When Emily spoke last week about not wanting to spend a season preaching on desire, I was right there with her. In other churches, that might not have been true; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing on desire over the past decade-plus, in relation to modern culture and in relation to the Sermon on the Mount, and you’ll get a bit of that in a few minutes. As a matter of intellectual engagement, I’m comfortable with the subject area, and I think we have to be if we want our community and our culture to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news. But the pesky little thing about this congregation is the long-ingrained expectation and understanding that merely intellectual engagement isn’t enough. No, if you’re going to preach here, you have to be willing to lay your soul on the line. A lot has changed in VSF over the decade we’ve been here, and the seven years or so I’ve been preaching here with some frequency, but that expectation hasn’t changed—in some small part because Tim Poyner ground it into me so thoroughly that I bring it with me into the pulpit whenever I open the Word with you of a Sunday.
And in the light of that expectation . . . yeah, when Emily was singing the melody, I was harmonizing right along on the bass line. I told Phil Whisler after the service last week my “truth about God,” as Jamie Winship would put it, is that God has spent most of a decade trolling me. God would trail opportunities in front of me until I couldn’t help myself but ask for them—and as soon as I started asking, he would slam the door. Maybe you think I’m making it up, or I’m being overdramatic, but here’s two things.
One, that pattern repeated over and over and over—I lost count of how many times.
Two, God sort of confirmed to me that that was what he was doing. There was an opening in a church in southern Oregon in 2017—I hadn’t even been through that cycle many times yet—which I knew immediately would never give me even a first look. I decided to ignore it to protect my heart. I heard God tell me to send them my stuff and pursue the opportunity. I told him no, I wouldn’t, it would be pointless, I was never going to be taken seriously there. God didn’t disagree, he just commanded me to open my heart to hope even knowing that hope would be quickly crushed. And so I did, and I was right: I never even received an acknowledgement of my e-mail. For some reason, I needed to make the deliberate, intentional choice to expose my heart in that way, to open myself wide to the hurt of being rejected unseen instead of avoiding it and protecting myself from it. I still don’t understand why . . . but that wasn’t the last time.