The pulpit is less than half of the mystery of preaching. If we attempt to separate it from what is happening on the listening side, it can be an empty gong or a clanging cymbal. Sermons are one-dimensional until a warming current begins to flow along the fragile wiring of the heart.

One Sunday at 10:55 a.m. I was stopped in the hallway by a young church member who appeared in great distress. He asked me, as the preacher who would be leading the service, if it would be all right if I asked the congregation to remain a few minutes after the benediction so he might speak to them. His request unnerved me a little. I had no idea what it was he wanted to say. There were only two minutes left before the chimes would ring and start the Introit and Call to Worship. But this was obviously most important. I asked him more about his request.

The day before, while driving along the Main Street of nearby Mt. Sterling, he had experienced a Grand Mal seizure that caused him to lose control of the car. It left the traffic lane, jumped the curb, and plunged through the door of a bank. While no one was hurt or killed, this discovery about a serious problem of which he had had no previous knowledge -and the threat it posed to both his job and the security of his family - had left him in a state of near terror. He would ask the members to pray for him. The chimes had now finished the ringing. The opening words of the service would have to await the tardy minister.

"Let me think about it," I said. "I will try to do what is best." We proceeded. And when it was time for the intercessory prayers, I said something like this:

"One of our members is here today with an especially heavy burden for which we are all asked to pray...."

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than he stood. And in a voice stronger than my own, said: "I am the man!"

Then followed a dramatic, attentive silence. Calmly he told the story and made his request. More silence. Compassionate silence. Then our prayer. And, after worship ended, intimate surrounding concern, and offers to help.

Sermons often are beat out on the anvil of immediate events, as the times and the timeless intersect and hope is called upon to defeat despair, as life tries one more time to get the best of death.

Other times they survive in states of suspension and dead detachment from where the world really is in its journey, from where the people truly are.

The Holy Spirit waits in the wings.

But the preacher cannot default. He cannot stand there mute, helpless to bring the Word to life. If the Word's servant retreats into the obligation to "say something" because it is Sunday, it is a poor substitute for the passion of proclamation that cannot and will not be stilled.

All who preach, or have preached on any regular basis, will admit to having done both - sometimes from calendared necessity, and other times when the sermon is so electric, so urgent that it writes itself.

And the congregation waits, wondering which today it will be, while out there, half-way to the rear are more than one who wants to cry, "I am the man!" or "I am the woman!" What have you to say to me, what can you say to me about my fears, my job, my alienation from a son that has brought such pain? To sorrow over a husband dead four years that is like an iron weight inside me. To my guilt. To my amazement over the good that keeps pouring through my days and years.

When we who preach come across with the real goods - with something we need to say and want to say - it will be because we have found a way to personalize the truth so that it includes our own blood.

Because we have invaded the present rather than only reviewing the past.

Because we have located whatever it is that connects the hearers to a larger loaf; because our questions, our wonder, our complicity, and our love are also part of the process.

Because we have shared more than ideas. Because we will also have shared the present grace of the living God.

I remember times when none of this happened - at least that's the way it seems now. Over weeks of preparation for a new fall I once became excited by discovering Paul's exhortation to "be holy in every department of your lives." Now here was something to run with, to race with, to tantalize the congregational imagination with, to lead the people along new, secret passageways of the spirit, connectors with eternal things.

The first of the series had been lovingly written and readied for Sunday morning delivery. I picked up the Saturday paper to read how a young civil rights worker had been murdered in Mississippi. Although the next day there were reports of the tragic effect on his family and an increasingly traumatized nation, the sermon stayed mostly as it was. I have never overcome feelings of failure about what I said that morning.

In another parish with a considerable retirement-age constituency, I preached an autumn sermon titled "The November Years." For some it came out sounding as if it were time to see an attorney about drafting a Last Will and Testament. The people's minds were in another place - not contemplating the approach of death, but dwelling on the daily damage wrought by stereotypes of ageism.

Another Sunday I tried to proclaim the salvation gospel through the eyes and experience of three other Christians who had given shape to my own trust in God - G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, Thomas Merton, and Henri J. M. Nouwen. While the effort was noble, I remember talking later with two listeners who had personal agendas of suffering that were light years removed from what I had been talking about.

Yet other Sabbath mornings I seemed to have gotten it right. Sermons titled "Learning To Manage Our Fears" and "What Shall We Do About The Problems We Cannot Do Anything About?" apparently had impact. Another came on that Easter morning when our daughter Susan was killed in an accident on the way home to spend Resurrection Day with us. The sermon (the book came later), with the stolen title, "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever," also seemed to leave the people feeling that I had been speaking directly to them - that God was present in undeniable ways.

Little is here about lectionary preaching. I am not hesitant to affirm its values, so long as it does not become wooden or mechanical. It doesn't have to be. Yet neither does obedience to a lectionary assure anything except a comprehensiveness of approach to what the Bible has to say. One can still preach from a list and wind up fumbling with ashes.

There are too many Sundays on which one feels called to be a persuasive expositor of faith. Sometimes we are too tired to listen to the Voice beyond our own. Sometimes we try too hard to parade our scholarship when a crust of bread is what is needed. Or we may fall in love with our own plans that prevent our hearing the wild winds of humanity or the soft breezes of peace.

But when we stand there and look into those wonderful, waiting faces, and trust the knowledge that we have something to say that must be heard, something that is longing to be heard, something that transcends yesterday's ten o'clock news, something that feeds the soul and comes out of the overflow of our own struggle with God - preaching as programmed obligation dies and the continuing incarnation is confirmed.

I still see, standing up within the congregation, that young man who had told me about his car lurching through the door of a bank building saying, "I am the man!" Like Pilate saying, "Ecce Homo" (behold the man) as he presented Jesus to the crowds. "I am the man" shows up regularly. One waits to see if any word has come that bears his name, a word that is uniquely his own reassurance, or summons to act.

This is a time in which it is easy to be disillusioned about preachers and preaching. We have moved into a new age of communications and of skepticism about those who pretend to higher authority. Even the word "preaching" is made to sound shallow and of limited use in helping people to form decisions or live gallantly.

At its best, though, preaching shatters the routineness. It opens the eyes of second worlds. It becomes a letter from Christ "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts."

As a long-time admirer of the writer/dramatist Norman Corwin, I once in a moment of boldness mailed him a copy of a book I had written. He was then teaching, as a senior statesman of creative and script writing at the University of Southern California. In acknowledging what I had sent, he said the book had arrived on the day before one of his last classes of the semester - and that he had ended the class by reading aloud from it.

Like a treasured personal letter, we can expect a sermon to be unique to the moment, and as important to those who listen as a love letter is to us in our most tender moments.

That happens when we have had something to say. Something that may not last out the night, but has given someone a few glimpses of stars.