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I spent this week at the first retreat for the Institute of Preaching, a year’s commitment to working alongside a small group of colleagues to improve our preaching. That may elicit a sigh of relief from some of you, which is fair. It certainly did for me. I love preaching. The opportunity to spend time in scripture and, as Zan Holmes puts it, find ways for the Word of God to happen in preparation, and happen again in worship for preacher and congregation. But there are weeks when preparation risks not moving much past the practical. There is a task that must be completed, an expectation to be met: that come around 11:15 Sunday morning I will have something to say. And truly that task, that expectation, is one of my favorite things, and that’s partly what I was reminded of this week. And more particularly: the importance that it grows out of the truth of the Gospel as I seek to live it, the truth of the Gospel as we that are San Marco Church seek to live it. All of our work this week seemed to invite us back to the basics, which in some ways meant reminders of process and resources and non-verbal communication. And we acknowledged that beautiful, scary truth of the personal voice blessed by personal call: that only when we share from the truth of ourselves do we honor God’s creation and call. I invite you to join me in sharing your voice, in honoring its creation and the call God has placed on your life. On Sunday we’ll consider how communion, and in particular on World Communion Sunday, moves us to empty ourselves for the ministry of Jesus. And below I share a poem I’ve been contemplating around this, William Ayot’s “Anyone Can Sing”. But also, consider being a part of this weekly blog as we share with one another in the coming series, “Sabbath as Resistance”. When it begins in late October, I hope each week’s blog post will share some of the practices and experiences of sabbath from our own community. Ways that you rest, play, worship, and practice renewal. Please consider adding your voice to this, and let me know if that’s something you’d like to consider contributing to. Grace and Peace, my friends, and see you Sunday Rev. Ben Richards “Anyone Can Sing” Anyone can sing. You just open your mouth,
and give shape to a sound. Anyone can sing.
What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,
to initiate a wild and necessary deepening:
to give the voice broad, sonorous wings
of solitude, grief, and celebration,
to fill the body with the echoes of voices
lost long ago to bravery, and silence,
to prise the reluctant heart wide open,
to witness defeat, to suffer contempt,
to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,
to retreat to the last dark hiding-place
where the tattered remnants of your pride
still gather themselves around your nakedness,
to know these rags as your only protection
and yet still open - to face the possibility
that your innermost core may hold nothing at all,
and to sing from that - to fill the void
with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy
that staves off death yet honours its coming,
to sing both full and utterly empty,
alone and conjoined, exiled and at home,
to sing what people feel most keenly
yet never acknowledge until you sing it.
Anyone can sing. Yes. Anyone can sing.
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