Once more: we need better sermons

A rant with a concrete proposal

Because I am the kind of person who quickly identifies problems and has a hard time ignoring them, I am self-conscious about sounding critical too often. I try to see the best in people and situations, and I consider myself a truly happy and contented person. But my experience with church, especially in the last year, has been a challenge. When I previously wrote about the problem of bad sermons here, I received an unusual amount of feedback—people agreeing with me that most sermons leave them disappointed.

On Sunday, I heard a truly poor sermon, but what struck me about it was that there was almost nothing in it that I disagreed with. It was a supply priest who was covering for the rector, and the sermon focused largely on the benefits of practicing gratitude, the discipline of staying mentally present and mindful, and appreciating the experience of today. As one who has found great benefit in mindfulness practices that resemble what you’d learn in yoga or certain kinds of Buddhism, I can attest personally that what the preacher said was true and, if put into practice, probably helpful.

A situation like this one illustrates an important and, in my view, under-discussed problem, which we might call the problem of Other Good Things.

I’ve spent the last several years trying (and usually failing) to persuade church people that we must handle with great caution these Other Good Things, because these Other Good Things have a tendency to displace the One Good Thing that ought to be indispensable in the church’s life. Saint Paul wrote that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), which is at least a very dramatic way of saying that those things that sabotage us spiritually are not generally overt evil, but Other Good Things that we want rather than the One Good Thing that God has entrusted to us.

When, for example, a preacher tells a congregation something that they could just as easily hear in one of the guided meditations from the Calm or Headspace apps rather than elaborating the gospel, what the preacher is conveying is that he or she believes that a mindfulness meditation practice is more helpful than the gospel. Whenever the church puts before its members and the world something other than the word of God, the church is admitting to having lost confidence in God’s word.

Other Good Things take many forms: emotional wellness or pop psychology, social ethics and social justice activism, moral lectures that usually amount to the injunction  to “be nice,” and so on.

I call these Other Good Things because these things really can be good, and in key instances the church really should concern itself with them. But key instances are an exception. The rule of the church’s life is communion with God—being addressed by God in his word, responding to God in prayer and praise, and union with God in the sacraments.

The job of the preacher is to provide to the church’s members that which only the church can provide, equipping those members for their own lay ministries out in the world—ministries that in all likelihood revolve around Other Good Things. When the preacher decides to offer some Other Good Thing in place of the gospel, the preacher is also deciding to deprive the people of the spiritual resources they need carry out their own baptismal promises.

What I wish—and I say this with some desperation—is that the church would only ordain clergy who clearly trust that the thing they are asked to preach really is good enough. And I wish that if clergy have lost confidence that the word of God is enough, that they find some way to admit to this fact and find secular employment outside the church. I would fully support using church funds to cover temporarily the salaries and benefits of clergy who have lost their faith and who need time and financial assistance in order to transition into secular employment. Paying clergy who have lost their faith not to preach is far cheaper and far more humane than having them stick around. If money is what keeps them from leaving, I say we provide whatever they need to figure out where they really belong. And to be clear, when a clergy person is preaching mindfulness rather than the gospel, that is a clergy person who has lost their faith. Especially as churches are dying because of such leadership, we can’t really afford to equivocate about something this obvious.

The Christian faith is that among our many and various needs, the one need above all others is to know God in Jesus, and preaching ought to reflect that faith. The word of God is not the only good thing, but the church is the only community whose purpose is to proclaim the word of God. And again, preaching ought to reflect that.