There’s a small bit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian that shows the crowds gathering to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The Python gang, including the titular Brian, are in the back of the crowd and can’t hear very well, and they are bickering amongst themselves about other matters, making it almost impossible to hear anything at all. But, they do catch a word or two: “I think he said ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.'” And, that begins a short debate on what’s so great about cheesemakers. Maybe Jesus is actually referring to the whole field of dairy workers, perhaps? And, then Brian overhears a group from the better dressed in the audience, as they are walking away and discussing that Jesus doesn’t seem to understand that the meek are the problem.

While this episode is mildly amusing, it makes one wonder about who was wrote the whole thing down at the start. Did anyone test their listening and comprehension?

Over my long career in parish ministry I’ve had the great pleasure of serving church communities full of interesting people, many of those people well-educated and thoughtful— with lots of years of church involvement. Occasionally, though, in the midst of these good people, I find myself wondering about their listening skills. One of the most confounding aspects of my job as preacher and teacher is discovering that some people not only fail to listen on a regular basis to what I say from the pulpit, but manage to believe fully in a point that they are sure I made, when I know for certain that that’s not what I said. It’s a strange experience to argue with a person who thinks that I’ve said something when I actually made a point in direct opposition to what they think I said. Upon hearing my attempt at correction, they sometimes dig in, staying true to what they are sure they heard— even though it’s not at all what I said.

And, then there are other times when I have said things that I think are rather provocative, things that are meant to unsettle, yet they elicit no response at all. Part of my job, after all, is to challenge and disrupt, in order to foster spiritual growth. Occasionally, someone will follow up with a question or comment after worship, or in an email, but it’s rare.

This month at Old South the worship theme has been prayer – what is it for? how should we do it? what is the point? We have taken a quick look at the Lord’s Prayer, as Jesus’s example of how to pray. We have also considered lament, as well as Jesus’s long prayer in the Farewell Discourse in John. Last Sunday, we considered the practice of prayer, including a new look at an old method of structuring prayer. 

During the series, I offered a few thoughts and suggestions that were intended to be provocative. What does it mean when I say that I don’t think that God is all that engaged in the details, that God is not particularly involved with the everyday aspects of my life, or any individual’s life, or a community’s? What does it mean to pray if I’m not sure that God is listening or paying attention?

No questions. No comments. No argument.

Four weeks in, I invited people to stay after worship to talk about this series on prayer. We had a small group gathered around a table and the discussion was lively. The only problem was that the discussion didn’t really focus in any way on anything I had said in recent weeks. People talked about their long-held ideas around prayer, with no new ground offered for debate.

I spent weeks planning and plotting, trying to inspire a new awareness of various aspects of prayer. Yet, the small sample of the congregation gathered around a table on that Sunday morning suggested that my words didn’t hit the mark. Instead, those words had gone through a remarkable process by which they were transformed into the words that the hearers expected, words that fit neatly into already well-formed beliefs and ideas.

It’s not that the already well-formed beliefs and ideas are all wrong, because they are not. What’s missing, though, is a conscientious consideration of new ideas, an active interest in engaging in previously unexplored dimensions of one’s faith tradition. The Christian faith is a vast pool of ideas, theologies, and experiences— enough material for multiple lifetimes. Faith communities ought not be filled with people who are all there just to keep rehashing the same old notions, especially when some of those old notions are not very helpful or affirming— and some of them not connected to biblical sources.

So, what’s a pastor and teacher to do about encouraging better listening and fostering new paths of exploration? Maybe I should start extolling the virtues of cheesemakers . . .