Saints and Sinners: When embellishing is OK
Ministers have to be careful about the anecdotes they tell. Sometimes, a minister who makes up a little story to warm up his congregation or to illustrate a point tells the story so often that eventually he can’t remember whether it’s true or not.
Usually this makes no difference. When you tell an interesting story, people don’t make an issue over whether it actually happened.
One of evangelist Billy Graham’s funniest stories is about a drunk on an airplane who stumbled up to him and muttered, “Mr. Graham, I am so glad to meet you. Your sermons have meant so much to me.”
I don’t imagine that ever happened. But it could have. Who knows? Who cares? It’s a good story, and I laugh every time I hear it.
When I was a minister in Boston, I once invited the great Baptist preacher Bernard Clausen to preach at my church. The title of his sermon was, “Good Grief!”
He began the sermon by saying, “Walking over to the church this morning, somebody came up to me and said ‘Bernard Clausen! Good grief! You here again?'”
I had accompanied Clausen from the Union Club to King’s Chapel that morning and nobody on the way made that remark. But it was a good lead-in to the sermon. What difference did it make if the story wasn’t true?
But not everybody feels as I do. I remember reading a review by Martin E. Marty on Ben Hibbs’ book, “White House Sermons,” (Harper & Row, 1972). After he read the transcribed sermons, Marty found that most of the East Room preachers invited by President Nixon overcrowded their sermons with “would-be funny stories and too many anecdotes.”
Marty, a renowned theologian and editor of “Context” (a newsletter that reviews thousands of books, magazines and newspapers pertaining to religion), said that Graham and clergyman Norman Vincent Peale “thrive on anecdotes.”
All in one sermon, Marty said, Graham “met a drunk on an airplane (there he is again), one of the greatest mathematicians in this country, the governor of Illinois, a little washer woman, a very wealthy man, a little old Baptist preacher, French student leaders and 3,000 hippies.”
In a warning to “ministers down the block,” Marty said, “No one really believes that you met all those people … or that something all that memorable happened in all those exchanges.”
Nevertheless, this tendency to want to tell a good story — and even to improve on it — was a failing of storytellers in Biblical times, too.
Scholars say that the writer who first told the story of the crossing of the Red Sea described how an east wind blew and temporarily dried up the swamp that was standing in the way of Israelites who wanted to escape from their Egyptian pursuers.
That may have been very close to the truth, but later storytellers apparently felt the tale lacked something. Embellishments were added and suddenly in the retelling Moses stretched his hand over the sea and it turned into dry land. That was better, but still not good enough. A later retelling, one that many of us are familiar with, had Moses lifting his hands to part the great waves of water which stood up like walls on either side (Sunday School leaflet artists have outdone themselves illustrating that one).
Is the story true? A bit of an exaggeration? Sure, but it has endured over the centuries, like any great story. And it, like Graham’s and Clausen’s tall tales, will continue to be talked about long after the strictly factual sermons have served their purpose.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)