Dr Joel Gregory, Truett Theological Seminary, 2015 National Festival of Young Preachers

0:08 Pre-arranged appointments. Finding stories at just the right time. It was just before Christmas and my wife Joanne and I were at the Central Market. I was doing what I usually do and that is pushing the basket while she was putting things in it. I need to make a confession. When it comes to nuts, I'm a little bit challenged. Now, I don't mean colloquially what we call crazy people. I mean nuts. I can know what a peanut is or a paper shell pecan. They grow those in the Trinity River Valley not far from here. Walnuts, I can usually identify, but then the taxonomy of nuts begins to get a little vague for me. she had a recipe that called for hazelnuts. This may be a painful thing to confess, but I couldn't quite remember what hazelnuts were.

1:07 When we got home, I asked her to put some of them in a little glass dish, and I sat down in my red fake leather reading chair with a glass of hazelnuts and a new book that had come to me. It was one of the Renovari series of books. You're probably familiar with it by Richard Foster. 52 weeks of readings, a different mystic for every week. It fell open in my lap, randomly. Fell open to the writings of a lady with whom I was not familiar, Julian of Norwich, the first woman to have written anything that is preserved in the English language. I'm eating my hazelnuts when my eyes fall on these words from Julian. I saw something small in my hand about the size of a hazelnut.

2:04 Have you ever swallowed a whole hazelnut? And then Julian went on to write in her mystical, inimitable, visionary way, God told me that he made it, that he preserves it, and that he uses it. You wouldn't know, but I would know that right at that moment, sitting in that overstuffed red reading chair, that was exactly the word that I needed to hear. I've come to call it a hazelnut moment. Carl Jung, the theistic founder of psychoanalysis, called it something else. He made up a word, synchronicity. In fact, he scientifically studied synchronicity, but he was afraid that the academy would ridicule what he was doing, so he didn't publish the book about it until it was a posthumous publication.

3:00 Carl Jung said that in life, things that come together randomly may be meaningful when there's no causation. That is, you walk into experience, you live stories that come into your life fraught with meaning, laden with significance, but there's no causation. A hazelnut here, a book there. You sit down in 6B on an airplane, and in 6A is someone who needs a word of testimony meaningfully. That's our strange little story this morning preserved by Mark. It's from Passion Week, but to lift it up out of that context for just a moment, here Jesus has two incognito, unnamed, anonymous disciples come to him and ask him, where shall we make arrangements to celebrate the Passover?

4:04 They talk to him as if he doesn't know what's going on. There's an element of irony in asking the Lamb of God, where are we going to have Passover? Sometimes we seek to inform Jesus what time it is, don't we? He's ahead of the game. What a strange thing. Go to Jerusalem. You'll meet a man there with a jar of water on his head, follow him, and he'll go to the house of another man, knock on his door, tell him the master needs the room, he'll show it to you, it'll be prepared. And it happened just as Jesus said it would happen. What a double synchronicity. Follow a man with a jar of water in his head, and he'll lead you to the house of another man. Nobody knows anybody, so far as we can tell, and you'll find a whole lot of very good stories. I wonder how the church held on to this story in those decades before Mark recorded the gospel.

5:04 I'm sure those two anonymous and cognito disciples told this story many times, and those to whom they told it told others, till it became a story of the community. But for me, in the preaching life, it's a reminder that even though you will find good stories by working on it the very best stories you ever tell will find you it's a matter of a strange pre-arrangement a divine appointment put yourself in the shoes of these two, they had a sense that things were not going too well for Jesus. He says, go around the mountain and go to Jerusalem. It was a city of gates, fish gate, sheep gate, dung gate, water gate. They could have gone into any gate, but they went into the one gate where there was a man with a jar of water on his head. Now that would have been a phenomenon because, unfortunately, ladies, in those patriarchal days, that was a job of women to carry water on their head so it would have been a phenomenon to see a man with a jar of water on his head.

6:17 Josephus, who was known for exaggeration, said there were a million people in Jerusalem. Here at just the right gate, they run into the unexampled sight of a man with a jar of water on his head. They follow him through the labyrinthine maze of streets till they come to the door of the house of another man that nobody don't know. They knock on it. I try to think of something like that happening here in North Texas. It would be like leaving North Park Mall and the stranger tells you, you see that red pickup, follow it into Highland Park, go up to the door where it stops and say, is the barbecue ready?

6:57 And yet, what a story. I have found that God is always in the process of putting someone in front of me with a jar of water on his head. Some years ago, in a transition in my own life, I was both preaching and publishing. Publish a magazine, get on a plane and go preach somewhere. Publishing finds its hub in New York City. I found myself there most months, distribution, advertising, something like that. I was on a delayed jet late after midnight into Newark International Airport. Tired and hungry, I did something I've never done before or after in hundreds and hundreds of flights. I grabbed my bag off the carousel, went to the cab line, first cab in the line. I said, take me to the closest hotel, don't care where it is.

7:52 Well, he took me almost to the end of the runway of the Newark Airport. said here it is I got out it was an old Ramada Inn I went up and said do you have a room I was so tired I was ready to sleep in the lobby one room then hunger overtook sleep I looked into a grill a man was eating something I sat down beside him and said could I have what he has when out of the back of that room came a voice. Dr. Gregory. My first impulse was to put my hands on me.

8:30 I was Newark after all. A tall, striking, handsome, 30-year-old African-American man walked up to me. He said, how strange it is to see you here. And I thought, he doesn't know how strange this is. He said, I just finished reading your autobiography today. And I wouldn't even know what you looked like had I not just texted a mutual friend who sent me your picture. that was Dr. Joe Carter pastor of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church on 106 Sussex in Newark, New Jersey now you may think well the odds caught up with you I know something about permutation or all of that stuff if you think so you think a printing plant would blow up and unabridged dictionaries would fall out of the air our lives have been intertwined the years since then working together for racial understanding in educational endeavors, in planning things locally and nationally.

9:50 God put him there as someone with a jar of water on his head, and it became one of the very best stories because it found me. Now this is not a suggestion to young preachers that you become lazy and fill your sermons with the latest thing you saw on TV last night.

10:13 But it is a suggestion that work though you may to find stories, the best ones are going to find you. And sometimes you may be leading someone or following someone to a story and not even know it. Meanwhile back in Jerusalem Somewhere while these nameless anonymous disciples Are following a name This anonymous man With a jar of water on his head To the house of another nameless anonymous man They really didn't know what was happening There's no suggestion That they thought anything other Well it's the 14th day of Nisan It's another Passover And a long succession of Passovers Little did they know That they were on their way To the most famous meal in history in the most famous room in history? You might want to challenge that statement, but think about it. Is there a more famous meal than that last supper, that Lord's Supper?

11:16 You can read ancient classic writers about various feasts, but those are forgotten in antiquity. no meal is more celebrated than that meal. And what about that room? I don't care. Name the rooms. Taj Mahal, Oval Office, House of Parliament. People who never heard of those know about an upper room. And they didn't know it.

11:41 The preaching life is like that. Sometimes you're on your way to the best of stories and you don't even know it. Let me give you a hint. When you're on your way to something big in preaching, a story that's just right, heaven doesn't open and a big hand doesn't say, now this is it.

12:07 Oftentimes they sneak up on you. This last June I've been preaching 50 years. Started when I was two. No, not really. Now I can look back on events in a preaching life that were watershed events. 1988, the denomination of which I was then a part, called on me to preach the annual message at a huge gathering in San Antonio. It was in the midst of a 10-year battle about who believed the Bible the most.

12:45 I didn't know what to say. It's basically a denominational civil war. I was crying out, God, something. I needed to get away from my church over in Fort Worth, so an older pastor in the city invited me to come study on the other side of town in a church hidden away in a very quiet neighborhood. This pastor happened to have the largest collection of sermon books that anybody ever knew, not exegetical commentaries. not books on hermeneutics or homiletics or theology, 10,000 sermon books. I'd never seen anything like it. I'm really not that much of a reader of sermon books ahead of exegesis, so I walked into that study and randomly, randomly without any thought, pulled off a volume by a late 19th, early 20th century Methodist preacher, Louis Albert Banks.

13:45 it fell open in my hand to a sermon that started with a story about an Irish lard, Londonderry, who had a castle raid. But the local peasants were scavenging it for stone, so he ordered that a wall be built around that castle. When he came back several years later, he found out that the castle was gone, but there was a perfect six-foot-tall wall.

14:15 They asked one of the peasants, where's the castle? And he said, Lord, what is it to us to be going over all island to find stones when there were wonderful stones in the castle? They built a wall and lost the castle. And it became the single most significant story that ever found me in a life of preaching. you can tear down the very thing you're trying to protect. Random. Ten thousand books, and I pull off the first one without even thinking. Now, don't misunderstand me. Sermon stories don't fall out of heaven every Saturday night. But the best ones are stories that will find you rather than you find them.

15:15 And they'll become part of you. Let me give you a hint of the most encouraging thing I ever discovered in preaching, and I discovered it too late. It is so painfully simple, I'm embarrassed to tell you. Jesus is on your side.

15:35 even when you're getting ready to preach. They went up to that room, and all three synoptics say they found it exactly like he said it would be. Passover lamb slain, maybe roasting, unleavened bread, Passover wine, bitter herbs, fruit, coffee, everything exactly as he said it would be. You'll find that when it comes to his promise. His promise to be with you always, even in preaching. Almost so much that you can become the story. I guess it's a largely forgotten book and movie now. You might want to look at it.

16:30 Ray Bradbury was a science fiction writer, Fahrenheit 451. Strange title for a book. It's The Temperature at Which Paper Ignites. Made a movie out of it in 1966 in some future scientific science fiction setting. The Gestapo of some sort was against old books. Nobody could have a book. So in order to save books, the refugee bibliophiles moved out into a forest. And every one of them memorized a classic. So much so that they gave up their Christian names and were simply known by the book that they memorized. Hi, I'm Homer. I'm Dickens. I'm Plato.

17:26 it became so much of them that they became the story the best stories are those things that come to your life by a divine synchronicity and you're not just telling that story that story becomes part of you Abraham has a knife up in the air and there's a ram in the thicket at just the right time Joseph gets thrown into Pharaoh's jail, and at just the right time, Pharaoh's butler shows up and needs a dream interpreted. Israel clamors for a king, and at just the right time, Kish's donkeys run away, and his son Saul chased those runaway donkeys, and he's surprised chasing donkeys to find out he's pronounced king.

18:34 a little baby Moses crying can't hide him anymore put him in a little basket for the second time in history all of God's purposes are in a little boat and at just that moment Pharaoh's daughter says my it's a hot day I think I'll go down to the Nile and bathe Paul doesn't know which way to go in Roman Asia in Turkey he tries to go this way that way the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus forbids him. Then he gets on a boat, and what should have been a three-day journey is a one-day journey with a wind blowing him straight across the Aegean because he has an appointment with a traveling businesswoman named Lydia, and there she is. The best stories are stories of divine timing that are prearranged and they will find out.