We need better sermons

Everyone knows it

I’m sorry I’ve not written in a while, and that I failed to respond to a couple comments. I’ll spare you my excuses. Also, happy new year! It’s good to be alive.

And speaking of being alive, I was talking to my wife this morning about the church, and how, at least here in the West, the church seems mostly dead. One great evidence of this death is the poor quality of preaching. Most of the preaching I hear makes me think that the preacher lost his or her faith at some point after ordination, that is, after it seemed too late to pursue a secular career.

I conduct a very simple thought experiment whenever I hear a sermon: I ask whether Christianity would have survived if all the apostles preached like this. Would the pagans have been converted? Would converts have been strengthened enough to face persecution? Would intelligent people have listened up? Would uneducated people feel dignified? And so on. You get it. And my answer most of the time is, no, if my faith in Jesus depended on this sort of preaching, I’d be serving another god or lord.

Christianity in our society is in crisis, and the sorts of sermons that are tolerated in American pulpits are both cause and symptom of this crisis. And without saying anything about the quality of my own preaching, here are my “rules” for better preaching.

1.       To preach in a Christian church, believe what the Christian faith teaches. I shouldn’t have to say this, but evidence suggests that it must be said: If you don’t believe that God exists, and that God communicates with us competently and decisively, please respect those of us who do believe the Christian faith by not preaching at all. If you think God has communicated with us, but has done so incompetently, such that She/He/It/They (hereafter: SHIT) needs you to correct SHIT’s self-revelation, please don’t preach at all. If you think God has communicated to us, but indecisively, such that what we find in Jesus or in the teaching of his apostles is incomplete, and that SHIT needs you to supplement that revelation, again, please don’t preach at all. (And if I had my way, people who think that male language for God is just an epiphenomenon of a patriarchal society—which means that God has either not revealed himself, has revealed himself incompetently, or has revealed himself indecisively—would also spare us from having to hear them preach. If you adhere to the SHIT religion, don’t preach in a Christian church.)

2.       Understand what you’re doing when you preach. I shouldn’t have to say this either. Christian preaching occurs in the context of Jesus having sent out his apostles: those who heard them heard him, and he remains with his church, speaking to them in Word and Sacrament, and through them in worship. In other words, the preacher claims not just to speak about Jesus, but for him—as him! And those who have hear him hear the one who sent him. Christian preaching, in biblical terms, is a species of prophecy. Every sermon has an implicit “thus says the Lord,” and every preacher who gets into the pulpit is subjected to God’s judgment, which will decide whether the preacher was a true or false prophet. Preaching should be undertaken with fear and trembling, self-examination, and constant repentance. As prophecy, preaching is proclamation. It is only accidentally educational, and the preacher should be reluctant if the sermon they’re writing is entertaining, self-referential, political, or mothering. There’s a lot to be reluctant about, but that’s what comes to mind. God’s Word may entertain, it may speak to the political situation, it may soothe and offer care, and it may even involve the life of the preacher—and the preacher must ensure that those qualities of the sermon are there only because the Word that God has spoken already involves those qualities. God’s Word gives life and comfort and strength, and it isn’t boring; those who feel the need to make up for the Bible’s alleged deficiencies should ask why they feel compelled to preach from a book they consider deficient.

3.       Preaching is proclamation—about God! God is not a thing, nor merely the horizon of meaning for human activity, but is himself a Subject, an Actor, a Speaker. If the sermon focuses solely on the past, that is, on what God did back then for such-and-such, it is, at best, a pious lecture. A Christian sermon conveys that God has identified himself by what he did for such-and-such back then, and that therefore, God, who is faithful, is doing this for you today and promises to do this for you tomorrow. God is the Subject, and the hearer of the sermon is the object—and in the present. Typically, what God has to say demands a response and makes of his hearers into subjects who are called to act faithfully, and the sermon should equip hearers to respond faithfully to God. But the key word is “respond.” If the sermon is a moral lesson about what people should do to be better humans, it is a bad sermon. If the sermon doesn’t identify God as the primary Subject, I’m not willing to call it a sermon.

4.     Preach from the text, and know what the text is. This point is less obvious than it may sound. But first, the obvious part. Preach from the Bible. Let me place emphasis on the preposition: preach from the Bible. Do not preach on the Bible, or about the Bible, or around the Bible, but from the Bible. God speaks through the Bible, and the Bible should speak through the preacher. The preacher’s first job is to listen to the text of Scripture for what God is saying to this group of people in this situation in this place and time, and then to say what they have heard. One way to test this is to ask whether the sermon allows the hearer to hear God’s voice anew by reading the assigned biblical passage. If the hearer goes away with a little knowledge of ancient Greek, or knowledge about the human author or the original audience, but they don’t know what God is saying to them in this passage, then the sermon was a pious lecture and not a sermon. The preacher must learn to use the Bible homiletically. Also, forget about topical sermons. As far as Christian preaching goes, there is no such thing as a topic. Topics are abstractions, and God is a person who is speaking. That being said, not every sermon comes directly from the biblical text. Sometimes the primary text of a sermon is the church architecture, or a Sacrament being celebrated, or an experience shared by the community. If that’s the case, the preacher should be clear with him- or herself about this fact. A great example is a wedding sermon: the couple’s decision to marry before God may serve as the text. Same goes for a dead person at a funeral, whose corpse should be integrated into the sermon as one of the main texts.

5.     Have a point. Lord, have mercy. Seriously, just one point. ONE POINT. If you’re preaching your very last sermon and you have a lot more to say than one point, accept the fact that God in his providence has frustrated your desires, and preach only one point.

6.     Discern who you’re speaking to. I know, I know, “whom.” When I was preaching, I generally had three types of person in mind, and I almost always had specific individuals in mind as exemplary of these types when I was writing sermons. Because I did almost all my preaching in the Episcopal church, the main person I was talking to was the person who was baptized but not converted to the Christian faith—the person who felt squeamish about the word “God,” and preferred instead to speak about “spirituality” or “religion,” who was convinced that being a “spiritual person,” or being part of a “religion” is about becoming a “better person” and “values,” especially helping “those with less than us.” My secondary audience was always the person who wasn’t a Christian but had the good fortune of knowing this fact about themselves. And my tertiary audience was the Christian with a living faith, for whom I hoped that the sermons would give strength and courage. Every preaching context is different, and the sorts of sermons I wrote would be inappropriate in many of them.

7.     Trust that the gospel is actually good news, and that it’s good enough. And preach as though it’s good and good enough. This point overlaps a little with point one. No one has a stable and clear understanding of why God decided to reconcile the world to himself through the death and resurrection of Jesus, or how it works that Jesus’ death and resurrection achieves this reconciliation—this is the mystery at the heart of the faith—but that is the good news. To those futile human efforts to rescue ourselves from all that inhibits us from flourishing, the preacher offers the perfection of Jesus. To human despair about our inability to manage, to the crushing moral debts that we all carry, the preacher offers Jesus’ death. To hopelessness, the victory of his resurrection. If the gospel we’re preaching turns out to be a covert way of telling people to try a little harder and to be a little nicer, that’s bad news and not the gospel. Alternatively, if the preacher comes to think that what the people really need is anti-racism training, or an untrained therapist to validate them and to tell them that they’re just fine as they are, then the preacher has stopped believing that the gospel is good news, or stopped believing that it’s good enough. If the preacher sets social justice activism as the implicit outcome of all Christian faith, then the preacher may be better off as a community organizer or social worker than as a preacher. The preacher should trust that the spiritual reality being offered in the gospel is more powerful and more badly needed than more readily available material things. The preacher must offer what only the preacher can offer: the Word of God.