The Sermon That Changed My Life

The year was 1995.

O.J. Simpson was on trial, eBay was founded, and I was closing out my high school career.

As a part of a local barbershop group in my hometown, named Twice, I had the opportunity to travel a lot. Our group performed for senior events, lodge parties, the occasional school function, and a multitude of other community-oriented events.  But often we found ourselves in churches.

When one grows up attending church and has the opportunity to visit so many churches, it is easy to become cynical and tune out even the best of speakers.

But a warm Summer morning in 1995 changed all of that for me.  On a performance tour we stopped at a small church of some random denominational flavor in upstate Indiana. It was a nondescript church with a graying crowd… a church with more empty seats than filled ones… a church not unlike the millions of others one passes daily and never takes notice of… a church that passes immediately into forgotteness.

Our group sang with as much gusto as we could muster during the worship portion of the Service, smiling broadly and trying to seem oh-so-sincere. But inside I think we all felt as though we were doing this boring church a favor.  As we stepped off the stage and into the front row, I never imagined that this little church and it’s dry Service was going to change my life.

As the Minister, an older gentleman with peppered hair and a lanky build, approached the pulpit I feared the worst.  He was not unlike the endless parade of preachers I had come to tune out on so often an occasion.  Except… he had a bit of a sly grin on his face, which I thought was rather odd.  And to this day I swear he looked right into my eyes, and perhaps even my soul, as he bent over the pulpit.  And then he did something wholly unexpected: digging into the dark recesses of the pulpit he pulled out a 2-liter bottle of soda pop and held it up for all to see, much like angler might raise a prize catch for all to see.

“THIS!,” he said in a tone seemingly swollen with pride and love, “is none other than Vernors Ginger Ale, the best drink on the planet.”

He then, ginger ale in hand, spent the next 20 minutes describing why Vernors Ginger Ale (and no other ginger ale but Vernors) was the perfect metaphor for Christ and a life spent sold out to Him.

I was spellbound.

He was short, to the point, and painted a picture in our minds about life with Christ that forever altered both my view of God… and ginger ale.  There weren’t three point and a poem, there wasn’t an altar call, and there was no yelling, sweating, or crying.  There was nothing shocking, mind altering, or ground shaking about anything he said.  Yet above all other sermons this is the one I still remember.  Perhaps that is shocking in and of itself.

And now, as a preacher myself, there’s not a sermon that goes by that I do not think back to that warm Summer morning in ‘95 when an unassuming preacher taught me the greatest lesson on preaching I’ve ever learned….

Make it memorable.