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The Art of Imagineering. Fourth message in the preaching workshop conducted by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Reviewing my calendar for the last 12 months, I discover that I have preached 155 times. And that doesn't count repeat or on-the-road material. And this gets to be a bit tough because while the actor uses the same lines each night,

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and the comic uses the same jokes with an occasional ad lib, we are expected to be better than both the actor and the comic, insightful, challenging, always fresh, never stale. Surely the preacher's greatest sin is to put people to sleep with the greatest story ever told. Yet many of us do this for a number of reasons of which I would like to mention only a few.

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First, we become very predictable in our preaching form. You know, an introduction, three points, and a poem. A common dictum of persuasive psychology is that the more predictable a communication is, the less information will be transmitted.

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You may recall at the height of the energy crisis that President Carter gave what was described as a very important speech. It was the speech in which he talked about the energy crisis as being the moral equivalent of war. But the speech was very quickly forgotten. And in the reviews which were made of the speech, the constant comment was, "It sounded too much like a sermon."

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The fact is that the gospel is predictable, but our way of telling it doesn't have to be. Another weakness that is quite evident in our preaching is that we commonly use a deductive approach. That is, we announce our point, affirm a particular perspective, and then seek to apply it. And this is unnatural because it puts the conclusion first, and most of us don't think in this way.

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The nature of our civilization invites a more inductive approach. That is, the setting of the problem, the accumulation of the evidence, and then a conclusion. Congregations respond to this because they are involved in the effort. When we give them an active role, they will become more interested in what is said.

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But we most often do not do this. Another reason that we bore is through our use of static and meaningless biblical vocabulary. Love means what? I love mashed potatoes. I love you. I'd love to bash your head in.

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Or sin, which is almost invariably translated by our hearers into some kind of sexual offense. Another problem with biblical language is that it is a given. Therefore, there are some who claim that they know it. And this betrays a rigidity which prohibits growth.

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The gal who knows of Noah's curse on Ham is very hard to reason with when it comes to prejudice. We've all had our experiences with biblically illiterate people who quote scripture all the time. I very much enjoy the story of the two men who got into an argument over which one knew the most of the Bible. And the one bet the other $10 that he wouldn't be able to recite the 23rd Psalm.

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And they put out their money and he said, "All right, go ahead, say it." And the first one said, "All right, I will." "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." And the other one says, "Here's your $10. I never thought you'd know it."

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The latest example of this kind of thing is a woman in my congregation who approached me three weeks ago to point out that the middle three letters of the word Jerusalem are U-S-A. You may draw from that whatever profundities you wish. Billy Graham goes around the world saying, "The Bible says."

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He says that in print and in person, and he also argues that he doesn't defend the scripture, he just quotes it. But what verses, and to whom, and when? Scripture can be quoted to very evil purpose. Which one of you has not heard some individual who is not inclined to help the poor

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quote Jesus as saying, "The poor you will always have with you." I would like to do a series of sermons sometime under the general heading, "Some Things I Wish Jesus Would Never Have Said." And I would preach on texts like that one, "The poor you will always have with you,"

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or "There is Only One Sin Which is Unforgivable," "The Sin Against the Holy Spirit," or "In Order to Be My Disciple You Must Leave Your Father and Mother," or "I Have Come to Bring a Sword." Those are all dandy. The fact is, Graham interprets the scripture every time he quotes it.

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He makes choices, because scripture demands this. When the Pharisees confronted Jesus in Mark 10 with a question about divorce, Jesus chose to respond by referring to Genesis 1 rather than Deuteronomy 24. And in doing that, he made an interpretive choice.

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We make those same kinds of choices. So let's get away from this notion that we don't preach anything but the Bible. We are constantly interpreting and adding our own emphasis. In fact, I think it's significant to notice that the word "prophetes,"

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at least as it's used in the New Testament, refers to those who took what God had said and then proceeded to say to others what they said God had said. Our task is the same as that.

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We are involved in interpretive acts with regard to the scripture. We select, we eliminate, we generalize, we modernize. We see the scriptures through eyeglasses as we were taught in seminary. We are not pure interpreters, and because we tend to run in ruts,

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we oftentimes bore with our style, our method, our approach, or our manner. Some have learned, of course, to cover up this routine by a thick layer of bombast. Arthur Rubinstein, writing in his autobiography, "My Young Years," tells of giving a concert once in Paris where he got a particularly bad piano.

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It was so bad he couldn't play the last number he had on his program, so he substituted a Chopin etude. He says that he banged his way through it, smearing the arpeggios with the pedal and adding a brilliantly flashy coda.

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When it was over, he got an ovation and bravos. And then he makes this comment, "A smashing performance gets response even if it is poor. I have exploited this truth many times."

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Well, a lot of preachers do exactly the same thing. The net result is that the preacher is Captain Courageous each Sunday morning. He tells his people off, and they go away thinking that reprimand is actually repentance. And this is folly because it ends with the handshake at the door.

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The hearers have not been engaged in confrontation or interaction with an idea, something that they can take home and chew upon. But enough of this. I've not exhausted the catalog of our preaching sins,

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but I've surely mentioned enough to make the point. It's a tough task to try to bring the past into the present every Sunday, to bring biblical truth smack into the middle of the here and now. It is not enough to say to our people, "Go back with me now to old Jerusalem,"

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because after worship, the front doors of the church will not open on old Jerusalem. They will open on Main Street, 20th century. It is not enough to rely on the Holy Spirit to create a new Pentecost each Sunday, blowing the dust off our doing things in the same old way.

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And it isn't enough to try to fit old biblical pictures to contemporary problems, which was the old social gospel technique. Now, this gives relevance for a little while, and it can be quite legitimate, but the approach soon loses fire and becomes routine.

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So how do we offer Christ in such a way that he fills the imaginations of our hearers? How do we present him so that they say yes to him and make him the image of their hearts and see everything through him? How do we present Christ so that our people say,

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"I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee"? Well, out of many possibilities, I choose one for our discussion tonight, what I have called, stealing the word from the Disney organization, "imagineering," the development and the use of imagination in preaching.

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Now, imagination is basic to all of our thinking. It is not fantasizing. It is an ingredient in problem solving. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all discovery is much like a journey on an airplane.

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It starts with the solid growth of observation. It rises into the flight of imagination, and it lands on the airstrip of rational interpretation. Einstein put it more simply.

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He said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Now, think for a moment of the power of imagination. Marcus Aurelius said, "The soul is dyed with the color of its imagination." And imagination does bring color.

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It is the pictures that we use to decorate the chambers of our soul. Suppose I were to lay a plank here on the floor that was 30 feet long and 10 inches wide and ask you to walk from one end of it to the other. You would do so without hesitation.

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But suppose I then lifted that plank 50 feet in the air and asked you to do exactly the same thing. It is still 30 feet long, and it is still 10 inches wide. But most of you would not walk it.

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Both your will and your purpose would have been defeated by your imagination, what you imagine might happen in the walking of it. Suppose C.S. Lewis had written a dozen essays on the nature of temptation. Chances are many of us would not know of them.

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But the screw tape letters fascinate us because they are an essay in imagination. Just so, I am prepared to argue that we will be better preachers if we are imagineers. We are not called upon to be retellers of the Bible's truth. We are called upon to recreate it, to bring it to life in our own time for our people.

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I am suggesting that preaching is an art. An art is essentially an act of imagination. Now, like all art, imagination must be used with restraint. Good art always leaves a feeling of power which is as yet untapped.

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And like all art, imagination does not demand, but rather offers itself to whosoever will. And like art, imagination has a sense of timing. It is not constantly at fever pitch. And like art at its best, imagination is not for its own sake.

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The best art is not for art's sake. And true preaching is not for its own sake, but for the gospel's sake. The Bible, it seems to me, is the record of the application of the gospel to concrete situations. It uses myths, poetry, images, and stories to do this.

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These devices are applied to very practical daily struggles, like poverty and slavery and being wed to unbelievers and the like. Preaching ought to be doing this today, with myths, images, poetry, stories still. The reason the biblical materials often don't come alive when we preach is that we don't recreate or imagine them.

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We don't think about what Amos' homeland was really like. We don't make an effort to understand what it would be to be a leper, to smell leprosy, to taste it, to think about the separation and the loneliness and the final hopelessness, what it must have been like to believe that you would never be touched by anyone again.

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Imagination is the cultivation of a sense of reality in our preaching. Press any theologian or professor of the faith in his arguments on any question, no matter how profound it is, and the time will come when he will say, "Well, once upon a time..." Now, why will he say that?

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Because stories tell things that other expositions do not make clear. Because stories lead us to want to know how things come out. We read a lot of pages and sit through a lot of commercials just to learn how things come out. Because stories force us to ask, "Is the story true?"

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You see, stories say that things happen for a purpose. There is a plan. They develop. Stories say implicitly and sometimes very explicitly that life adds up. And this prompts questions and thought and argument and involvement,

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which is what preaching is supposed to do, but so often does not. Preaching, then, is the imaginative recreation of the story of Scripture, so that people say, "I never thought of it that way before," or, "So you can play it this way also,"

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or, "If this is so, what does this mean?" The incarnation is the central miracle of our most holy faith. Preaching is the incarnation of the gospel into our life experiences. And to do this takes imagination, storytelling.

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You can stand up and say to your people, "All men are mortal," and they will nod. But if you stand up and say, "Philip, Mr. Brown's son, is dying," the church becomes the church. It moves into the stream of your people's experience.

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Now, to get them there and to tell of it in a way that is real and that touches the heart as well as the head is imagination. And it excites folks like nothing else that I know. If you've ever paused to analyze pleasure at all,

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you know that a key part of pleasure is anticipation or expectation. Christmas night is much more dull than Christmas Eve. And why? Because one is full of imagination, and the other is full only of memories.

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Catered dinners are never really as much fun as a dinner you cook in your own home. Why? Because there are no smells coming out of the kitchen, because there are no kitchen noises,

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because there are no samples throughout the day. Expectation is taken away. The use of imagination in preaching promotes expectation. It gets your people involved.

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Edward Albee, the noted playwright, says that anyone who buys a ticket to one of his plays bears some responsibility for what occurs in the theater that night. And just so, the use of imagination captures hearers, drags them into the narrative, and makes non-involvement virtually impossible.

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The deductive form, which we most often use, does not allow for this anticipation. There's no delight along the way. There's no curiosity. The matter is settled before our folks even get into the church that morning.

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Therefore, there's no ownership and no involvement. But sanctified imagination does otherwise, for the congregation and for the preacher. For the use of the imagination is the expression of the self. And the more you express yourself, the more you discover yourself.

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And the more you discover yourself, the more there is to express about yourself. So the process stimulates creation and keeps the juices flowing. And out of the swirl of these juices for pastor and people comes the excitement of a genuine preaching event.

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Now I'm sure that by this time a whole swarm of objections are taking to the air here in the room. So it probably would be well to face a few of them head on before speaking of how one develops the skill of imagination. I want to list only a few of these objections,

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but I hope they will be honestly representative. The first one is this. Well, imagination just doesn't feed people. At its best, it's only the frosting on the cake and therefore basically irrelevant.

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Now this is a very old objection. It's in the same general category with the Board of Trustees' discussion over whether they should put carpet or linoleum in the sanctuary. Has the utilitarian any place in our religion?

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It's the same question which Judas asked in Matthew 26 when he said it would be better to feed the people than to enjoy the fragrance of the ointment which would be gone in a few moments. Other applications of this same idea are never grow roses where onions will prosper.

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Or it is fundamentally wrong for a 70-voice choir to put a total of 700 hours of labor into a four-minute anthem when with the same number of man hours they might clean both sides of the highway from Madison to Oshkosh.

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Now this is a very vulgar objection. We are in trouble when the only way we see a forest is as bored feet of lumber. The only way we see clouds is as inches of rain, and the only way we see meadows is as bales of hay.

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To refuse flowers because you cannot fry them in swine fat is dangerous. It leads to the kind of prayer which is always for something. It leads to the kind of Bible study which is entered into to calm the nerves. It leads to the kind of clean living which is lived because it pays off.

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It leads to going to church in order to stop the communists. We must never forget that there is tremendous power in the aesthetic. It has always intrigued me that fascist and capitalist ideologues regularly belittle the arts.

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Yet when either of these groups gets into a position of power, the first people they try to eliminate are the artists. Art excites ideas. Read the great social reformers.

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Read Rauschenbusch or Washington Gladden or Martin Luther King. Tremendous imaginative power. They build on hope, which is an exercise in imagination. What else is the picture of the lion and the lamb but an essay in imagination?

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No, the soul needs beauty or it dies, and truth rides very gracefully on the wings of beauty. Another objection is that imagination doesn't speak to everyone but only to the cultured few.

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And all of my experience says that this is false. I mean, why do we find petunias planted outside the humblest cabin in Appalachia? Why do we find pictures cut from calendars decorating its inner walls? Why do the cavemen decorate their dens with stick figures?

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This world is a hard place, and it's foolish for any preacher to deny that. Good Friday came after Christmas, but the fact is the angels still sang at the manger. And in the midst of the hardest reality of life,

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there is always a welcome for tenderness and beauty. I have never met the person so swallowed up in darkness that they did not smile at some sign of the light. Ignorance, suffering, retardation, cruelty,

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they all respond to beauty. Another objection to the use of imagination is that it can draw attention away from the main point of the sermon. And there is no doubt truth in this.

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It is possible to put so ornate a frame around a picture that you detract from the painting. There was a great Welsh cleric by the name of Robert Roberts who was known for his imaginative and descriptive abilities.

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And he had an illustration of a group of bathers who went out onto a promontory to sunbathe and didn't realize that the tide was coming in behind them and was gradually covering up the pathway over which they had come.

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They were going to be trapped out there because of their indifference. And he drew from this an illustration of how we are cut off from the things of God by carelessness, lack of discipline, not paying attention, etc. But in the midst of the illustration, which was very vivid,

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and as he was piling up detail upon detail, he built up such alarm amongst his congregation that when he finally called out, "Run for your lives," everybody did. [laughter]

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There are places where imagination can get out of hand. But this, it seems to me, is not a fundamental criticism. It only wrestles with the question of degree. Surely imagination is to be subservient to the truth.

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And no word I've said tonight, I think, suggests the contrary. And I think the honest preacher knows when she crosses the line from one to the other. Another criticism also launched against the use of imagination is that when you use it, you open yourself to the attack of the quickly judgmental.

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And this is true. There are some who scorn the use of imagination in preaching. They will throw cold water on your efforts. It is essential at such times that you hold fast to your inner commitments,

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your vision, and your confidence. Every batter knows what it is to be booed during a slump. They hold on, and so must we. Incidentally, you must be aware particularly of the attack of the clergy in this matter.

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You're surely aware, as I am, of the low levels to which envy sometimes draws us. This does not come as a surprise. The imaginative preacher usually draws people and attention, and some resenting this will ridicule the effort.

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I love the story of the old bishop who had a church that was not prospering. So he found a young and aggressive priest who'd never served a parish and brought him in and assigned him to that church. And almost immediately, everything turned around--

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attendance, offering, mission commitment. And he was excited by this progress and went out to see how the young man was doing it. And at the end of the day, the young man showing the bishop around with great pride, the young man said, "Your Excellency, what do you think about my changes and innovations?"

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And the bishop replied, "Well, as an old soldier, it's sometimes difficult for me to identify with the methods of newness. I mean, I'm not accustomed to bucket seats in the sanctuary, and I've never seen holy water coming out of water coolers.

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I think the thing that shook me the most, however, was the drive-in confessional booth with the neon sign over it which said, 'Toot and tell or you go to hell.' Nevertheless, keep on trying." Well, the matter we're about here is too urgent to leave any stone unturned.

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And while incidentally we're speaking of judgmental criticism, I would urge you not to be too hard on yourself. You see, there is a sense in which imagination is not a self-conscious act. Aaron Copeland, the dean of American composers, has said that it is in a sense hallucinatory.

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It is as if one half of your personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. And if the second half looks too hard at the first half, the first half will stop. Now, our understanding of the physiology and neurology of the brain is helping us here.

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The point is, when you are in the midst of the creative act, don't be too hard on yourself. You have to be a bit Dr. Jekyll and a bit Mr. Hyde. Turn off the light of your own critical review or the exciting things that are happening in the shadows of your thoughts will scurry away.

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Instead, be open to newness, to self-discovery, to what can happen in you. But how does one let it happen? Can the imaginative faculty be developed? Well, obviously, my answer to that is in the affirmative.

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It would be a most unkind cut to speak of imagination and how it helps in preaching and then suggest that it is a possibility only for the chosen few. I must begin, of course, by recognizing that education in this country generally stifles imagination. We're taught to color inside the lines and never to talk except when we're supposed to be talking.

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You've noticed how children, when they get out for recess, don't play. They explode. It is because they are so restrained in the educational process. And this is true of us. J. Robert Oppenheimer said that children could solve most of my physics problems

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for they have modes of sensory perception which I have lost. And Wordsworth, Mike Halcom, quoted me a bit of Wordsworth earlier today, and I was reminded of this word of his. He lamented the loss of those years, he said, when his heart leaped up.

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Better a child's eye than an orator's tongue. We've been taught to be logical and critical and to seek perfection, and every one of these things stifles imagination. Fewer and fewer of us have had a liberal arts education,

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a rich mix of Cicero and Frost and Eliot, Greek or Latin, the follies of history, been in a class play or two, studied Michelangelo in one class and big city politics in the next, dissect the cat in the morning and read Cato in the afternoon. The theory was, of course, that this exotic mix would rub off.

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Usually it did not, but sometimes it did. And when it did, the liberal arts provided rooms in a soul which were well decorated, in which the imagination could roam and play and expand. So most of us must begin the process again.

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But I believe we can learn to be creative and imaginative. I think of Moses in Exodus 4. He said that he lacked speech and grace and talent, but he found it with God's guidance and help.

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Yes, Aaron was there, but one has only to read the speeches of Moses, as they've been passed down to us, to learn that what he thought he couldn't do, he did. And so it is with us. The thing to remember is that imagination or creative light is not most often a brilliant flash.

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Sometimes this is so, but not most frequently. The things that we're talking about come out of study, good materials, time, word choice, and so forth. Everyone has an occasional insight, or what the British call a brain wave. But Abraham Maslow has pointed out that the difference between a brain wave and Hamlet,

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or war and peace, or the Miso-Solemnus, is hard work, sweat, stubbornness, and determination. What I propose, then, are different disciplines that will be worth the effort if we will spend... Get out into life and develop your powers of observation. It was Picasso who noted that the artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where,

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from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, or a cobweb. If we are to bring the art of imagination into our preaching, we must be aware of what goes on about us. Barth said we're to preach with the Bible in one hand and the morning newspaper in the other. I add we ought to be listening to the top 40 and taking walks in the woods,

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visiting crowded stores and ghettos, singing, opening the door to the ordinary, but trying to see it in a new way. I'm not suggesting that we go out looking for illustrations. That's phony. We are to go out looking at life and enjoying it. My friends, Jesus lived in a very dull little land, 155 miles long and 65 miles wide.

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It was full of dirty villages. He was most likely a carpenter and spent most of his life talking to uneducated and essentially stupid fishermen. He traveled very little, but he saw everything that went on about him so that he could talk about widows, his mother probably was one, lilies, fish, coins, judges, both honest and dishonest, sheep, soils, and he could talk about these things with the touch of imagination so that they still charm the world.

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It's all a matter of observation. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about a gallery in New York City that was trying to determine which of its exhibits were most viewed by those who came to the gallery. And they decided to run a survey, which was going to cost a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money.

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Then someone got a better idea. They simply asked the janitors where they mocked the most, and that told them which pictures were looked at the most. It was simply a matter of observation. Of course, it helps to go to places where things are happening.

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Interesting visits and experiences develop the observational skills. I've done a number of clinical pastoral education seminars for the military, and I have noticed, following those, that the chaplains engaged very often drew experiences from their CPE training to illustrate their preaching, or go to the mission field if that is a viable option.

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Not too long ago, I went to Philadelphia just to see Eastmont High School. I don't know if you know about Eastmont High School or not. It was a school of great reputation in Philadelphia. It had outstanding athletic teams, very high academic standing.

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It was exceedingly well-known in every regard. Then a lot of black folks moved into the area. There was immediately white flight, and the white people built a new high school for their kids called Edison High. They left Eastmont High for the blacks.

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When the whites went to Edison High, they took all of the banners, all of the school songs, all of the trophies, all of the scholarships, two-thirds of the teachers, and just about everything else of value, leaving the blacks with a deteriorating school and only a small teaching staff. But Eastmont High is not famous for those reasons.

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Eastmont High is famous today because more graduates from Eastmont High died in the Vietnam War than from any other high school in America. I went to see it so I could talk about it. Take your family with you when you go to places. Visit the new Vietnam Memorial.

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Learn to see things on the way. When I got off the plane in Chicago on Friday afternoon, directly ahead of me was a young man returning from two years in Europe with the military. His whole family was gathered together to welcome him home. As I stood and watched that, my mind went to John 14, "And I will prepare a place for you."

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Does that mean that when we come home from the wars, the family will be gathered to welcome us home? There's a picture there that can be developed and used in an imaginative way. Engage in some observational exercises. Put a penny on a table in front of you.

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What does the penny say to you? Something about Abraham Lincoln? One red cent? For two cents, I'd...

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Giving someone a penny when they give you the gift of a knife? Reminding you that there's only one animal that leaves a scent? Is there anything you can buy for a penny beside a gumball? A penny for your thoughts?

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Two cents plain? A snake? Copperhead? A memorial? Lincoln Memorial on the other side? Be valueless, except for the 1943 copper penny, which is of great value.

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Exercise and develop thoughts that come out of the common things that you see about you. There's a famous essay by Walter Eaton, which probably appears in every college composition text that's ever been written, called "The Daily Theme Eye." It was a practice developed at Harvard University,

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in which each student, each day, was required to submit just one side of one page, a description of something that she or he had seen. A building against the sunlight. An innocent face at a dark window.

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A statue so real that its tongue seemed to wet its lips. Say these kinds of things. Submit yourself a one-page essay each day on something that you've seen, and hold on to these.

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Many times, a phrase, an idea, a picture which you develop will come to be of much value to you later. No part of our lives is all it can be without exercise. So exercise your powers of observation. Secondly, read.

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The single weakness most often seen in clergy is lack of reading. Most need a remedial course in Chaucer and Moliere and Dante and Vellos and William Leastheat Moon and Rilke. Whenever I run up against a clergyman who says, "I cannot come up with any new preaching ideas," I immediately ask them how much and what they have been reading.

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Now, I'm not suggesting that we ought to be reading for illustrations, as so many do. We ought to read serious nonfiction, and only that fiction which has stood the test of time. It's the best way I know to be in touch with other disciplines. Read black clergymen for special imaginative emphasis,

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people like James Weldon Johnson or Martin Luther King Jr. or Randolph Gardner or Howard Thurman. Remember that much greatness comes from very common sources. Shakespeare got most of the ideas from his plays from chief Italian comedies. The theme for the last movement of Tchaikovsky's F Minor Symphony is a Russian folk song, "A White Birch Grew in the Forest."

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The second movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony is built on a Negro spiritual. Of course, the thing we ought to read the most is the scriptures. The reason that we can be 50 times as creative as most people is that we have such a magnificent source. The Bible is like a Steinway piano. It's ready to rumble and to respond to our touch.

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We must seek to identify with its characters and its situations, just as when you see a play, you identify with its characters. What was it to be as meek as Moses, to be as canny as Abraham, to be as bold as Peter, to be as arrogant as the prodigal? This is very hard for us because the emotions in the Mediterranean world are far more flammable than our own.

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Not long ago, I saw a picture of an Israeli woman on television. Her son had been killed in a PLO raid and she was crying. But in that cry, there was hatred and vengeance and rage and scorched memory. And it might just as well have been Rahab weeping over the loss of her sons.

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Here is where tasting and feeling and seeing imagination is exercised. Andre Malraux says in The Voices of Silence, "All artistic experiences begin with a piece of art, something that stimulates us. And this experience for us as preachers is the Word of God written. There must be identity with the text, empathy with it, before there can be empathy with our hearers.

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This is costly, but it stretches the imaginative faculty. Nothing I have said detracts from exegesis, criticism, prayer, and all of the other homiletic homework with which we are familiar. But this is first. We add to it the spark of fire and imagination." A third key to the development of imagination is to not neglect pastoral involvement.

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And I'll be very brief about this because it's so obvious. We are not in the business of selling patent medicine. We write prescriptions, and that means personalized attention. I'm often asked when I lecture at seminaries, "Which is the most important, pastoral service or preaching?"

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My answer is always the same. They cannot be separated. One absolutely requires the other. When we write sermons, do we have a four-by-six card on our desk before us which bears the names of specific people in our congregation? And as we write, are we hearing their questions, their responses, their thoughts, and their emotions coming out of their lives as they are living them?

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In art, which is an exercise of imagination, you give yourself up to your experiences. You get into their vividness and their pain. Yet, a certain amount of detachment is necessary. For if you are not detached, you won't be able to understand what you are a part of and to tell of it.

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This is why seminarians are never able to do funerals well. Most of them have not experienced death before, or if they have, they are so new at the game that they are not detached in what they are doing to any degree and thus are swallowed up by it. The man who put this most clearly to me is Helmut Thielecke. He wrote, "As a preacher, I am involved in an unending dialogue with those to whom I must deliver my message.

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Every conversation I engage in becomes at bottom a meditation, a preparation, a gathering of material for my preaching. Life in all of its fullness becomes for me a thesaurus in which I keep rummaging because it is full of relevant material for my message." How can you speak of poverty if you've never talked to a kid who was afraid to wear the sport coat which his mother bought him at a rummy sale

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because he might run into the kid at school whose parents had given the coat to the sale in the first place? How can you talk about geriatrics without reference to stainless steel trays, empty parking lots marked "reserved for visitors," King James versions of the Bible with large print,

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plastic flowers, and the smell of urine, vomit, and age? Distance does not give authority in preaching. Closeness does. All of this, of course, takes effort and identification, being among the people.

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But it makes preaching real, and the imagination that is fired by it captures those who do not know our experiences except as we tell of them. Another thing to do. Learn to try new and exciting angles in your preaching. Refuse to approach the text in the same old way.

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Why didn't the nine lepers return to thank Jesus? Did one not come because he was worried about his family? Did one not come because he had a girlfriend and he was anxious to discover whether she waited for him or not? Did one not come because, after all, healers are supposed to heal, so why should they be thanked for it?

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All kinds of possibilities. Suppose the Good Samaritan had come upon the scene 30 minutes earlier. What would have been his reaction? "Put two texts together," Paul says.

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"I put away childish things," Jesus says. "Except you become as a little child." What do you make of that? At Christ's baptism, some heard the voice of God, and others said, "It thundered."

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Let your imagination play with that one for a while. Jesus said, "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." Now, this was an obvious anthropomorphism. What did hands mean to Jesus when he thought of God?

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His hands were hands that made, hands that healed, hands that touched those whom no one else would touch, hands that broke bread, hands that touched the dead so that they became living, "palli facumi," hands that were nailed. Be the older brother when he hears the music.

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Are you really in favor of parties for prodigals? Be Zebedee, sitting there with a lap full of nets while your two sons run off to follow the latest cult leader. This isn't a game. I'm not trying to be cute.

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What I'm saying is, don't be so obvious in the route that you take. Get into the text from a different angle. Feel it. Let it happen to you, and then share it.

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And the more often you do this, the easier it will become. Another thing to do is to allow time for your ideas to gel and to firm up. Phillips Brooks, the great Episcopal preacher, used to put his sermon notes in different envelopes, and he decided what he'd preach each week by weighing the envelopes,

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and whichever envelope was the heaviest, that's the one he preached. Well, there's something to be said for that, or we might liken it to a good cook. A good cook does not prepare a menu and then go to the store to buy what she needs or he needs to prepare the meal. Oh, no.

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A really good cook goes to the market, finds which vegetables are freshest, which fish looks the most attractive and is the freshest, and assembles the ingredients, and then, when the ingredients are assembled, the best available, then and only then, is the menu prepared, and there is a long time of simmering and careful cooking with the right seasoning,

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and the whole thing is presented with élan. You know, industry spends a great deal of time on creativity, and industry says that there are two key principles in creativity. The first one is this.

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Defer judgment. Don't take your first option. If you look at the text and some outline immediately pops into mind, you can be sure, almost invariably, that you heard it in Sunday school 25 years ago,

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and that's the reason it comes so readily to mind. Well, don't go for the first hook. Study the passage. Try to come at it a different way.

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Dream it a bit. The other basic principle which industry holds forth as fundamental to creativity is this. Quantity begets quality. The more ideas you have, the better your choices will be.

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In fact, studies have shown that 78% of good and profitable ideas are brought forward in the second half of the time spent gathering them. Look how many times Beethoven revised his symphonies. So allow some time to pass.

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Don't expose your creations too early, and then serve them up with good grammar. Not too many adjectives, because that deprives your listeners of their part in the story, their opportunity to judge. Don't try to tell everything in the scene.

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We never see anything in every scene, so don't hesitate to be fragmentary. Don't interrupt yourself. Don't say, "We find," or "I think," or "It seems to me." You don't do that when you're reading a book.

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Use your own language with great clarity. Use images out of today. If the only illustration of a martyr you can think of is Polly Carp, don't use it. Use images which appeal to the senses.

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Don't talk about holy matrimony, but about flowers and veils and candles. And don't talk about babies. Talk about the smell of burped milk on a mother's blouse. For myself, before I sit down to write, I like to listen to a little bit of music,

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perhaps a scene from an opera, or read a bit of poetry. And then I pray, and then I write confidently. And the text which I use as the text for all of this is a marginal reading in the American Standard Version's translation of Isaiah 26.3.

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It reads, "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose imagination is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee." Well, I've noticed that some of you have been writing, and some of you have not. I want to give you one word in closing which sums up everything I've said,

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one key word which I really would ask you to write down and to hold in your minds. I was in the state of Tennessee, visiting a town where a beauty pageant was in process, being presented by the local Jaycees. Now, in order to be in this beauty pageant, you needed two things.

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You had to be beautiful, and you had to have a talent. The fellow I was visiting and his wife were part of the committee, and so I was there for the dress rehearsal when a very pretty 18-year-old came up and announced that her talent was baton twirling.

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Now, I'm 52 years old, and I've seen enough baton twirlers to last me for eternity. You know, the ones who are always doing it to maligany and who finish with fire on both ends of the stick. I don't want to belittle baton twirling.

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I mean, it is an art. It's hard to get it to move between your fingers like that. But this poor girl had only studied baton for two weeks, and she did it when she was in the third grade,

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and she was now 18 years old, and she wanted to do it as her talent for three minutes on the stage. Well, it came her time to get up and rehearse, and I was really fascinated by this because I wanted to see what this girl was going to do,

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and she took that baton in her hand, and she didn't twirl it at all. She simply held it and went like this, twisting it back and forth. I guess she was assuming that in the darkness, in the distance of the auditorium, no one would be able to tell.

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Well, I said to my friend, "There is no hope for this girl." And he said, "Yes, but isn't she pretty?" And I said, "She's going to get up in front of the whole town and make a fool of herself." And he said, "Well, this girl has a lot of personality.

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Her only problem is she doesn't have any talent." Well, in the middle of the rehearsal and of her number, it was about a minute and 15 seconds into the phonograph record, she reared back and tossed this baton into the air.

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Now, you know what's supposed to happen. It comes down, and she was to catch it. But this girl had no control at all over what was happening, and it hit and bounced no matter how many times it hit and bounced

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until some ladies who were in the audience actually put their children down under the chairs because they were afraid they would get hit by the baton. I want you to get the scene of the next night. Small town, Tennessee, August.

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Elementary school. No air conditioning. Windows held up with sticks. Seats 650, about 800 there.

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One large lady in the front row with a funeral home fan never missing a beat. J.C. standing around with walkie-talkies about four feet apart saying, "Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" The first act was a little girl who got up and played what she described

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as a medley of George Gershwin tunes which she had written. And after this girl came the twirler, and she walked out there on the stage and took that baton and just went like this. Now, the audience was filled with disbelief.

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I mean, they didn't know what to do. There wasn't a single person in the room who was fooled, and they all leaned forward. Even the fat lady in the front row stopped her fanning

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because she didn't know what to do either. I mean, they all wanted to laugh. You could see that, but they didn't know whether it was a comedy or not. So they all held it in, and the judges were breaking their pencils,

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and the people actually had their hands over their mouths to control themselves, and they would have made it had it not been for the big toss. She reared back and hurled the baton into the air, and it didn't come down.

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[laughter] It didn't come down. She looked over to the master of ceremonies, and he said, "I don't have it." [laughter]

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She looked to the other side of the stage where everyone else was watching in disbelief, and they said, "We don't have it." What had happened, of course, was that it got caught in the curtains up above. Now, she had a number of alternatives at this point.

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She could have fainted dead away. She could have blamed the Jaycees. All this time the music was going on because, you see, the record didn't know that the baton was stuck in the cupboard,

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and it kept on playing. She jumped up and down trying to jar the baton loose, and it didn't come. But some of the sticks in the windows did fall out.

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[laughter] Now, there was about a minute left on the phonograph record, and she did an absolutely wonderful thing. She smiled a beautiful smile at the audience

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and then began to pantomime as if the baton had come down. And she was magnificent. She spun it behind her neck. She spun it behind her back.

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She threw it in the air and caught it again. She threw it in the air so that it made loops like this, and 800 people sitting out there in the audience were all watching it make loops. And when it was almost at the end of the number,

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she danced to the side of the stage. I'm breathing a sigh of relief that it's going to be over at last, but oh, no. She receives another imaginary baton and comes out on the stage, and she's now spinning both of them at the same time.

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And there was an old man sitting in front of me who turned to his wife and said, "Mother, she's spinning them so fast I can't even see them." [laughter] So, my friends, if you want to catch your congregation

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and you want to hold them and you want to thrill them and you want to send them home with a memory, use your imagination. And if you want to write down one word to remind you of it all,

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here's the word--baton. Write down "baton." Thank you very much. [applause]