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It happened with alarming regularity when I was a parish priest.
I would spend hours carefully preparing a Sunday sermon, trying to make sense of a passage and work out what it might have to say to us. Somewhere along the way, I would usually add a personal illustration. Perhaps I would mention something about my family, or something I had noticed in the garden. The idea was simply to give people a way into the passage, to connect these ancient words with ordinary life.
Then, after the service, I would stand by the door as everyone left.
Alongside the familiar “Nice sermon, Vicar,” somebody would occasionally stop and say something like, “I didn’t know that about daffodils. Thank you.”
And I would smile, while thinking that somewhere in the previous twenty minutes, Jesus had said something rather challenging about how we should live, and somehow I had managed to turn it into a gardening lesson.
I eventually learned to use illustrations rather more carefully.
But I also began to realise something else.
People had not simply heard the words I had spoken. They had heard them through their own interests, experiences and expectations. Something familiar had caught their attention, and once it did, everything else was filtered through it.
We do something very similar when we read the Bible.
