c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _ My 8-year-old son starts to squirm even before the sermon begins. So as the preacher climbs into the pulpit, I take my son’s hand and begin to trace the lines on his palm.

He finds the lines fascinating. Meanwhile, I listen closely to the preacher’s words.

I am struck anew by what a dangerous thing it is to preach. Not just because many adults have an attention span no longer than my son’s and squirm visibly unless their hands, as it were, are stroked. Preaching is dangerous because it rouses the pharisees, those custodians of religion who arise in every age to keep the faithful in line.

If the preacher truly sits with the Word and allows it to touch his or her life, then the very starting point of proclamation is unease. I don’t mean the intellectual unease of trying to analyze the words. The gospel isn’t that hard to decipher. The words are relatively simple and the images uncomplicated. I mean the soul unease of knowing full well what they mean.

The gospel is simply hard to hear. It stirs the preacher’s own pharisee. If the preacher starts quoting books about Scripture or contemporary culture, or analyzing Greek words, or making jokes, or playing with clever images, I figure the internal pharisee won. The Word never got too close for comfort.

Then there are the pharisees sitting in the pews. If the overwhelming implications of the gospel set Jesus to sweating blood in Gethsemane, imagine what it does to a hired preacher who has a job to lose.

There is very little in life that is more dangerous than telling people they need to change their lives. That’s why politicians flatter, rather than challenge. That’s why advertisers appeal to appetite. That’s why many preachers have learned to say as little as possible. Keep it light, keep it safe, keep it short.

If worshipers walk out the door beaming and congratulating the preacher on yet another”good sermon,”I figure the preacher said too little, or the listeners didn’t listen, or both. In modern religion, we don’t throw strong preachers off cliffs, as they once tried to do to Jesus; we buy our comfort by rewarding blandness.

What if Sunday preaching happened this way? The preacher wrestles with the Word, allows it to touch deeply, and then, with more candor and less polish, says as much as he or she can say. The preacher then goes immediately to a private place and repents of not having said more.

The people, meanwhile, simply exit into the world, not wearing the garment of pleasantry which they wore on arrival, but wearing the stark white robe of the convert, moistened perhaps by tears, wrinkled by discomfort.

Instead of restoring our equilibrium at coffee hour, we would walk, dazed, into a strange world, whose strangeness has just been illuminated afresh, and we ourselves would enter into danger. For the pharisees outside aren’t any more eager to encounter the gospel than the pharisees inside.

Outside, they threaten to take away tax exemptions on church property and tax deductions for charitable giving. Outside, they treat believers as odd but necessary to the civic order. Outside, they keep impolite preachers off the podium at political prayer breakfasts and reward those who join the America-first chorus. Outside, they snub, they schedule soccer games on Sunday morning, they sneer.

Outside, they treat faith as an alternative life style, which a pluralistic society like ours knows how to embrace.

But Jesus wasn’t just odd. He was literally a danger to the established order. If their goal was to preserve life as they knew it, the Pharisees were right to oppose him at every turn.

Jesus was a savior to the lost, not a cheerleader for the found. He came to redeem sinners, not to entertain or soothe the prickly.

That’s why his ministry lasted less than three years, a tenure that most modern clergy would consider too short and a turnover rate that most congregational leaders would consider an economic nuisance.

DEA END EHRICH