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I deeply love doing it, but being a preacher is weird––in lots of ways, including the preaching itself.

Or maybe not. In these days of social media, Substacks, YouTube channels, and podcasts, everyone is pumping out content. Who isn't a content creator these days? Still, I perceive something peculiar about the sermon: it’s almost absurdly old school, essentially a half hour monologue––a discreet piece of oral rhetoric––delivered weekly.

As much as I’d love to pretend otherwise, it’s probably both hubristic and highly aspirational for preachers to consider themselves “creatives.” Preaching is more of a craft than an art, a piece of furniture rather than a painting. What I love about art is its stubborn uselessness––ars gratia artis, and all that jazz––and by contrast I would never want to lose sight of the fact that sermons must above all be functional. They need to bring honor and glory to God, draw people toward Jesus, and move them forward in both the obedience of faith and the mission of the gospel.

At the same time, sermon construction carries with it an aspect that is irreducibly creative and writerly. And that suits me just fine.

Last weekend I picked up from Labyrinth Bookstore in Princeton a slim non-fiction from Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. My thought process in buying this book went something like this: “Hey, I like Elena Ferrante! I take pleasure in reading! I take pleasure in writing! This book must be for me.” Sometimes we don’t have to overthink things.

I read about half of In the Margins last night and was fascinated to be afforded a peek behind the curtain of Ferrante’s own authorial process. Specifically, it intrigued me to learn that when she begins to write, it’s no longer she, per se, that is writing:
What writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular “I,” solidly planted in everyday life, but it is twenty people, that is, a number thrown out there to say: when I write, I don’t now even know who I am.
When one generates fiction, the self recedes as other voices surface. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Ferrante herself in In the Margins spends some pages in conversation with Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, and from this dialogue develops further her musings about a author's subjectivity while writing. She observes,
For Virginia Woolf, writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life. . . "Oh yes, I like being Virginia, but the 'I' who writes seriously isn’t Virginia; the 'I' who writes seriously is twenty people, a hypersensitive plurality concentrated in the hand provided with the pen."
The solitary writer as a “hypersensitive plurality.”

What about the humble preacher, pray tell? Do I write sermons as me, or am I twenty people?

I’d never wondered that before.

I’m on vacation next week and then on a work trip after that. Let me chew on this question and get back to you.

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