Note
Used as LCOS šEpistle April 2026.
I would like to tell you the story of my first sermon.
As the clock rewinds, what you should know is that I donāt really like being the one up front. I am not a natural communicator. I have always had a certain sense of entrapment within my own mind, unable to find adequate words of expression. In fact, preaching and teaching were the biggest factors that made me question if being a pastor was the right choice for me. But preaching in particular is kind of a big deal, so I had to learn how to at least muddle through it in seminary.
I had a long runway up to this first sermon. They donāt let seminarians preach until we finish all our introductory classes. So I had been studying for over a year before my fieldwork supervisor put me on the preaching schedule for the very first time.
When the time approached, it was with a decent amount of internal agony and angst I wrote that sermon, scrawled on a few sheets of wrinkled note paper. In class, they had been impressing on us the benefit of preaching from memory. And so like all students who take their lessons too literally, I stepped into the pulpit without a single note in front of me.
I can still picture those three steps up into the pulpit: one, two, threeā¦ Then looking up from high in the pulpit out into the congregation felt a lot like balancing on a highwire. At that moment, everything in my mind shut off. My outline and points just flew away and left me standing there.
The furious internal search ensued with a mumbling and babbling of some incoherent points. I stretched them out as long as I could. Sitting down after a horrible and horrifyingā¦ two minutesā¦ feeling every heartbeat in-between like a war drum before battle.
I am sure many of you have had similar moments of āI donāt know if I can do this.ā Being asked to step outside your comfort zone means things can go down in flames quite spectacularly. That day made me swear I would never be a sole pastor, and yet here I am.
It is easy to tame the call to follow Jesus to fit inside our comfort zone. No big failures, no anxious nerves, a certain sense of predictability. We can forget the Jesus who said:
āFollow me, and leaveĀ the dead to bury their own dead.ā And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. - Matthew 8:21-23
Following Jesus looks a lot more like dying than it does taking a victory lap. God works the most powerfully when we are holding onto Him for dear life. He called Moses with a studder and asked him to speak (with a little help, but he still had to do it). He called short overlooked David to become a warrior and king. He called crabby Jonah to extend a warning and then blessing to Nineveh. It is often in the things we are convinced we canāt, donāt want to, or will mess up that Jesus calls us to follow him.
Dying to your own self-worth is terrifying. Failure is embarrassing. But following Jesus is not about personal achievement, it is about life in and through Him. With that in mind:
What part of you needs to die so that something else can grow? What comfort zone needs stretched so that you get on the boat with Jesus?
Take some time to sit with those questions honestly. If you find any easy answer, its probably a copout. If you donāt feel like you might have to die a little inside you havenāt quite found it yet. Because when we finally come to the end of ourselves, in that place were we finally feel small, is the place Jesus has always met His disciples and said: āFollow me.ā