The Weight
The Weight
"Living A Sermon" with Austin Carty
Show Notes:
Eddie and Chris are joined by previous guest Austin Carty for the first part of a double episode about his new book, Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon. Preachers are human, and just like all of us, they are influenced by their past, their community, and their surroundings. Preaching is a form of self-discovery that not everyone experiences, but Austin encourages all of us to take some time to sit with our pasts and write it out--if only to allow the transformational Spirit to work through us.
Austin is pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina. He earned his MDiv from Wake Forest University and his DMin from Emory University. He is the author of High Points and Lows: Life, Faith, and Figuring It All Out and The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry, which received the 2023 Christianity Today Award of Merit and was named Book of the Year by Preaching magazine.
Resources:
Follow Austin on Facebook
Buy Some of the Words are Theirs
Listen to Austin’s previous episode on The Weight
Hi. I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly:I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today, we're talking to Austin Carty. Austin is a pastor and a writer, and he's here today to talk about a new book that he has published called "Some of the Words Are Theirs: The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon." And Austin's a return guest on the podcast. We had him on a few years ago to talk about another book that he'd written. Man, I love this guy. It was great.
Eddie Rester:This guy, just fantastic. And for folks who are
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, for sure, it's, yeah. One of the lines he starting to check out right now because, like, "I'm not a preacher. I don't write sermons." You need to know that this book is about a lot more than writing a sermon. says early on is, "All theology is autobiographical." And if you're interested in faith at all, like the stories of faith, oftentimes, it's a way of kind of working out what's going on in your own life, in your own story.
Eddie Rester:Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:And this is a book about writing a sermon. It really is a metaphor for just thinking about how we live our lives. It's powerful book, man. It is so good. It's more like a memoir than it is a manual.
Eddie Rester:It caught me... It caught me off guard, because I was thinking, "Well, I'm gonna, I'll skate through this book real fast, prep for the podcast." And then I was just drawn into the story of his life and how he wove it into... There's process to life, and there's process to getting to understanding. There's process to accepting the stories that are helping write your story that sometimes you don't want to acknowledge. You know, as we talked, I thought about Faulkner saying that "the past is never dead. It's not even past," and how important that is for us to acknowledge, not just in the world, but in our own stories. And I think that if you're trying to figure out why, why am I struggling here? Why is this bothering me, and why am I this this way with my family or my friends? I think this is one of those books. Again, even if you don't write sermons, can help you think about that, and if you are a preacher, we're going to have him back to talk about process, because the book also talks about sermon process.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, so it does talk about sermon process. But more than that, it's like this... Preachers are people, and they have stories and they have a past. They're not perfect, and Austin makes that very clear and invites the human... I think it's for me, it reminded me to invite my humanity into an engagement with the task of preaching. And in doing that, it also gives freedom to not have to make every story come out right, not to fix every problem. That preaching is not that it's a faithful task. It's done. You don't have to be original. You don't have to, you know, write the finest and most original line ever. It's receiving words that were faithful, that that come to you from upstream. He'll use this metaphor of a river, and also know that the river is going somewhere, that God is not going to allow that which is beautiful or excellent or true to be dropped down. It will find its way into the kingdom of God, and we will as well, and our role is just to be faithful to the task. So good this book, and love the conversation.
Eddie Rester:Great conversation today. Grab the book, but also share the podcast. Let others know. Austin's also a fan of podcast, so if you're a fan of him, you should be a fan of the podcast and sharing that out in the world. That's all I'm going to say.
Chris McAlilly:It's good to talk with you. We'll talk to you soon, man. Peace.[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
Eddie Rester:As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy ,and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
Chris McAlilly:But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
Eddie Rester:That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
Chris McAlilly:Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition, and responsiveness to a changing world.
Eddie Rester:So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] We're here today with Austin Carty, written a new book, "Some of the Words Are Theirs." We'll talk about that in just a minute. Austin, you're back. You came. You were a guest a few years ago. Welcome back to The Weight.
Austin Carty:I am delighted to be back, and I came on the first time as a guest. This time I come on as a fan, because not only did I enjoy my time with you all so much last time, I began listening to your podcast on my own. So it is a thrill to be with you all. Thanks for inviting me back.
Chris McAlilly:You're gonna, you're just gonna make Eddie blush.
Eddie Rester:Well, just, actually, I'm gonna make you blush. Because a couple weeks ago, I was having a conversation about reading, and I said, "Hey, we had this guy on the podcast couple years ago, and he said,'It's okay to read fiction.'" So he has released me to read just crappy fiction all the time, in between reading deep theological stuff and cultural stuff, but just as a way to release the mind, to imagine. So that's still a part of what I tried to encourage people.
Chris McAlilly:Young adult fiction that Eddie reads, you know, every...
Eddie Rester:That's right.
Chris McAlilly:Every Thursday morning when you should be writing a sermon.
Eddie Rester:"Hunger Games." I'm reading lot of deep into...
Austin Carty:I'm glad to be the one who was able to give you permission to read all of these deep, important books, Eddie. I'm glad that I could make you feel good for reading.
Eddie Rester:Kindle Prime is my friend. Any any of the free sci fi stuff. So...
Chris McAlilly:So what's the best novel that you read over the summer, Eddie? Let's start there.
Eddie Rester:Oh, gosh.
Chris McAlilly:What'd you read? Anything good?
Eddie Rester:Um, yes, actually, I reread Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.
Chris McAlilly:Nice. The whole series?
Eddie Rester:I did.
Chris McAlilly:This is what you do...
Austin Carty:That's a good summer.
Chris McAlilly:Austin, this is what you can do when you don't have kids at home anymore. This is...
Eddie Rester:That's exactly right.
Chris McAlilly:Eddie's sitting out by the pool, lush, total lush, just reading.
Austin Carty:It certainly opens up a lot more reading time, I'm sure.
Eddie Rester:It does.
Austin Carty:I am on the complete opposite end, because I have four children, 12, 10, 6, and 4. So I still have to be very intentional about creating those reading margins.
Chris McAlilly:What about you? What about you, man? What did you read this summer that you really liked? I want to get to this before we get into it.
Austin Carty:The first book that comes to mind, in terms of novels that I read this summer, was I finally got around to reading Ann Patchett's "Tom Lake." I don't know if you all read that one, but it's a really good novel. It was enjoyable, had something to say. That's that's the first one that comes to mind. What about you, Chris?
Chris McAlilly:I read this book, "This Is Happiness" by Niall Williams, Irish writer, Faha Ireland, 1950s and it's before electricity comes in. Just a lovely, lovely, it's kind of Dickensian. It's like, totally immersive. Nothing much happens, but you have these really, really well developed characters. The prose is just extraordinary. And, I mean, you have to have some guts to name your novel "This Is Happiness," but I think it delivers.
Eddie Rester:I emailed him.
Chris McAlilly:Did you?
Eddie Rester:After I read the book.
Chris McAlilly:That's amazing.
Eddie Rester:"Hey, man, you need to know this book was amazing." It's about church. Religion is woven into it, regrets, lost love. It really is. Austin, you know, as your kids grow up, it's, I tell people all the time, "read this book."
Austin Carty:When did it come out? I'm not familiar with it.
Chris McAlilly:So I discovered it actually, a friend of mine, Sarah, who's in the MFA program here at Ole Miss, she knew that I liked Wendell Berry, and she knew that like Jayber Crow, and she knew that I liked Marilyn Robinson Gilead. And she was like, "I think you would like this book." And sure enough, yeah. I mean, it kind of, it's this, you know, I don't know... It's this guy. He was from Dublin. He moved to New York, and then he moves back to the western coast of Ireland, and then he's just immersed, just in this immersive world for the last 30 years. And you feel like you're in that world when you're reading his prose. It's the most extraordinary thing. It's amazing.
Austin Carty:Well, you know your naming my people with Wendell Berry and Marilyn Robinson. I mean, the Port William world and the Ames Iowa world, or John Ames in the world and Iowa.. I mean, those are my locales, so I'm gonna have to check it out.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:Chris, it hurts me. I posted about that book multiple times.
Chris McAlilly:No, I didn't see it.
Eddie Rester:Posted multiple times. Quotes from the book.
Chris McAlilly:This is actually the way my wife feels. And, you know, Millie will not listen to this podcast, but if she does, she always feels like, you know, she'll give me the bit of wisdom the idea, and then somebody else along the way will come along and say, "Ah, this is the best thing," and then I'll follow it then. And she's like, "I said that to you about two months ago," you know. So anyway, we're far afield now.
Eddie Rester:Let's talk about wisdom. Let's talk about some wisdom. So, Austin, you've written this new book, "Some of
the Words Are Theirs:The Art of Writing and Living a Sermon." And when I started the book, I thought it was just going to be about, how do you write a sermon? And it is that, but the word at the end, "living a sermon," really becomes, I think, where the book lands. So tell us a little bit about how this book came to be. Tell us a little bit about why it's more than just about how to write a sermon.
Austin Carty:So when I first conceived of the book, unlike"The Pastor's Bookshelf," where I had already a pretty full outline that I was able to present to the publisher, and while the book looked different than I conceived of in the beginning, I had a pretty good idea of where I was going with it. With this book, I had really just a paragraph, a gesture towards where I was going with it. But I did have the sense that I hoped to write a book on the craft of sermon writing that did for sermon writing what a book like "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott or "On Writing" by Stephen King does for the art of novel writing, which is to say it's ostensibly a how-to, but it's a memoir masquerading as how to. And when I'd been in divinity school, ages ago, and was first in preaching classes, I'd come into divinity school as one who'd already been trying for close to a decade to make it as a writer, and had already spent a lot of time with books like those, and had written lots of failed novels, and had various both failures and minimal successes as a writer in the publishing industry. And so I remember sitting in a preaching 101 class, like an early intro to homiletics, or something that, and I remember thinking,"Somebody ought to do a book like 'Bird by Bird' for sermon writing." And I did not think at the time, yeah, I'll try to do that, but it's just kind of where the idea first began. So when I sat down two years ago with this idea, I knew that it was going to somehow be more than just sermon writing, but I did not know where it was going to go. To go I didn't know what parts of my life were going to be touched on and revealed. I just knew that kind of my life was going to be the cipher through which I showed how I do the bits, the nuts and bolts of putting together the sermon. But what ended up happening was I worked out and worked through a lot of kind of significant things in my own life through the power of the metaphor of sermon writing. So it was a really transformative experience for me. The book just looks differently than I thought it would.
Chris McAlilly:Early in the book, you quote Frederick Buechner, who himself kind of was a guy that modeled this kind of, I don't know, this way of writing that's both prosaic and almost novelistic, while also writing in kind of a narrative way about preaching and the Bible. And you quote him as saying, you know, that, in the final analysis, all theology is autobiographical. Why? Why do you think that's true? Like, how is that? How does that play itself out in the book?
Austin Carty:So Buechner is a big influence on me, and that word, by the way, is a kind of important one for us to put our pin in for this conversation, too, because the premise of the book is that nothing that we ever say as preachers and nothing that we, by extension, ever do as individuals, is ever in a vacuum. We carry with us the influence and the markings of all those who've loved us, who've heard us, who've taught us, who've guided us. It's all there, almost always lurking underneath in ways that we're not consciously aware of in the moment. And that's very true when we sit down to write sermons. It's very true as we go about our daily lives. So the title itself, "Some of the Words Are Theirs," is pointing to that reality. But so Buechner was somebody I was reading a lot of when I was first trying to make my way...
Eddie Rester:For those who may not know, Frederick Buechner, who really is a gift, died a few years ago, just kind of quickly tell us who he was.
Austin Carty:Buechner himself was a writer turned clergyman, right out of Princeton. And this is in, I want to say the 20s, maybe the maybe early 30s. He had a success with his first novel, and was a celebrated novelist. And there's a wonderful story of him going and attending church at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, and listening to the preacher, George Buttrick, preach. And he had this experience where, it wasn't even the sermon, as Buechner recounts it later, it was just a turn of phrase in Buttrick's sermon that brought tears to his eyes. And he said that he thinks that he has spent the rest of his life trying to trace back the origin those tears, and it led him, ultimately to go to Union Seminary and to enter the ministry. And so he just became this towering figure of both letters and faith-based writing. And so all of us who have an appreciation for the intersection of those two things, he's kind of the preeminent figure in that way.
Chris McAlilly:The way that you draw it forward, though, to me, that I know, but I had not thought about, and this is just, you're just, you know, drawing out this thread throughout the novel, is this idea... Or not the novel, throughout the book, is this idea of preaching as self discovery that that's not sufficiently articulated in the vocational literature about preaching. And, you know, I've been preaching now for about 17 years. My dad and grandfather both preachers, and I just think that that's absolutely right. You know, that preaching is a form of self discovery. I had not really thought about it like that. Just talk a little bit about what you mean when you make that claim, and kind of how you how you came to realize that.
Austin Carty:So I I have been preaching for over a decade now, in the sense of being the every Sunday preacher. And right as I turned to that decade corner, it occurred to me to go back and look at and reread my old sermons, and that's where it became much clearer to me.
Chris McAlilly:I burned all mine. I burned 'em all.
Austin Carty:I would have done well to burn a lot of them, trust me. It was painful to look at a lot of these. But I was able to see the development as a writer. But I was also able to see things that I was working out in the moment that I didn't realize to the degree to which I was working out at the time. And moreover, I could then begin to pick up on the influence of others that was underneath things that I was saying, folks that I was preaching to, folks that was preaching at, folks that were preaching through me, all of these things that I didn't realize the kind of impact they were having at the time that I was at my computer writing them. But when I talk about it being an exercise in self discovery, one of the things that has impressed itself upon me in the last probably five years or so is that we take in so much information as human beings. And this has always been true, but this day and age, it's far truer than ever.
Eddie Rester:Unbelievable.
Austin Carty:I mean, it's just an onslaught of just information and stimuli and all these things that we're trying to process. But our brains can't process all of those things and distill them and try to make sense of them. And so we tend to go through life with all of these fragmented things that have never really kind of been put together, and we've never sat down to think, all right, well, what do I really think? How do I make sense of these things? And for those of us who are preachers, we have this built in obligation to sit down and take a text of scripture and begin to try to work through thinking, alright, so what do I really think? What is going on inside of me? And so by Sunday, by the time we're preaching that sermon, we've had the opportunity to do a lot of self introspection that other folks oftentimes don't do, simply because they, unlike us, are not required to sit down and try to make sense of something each week in a kind of coherent and cogent fashion. So I think that's part of the vocation that is underappreciated and certainly under sung is the way that preaching just helps us understand, with a little bit more clarity, what we think about things.
Eddie Rester:Well. And as I read that, I thought back to a conversation we had with Neil White, who's a writer and author, owns a publishing company, and he says everybody should write, for what you're talking about. It allows us to to bring disparate threads together. It allows us to kind of express some things. And you know, our vocation is unique in that, you know, I can't remember who it was that said a sermon is never finished. It's just preached. And as I thought about what you were saying, sermons aren't are never really finished, not just because we run out of time, but because our thoughts are never complete on things.
Chris McAlilly:I love the way, this is page five. So, "The thing about writing," this is Austin's words. "The thing about writing is that if you do it right and well, a great many of the words that you write will prove to be unnecessary. Not unnecessary in the sense that they are inconsequential to the process. But unnecessary in that they don't finally serve the point you were trying to make." And the whole book is kind of working that point through, that you're just kind of trying to find your way to why the heck is it that I'm preaching, you know? It's extraordinary. And I think we all have this. I sense this in my own life. I'm trying to work out really hard questions. And if I, and a lot of them, I'm scared to even go into the... That's one of, the courage of this book is one of the things that I admire the most about it, your willingness to kind of dig into your own family narrative, your own story. Yeah, it's a very personal book. And I think if there are preachers out there that read this book, you will admire the courage that Austin has, in kind of bringing this stuff forward. But because you have this history and this background of being a writer, I just think you're uniquely suited to kind of help us pull the threads together. And you've spent a lot of time thinking both about the craft of writing and the craft of preaching. And, you know, I just loved it. I just... It gave me another way... There are times in preaching where I feel like I plateau, or I just kind of get in a rut. And I think anybody that preaches will know what that is. You know, the way my dad always says is,"Sometimes you've got something to say, and sometimes you just have to say something," you know. And I think it's helpful to be reminded. It was helpful for me to be reminded that some of these deep, you know, undercurrents of my life are surfacing in certain ways in my preaching, in ways I'm both conscious of and unconscious of. And if I can just keep working those things through, I could get to maybe a different perspective or understanding, I don't know. Talk about, you know, how this book helped you kind of make sense of your own story, maybe a little bit with a little bit more clarity.
Austin Carty:Well, first of all, I appreciate everything you just said. That means more than you could possibly know. And there is a line that is one of the epigraphs of three epigraphs to the book. One of them is from Annie Dillard, from "This Writing Life," where she says,"you write it all and you discovered at the end of the line." And that harkens back to what I was saying earlier about starting the book and not knowing what it was ultimately going to be. When we sit down to write, whether we're trying to write a book, whether trying to write a sermon, or whether it's just to follow that wonderful advice about sitting down and to write just about what's going on in our head, almost never does what we finish with look like what we sat down thinking that we were about to write. We really do. Annie Dillard's, right. We tend to discover what it is that we're trying to say, what it is we really think, as we write, as we do that distillation process that otherwise we seldom do, because there's just too much going on. We're taking too much in, and, therefore, we don't get an opportunity to distill it. But once we do start trying to distill it that way, we're often surprised by what we come to learn about ourselves, what we come to find we really do actually think about any number of things. And for me, one of the really salient examples of this, of that quote that you just read, was I had gone up to my attic a few years ago to look for something in some old files, in old paper files, and there was in one of these boxes a copy of a novel that I wrote that I first landed literary agent with back in 2003. It was a novel called "Storm of Fireflies." Anybody listening, don't bother going and looking on Amazon. You won't find it because it never sold. But we worked on eight different drafts over so many years. I didn't finally give up on "Storm of Fireflies" until 2008. And all these different drafts, all of the hopes that I had invested in this project, I had these huge visions of the literary success that I was going to have, and all of this. Well, so much time had gone by and I hadn't thought about that novel in well over a decade, and suddenly I saw that old manuscript sitting there. Because this was back when you actually had to mail manuscripts back and forth, you know, to New York.
Eddie Rester:Real live paper.
Austin Carty:Real live paper. And that's why I had this. Otherwise something now would just be sitting, you know, in the cloud, or it'd be something digital. I would never even have a printed version of it. But I did. It was this old, old print version, and the nostalgia of it, you know, washed over me. And I thought, "I'm gonna read this." And I sat down, and I went through and I reread it, and I was able to see both how it did land me an agent, but also why it didn't land with a publisher. It wasn't ready. But the reason I bring that up right now, and I say this in the book, but the reason I bring it up right now, is that there was one line that I read while I was reading that novel of probably 80,000 words that stopped me cold. It quite literally took my breath away, because it was so incisive about the deepest things that I was at the time, trying to work through. But I didn't know at the time how central of a line it was. I wish I had it in front of me. It was something to the...
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, I got it right here. Yeah, "I ran because I got it.
Austin Carty:You got it? I was scared." This is the one, right? Yeah. Yeah. "I ran because I was scared, scared of how broken my family had become, and scared more by my inability to fix things." That's the one. And this was a novel, mind you, this was fiction, and I did not know at the time, I mean that so sincerely, I did not know at the time how that one sentence was a revelation of everything that I was experiencing and undergoing and trying to grapple with and make sense of at that moment. And so we write it, and we discovered at the end of the line, but sometimes it's only long after the fact that we find out what those words really meant and what they were doing. And thus, towards the end of the book, I talk about how who knows what will happen to our insufficient and soon forgotten words when the transformative wind of an eternal tomorrow sweeps them up and carries them away. So the book itself has this eschatological bit because there's this trust that we're working through it, but we often don't know the thing that we're really most trying to convey. But just like Saint Paul says about the things that are gold and silver and precious stones abiding in the wood and the hay and the dross being burned away, those things that we really were trying to, the things that ultimately had truth, that were really, really putting our finger on truth, are the things that somehow were going to be carried forward.
Eddie Rester:It used to frustrate me when someone would
Chris McAlilly:Amen. want to talk about one of my sermons in that they would talk with me about things I was like, well, that's not what I preached at all. That's not. Let me tell you where I was actually headed with that. But there's a sense of loss of control, I wrote"control" down while you were talking. And I think for so many of us, that the idea, if we can control what we write, or we can control what we want to put into the world, then it'll be okay. But it's when we're willing to understand that anything we put in the world, and this goes not just for sermon writing, goes for the life, sometimes the lives that we lead, and the choices that we make. It works better for us if we could just acknowledge on the front end, there's nothing about this that I... I'm just going to release it. I'm going to do the best I can do. I think that goes for writing. I think that goes for family, and I think that's a thread for you in the book, and powerful for me. There are a lot of parallels to my own story in what you wrote, in your relationship with family, particularly your father, but late in the book, I think you get to a place that you share about. You do have to release control. Say, maybe a little bit more about that, just how that lesson of life came to you. I know you talk about it when you had your first child. That was a big moment, but I'll let you fill in some of the blanks there.
Austin Carty:Yeah, that's ultimately where the book and my advice, land, which is that in preaching, like in life, we want so much to control every aspect of it, and we think if we could just fix it, if we could just get it right, then we would... everything would be okay. But there is never going to be a perfect sermon. And we are all imperfect people, and we can't fix the brokenness of others' lives. We can't expect other people to fix the brokenness of our own. And there has to be grace upon grace. And we do our best. We are intentional about the way we go about our work as preachers, as we ought to be intentional about the way that we go about living our lives, and we try to do it faithfully and honestly and with integrity. But then there is something really powerful but also difficult about then the surrender of saying, "and then I'm going to let it go because I cannot control every aspect of it." Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:So much.
Eddie Rester:Here's what you...
Chris McAlilly:No, go for it, Eddie.
Eddie Rester:Here's here's what you say, "When putting the finishing touches on our drafts, it is perfectly natural to grieve the loss of our original idea, that is to say, the framework out of which we first began to write. That said, if we will remain attentive to the arrangement the Spirit is calling us to, our sermons will shine with greater truth and deeper integrity on that account." And you could substitute "life" for "sermon" in that sentence. I think it works just as perfectly.
Austin Carty:And that's, that's the analogy that I'm trying to work through in the whole book. And I, you know, we've touched on how this is a very personal book and one of the things that it's important that I name is that I had this wonderful childhood, and I also had these ideas of how golden it was that I didn't quite fully understand everything else going on around me at the time. But what it made for was this experience where I had this great idea of how life was and how life was going to go, and it is a deep grief to have to let go of that kind of an experience. It's theologically akin to remembering back to this blessed, original state that we were living in. But then there's a brokenness and a fall that has to be acknowledged, and we then pine for and hope for and trust in this coming redemption. But the redemption is not ours to affect. We have to give it over to the One who ultimately can bring about the redemption of all things.
Chris McAlilly:And I think that that, to me, is... There is this sense when you're the person standing up and you're offering the words, saying the words, so yeah, you feel this intently at the end of someone's life and you're offering the words over their life at a funeral or memorial service. Preachers, I think kind of instinctively know that this is a big moment, because you're kind of narratively tying off loose ends, and it's hard. It's hard to do that well, especially when the life is complicated. And I think there is this sense that people project on to preachers, that when life isn't making sense, that there's some kind of a word that you'll be able to offer that will bring order, that you will make things make sense in some ways. Like there's this hope that a story can be offered where someone does feel a little bit more control. And I think one of the things I hear in the book is an acknowledgement that that doesn't always happen. You know, that it maybe isn't our job to fix every, to make every story come out right. You know? And there's a lot of freedom in that. I mean, even as it's really, really hard to acknowledge. And I just, yeah, I mean, I think that's the emotion that I had in reading the book. I think it was tied to the reality that I feel as a pastor, often put in these roles of people wanting a word that will make things come out right. And I just appreciated the journey that you take us on to get to a place where you can say, "You know what? I did that, too. I did it for my family and I can't..." It ultimately comes down to, why are you preaching? Are you preaching to fix things, or is there a greater purpose? Will you talk through that discovery that you're not just preaching to fix things, that maybe there's a deeper aim or vocation that the preaching task is kind of pointing towards?
Austin Carty:That's one of the key discoveries that that I note happened to me by going back and looking at these old sermons and realizing the degree to which I was completely unaware, trying to still fix things that I'd otherwise thought that I had left behind and run away from. And that came as a great surprise to me, that we can run hundreds of miles away, and I've never really left home at all, so to speak. And we to go back to Buechner saying that all theology is at bottom autobiographical. That's a reality that we all contend with, and it's why I think ultimately, the soundest final advice is to do the best and then try, as well as one can, to then let go and trust that it's not finally up to if you got the words exactly right, or for you to have been creative or unique enough to have come up with the right word to say, that you were faithful to the task, and then give it over and hope and trust that the story we've rooted our lives in is true. Amen to that.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, in that it does... Whatever brokenness there was can and will be redeemed, whether now or when we... in eternity. I mean, there's this sense of, and I remember as a young preacher, I wanted to fix every sermon. I wanted every sermon fix things. In my work, I wanted to fix people. And it's a hard lesson in life to realize that's just not going to happen. You know, the book that gives title to your book, and the book lands in a scene from this kind of base book, "A River Runs Through It," is really the story of a writer coming to grips with he couldn't fix his brother, couldn't fix his family, and that the river continued to run. So say a little bit more about your attachment to "A River Runs Through It" and why that helped shape this book.
Austin Carty:Thank you for asking me that question.
Eddie Rester:See, I knew I was going to get there.
Austin Carty:Thank you for asking me that question.
Eddie Rester:And let me say to folks who are listening, if you haven't watched the movie, go. If you don't want to read the book, go watch the movie. One of the most beautiful movies ever filmed and done well by the book. So you can get by with the movie, but read the book. So go ahead.
Austin Carty:Yeah, no, you're absolutely... It is my very favorite movie, and one of my very favorite books. It is just exquisite. It's a masterpiece of literature, and it is a masterpiece of a film, and the title, "Some of the Words Are Theirs," comes from the final paragraph of that book and of that movie. And y'all have the book in front of you. You can read that passage in just a minute. But the idea of "some of the words are theirs" is pointing to the way that we are influenced by and carry with us all of those that have marked our lives, and we do so in ways that we, most of the time, don't even recognize. I talk about in the beginning of the book, how, in the very opening scene of the book, I narrate this story of being in my front yard with my then four-year-old son Whit, and he was climbing a magnolia tree in our yard, and he was climbing up, and he said down to me,"Daddy, Daddy, do you see me?" And I call out, I said, "Yeah, buddy, you're doing it!" And he looked at me. He said, "You sound like Papa when you say that." And I was caught off guard. I said, "I do?" And that's my dad. And I didn't know the way that that inflection was right there under. It was my dad coming through me in the way that I said that. Not only the words, the encouragement, the enthusiasm, the sincerity, the inflection of my voice, I mean, all of those. These things I inherited from my dad that I'm so grateful for, you know. And then later in the book, there's a story of Whit and me, where I think that I have cleverly gotten away from my family, and I'm in the kitchen and I'm behind the pantry door. And the way that our kitchen's set up, there's a dual entry on the other side, and he had snuck up, and I didn't know he was there. And I was just shoveling Oreos in my mouth, and all of a sudden I hear this little voice below me say, "Daddy, why do you do that?" And I say, "Do what?" And he said, "You come over here and you close your eyes and you eat Oreos like that." I said, "I don't do that, buddy." And he said, "Yeah, you do. You come over here and you close your eyes and you eat Oreos like that." Well, I tell this other story right before it in the book, where I confront my dad, who has struggled for decades now with alcohol, and I confront him about hiding his beers in the bushes. And when I confront him, I say, "Dad, why do you do that? He says, "I don't do that." I say, "Yeah, you do. You come over and you put your beers in the bushes." It was the exact thing. And so the point being there of having these two stories that run parallel. We are marked and influenced by folks in our lives, both for good and for ill. And as we talk about this eschatological view of things, and this gold and silver and precious stones, we hope and we trust that those good things are going to be carried forward, and that these weaknesses and these shortcomings are the things that we hopefully can look at and try our best to say, "I'm going to try to grow beyond these things." And then we then leave it, of course, when it's for other folks to the refining work of God's Spirit, whether that be now or on the other side. But so with the title, then, I'm trying to point to the way that when we sit down to write, like as we go forward in our lives, we do the best that we can, and that we're never operating in a vacuum, and that under our words, just like under our lives, are the voices of others. And some of the voices are those that have loved us and marked us most, and we are always haunted by those voices, and rather than lament that, we should celebrate And just a quick word on why I say that, we live in a moment in it. which, as preachers, there's a pressure on us that I think is probably more acute now than ever, and in some ways may even be unique, that we ourselves be unique, that we be original, that we are the ones to say something first, and that we say it the most creatively and cleverly. The first one who can respond to anything going on in the culture, on social media or on the podcast or in the pulpit, and then have it shared widely, whatever. The first one that can say, the thing that then gets shared, and everybody's talking about, somehow that has this currency to mean that somehow we're being successful as pastors and preachers. And I just over time I began, because I was caught up in that, like things would happen, and I would think, "Oh, what am I gonna say about this?" You know, I feel this hyper pressure, like, "But I've already seen other people post on this, and they've said this, I've got to..."
Eddie Rester:"I've got to say something unique."
Austin Carty:Yeah, that's exactly right. And then finally I realized, like, if the story that we've rooted our lives in is true, which I deeply believe it is, then there's not going to be anything else original that I can really say. We're all downstream of something else. And rather than grieve that, I think it's something to celebrate. And so, yeah.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. I...
Eddie Rester:Just...Go ahead.
Chris McAlilly:No, you're fine. I, you know, just trying to tease this out, because I do think there is a feeling, if you preach for a certain amount of time, that your words are going to bump up against... Like they aren't going to move the needle. They're not going to change somebody. Maybe they can't fix anybody, but maybe they don't even matter, you know, like you bump up against that doubt or question. And so this kind of eschatological perspective, which just big, fancy theological word for "Christian hope," is that, you know... And I love the image of a river, that we're in the river. We're receiving things from upstream. Some of them are precious gold, you know, we can pick those up and use them. But anything that's not excellent or good or true is going to fall away. But the things that are, as you say, excellent, good or true, that will be pulled forward into the world to come, a world in which the kingdom will be built, where things will be everlasting. All the hay and the stubble, all the things that are not of of God, that they're just gonna they're gonna fall away. And the, I don't know, the release that I felt when I got to that part of the book, was I can do my part. I can offer my words. I can keep at the task, knowing and trusting that things are going to work out, but it's not on me to make them work out. But also I can keep doing the thing, you know,. And that's a perspective that, it really has blown wind behind my preaching as I moved into another fall, another season. It's just, it's given me confidence to go ahead and say the thing that I believe to be true, even at the same time that there's situations that I'm navigating that are not fixable. And it just, you know that that confidence is something that you know... I mean, it's hope. I mean, the way Eddie is always described it in his leadership that I just hold on to is unwarranted hope. And I just, I mean, I love this book, man. I just love this book so much. I'm so grateful.
Eddie Rester:Well, yeah, again for me, I said at the beginning, was just an unexpected gift. I think one of the things it just made me think about different moments in my life that impact my preaching, my style, what's important to me, how I how I work with staff and with others. You know, you begin to pull the threads of it's this way for me because of this person or that person, or this moment in my life. I, you know, I remember when I was right out of seminary, I was doing youth ministry as an associate pastor. I told my mentor at Duke, "I know two things I'm not going to do when I leave seminary. I'm not going to be an associate pastor. I'm not going to youth ministry." Did both of them. But a lady in the church was a counselor, and here's--never go to lunch with a counselor if they ask you to lunch, because they're going to. They're going to dig. And she finally said,"Eddie, what's driving you? What's driving you?" And I remember, I can, sitting here today, I can. We were in the Pizza Hut on Hardy Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in a booth by the window. And you know, really was how, what she was trying to get at was, what out of your story are you reliving? And I think for me, that's one of the gifts of the book, is that it's an invitation to relive that. You can't outrun your past. I mean, I think that's also a clear part of book. But you can walk in a healthier way with your past. If you say, if you finally say,"This is my past."
Austin Carty:That's so well put, and that's so, that's so lovely. And then that story is so resonant with my own experience in CPE. I talk about that briefly in the book, and won't go into the whole story, but just to say that that that is exactly the experience when suddenly questions being asked that... And to hearken back to what we said about Buechner, questions being asked, when suddenly you find yourself crying as you answer that, there's something significant happening. There's something kind of at that depth level that is worthy of deep interrogation, and likely something that is propelling, for good or ill, the trajectory of your life.
Eddie Rester:And something that's worth, for folks out there who aren't preachers or don't have that gift of writing every week, might be worth writing about, just sitting down and getting it, letting the Spirit guide the pen to put it on the page. Don't plan what you're going to say, just put it on the page.
Austin Carty:I think it is about as sound a piece of advice as there is, and I know that there can be reluctance to do it, because it's work. It is. It is work, particularly if it's not something that one's used to doing. But one doesn't have to sit down thinking, "Okay, well, this is going to win a Pulitzer for me." It's not even about that. It doesn't have to be shown to anyone. The work is worth it, because what gets worked through will inevitably be, without trying to sound too grandiose, transformational, maybe with just a little T in most cases, but nonetheless, transformational.
Chris McAlilly:I do think that we're gonna have to... We spent the whole time talking about, kind of, some of the conceptual or theoretical dimensions the book. I want to have another conversation just about process. We don't have time for that today, but I want to.
Eddie Rester:Let me, let me just say... Can we talk for one minute about process, Chris?
Chris McAlilly:Go for it.
Eddie Rester:I mean, can you give us 60 seconds? I can give you two minutes. All I could think of as I was reading process about writing a sermon was, "holy crap. Every preacher must... You blow up the same way." You come out and you write Saturday night specials and you don't have time and you don't know what you're doing, but process is key. I am a... You know... Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:I'll stop there.
Chris McAlilly:I would love... Eddie's a great preacher, despite what I've said about him in other contexts. I do think you're...
Eddie Rester:Exactly.
Chris McAlilly:I really enjoy your your preaching, always have, and I appreciated watching your process through the years. And I love... We're just gonna have to have you back.
Eddie Rester:I think so. Let's have a process episode.
Chris McAlilly:We can have a second conversation about the process of preaching. We got to do it.
Eddie Rester:Now. You do get, like, an award if you're on the podcast three times. Then you're like, Will Willimon...
Chris McAlilly:For the right amount of money, Austin, we can get Eddie off this thing, and you and I...
Eddie Rester:That's right. It can just be the two of you, and I'll just listen.
Austin Carty:Hey, listen, if you're gonna put my name in the same breath as Will Willimon, is that someone you're gonna point to? Listen, I will take it. So is it gonna be like, SNL or like, if you're like, a five timer, like...
Eddie Rester:You get a jacket.
Austin Carty:This jacket.
Eddie Rester:You get a jacket. Exactly.
Austin Carty:Part of an elite, rarefied club.
Chris McAlilly:Eddie. Eddie will. Eddie will buy you a jacket.
Eddie Rester:That's right. It'll be a powder blue, polyester, Ole Miss jacket that they put on sale at the end of the season at a store in Oxford, because nobody buys them, but they load up on them every year. So I'll get you one.
Austin Carty:I'll wear it with great honor.
Chris McAlilly:Thank you, Austin, thanks for your time. Thanks for writing the book, man, seriously, it's awesome.
Eddie Rester:Absolutely fantastic. Thank you.
Austin Carty:What a joy y'all. Thanks so much for having me. Can't wait to talk again soon.
Eddie Rester:[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly:If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]