CREEDE HINSHAW: Insulted in worship

Over the decades, novelists have portrayed preachers as venal scoundrels, cowardly buffoons, duplicitous schemers and naïve do-gooders. That’s just for starters. I’ve read quite a large swath of novels featuring clergypersons. A few writers get it right.

A novel I am currently reading describes a preacher and his congregation. A Scots Quaire, a trilogy set in 1915-1920 by the Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was written in 1932, the three books being “Sunset Song,” “Cloud Howe” and “Grey Granite.” I purchased the trilogy after a reviewer called it “the greatest Scottish novel ever written by a Scotsman.”

I love the novels, although they take some getting used to, because the author sprinkles the Scots language liberally through the novel, forcing the reader to guess at some of the words. (There is a glossary, but on Kindle it is difficult to access.)

At any rate, the cleric in the novel, though not the main character, is a noble person, generous to a fault and unafraid to address life’s inequities and Christian duty. But the congregation isn’t so sure they like him.

Gibbon writes the rural church folk, instead of attending Sunday worship, would rather “take the mistress on a jaunt … or maybe just lie happed in your bed and have breakfast … than go up to the kirk of a Sabbath and sit down and hear himself insulted.”

And how did the preacher insult? The novelist explains: “You went to kirk to hear a sermon about Paul and the things he wrote the Corinthians, all of them folk that were safely dead.” But this pastor “would try to make out that you yourself, born of honest folk, were a kind of Corinthian. No, you were hardly so daft as take that …”

Author Gibbon isn’t the first person to note that those in the pew are often disgruntled when the expositor of the gospel hits a little too close to home. It’s always safe to preach about those long-deceased Thessalonians, Athenians or Philippians. They’re not around to defend themselves, and they make pretty good targets. People begin to squirm, however, if the expositor starts connecting the dots between the ancient Biblical world and the 21st century.

Good preaching and good worship connect church and world. It may be safer to stick to stories about Samson or Isaiah, choosing to let the person in the pew draw his/her own connections, but those who preach with integrity and power will “go to meddling” in their sermons.

I value the foundation of our faith — those things the Corinthians did and where they fell short and how they overcame challenges — but I expect those ancient lessons to be applied to the local and world situation in 2021. Hearing exclusively about the Corinthians would be very boring. Give me some real application, even if I feel “insulted” by it. Worship and preaching should help us see and address today’s truth.