More than a Sermon (eBook)

Part I

The Purpose of Preaching

1

More than a Sermon

There is a prophet within us, forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen.

Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom

Cause my mind to fear whether my heart means what I say.

Martin Kähler, Theologe und Christ (1926)

My first church job was as a janitor. I buffed floors, cut grass, cleaned windows, and vacuumed the sanctuary for a church that was not my home church. It was a lonely job because most of the time I was the only one in the building, and the pews only needed so much Lemon Pledge. The pastor was friendly and easy to please. One day he proudly showed me his 150 sermons, all neatly numbered and well organized. He kept them locked up in his office file cabinet. He informed me, “I have a sermon for every occasion.” His confidence did not impress me as a boast as much as a statement of fact. I believed him. His collection of neatly outlined, generically illustrated, and well-rehearsed sermons probably covered every pastoral need he could imagine.

SERMONIC TALKS

Back then I thought preachers prepared talks, the purpose of which was to motivate their church members to take their faith more seriously. Talks were well-prepared truth packages based on the Bible, outlined in three points, with an application at the end. Through humor and anecdotes these talks were designed to keep people’s attention and deliver a solid spiritual punch. They were like Swanson frozen dinners or Lean Cuisine—pull off the plastic, heat them up, and serve them hot. Preachers had a reusable repertoire of these talks so that they were “ready in season and out of season” to preach “with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2).

I did not picture myself becoming a preacher. What introverted teen wants to become a glad-handing, gregarious center of attention? The preachers in my world pretty much sounded all alike. Even in conversation, they seemed to be talking to a crowd. Their preaching voice was their conversational voice, at least when they were on the job. The pressure to be the man of the moment must have been a constant strain. Unfortunately, their artificial manner and affected tone made them seem more like salesmen than pastors or prophets. I never imagined Jeremiah acting like any of the pastors I knew. The prophet Jeremiah’s message was like a hammer against rock. Preachy, never. Provocative, prophetic, powerful—always!

During my teen years, our home church pastor, whom I genuinely liked, was a shouter. When he got carried away delivering his sermon, he yelled. His face turned red, and white spittle formed around the edges of his mouth. My father, a math teacher, reasoned that there was a correlation between sermon preparation and shouting. The more the pastor prepared, the less he shouted. Sometimes when the pastor began shouting, my dad pulled out a piece of paper from his suit pocket and began working on a math problem.

I do not imagine the apostles delivered the kind of sermonic talks that we may be used to hearing on Sunday morning. Their powerful preaching and teaching in the household of faith contributed to a movement sweeping the Roman Empire. The gospel was turning the world upside down. House churches were springing up everywhere. It was personally and socially revolutionary. It still is, but parishioners do not get that feeling most Sunday mornings. The preacher’s packaged presentation of biblical truth is like the plastic-wrapped chicken you buy at the grocery store. Sermons are usually geared to an individual spiritual consumer who wants to eat their manna on the run like an unhealthy fast-food diet.

The early church paid dearly for their faith, but we struggle to distinguish between the American dream and the kingdom of God. Shallow Christianity pays dearly, too, but it is not the high cost of discipleship; it is the high cost of compromise and complacency. The apostles showed us how to be in the world and for the world without becoming of the world. They believed in the real presence of the body of Christ in the fellowship of believers.

A sermonic talk is usually the religious by-product of a sentimental faith with a built-in anti-intellectual, antiscience bias. These talks do little to comfort and convict the soul. The self, whether secular or religious, remains the controlling influence, inspiring and determining what is preached and what is heard. Preachers are tempted to gear their sermons to people “who might be feeling a little lost” or “who just want to be part of something bigger than themselves”—the idea being that how I think about myself is more important than what God thinks of me. In practical terms, my felt need for affirmation overshadows my greater spiritual need for salvation. Instead of mere Christianity, we end up with a version of me-Christianity.

WE PREACH WHO WE ARE

Educator Parker Palmer insists, “We teach who we are.” This is especially true of anyone who lives to proclaim the gospel. Palmer quotes from one of his students, who claims that all her bad teachers were the same: “Their words float somewhere in front of their faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.” But all her good teachers were unique. They were gripped by their subject, and they spoke with a distinctive voice. “Authority is granted,” Palmer insists, “to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.”4 Their authority comes from their own authorship.

What is true for teachers is true for preachers. The word of God ought to be heard, as authentic speech, voiced out of the integrity of the disciple, stripped of religious jargon and free of cliché. It is a message that issues from the preacher’s heart, mind, and soul. Preaching that can be characterized as bubble speech or anecdotal babble or dry Bible information is really not preaching at all. Before we parse a verb, outline a passage, or read a commentary, we know that gospel preaching issues out of character. Phillips Brooks, in his famous Yale University lectures on preaching in 1877, defined preaching as “the bringing of truth through personality.” To build on that definition, we might add that all faithful and fruitful preaching issues out of the character of the preacher. The truth of the gospel has to be lived in order to be preached. It is rooted in character, reflected in personality, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul addresses this issue in one of his early pastoral letters:

For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed—God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people. (1 Thess 2:3–6)

The willingness of Paul to raise these personal issues openly regarding motive and method emphasizes the importance he placed on holiness and wisdom. Good preaching is not a matter of technique. It comes from within, from the identity and integrity of the preacher.5

Saul of Tarsus was a trained Jewish theologian long before he met the risen Jesus on the road leading to Damascus and his name was changed to Paul. He grew up in a devout Jewish family and was immersed in temple and Torah. From a young age, he was dedicated to the law of God with the heroic zeal of Phinehas (Num 25:1; Ps 106:30–31). That he was taught by Gamaliel, one of the leading rabbis of his day, offers evidence that he showed promise and passion as a defender of the ancestral tradition—a future devoted leader of Israel. But none of that mattered after the blinding light of the risen Lord Jesus, the gift of the Spirit of Christ, and his commissioning to proclaim the gospel to the gentiles.

Luke says that Paul “immediately” began to proclaim Jesus “in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God’ ” (Acts 9:20). Paul’s deep background in the Scriptures and his vision of the crucified and risen Messiah inspired his heralding of the gospel. N. T. Wright observes, “Paul’s powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as ‘son of God’ can hardly be called ‘preaching,’ if by ‘preaching’ we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world.”6 If we were to engage in the kind of preaching that Paul did, both at the beginning of his mission and throughout its entirety, we would be announcing to the world that history has reached its climax, that God is fulfilling his promises to bless the nations through Israel, and that the crucified and risen Messiah is the Savior of the world and the King of kings and Lord of lords. The expansive reach of the gospel message embraces the totality of life. It is all encompassing, redeeming and revolutionizing every sphere of life. Paul’s proclamation of the gospel was perceived as a threat to Roman rule and Jerusalem’s religious authority. The power of the gospel upended every political, spiritual, and social arrangement. It was definitely not a sermonic talk.

Paul’s story exemplifies an interesting development for today’s disciples. Behind the scenes there is a learning curve that includes waiting and suffering, along with plenty of time to mature and grow in the grace and knowledge...