Penned this while I waited on the storm last night. Nothing special poetically, but a grand lesson.

I sat among my books last night
and marveled as I mused
at just how much was written there
and how little I’d infused—
of fact and figure, trope and truth,
of wisdom gained at crushing cost,
and as I sat among my books
I mourned my sorry loss.

Might you hazard a guess at what I have in mind by this expression: “preacher tone”?

If you reckoned on something like contrived showiness, an overly-stilted formality, an exaggerated intonation, all delivered in some strange rhythm and pattern, then you’re right on target.

I’m unsure of the history of this phenomenon, but I’m quite sure that the sooner we preachers get over it, the better. Where have we gotten this peculiar idea that our preaching voice should be, must be, something quite other than and decidedly odder than our everyday voice? Has tradition bequeathed this to us? Has the cult of personality in American religion helped establish it? Is there some element of idolatrous worship involved in sustaining its artificial life? These are painful but pivotal questions.

The “Oxford comma” is the comma placed before the word “and” in a list of three or more items for the purpose of clarification. The “Grammarly Blog” offers this humorous example of its merit:

We all know the story, we’ve all heard it told,
of the Whos down in Whoville, and the Grinch, bold and cold;
how the grouchy old Grump greatly hated their joys
and grinningly plotted to steal all their toys.

Oh, we watch every year, at least most everyone.
We watch, and we watch, as the dark deed is done;
as the Grinch takes the toys of the Who girls and boys
and away, on his sleigh, takes them all, without noise.

“I wish …”

• I had started earlier.
• I had listened better.
• I had read more.
• I had watched more closely.
• I had moved more slowly.
• I had learned more quickly.
• I had seen more clearly.
• I had trusted more fully.
• I had rejoiced more readily.
• I had wept more willingly.
• I had loved more openly.
• I had lived more heroically!

I suppose these all are frank expressions of regret—godly regret, I hope—but they aren’t declarations of defeat. I’m convicted by my failures, but not crushed. Rebuked by them, but not wrecked. Humbled, but not hopeless. Why? The Gospel!

In the previous post, “Insensibly …”,  we were considering the dangers posed by “drift”—this all-too-easy business of inattention and indifference which can take us, oh so insensibly, into decline and fall before we know what’s happened. And we exhorted ourselves then to come to our senses, or as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, to “pay much closer attention to what we have heard” (Heb 2:1). Then we ended by asking, “How?” How do we come to our senses? How do we avoid the danger of insensibly drifting away into decline and ruin? How do we really fight “the good fight,” especially in such strange days as these?

The past few weeks I’ve been reading a bit on reading! James Sire’s little treatise entitled How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension¹ is a tasty treat, as is Gene Veith’s Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature.² The book I’m reading now is Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction³ which I’m finding both charming and challenging!

At one point in his larger case, speaking to the trouble of trying to “read noninstrumental texts in an instrumental way,”⁴ Jacobs points out how the best features of artful writing—i.e. language that’s “unusually vivid or lovely, or if its presentation of ideas or images is subtle and surprising”—can just be missed by our reading too quickly with the wrong goals in view. And as an example he points to Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Folks who know me—especially at the church or in my college/university classes—know that I talk often (and often, passionately) about the difference between big-“T” truth¹ and little-“t” truth.

Little-“t” truth is subjective and/or contextual. You may, e.g., say about a movie you’ve watched, “It made me sad!” That is a little-“t” true statement concerning the emotion/feeling the movie stirred in you. No one can deny the reality of your response. Others, though, may offer a different little-“t” true statement—”That movie really encouraged me!”—based on their feelings, a view that disagrees with yours but still is undeniable. Being subjective/contextual means two little-“t” truths may conflict with one another and yet both still be discretely “true.”

The Christian faith has, at its core, cognitive content.

When that reality crashed in on my understanding some 40 years ago, it changed my whole life.

How had I missed this? I had been raised in church. At the time, I was caught up in the influence of the Jesus movement, and the budding contemporary Christian music scene, and the excited anticipation of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth apocalypticism. And though I knew some of what the Bible said, I realized that I knew next to nothing about what the Bible taught. And so, confronted with my ignorance, I started reading Scripture again with new focus. And verse after startling verse, all related to this growing awareness of the gospel’s truth content, passed before my wondering mind with new and burning clarity: