As the below true-life examples illustrate, I’ve been known to let faux curse words slip in my sermons on more than one occasion:

“The disciples had been fishing all day, and they hadn’t caught anything whatsoever. They probably felt like crap.”

“You’re going to break your wedding vows. It might not be in a big, dramatic Grey’s Anatomy kind of way, but you will break them. I mean, I love my husband Jeff, but when I’m pissed at him for eating the leftovers I wanted for my own dinner, I’m pretty sure I’m not cherishing him.”

“So if you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, ‘Well, great, I’m screwed,’ don’t worry; you’re not alone.”

These words started making appearances on the smaller, more informal Wednesday night service, when I was preaching without notes. I soon found myself saying these kinds of things in my Sunday morning sermons to hundreds of people. I started to ask myself why recently.

 

Part of the “problem”  is that I’ve always loved words. My poor mother had to carry around this ridiculously small chatterbox of a child (I was in the first percentile, meaning 99% of the kids my age were bigger than I) who spoke in complete sentences but who couldn’t walk yet. When I did (finally) learn to walk, I used my newfound motor skills to make my way over to any available lap, book in tow, chanting, “Read the book; read the book.”

Soon I was sitting by the back door on my older sister’s “liberry” day, waiting to relieve her of her latest acquisition. A few years later, when most of my friends’ parents had rules about how long they had to read before being allowed to play or watch television, my mom had to make an entirely different set of rules: no reading until I was ready to leave; no reading after lights out; no reading at the dinner table.

Ironically, I had a speech impediment. Words that began with “r” or “l” came out sounding like they started with a “w.” My mispronunciations as a toddler were age-appropriate and thus somewhat cute. In second grade, I went to speech therapy to find my lost consonants. Talking became a chore; communicating orally was hard work and, quite literally, homework. I gradually became less and less talkative. My interest shifted even more to the written word. After years and years of reading others’ words, I began shaping words myself as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

To be honest, I sometimes wonder if my life might be just a little bit easier if I didn’t care about words so much. I still haven’t completely overcome my reluctance to speak. If someone else is willing to talk, I’ll generally let her, unless I think I have something to say worth hearing. If I weren’t so caught up in wanting to express myself well, I’d probably be less hesitant to speak. With the written word, there are built-in opportunities, even expectations, around editing that don’t exist with language in its oral form. If words didn’t matter to me, I’d change my words in my sermons to be less questionable. Read more