This will preach!

"And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow." Matt. 13:3

Poets and preachers ply much the same trade. They rummage about in old sheds and ploughed fields always casting a keen eye for odd bits of iron or stone, trinket or toy, broken or whole that tell a story. Picking up the oddest specimens of the everyday, the common, the familiar, they discover them to be treasuries of meaning; Rosetta stones that unlock mysteries of morality and truth. They look beyond the obvious to translate for us the tales of significance and value locked in their earth worn covers much like the bilingual person can read to us from a cast off book written in a foreign tongue.

Jesus was pre-eminent among them taking sheep, bread, wheat, and wages and unleashing from them pictures for the eyes of our imaginations that leaped the barriers of literacy, prejudice, status, or age. Olive trees became discourses and wineskins, dissertations that conveyed truth down into our souls with a sweetness and ease that disarmed our defenses and silenced the critics of our hearts, at least for the moment. Caesar’s coin in the hands of the carpenter’s son defeated even the most devious of minds and most relentless of foes and left them silent, their entrapments in shambles, their arguments destroyed.

Long after the terminology was lost, the picture remains, burned into the memory like the heat and brilliance of a grand fire. Grandma Shown was good at it, too. When the children unwittingly tripped us up, she would sermonize succinctly and simply: “When they are young, they step on your toes. When they are old, they step on your heart.” She had known both, in spades. Herman Melville was a master at seeing the universal in the particular and proclaimed doggedly, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.” His masterpiece, Moby Dick, is awash in moralizing at every turn with deep reflections on life taken from the everyday experiences of a whaler, in all their beauty and terror.

For one, Melville takes considerable time to describe the careful path of the harpoon rope laid about in the whale boat before it followed its mark with a whizzing that could take off a leg or arm or snatch one into a watery grave. It actually lay across arms and shoulders as it trailed from its coiled lair, innocent as “the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball.” It was the thing which carried “more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.” But why say more, he adds. “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

Following the tradition, I continue to exclaim for all to hear at every cluttered closet and tangled garden hose, “Chaos always descends from order! Order never descends from chaos!” (A pox on Darwin and all his kin!) Come to my woodshop and you are likely to hear, “If you work with wood, you will get slivers. If you work with people, you will get hurt.” Young preachers (& teachers) need forewarning. Can we see the eternal significance in those things that surround us each day and point them out to young ears as lessons for the heart? “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways” the Scripture says, and so we look beneath our feet and see wisdom for the taking. Through eyes of faith and vision, we, too, can see the treasure in the common and exclaim with sudden discovery and joy, “This will preach!”