The Night My Brain Caught on Fire

There I was, about to get up and deliver a sermon in front of 2500 youth and adults, when my brain caught on fire.

First, a little background. For those who have not been in church for a minute, generally before the preacher gets up, someone reads a selection or two from the Bible. Ideally, the preacher has wrestled with those texts, honored the community's cultural realities, and considered the day's current context, all in the hope of delivering a message that conveys an understanding of who God intends for that community to be and become. Make no mistake, this is a daunting task, no matter how many people are in the congregation, but when there are thousands of high schoolers, it's downright terrifying.

So that was the charge and the setting. I was about to preach a sermon, and when the reader started reading the first scripture passage, to my horror, I realized that the passage that was being read WAS NOT THE PASSAGE THAT I HAD PREPARED TO PREACH ON! Head. Hot. Brain. Fire. I leaned over to my friend sitting next to me and said, "Holy shit, that's not the passage that I prepared for." I figured swearing at that moment was completely justified. Her eyes got wide, and her feelings of shock and pity were probably only surpassed by the relief that, in five minutes, it was not she who had to get up there and preach.

I am not sure how this happened. This was an event that had been years in the planning, had been cancelled once, and then restarted. I looked back at the planning notes, and there was a different passage sent to me in an incorrect note, probably due to cut-and-paste errors. I should have noticed and double-checked in all areas. There is zero blame here. Sometimes things happen, and we adapt. It's not the first time and it will not be the last. To be clear, this post is neither about blaming nor flexing, it is entirely about trusting the movement of the Spirit.

In any case, when I realized what was happening, everything went into slow motion as I weighed my only two options: get up there and read the passage that I thought I was supposed to preach on, or quickly adapt and rewrite the first part of my sermon in the next few minutes (Thankfully, the second passage was correct). I quickly decided that option one was out, because I was pretty sure that another preacher later in the week was probably going to preach on that passage, so I didn't want to steal their thunder, so option two it was. So I put my head in my hands (Later, a friend said they saw me at that moment, and they said I looked like I was focused and getting in the zone. Little did they know it was the panic zone.) and, before trying to put words in any order, I prayed with each breath,

Inhale, "Spirit, be with me."
Exhale, "Spirit, I trust you."

I quickly thought through the passage that was just read. What did I remember about its context, Biblical questions, and theological issues? How should I start? Where did I want to end? What was the bridge to the second passage? And how would I weave a clear and compelling path between the three points of contact?

Inhale, "Spirit, be with me."
Exhale, "Spirit, I trust you."

I thought of a story to help me get from one place to another. I marked a list of current-day topics that I wanted to make sure were driven home. I walked through the second part of my sermon, which did not change, to make sure it all still made sense in my head.

Inhale, "Spirit, be with me."
Exhale, "Spirit, I trust you."

All of this in what felt like an hour, but in reality was more like about 5 minutes. I was introduced, I walked up onto the platform, my brain was a little cooler, and I tried to look like this was just any other day at the pulpit, because at the end of the day, it was. And like any other time I step into speaking spaces, whether it's in front of 2000, 200, or 20, I trust that I am prepared and I trust the Spirit. At the end of the day, it turned out just fine. It was better than fine according to some, too political, according to others, and I am sure everything in between depending on who you talk to . . . so yeah, just like any other day in the pulpit.

Inhale, "Spirit, be with me."
Exhale, "Spirit, I trust you."

For those who have heard me preach or speak, you know that I am not a manuscript preacher, so it was probably a good thing that it happened to me. Please do not let me give the impression that this was in any way easy. To be clear, in my professional ministry, I have never trusted the Spirit more than at that very moment. I still get nervous whenever I step up to speak in front of people, but this was different; this was barf-level nervousness even without the scripture confusion. But what I have learned over the past three decades of this work is that I cannot, must not rely solely on myself, no matter how gifted or skilled I may believe I am. I have gone down the road of trying too hard and relying on myself too much, and it is not pretty what I do. It always goes far better when I trust that I have done what I could to prepare and then loosen my grasp on the proclamation moment and let the spirit coax the best out of me: the precision of the words, the texture of imagery, and the cadence of the conversation.

I have found that this posture of trust is also not just about preaching, but about most things in life. It does sound like a throw pillow, but we can only control so much, Let Go and Let Go and all that. I do believe God gives us agency and calls us to participate in the unfolding of God's reality and revelations, but the only way that we can genuinely do this is to prepare, yes, to be thoughtful, of course, to be strategic, definitely, and then to lose our grasp on what may be. Sometimes things may indeed turn out exactly as planned, but I have found that more times than not, when we let the Spirit loose a little bit, things turn out even better than we could have ever imagined.

Peace,