“Preaching, I realized, wasn’t just about me or my experience; it wasn’t a neatly packaged ‘lesson’. It was a handmade connection between Word and flesh: text and bread. It was more than anything else a way to point to the Table, use language to set it, lead people to it.” -Sarah Miles
I grasped the lectern with my fingers, barely touching my open journal, my left hand on the page an anchor to keep me from rocking. Christina stood to my right, looking out over a wood-paneled sanctuary shaped like an inverted ship’s hull.
The pews were full. So was the baptismal, and the altar at the foot of the steps to the stage had the elements of communion set out. Six feet above the altar, I stood trembling, fairly confident I was going to projectile vomit on the guys running sound in the first row.
The room was silent. I planted my feet and glanced at Christina, and took a deep breath.
//
The first time I preached, I was eleven years old. I stood in the pulpit of the church I grew up in, before sunrise on Easter morning, and talked about resurrection.
No one told me it was still revolutionary for a girl-child to stand in the pulpit and speak, so I grew up believing in the normalcy of this act. I also grew up preaching- words I don’t remember (and words I sometimes wish I could forget), spoken from the front of the white-washed sanctuary of a Texas church, and from the Holy Spirit I didn’t understand, but could sometimes feel in my chest like a spark.
When I was seventeen, I thought I’d go on preaching forever. The Spirit was big and the world endless, and certainly this feeling would never run dry.
//
In Peru my team preached almost every single day. We would file into a one-room church with dirt floors somewhere outside of Cajamarca, and eventually one of us would share a testimony, we would all sing a song, and someone would speak.
We were seven female missionaries, privileged by our foreignness, our American identities. Often, I wondered if the Peruvian women were given the same pulpit as we were. They sat quietly in the services, and sang songs in high, nasal voices, but only once did I see a woman lead a service. Even then, it wasn’t her that preached, but a male associate pastor from Monte Sion.
I wondered if we were an exception to the rule or an overlooked offense.
Either way, for the church’s 24th anniversary service, Pastor Helmer asked one of us to teach on baptism and communion. These were sacraments their church apparently observed rarely and with lots of rules, and we would preach in front of the whole congregation and all of the church plants in surrounding towns who had come in for the special occasion.
Jami didn’t even ask the group who wanted to speak. She looked at me and said, “I thought this was right up your alley.”
And it was, a softball lobbed right over the plate: the two subjects I spent the most time thinking about, in one sermon, and with several days to prepare. But I still dreaded it.
//
The first time someone told me women shouldn’t preach, I was a freshman in college, and he knew I planned to be a pastor.
It didn’t make me doubt the ‘calling’- it made me mad. I started reading stacks of theology books, exploring church history, and basically becoming even more of an angry feminist than I already was (and I’d earned comparisons to Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You). I realized the revolutionary power of a woman in the pulpit.
Around that same time, I stopped preaching. It wasn’t because of what the guy said, or self-doubt— at least, at first.
For the first time in my life, I had lost the words that had been my constant companion. The Spirit, which had seemed so bright and real only months ago, burnt out.
Somewhere in between losing my calling and my words, communion became a tangible representation of a faith that felt dead. I lost speech but found something sweeter, something I didn’t fully understand but made me feel like the living water so often talked about might still be in me, bubbling somewhere beneath the surface.
But the words were still lost.
//
My knees felt weak, and my chest was tight. Whatever calling I used to feel, now I hate standing up in front of any amount of people. There, at the focal point of the ship-hull sanctuary, my mind was racing at a hundred miles an hour, way ahead of the notes in my journal and the rapid Spanish Christina translated.
This is awful. None of this makes sense. Who gave you the right?
But I kept speaking, trying to subtly gasp for breath, occasionally looking at the only friendly face in the front rows: a little girl, smiling and swinging her feet.
//
When I was in the dark night, the desert of the soul, I started believing that I wasn’t good enough to preach. And it wasn’t because I was a woman, or barely in my twenties, or any of the other rules the church puts on people who try to stand in a pulpit and speak out holy things.
I thought I’d lost the holy things. The words, the water, the spark in my chest that made me brave: the Holy Spirit.
While fighting for air in front of two hundred Peruvians, the Holy Spirit reminded me that she was in me the whole time, through the dark night and desert, in the silence and stillness, and was still with me as I spoke about the Savior that came for us out of the house of bread.
For a moment, the voice that asks if I even have a right to be in a pulpit speaking of resurrection was silenced, like it was silenced ten years ago on a cold Easter morning.
I didn’t keep standing up to speak because of any sort of inner strength, or even a sense of duty to my team. The thing that kept bringing me back was the little girl in the front row, who maybe someday will feel the Spirit like a spark in her chest. I came back because of the Table where all are welcome, where Jesus asks us to remember all the ways he gave himself up for us. And always, because of the feast that is to come.
I kept standing in the pulpit and speaking of resurrection, because it’s not a calling anymore, but a way of abundant life.
