Keep It Simple

Sometimes, it's harder to say things simply and directly. This past Sunday, I preached the same "basic" sermon 3 times, in 3 different settings. Even though the central message stayed the same, I re-wrote it for each service to tailor the style and wording for the audience.

The easiest one to write, and the one I started with, was the most formal and wordiest one, for our traditional worship service. I altered it slightly, to be a little more conversational, for our contemporary worship service - and added a slideshow to go along with the sermon. The most challenging, strangely, was the version that had the most basic theology and vocabulary. It was for the Montagnard-American Alliance church's worship service, a congregation composed of Montagnard refugees from Vietnam, many of whom are fairly recent converts to Christianity. The sentences had to be short, so they could be translated into Jarai as I preached. The images and language had to be easily accessible to a community with different metaphors and experiences than my own.

I have always been a slow writer, largely because I choose my words and construct my sentences carefully. The flow is important to me - I search for just the right phrasing and language. I love the right-click thesaurus in Microsoft Word! So, it was a real challenge to let go of the desire to speak poetically and to instead construct brief, concise phrases that explained exactly what Lent is; that said why we often give things up for 6 weeks; that tried to quickly clarify who Satan is and why he'd want to tempt Jesus...to re-read each sentence I had written with new eyes that urged me to explain so many of the ideas that I take for granted because I've grown up with them.

It was such a helpful exercise for me, though, to have to boil down my fancy words to expose the real foundation underneath. To speak the good news in it's most simple, direct form. To figure out what I was really trying to say that would matter to someone who had really confronted evil & violence firsthand and who had truly found new life by starting all over again in a strange country.

The simplest things are often the hardest, but they can also be the most rewarding.