Over-packaging

Until recently, layers of packaging on manufactured items were considered a sign that the goods inside were of superior quality, whereas cheap goods had minimal packaging.
Now supermarkets are being encouraged to use less packaging because all that superfluous wrapping around the product ends up in landfill sites, and that’s unfriendly to the environment.
After last Sunday morning’s church service, I think the same principle should be applied to sermons.
Too much packaging is bad for the church environment.
Less is more.
We had a guest speaker, who arrived with a message that was tailor-made – in fact, God-made – for this particular church, which has gone through some tough times in the past year.
For the first five minutes, you could feel everyone thinking this man was a Godsend. And I’m sure he was.
For five minutes he talked about waiting patiently for God while you’re in the pits and not thinking he has forgotten you, because he has good things in store.
He repeated it a few times in different ways. That took five minutes more.
The allocated sermon time was twenty-five minutes, so there was plenty of time for the bible reading he used to illustrate his point.
The bible reading took about another five minutes.
Fifteen minutes’worth of good stuff, worth listening to.
But he took forty.
Some of the people were elderly and not well, and it was an effort for them to sit still, on hard chairs, for that long.
Others had children next door in the children’s group and couldn’t go out to fetch them, so the children’s workers all had to stay twenty minutes extra.
Some people had dinner in the oven and family arriving.
I had a husband at home packing last minute items and waiting for me to come home because we had a three-hour drive to do as soon as the service was over.
For a really essential message from God, we would all have stayed willingly for however long it took. It’s that kind of church.
But the message had been delivered within fifteen minutes of the speaker beginning to talk.
So what was the other twenty-five minutes about?
Some of it, prefacing the bible reading, was an unnecessary diatribe about Christians not bringing bibles to church with them - unnecessary because our church has skilled technicians who locate every bible reference on the computer and have it on the overhead screen almost before the preacher has mentioned the verse number. So we don’t need to carry bibles and rustle the pages over the talk.
Then he did multiple choice responses – choice of two answers to an easy question, one of them obviously right and one obviously wrong.
When people shouted out the right answer, he pretended to be hard of hearing and made everyone shout louder.
When he finally acknowledged the right answer, he told us all why the wrong one would have been wrong.
This happened several times.
He also did repeat-after-me a few times, making people twice his age chant catchphrases after him. Old people are resilient, and humoured him. The children would not have done so, not after the age of five, anyway.
Several times he went into a digression about what he would say to an atheist if one was in the room. Then what he would say to a specific atheist, Richard Dawkins, if Richard Dawkins had been in the room – or, I suspect, if he had been a fellow guest star on television with him.
Then he told jokes. And people at our church are generally kind, so they laughed at them. Before the punchline, even, because we’d heard them all before.
And he came out with slogans and quotes and soundbites we’d heard many times before too.
Finally, he went into a diatribe about how old hymns are so much better than contemporary worship songs because they contain so many more words of theology.
And they rhyme. And they scan. And apparently that’s a good thing in worshipping God, though I’m not sure why.
He recited the lyrics of several old hymns, at length, and demonstrated to us their wordiness and rhyminess, and his prodigious memory.
Then he launched another diatribe about contemporary songwriters whom he described as 19-year olds scribbling songs on the back of an envelope.
I wasn’t clear why he thought God would find that offensive.
The preacher elucidated. Those so-called songwriters, he said, don’t use iambic pentameters like the old hymn-writers.
In fact, he said, today’s song-scribblers wouldn’t even know what an iambic pentameter was.
At this point, our kindly and tolerant congregation began to grow restive – half because they didn’t know what an iambic pentameter was either, and half because the preacher’s acerbic comments were getting increasingly opinionated and divorced from God’s message – unless he intended to make us really feel the point about being in the pits and longing to be rescued by God.
For five minutes of the sermon, and ten minutes of reading from Genesis, this speaker made a good point well and was worth hearing. God spoke through him.
The rest of the time, he wasn’t preaching God’s message at all but some other agenda of his own.
It wasn’t enough being guest preacher in a small church on an ordinary Sunday morning. He was also being stand-up comic, literary critic, primary school teacher, nostalgic fan of the good ol’ days, TV antagonist, defender of the faith, and guest star on Grumpy Old Men.
I can still remember what he preached about, and I’m sure it was what God wanted him to say to us that morning, which is the main thing. But the essence of the message so nearly risked getting swamped by all the other roles he assigned himself.
Too much packaging.