The now sainted John Prine sings a song entitled “Clay Pigeons,” which is actually a cover of a song written by a guy named Blaze Foley. In that song, Foley and Prine sing about a man who boards a Greyhound bus for a 2 to 3 day trip in order to put some healthy distance between himself and his day-to-day life. 
You find the hook of the song when Foley writes, “Feed the pigeons some clay/Turn the night into day/and start talking again when I know what to say.” As I listened to this song recently while on my back porch thinking about my upcoming one month time of sabbatical, there was something that resonated with me about that last line, “start talking again when I know what to say.”
It’s not that I don’t know what to say. Thankfully the role of a preacher (especially one tied to something like a system of Biblical readings like our lectionary system) is one that is constantly given a message to preach. If you’re coming up with that message by yourself you’re probably doing it wrong. The questions that plague the preacher are often more questions of “how” to say it than “what” to say. But I share with Foley’s character that I am looking forward to a time of a little less speaking in hopes that the words come easier afterwards.
My plan for this sabbatical is at least in part to learn a little of what my dad is doing with a bunch of rental properties that he owns in St. Louis. While this will give me some distance from my own every day existence, I will also continue some of the things that I do for University Lutheran. I’ll be writing sermons and working on worship services. I’ll be doing some of the meetings that I normally do, just not all of them. I’ll be back and forth between STL and TLH. I’ll keep in touch. But I will be a little less available. And the ultimate hope in this is to serve you better, to “know what to say” that when I start “talking again” in full time ministry. I’m hoping to have some good words, some better words.
And perhaps this is something that we can work on together as a congregation. In the world of social media, we all have a platform to speak, and that platform can be an exhausting place. We can feel as if we all have to respond to every minor skirmish or stimulus in our lives. But often times, our silence can make the space for God’s words to be found in our mouths rather than our own frail words or our parroting of others words. Let’s feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into day, and start talking again when we know what to say. And when we do, we might be surprised to find that those words are God’s.