Seeds, Feathers, and Words

Words are seeds that do more than blow around. They land in our hearts and not the ground. Be careful what you plant and careful what you say. You might have to eat what you planted one day.

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I read about a children’s sermon once in which the pastor used two bowls, two tubes of toothpaste, and two young volunteers to make a point. The pastor offered a prize, a piece of candy, to the child who could empty the tube of toothpaste into the bowl the fastest. After some frantic, messy squeezing, the competition was declared a tie and both children won a prize. “Now,” the pastor said, “here’s the real competition. I’ll give $20 to the one who can get all the toothpaste back into the tube the fastest.” It didn’t take long before both contestants protested that the task was impossible. “You can’t put it back in once you’ve squeezed it all out!” That, of course, was the whole point of the children’s sermon. The toothpaste was compared to words we’ve said in anger, meanness, jealousy, or gossip – words that once spoken could never be unspoken. All the kids were given a piece of candy and sent back to their pews.

Not bad, I guess, as far as children’s sermons go. I’ve also heard a sermon illustration that is very similar that talks about tearing a hole in a feather pillow and scattering the feathers. That story always cracks me up because it brings back memories of one Christmas when extended family gathered at my grandparents’ house. All of us kids went upstairs to hang out, cut up, and basically stay out the adults’ hair. A couple of the older cousins got into a pillow fight that exploded. Literally. One of the pillows they were using was a feather pillow that burst, spewing feathers everywhere. Certain that we would all be in big trouble, we frantically stuffed the feathers, or at least as many as we could gather, back into the pillow before filing quietly downstairs. We all sat down, six innocent angels. The adults all got quiet and stared at us. My uncle spoke first, asking us what we’d been doing. We claimed that we had just been talking and playing games. “No pillow fights?” We looked at each other wide-eyed, wondering if it’s true that adults have eyes in the backs of their heads. Then my uncle stood up, walked across the room, and started plucking feathers from our hair, feathers we had somehow overlooked in our scramble to re-stuff the pillow.

For better or for worse our words, whether said aloud or written and released into the world, cannot be erased or taken back. Even when we think we’ve pulled off adequate damage control, our words can still come back to haunt us. I believe this is what is at the root of writers block for many of us. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot this week.

Here’s why. During the pandemic shut down, our small church (like all churches who took the danger of the virus seriously) had to pivot. I began videotaping my sermons, something I’ve been loathe to do for the entirety of my ministry. The only thing I hate more than hearing a recording of my own voice is being able to see myself at the same time. If you mess up in a worship service, sure people will remember it. But all they have is the memory. If you mess up on video, well…. Necessity forced me to overcome this phobia and for months I went to the church each week, video recorded myself, played it back to make sure I didn’t say/do anything too embarrassing, and then watched it again with my congregation as we gathered on Zoom on Sunday mornings. The video itself was later posted in a private Facebook group and to our website. We have several in our church who do not have computers or internet access, so a written copy of the sermon was mailed to them each week.

Now that we are worshipping in person again, we are still continuing with these pandemic-birthed practices. We video the service each week and we mail out sermons to those who still want them. This causes a bit of anxiety for me because now I am longer am I in control of the video. What happens, happens. I just pray each week that there won’t be too many bloopers. I wasn’t as worried about the sermon copies because only a handful of people are still getting those.

Or so I thought. I found out something interesting this week. One person who received my sermons by mail had been reading them and then passing them on to a neighbor. That neighbor read them and passed them on to an 80 year old man who “studied them” and then passed them on to his sister. What happened to them once the sister was finished, I do not know. What I do know is that words I have written have been shared more widely than I anticipated.

This is all good stuff. It’s time for churches, even small rural ones, to step up to try new ways of sharing the Word. It’s wonderful that church members are sharing with neighbors, and neighbors are sharing with friends, and those friends are sharing with family. That’s the way it should be.

Yet back to the writers block thing. I am comfortable preaching to “my” church and sharing sermons with them. I know them. They know me. I picture their faces and remember their stories when I write my sermons. I know about how much I can push and when I need to proceed with gentleness. As for those who watch online and those who receive paper sermons second-, third- hand, I don’t know them. I can’t pretend to anticipate how they hear and receive the words I write and preach. And it makes me nervous.

This is another reason I have returned to the practice of blogging after several years away. There’s really no difference in hitting the “Publish” button on a blog, pressing record on a camera, and putting a stamp on a sermon before dropping it in the mail. Once the words are out there, I no longer have control over them.

Once upon a time, I wrote regularly, daily sometimes, about all manner of things not knowing if it would be read, or by whom. I didn’t spend much time worrying about whether anyone would like it. I figured if they didn’t, they would just move on. It was more important to me back then to practice using my voice than it was to having my words liked or approved.

I don’t think I will ever be able to go back to those idyllic early blogging days again. The world has changed. People are quicker to criticize or even attack. Those were the kinds of things that precipitated my exit from blogging for so long. But now I am back. I’m back because my intent is to put good words, good seeds, out there. Sometimes words don’t need to be stuffed back into a pillowcase. Sometimes they need to be scattered, hopefully accomplishing good.

So here I am, trying to learn to balance out my voice and my fear. I don’t like a spotlight and have never sought one out, but it’s awfully hard to plant seeds in the dark. Maybe, just maybe, a few of those seeds will make a difference, somewhere, for the the better.

“Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.” -Abraham Joshua Herschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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