The Joy of Preaching: Lifting the Veil
Melinda Quivik is Backstory Preaching mentor and an ordained ELCA pastor who has served Lutheran churches in three states and a UCC/Presbyterian congregation in Michigan. A former professor of liturgy and preaching and past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, she is now the Editor-in-Chief of Liturgy and a liturgical and homiletical scholar whose books include Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays (2023), Leading Worship Matters (2017), Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (2009), scholar’s contributions to Sundays & Seasons: Preaching, and other publications.
Seeking more joy for preaching, around 1996 I signed up for a preaching workshop at Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania.
The retreat included at least six of the homileticians whose books I had been reading.
To meet those preachers in person would, I guessed, bring me precious new insights.
I drove from Montana.
Christine Smith unpacked the themes in the movie “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” to tease out the ways in which God’s word liberates.
In the session taught by Paul Scott Wilson, I was dared to give a sermon without a manuscript.
Charles Rice talked about a life of prayer.
When James Forbes ended his forty-five-minute sermon, I wanted more because I was mesmerized. He taught that our sermon prep ought to be such that we can hardly wait to get to church to deliver it.
What is it about preaching that can generate that much joy?
Our Human Condition is a State of Blurred Vision
Our human condition means that we live without clarity of vision—about most everything.
We judge ourselves. We judge others. We question our own worth, value, and ability—and that of those around us.
But we are not cursed to this reality forever.
God’s word reveals our current state by telling us how that state will eventually change:
“All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another...” (2 Cor. 3:18, NRSVUE)
In the future, we will gaze upon God’s own “glory.” Our human condition will be transformed to complete absorption into the goodness of the LORD.
But notice: God’s glory will be “reflected in a mirror.”
What is in a mirror? A reflection of the looker.
We see the one who is looking in that mirror. You. Me. Anyone who is looking into that reflecting glass.
(The brilliant depths of God’s word should amaze us time and time again.)
Someday, the veil that shrouds our comprehension of this life will be gone, and the light of truth will shine—like when cataracts are surgically removed.
Vision will become unobstructed.
Until that day, though, we live with veiled faces and murky vision.
We grope in the dark for a glimmer of insight, clarity, or relief from the feelings that accompany our fears of being incapable.
We grumble about not being “up to the job” or imperfect or simply not being sure we are in the right place at the right time.
Only in the future will we “with unveiled faces” see the Lord in full, know the truth, and rest completely in the embrace of confidence.
Only in the future will we be moved from one praiseworthy identity to the next. We will be made admirable.
Preaching Reveals the Good News Available to us today
IN THE MEANTIME, preachers show us God’s intentions for us.
As preachers, we squint at the unveiled life.
We struggle with the enormous task and great privilege of wrangling the words that might help others see beneath, behind, within, beyond that veil.
We train our attention on what it is to be “glorified,” and then we share what we find.
The joy of preaching is that we are asked to articulate how God’s word already transforms the world because of what God promises us.
“I will give you rest.”
“Do not be afraid.”
“I will gather you from the ends of the earth.”
“I am the bread of life.”
“You will know the truth.”
Every syllable from the mouth of God is laden with complexity and wonder.
The preacher’s responsibility is to live inside that marvelous compendium of beauty and then, in a sermon, point out the joy within it.
Our job is to wrap words around the Good News we’ve discovered each week.
Finding the word that Helps Lift the Veil
Pulitzer prize-winning author, John McPhee, lets us in on how he finds the words that give him greatest joy and satisfaction in his writing.
In his first draft, he will come upon a word that may not be just the right word he intends, so he looks it up in his dictionary. There he finds another word that defines his initial word, leading to yet other words that define those.
In this way he hunts through the dictionary until he has honed the definition of the word he wants to its greatest precision.
THE IMAGE OF EXPRESSING JOY IN WORDS that I hold up for myself is the exuberance of a four-year-old boy whose hard birth had damaged his ability to speak in understandable sounds. He wanted to talk. He babbled and waited for a response, but even those who most loved him could not understand what he tried to convey.
Five days a week for months, public school speech therapists helped him.
At church on Sundays, he played in the nursery for the first part of the worship service because the two older women there welcomed him. Just before communion, his mother would leave the sanctuary to fetch him for holy communion.
On one trimphant Sunday, he entered the church and with his arms in the air immediately ran up the aisle toward the front of the church shouting “Bread!”
We all heard it. We all knew his struggle. This word “bread” was a miracle.
A single word opened up worlds.
In every pew, we rejoiced.
He proclaimed something previously inaccessible.
Preachers look for the exact word that will surprise formerly settled understandings.
And when we find that word, the veil over it is removed.
The universe gets bigger and the details take on a new shimmer. The vastness of our immense not-knowing nudges a bit closer to comprehension.
It is as if that word is a gem the preacher turns inch by inch, illuminating the facets by the light of wisdom until we gasp with delight—arms in the air, shouting out the bread of life.
This is the joy of preaching, of finding and offering a link, a window, a tiny peek into the universe of love that is our God and laying it out for others to behold and receive..