Preaching 300 Sermons at Once

In an adult-education lecture this morning, one of our priests quoted a saying of a Bishop Cox (sp?):  When you preach a sermon to 300 people, you’re really preaching 300 different sermons, because the people all have their own “grids” through which they filter what they hear.

We all see the world through our own individual grids — or it you will, our own prisms.  That goes for pew-sitters, priests, and bishops.  We have no reason to think it wasn’t equally true of the Church Fathers — and of the authors of the documents we have canonized as Scripture.

Certainly that doesn’t mean we can go to the other extreme, and categorically disbelieve everything that anyone else ever says to us.  If we did, life would be pretty short.   So, for example, we can’t categorically reject everything that’s said in Scripture, just because its authors were human and therefore fallible.

But we do have to be cautious.  We can’t assume that, just because Person A said X, that X is therefore automatically true.  Person X has his prisms, and is seeing the world through them.  We too have our prisms, and we interpret what he says to us through them.