The Three Minute Sermon and Other Summer Reflections

July 27, 2003

". . .But what has been done by all the art and literature of the world towards describing one summer day?"

--Thomas Wentworth Higginson

And I suspect that many a listener to sermons has come into the congregation secretly hoping against hope that the preacher might, on this one occasion at least, be brief. Most of us preachers know that there is little to be gained by increasing the length of our sermons, yet we persist in the usually unwarranted hope that if we say it loud enough and long enough, the people might finally hear and understand what it is we have been desperately trying to tell them. The great failing of the young preacher is to try to tell the people everything he knows in every single sermon. Unfortunately, this failing sometimes continues into a ripe--some would say an over-ripe--old age.

Recently I heard a story in which a minister's sermon achieved both refreshing brevity and life altering change in one fell swoop. I call it "the story of the three minute sermon."

It was related to me one recent summer evening by my Hungarian ministerial colleague Josef Kaszoni, who is minister of the Unitarian congregation in Budapest, Hungary. The Rev. Kaszoni referred to his three minute wonder as not only his shortest, but also his most effective sermon in over forty years of preaching, giving hope to every one who has ever preached, or who has ever listened to, an interminable and indeterminate discourse from the pulpit.

Most impressive of all, the three minute sermon literally saved the lives of three individuals in imminent danger of violent death.

The setting was the village of Homorod Szentmarton in Transylvania on the eve of the fall of Romania's Ceaucescu regime on December 21, 1989. The sermon was not delivered in the church, but in the street outside the local government offices. It seems that three public officials, the Mayor, his secretary, and the local policeman, unwilling to believe that the reports of Ceaucescu's demise were not exaggerated, had decided to show up for work as usual. An angry crowd had gathered in the streets, the government offices were in the process of being ransacked, and the three officials looked to be likely victims of a public lynching. After all, fifty years of repression by such petty officialdom under Communism had built up a tremendous store of resentment, and revenge seemed the order of the day.

It was at this point that the Rev. Kaszoni was summoned to intervene. Now, to grasp the complete irony of the situation, you must understand that Mr. Kaszoni, like many of his ministerial colleagues under Communism, had until this day of liberation been considered persona non grata by these self-same officials; he would later learn that his file in the offices of the dreaded Securitatae in Bucharest was nearly fifty pages long. The policeman in question had gone out of his way to make Mr. Kaszoni's life miserable.

But on this day the Rev. Josef Kaszoni was destined to achieve what few preachers ever do. In a sermon lasting only three minutes, he told the familiar story of Jesus and the woman accused of adultery, asking who among those assembled there was prepared to cast the first stone at the three petty officials. After all, hardly anyone's reputation had managed to remain untarnished during Communism's long reign of fear and secrecy in Romania. Those who had resisted completely were mostly dead, victims of imprisonment and torture, worked to death or executed by the government.

The Rev. Kaszoni, who had no love for the three officials, who, after all, had been making his life difficult for years, called for the angry crowd to heed the words of Jesus, to live out the Christian principles to which they supposedly subscribed, to allow the officials to return to their homes, and to disperse to their own to enjoy their first Christmas of freedom in over fifty years. Miracle of miracles, the officials were allowed to leave, and the crowd returned to their homes, thankfully without blood on their hands.

We were not told whether the three officials in question ever expressed their appreciation to their former target turned savior. It really doesn't matter. What matters is that, for this one time, at least, words really mattered, and that it didn't take many of them. It gives one renewed hope for the possibilities of preaching.

Of course, such a dramatic opportunity to literally save lives won't come to most of us, and perhaps we should say "thank God" to that. Most of us must be satisfied with a more modest outcome, and hope that our words--too many of them, no doubt--will at least touch the hearts of our hearers, and send them forth glad that they have heard them, even if they have gone on a bit longer than was called for.

This is, after all, not a perfect world. I have had ample time to reflect on this truth this summer. As if the daily news were not enough, I have been spending a lot of my time in my flower garden, and learning again what most gardeners know all too well: that this is a most imperfect world, a world where obnoxious critters of every size and description stand by at every moment to destroy what we have created through the very sweat of our brows, and where the poet's "canker on the rose" is but all too real.

I have battled--unsuccessfully, I might add--with skunks and squirrels, who insist on digging up my lawn in search grubs which will eventually turn into Japanese beetles and eat my roses. My cat insists on using the entire garden as a cat-box, so that in places it looks like the French countryside after the battle of the Somme. The leaves of my flowering crab apple tree have acquired a fungus which causes them to fall off at an infuriatingly slow pace over the course of the entire summer. Giant slugs leave slick trails on lawn and in garden. Aphids feed on my rose leaves; at least they provide a meal for the more helpful lady bugs.

In the garden it is either too dry or too wet or too windy. It is too hot or too cold. The fertilizer we apply to make the lawn green burns it up instead. The weeds disguise themselves among the flowers (and what is a flower anyway, but a domesticated weed?); they thrive while the plants upon which we have showered such tender loving care wither and die for no apparent reason. The mint we planted so hopefully takes over the entire garden.

Certainly, this is no "garden of earthly delights." But it does serve as a great corrective to any thoughts we might have had of achieving perfection. Gardening reminds us that we will never get it completely right. No matter how beautiful the flower, the worm is busy down there gnawing at the root. The lawn, not matter how lush, will never become the perfect green carpet of our desire.

Henry David Thoreau, that keen observer of most everything natural, recognized the paradoxes of gardening long before most. "Flowers must not be too profuse and obtrusive," he wrote, "else they acquire the reputation of weeds." In another place, he wrote,

Not only foul and poisonous weeds grow in our tracks, but our vileness and luxuriance make simple, wholesome plants rank and weed- like. All that I ever got a premium for was a monstrous squash, so coarse that nobody would eat it. Some of these bad qualities will be found to lurk in the pears that are invented in the neighborhood of great towns. "The evil that men do lives after them." The corn and potatoes produced by excessive manuring may be said to have not only a coarse, but a poisonous quality. . . . What creatures is the grain raised in the cornfields of Waterloo for, unless it be for such as prey upon men? Who cuts the grass in the graveyard? I can detect the site of the shanties that have stood all along the railroad by the ranker vegetation. I do not go there for delicate wild flowers. It is important, then, that we should air our lives by removals, excursions into the fields and woods. Starve your vices. Do not sit so long over any cellar hole as to tempt your neighbor to bid for the privilege of digging saltpetre there. So live that only the most beautiful wild flowers will spring up where you have dwelt, harebells, violets, and blue-eyed grass.

One of the best pieces of news to come out of the "lazy, hazy, crazy" days of this summer was the firing of Michael Savage, about whom I spoke to you earlier this year in my sermon on "Civility." You may remember that I expressed outrage that MSNBC had contracted with Savage to bring his "Savage Nation" radio talk-show to the television airwaves. I complained that this hate-monger should be given the opportunity to spread his despicable views even more broadly than he had hitherto managed spread them. Well, in the words of a famous cliche, it seems that Mr. Savage has been "hoisted upon his own petard." The Boston Globe reported a few weeks back that "The popular radio talk-show host [popular with whom?], who did a weekend TV show for the cable channel, referred to an unidentified caller to his show Saturday as a 'sodomite' and said he should 'get AIDS and die.'

"'His comments were extremely inappropriate and the decision was an easy one,' MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said yesterday." Well, gee, what did they think he was going to say?

Actually, what Mr. Savage said (in particularly savage language) was, "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. . . . You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."

The great Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker once said that "The arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I pray that it is true, and every once in a while I am rewarded with a glimpse of the possibility that it might actually be so.

Perhaps, as with gardening, as with preaching, it is the effort that ultimately matters. We may not always succeed in producing the perfect flower or the life-saving three minute sermon, but it is the effort to do so that matters, it is the striving after justice that counts, just as it is the attempt to create beauty that must suffice, no matter how often our efforts to do so fail. We must never give up our hope, no matter how difficult the task, no matter how insurmountable the challenge. Our lives depend upon it.

May we go forth to live our lives in beauty and justice, not becoming discouraged by the weeds or the words that sometimes fill our hearts with frustration and grief. Beauty lies all around us. Let us be its bearers, recalling May Sarton's little poem along the way:

Help us to be the always hopeful
gardeners of the spirit
who know that without darkness
nothing comes to birth
as without light
nothing flowers.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock