’s homiliary, no matter how well intended. Each contains the
sermons of famous preachers. Each professes to be a tried and true collec-
tion, thereby guaranteeing a measure of success. Each contains sermons
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