SAGE ADVICE: Talking about preaching

I was spoiled by an early lifetime of listening to Missionary Baptist preachers, the kinds who wore clip-on ties after working a full week at a real job and accepted love offerings when the congregation insisted but usually just gave that right back to one of the less-fortunate members. Up until maybe a decade ago I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get into that particular club unless you could flat out give a speech. Sure they called them sermons in those days before they called them chatting over bagels or whatever it is they call them now. And there were other qualifications, I know, but up there, in the top 10 maybe, was the ability to wrap your words around people and shake them or hug them, depending upon what they needed. Those men, and they were men ladies, could bring a crowd to its feet and then its knees. They knew how to talk, plain and simple.
Some of the Republicans and Democrats at this year’s conventions should go back in time with me some time to Razor Ridge and learn how to talk right. Some of them though, especially Barack Obama and Fred Thompson, must have been there, sitting in the front row, taking notes. There’s no other explanation on why Obama, Thompson and a handful of other Democrat and Republican speakers talk so doggone good.
Thompson with his buckets of water imagery and good-old-boy, I’m one of you demeanor makes us all feel like a friend. At first I thought maybe it was a Southern thing. Hillary Clinton, I didn’t think, did all that well. Bill did. Joe Biden was boring, almost as boring as Joe Lieberman. If you managed to stay awake through that, you must have come up in one of those robe-wearing churches, away from the men who could sweat through a shirt, tie and coat while making Benito Mussolini look like he stuttered (no offense Sen. Biden). Then I heard Bill Frist. Lord have mercy. If that man was delivering some urgent medical news to me I’m fairly certain I’d miss it through the yawns. I’d have to ask for a second opinion, from someone who doesn’t require you mainline coffee to keep focused. But again, I was spoiled. I might be overly harsh on the more boring speech makers, even if they did have a half a year to prepare and don’t really have much else they have to be doing, like feeding calves or gathering chicken eggs.
Still I was happy with the overall speech making. In fact, I might be the lone member of the media that doesn’t have a problem with John McCain presuming we’re all his friends. It’s a legitimate way of talking, of keeping the cadence that good speeching is all about. My grandfather punctuated sentences with it while in the pulpit.
It’s a good thing Tom Brokaw et al never made it down Troutdale way. They’d have been horrified at the my friending that went on back then. And they’d have been welcome there, as welcome as any other millionaire or pauper.
Me, I’m not near the good Christian man my grandfather was. If given half a chance I’d fight the whole lot of them just for daring to step on my good friend memories.
Contact Mark Sage at 228-6611 or .