Seasoned with poetry: Texts for preaching

We wondered what kind of reading ministers rely on for inspiration or help in preaching—apart from reading commentaries on scripture or other materials directly related to the task. Do they draw on certain authors of fiction or nonfiction? Are they influenced by essays, poetry, magazines or children’s literature? Here are some reflections. —Ed.

One night recently I was reading to my children a book about songbirds. There we discovered one of the most beautiful things in the world: a brood patch. When songbirds get ready to have babies, the feathers on their tummies get loose and fall out. The result is a brood patch, an oval of bare skin on the underside of the bird. It turns out that those tummy feathers, otherwise used to keep the bird’s body heat in, become a barrier that keeps that heat away from their young. And so, during breeding season, to better to conduct warmth to speckled eggs and then to newborns, songbirds develop a brood patch.

They lose their feathers for the sake of intimacy and new life: “O Jerusalem, how often I long to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, as a songbird gathers her eggs under her warm bare belly.”