“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.”   John Coltrane 

Unbeknownst to me, the seminary I attended was on its way to becoming a graduate school of religion. Consequently, no one taught preaching.  This was fine with me. 

By the time I finished my Masters of Divinity degree I had decided I didn’t want to be a pastor after all, so I went on to work toward a PhD in Philosophy of Religion. But when it came time to write my thesis, I realized I was neither capable of, nor interested in, thinking and writing at the required level of abstraction.

Around that time, my wife and I were visiting friends up in a hill town in Western Massachusetts.  It was the height of color season and we both were nearly knocked out by the beauty.  We kept crying out to each other, “How could we live here!?  How could we live here !?” Our friend, knowing my struggles, folded his arms and said, “Well, Heath and Rowe (two neighboring towns) are looking for a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister to share.” I applied and was called. By the next summer we were living there.

The problem was, I was no better at writing sermons than a dissertation. Compounding my problem was that during the summer both churches were full of theologians, some of them pretty well known. So, I was expected to be a scholar again, although I was no better at writing pastoral prayers than I was sermons.  And then, when fall came, the theologians left, leaving me with the Yankees.

It was a pretty uninspiring fall and winter for all of us in church that year. I tried writing notes and I tried writing whole texts for the sermons. None of it worked.  And I was just winging it with the pastoral prayers. I’m pretty sure people were bored and as unhappy as I was with the results. One day, a matriarch of the Heath church spoke to me after services.  “The pastoral prayer is just as important as the sermon,” she said, “if not more important.”

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Then came Holy Week.  We were really busy as congregations all week leading up to Easter. We had an active youth group with kids from both churches. My wife and I were young and well-liked by the kids, who were accustomed to being bored in church, so we centered a lot of the Holy Week activities around them. This made the adults happy too.

But all of this had taken up so much time that I came up to the night before Easter without a sermon or a prayer. I was terrified and I didn’t know what I was going to do. Of course I couldn’t sleep that night. I finally got up and drove around the countryside listening to a great all-night jazz program on public radio to soothe my soul.

I’d been thinking all week about Easter’s Bible stories and the prophetic stories that always surrounded them. As I drove, I discovered a story of my own began to flow in my imagination. By the time I got home around 4 a.m., that story was all I had. So, I sat down and attempted to write what was flowing through me. I realized what I was writing came out as a prayer, not a sermon.

I had no choice but to accept the prayer as a gift. It would serve as the pastoral prayer for that Easter service. But I still went to church without a sermon, still terrified. When sermon time came, I started to talk and the story which had begun in the night continued to flow. I think some of the people found it worth hearing from the look in their eyes, which I could see because I wasn’t trying to read something. One of the deacons, a carpenter who later built my house, came up afterward and said in his Yankee twang, “I never know what you’re trying to say to me, but I like it a lot better when you look at me when you’re trying to say it!”

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I never tried to write a sermon ever again. I came to trust the experience of riding through the countryside late Saturday nights listening to jazz after meditating on the Bible stories for a week. Each Sunday at dawn, a prayer would flow from the story that was surfacing and I would write it down for the service. Then I would get into the pulpit and tell the story that emerged.

I didn’t reflect much on what was happening on those Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. I just continued to do it for the next 50-some years. 

Recently, I went to a jazz concert made up of the progressive jazz that played on the radio as I drove waiting for inspiration. I decided to listen carefully to how each song developed. Here’s what I heard: 
~First, the band played a melody they and everybody else were familiar with. 
~Next, each musician was inspired to improvise on that melody. 
~Then, the musicians improvised together, which produced scarily marvelous harmonies and disharmonies. 

It suddenly came to me that these jazz musicians had taught me how to preach and pray.  My common melodies were the Bible stories, which inspired me. My improvisations emerged when Bible’s stories merged with our common story. What rose from this inspiration was not some abstract Truth but, at best, experiencing our own stories more truly.

I am still learning, as Sarah Vaughan said, “There are notes between notes, you know.” 

Rev. Comstock’s prayers have been gathered into a book, Seasonings: prayers of praise and complaint. There’s no collection of his sermons, however, as they were never written.