I am very content with my calling. I love writing sermons. I love preaching. I love the fact that preaching is, in fact, an act of love to people. This all began however more as an urge of artistry than one of unction. I simply enjoy putting ideas together in a creative fashion. If I weren’t called to preach, these same urges would find vent in different ways. My call to ministry doesn’t ignore my wiring but rather redirects it.
One of my earliest realizations of joy in expression came through my appreciation of the music of The Police. When kids in junior high were talking about the music of All-4-One, I honestly thought they were referring to a song by Sting, Rod Stewart, and Bryan Adams. Would that they were. While many in high school were listening to Backstreet Boys or whatever was memorialized in the ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ CDs, I was working my way through The Police anthology. Even one of my senior pictures was an homage to Sting.
Many of the songs that Sting has written deal with ideas. How many bands produce one song that is named after Jungian psychology, let alone two? I knew that I wanted to express ideas creatively the way that he did. In some ways I have. A sermon is a relatively short but coherent whole that weave together a variety of disciplines just like a song is a short but coherent whole that weaves together a variety of instrumentations, including voice. Both songs and sermons fit within a larger mosaic (an album in the case of a song and a sermon series in the case of a sermon). There are, of course, any number of considerations and experiences between my appreciation of the artistry of an album and finding myself in the pulpit, but what I am trying to do in this particular interaction is be honest with some of the urges that are part of my make-up. Every preacher has them and they are intimately wrapped up with his own biography. If he pretends that they aren’t present and that he has always and only wanted to speak ‘thus saith the Lord’, his unspoken and unexamined urges will have more an impact than they would otherwise and this will be to the detriment of his preaching.
I have found that my desire to arrange ideas, as I saw Sting doing, has helped me understanding the processes of sermon writing and preaching. In songwriting authentic voice matters a great deal. The same is true in preaching but the voice must authentically be God’s and also that of the preacher in an analogous way to Scripture is the word of God and that of the author. Speaking the word of God requires a good deal of time in the study to determine God’s voice in the text and a good deal of submission to God in life to truly want to say what God says. In other words, the preacher must submit his voice to find his voice.
Speaking with one’s own voice is part of what separates art from artifice and much of what separates preaching from merely reading a sermon that one has written. The minute a man performs, preaching has ended. The preacher must authentically be himself just as the artist must, but he must speak for God in a way quite different from the artist.
To turn to the book, it is certainly among the better written memoirs, which shouldn’t be surprising given the man’s craft. He is obviously at home with words and there is no sense that he has busted out the thesaurus to impress his reader. He is refreshingly transparent not only in the events of his life but also in his awareness that he is interpreting the events of his life. For example, the book begins with his reflections on why he and his wife took part in a pagan, drug-induced trance. If you are looking for a work approved by Focus on the Family, this book is not for you. As a minister, I appreciate reading any book in which the author is authentic. There can be such a temptation to put on a mask when speaking to a minister and this is a book without guile.
Sting makes clear at the beginning of this book that he has no interest in writing an autobiography but rather wants to make sense of particular moments. It becomes obvious as the book progresses that the moments of which he is making sense are his mother’s long-term infidelity, the end of his own first marriage, the death of his parents, and especially his decision not to attend either of his parents’ funerals. This final topic serves as the bookends to this work.
I have absolutely no idea if this book would be of interest to you. As I’ve made clear, it was of interest to me for biographical reasons. I do, however, encourage you to take an interest in biographies, both in book form and in the form of the people whom you meet everyday. God certainly uses our make-up and histories in remarkable ways.