Sermon Material

As a UCC person, I both feel at home with the use of extrabiblical sources and a need to incorporate biblical sources into my own sermons and my presence as a potential UCC minister.  Today my minister used scripture from Matthew, from Buddhist text, and from poetry from David Whyte.  She challenged me to understand scripture as a source and to expand my own vision of what constitutes appropriate “source” for sermon material.  While accepting many sources as having spiritual value, I also find it hard to establish what constitutes appropriate source material within a community which seeks to understand both biblical and extrabiblical contexts.  I feel, as a UCC person, called to utilize scripture from either the Hebrew Scriptures or the Christian New Testament, despite the reality that such sources may or may not, on the surface, speak to the context of my home congregation.  The liturgical calendar asks me to consider textual sources that I may not be at home in, yet it asks me to frame my own understanding of scripture in the terms of a particular passage.  I find this, as a person raised outside of the church and unchurched in many liturgical themes, to be problematic.  

In considering what constitutes appropriate source material, I feel that I am asked to reconsider biblical material that I might otherwise be inclined to look past.  Since my church does, in more general terms, utilize liturgical scriptural material, I feel obligated to conform to the liturgical calendar that has sustained my tradition.  Despite that feeling, I find myself often at odds with what I feel is the central consideration of a particular passage.  While my tradition asks such specific things of me, I find such specificity both problematic and comforting. It might be harder to imagine my own reference points if I reject the liturgical calender, but it may also challenge me to consider vantage points I might be inclined to look past.  

For those of us who find ourselves outside of more constricting calendars, the source material can seem simultaneously liberating and challenging.  Preaching from poetry may allow more seamless transitions into spiritual understandings, but it may also present more challenging theological transitions.  I feel as though biblical sources have the advantage of generations of consideration while challenging us to find something unique in material that has been passed along for generations.   I don’t always know how to respond to such challenges, especially as a person who entered the biblical tradition later in life and who may lack the biblical background that many preachers have.  However, I try also to see this as a unique vantage point that allows me the capacity to approach the biblical tradition without the theologies that have weighted it down for generations and to reform that tradition.  I look for moments of “other” in scripture and I hope, with reason or without, that liturgical sources will allow me a passage to find a space for the unspoken truths that have existed between the lines and lacked voice.  While this may not always be the case, I hope to foster an ability within myself to see the unseen and speak for those on the mountain top who may have originally found themselves looked over.  

The mountain top may not be barren, but in order for us to fill in life in the unspoken spaces, we need to seek those places in scripture and outside of it that challenge us to fill in those spots and create a message that considers the perspectives of those who I might not immediately find in a biblical story.