Sept 7 Column on speechmaking in convention and pulpit

One of the annoying things about being a pastor is that everything we encounter becomes grist for the mill of Bible Study or sermons. So, listening or reading a few convention speeches dovetailed into my work. I listened to a number of the convention speeches in the past week or so. I am going to avoid any partisan notes, to the extent I am able, but wish to focus on the rhetoric, the presentation of self and ideas of some of the speakers. If I have time, I will use this as a focus for the task of preaching. I was so impressed with the tone of voice throughout Gov. Romney’s address. It was mercifully lacking the stridency of so much of his party compatriots. Instead, it had the sound of someone bemused and saddened by the position of our country. He added to the script of his remarks with his tone of disappointment. Senate aspirant Elizabeth Warren was noteworthy for the strength of the verbs she often deployed. For instance, Wall Street malefactors don’t walk, they “strut.” A program gets “vaporized.” Ms. Warren does not strike me as a natural speaker. She used her quiet voice as a source of strength. She had an editor's pen in her speech to give it punch and some flow. A Harvard professor would say unbalanced, but a speaker would say “rigged.” this was striking in her argument against corporate personhood on “real people.” “they live; they love, they die, and that matters.” Its power came in part from the simple single syllable Anglo-Saxon string of verbs. Clinton’s deployment of detail enhanced his argument for a few reasons. Why did not our eyes glaze over with statistics? It kept it grounded from dreamy flights of mere words. Second, it signaled that he took his audience seriously. Third, he was able to fit the data into the structure of his argument, so that it fit a narrative flow and did not seem to be a parade of statistics floating out in the void. Susie Delano of First Presbyterian noted that Clinton is gifted with capturing a phrase or a bit of information that connects with people as a part of a lifetime of political discourse. Apparently about a third of the speech had additions made on the spur of the moment (I didn’t want to say on the fly when it comes to President Clinton).So having a manuscript gave him freedom to extemporize, as opposed to the lack of structure that made Clint Eastwood’s performance so baffling. In the recent Christian Century magazine, the new CTS President Matthew Boulton and his talented spouse wrote about the difficulties of sermon writing. They did not take aim at the usual suspects of being too long or too boring. (For instance, a few weeks a go, a member loved a sermon on David and Bathsheba as it was about sexual indiscretion, but the next week he said the sermon was “something about Communion.) Building on Eph.6:10-20, they urged pastors to be much more demanding aobut our use of images that take on a poetic quality, that invite us into a person’s skin or situation, instead of being content to describe it. Not only are that asking that we deploy stories to illustrate a point, they invite us to struggle for words that help us enter into the story, to smell the sizzle of a burger on the grill, to walks around with an infant with colic at 3AM, to recapture the quiver in your voice when you first ask out someone you like in high school. Words are frail instruments, but they are what we have to communicate our best aspirations. Politicians and pastors share that trying task. We owe it to our listeners to do our best to both inform and inspire.