No one is more stunned than I am when, once every six weeks or so, I stand up in a pulpit in an international, multi-racial and -cultural Methodist congregation and offer a testimony of God’s love to my faith community. Most would call what I do preaching, although that word makes me squirm. There are several things “wrong” with this picture: I continue to self-identify not as a Methodist, but a Quaker - and not as a preacher, but as a writer. I continue to wrestle actively with the idea of preaching and to believe deeply that no one voice alone is authorized to speak of God. Isn’t that a core tenant of Quakerism: the radical democratization of religious experience, the insistence that every one of us hears and feels the Light within us?

Silence was and is the center of God for me. That will never change. Silence is the door to the vast world of reverence, holiness, and awe – the place where my clumsy, inarticulate, wholly inadequate attempts to define God fall mercifully quiet. Silence has always been a relief to me. Looking back, I believe I fled to silence as a form of retreat in the face of fundamentalism and prejudice. After all, as long as we remain silent, none of us can abuse God or call him to our side to promote racism, misogyny, oppression, or dubious political schemes. This certainly explains my deep affinity for negative theology, as well.

But a Christianity of silence and apophasis is a solitary venture, and in the last few years God has led me into relationship and community as never before. I got married; and I have finally stopped drifting and become a dedicated, committed member of a faith community. In a truly relational setting where my soul and life mingle with those of others, I discover that I long to share my experiences of the God of Love with the people I love. And I long to hear their stories, too. In the radical democracy of the Kingdom, we must each articulate what we have seen and felt of God in the silence, because only the polyphony that results can truly echo the God who appears to us in so many voices, faces and guises.

Perhaps in my ideal church, every voice would contribute equally to the way God is articulated in the community - but in most congregations (and in mine) this is for many reasons impossible. That is why I see my vocation as a lay preacher as, first and foremost, a vocation of <i>listening</i>, not speaking. I could never fully articulate anyone else’s vision of God, but I hope that by listening hard enough, I can try to represent the experiences of all of my brothers and sisters in the pulpit. I listen to my congregation, my ear to their hearts; and I listen hard for the Spirit in the silence and for God in her Scriptures. I listen, wrestle, mull and wait. What I’m waiting for is a glimpse of the place where the needs and dreams of my faith family and the presence of God meet. And once I have felt my way into that place and sounded out its dimensions, I draw on every resource I have to find the words, images, metaphors and poetry to describe it so that we as a community can jointly reflect on the experience. They’re my words, but it’s their lives and their God. I can only bear witness to the Love present in our midst and try not to get myself in the way. And that’s it, honestly: weeks of attentive, concentrated listening and loving to produce a 15 minute sermon.  Which is, I think, just the right balance.