The Foolishness of Preaching. 3. Lent Day 8

 

The Windows.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

    He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

 

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

    Making thy life to shine within

The holy preachers, then the light and glory

    More reverend grows, and more doth win;

    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

    When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

 

Any preacher called to fulfil God's summons to preach must start by asking Herbert's question, "How..." A sense of inadequacy is a prerequisite, because a sense of adequacy is embarrassingly graceless.

 

So start with that discomfiting interrogative, "How?"

 

How can human limitation express divine fullness? How can "brittle crazy glass" ever be useful in transforming that real human world out there, in all its brokenness, perplexity and ruined potential?

 

Think stained glass, the colours burned into the very substance of the glass; think the glorious transcendent sunlight filtered through annealed colours; and now think of a human being, made in the image of God,  that image as imperfect as "brittle crazie glasse", becomes a window "through thy grace."

 

When that happens doctrine and life are fused into one integrated whole, just as light and colour and glass coincide in time and place to create an image of beauty. What was brittle crazed glass, is now a work of art, telling God's story, illumined from within by the living presence of Christ the light of the world. Such a preacher is a sight to behold because doctrine and life, what is believed and what is lived, talk and walk, have a visible, arresting, integrity.

 

Like annealed glass, the preacher's life is infused, made capable of being the medium by which the eternal word, God's story, filters through human words irradiated by divine light.

 

Then Herbert punctures the first inclinations of the self-satisfied preacher impressed by their own rhetoric, learning, and shining example! The strong regard and awe of a congregation are not to be trifled with, or aimed at. The preacher tells God's story so that the hearer's conscience will ring with the clarity of an uncracked glass bell. Such awe is the vestibule leading to worshipping obedience; it is the divinely given response to a preacher whose character is as annealed glass through which pass the sunlight rays of God's story, word for Word. 

 

What Herbert achieves in this poem, is the powerful effect in personal experience of what it means to say "through thy grace". He sets up a collision of opposites; brittle crazy glass can be a window, "through thy grace." Crazed dull glass becomes a filter for the divine light; man, fallen humanity, can nevertheless become holy preacher of the eternal word, God's story annealed in the heart, "through thy grace."

 

Lent is a good time for preachers to remember that every word they speak, and we speak millions of them in a lifetime, comes from brittle crazy glass. The light of God's Word filters through the annealed glass; in a contemporary image, the cracks are where the light gets through. The preacher's calling is to allow "brittle crazy glass" illumine God's story, but always, only, "through thy grace."

 

(The stained glass is from Glenmuick Church of Scotland, in The Square, Ballater.)       

Comments

[Kenneth Mackintosh]

That's a cracking sentence, Jim, relevant to so many walks of life: "A sense of inadequacy is a prerequisite, because a sense of adequacy is embarrassingly graceless." The lack of humility and graceless arrogance we see in so many areas - from politics, tabloid press, business, and the rest - is indeed "embarrassingly graceless".
Ken