Something about preaching we did not know: We are preaching in the best of times, in an era when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is radically counter to society.
During my years of seminary teaching, I taught the introductory preaching course dozens of times. Typically, I asked the students to prepare three or four sermons over the semester, and I paced the course to allow them to move slowly through the creative process and savor each step of sermon building. By taking time on each part of the craft – interpreting the biblical text, discovering connections between the text and contemporary life, forming a listenable and logical structure, employing picturesque language, finding imaginative illustrative material and so on – the students would gradually become skillful and seasoned at performing the essential tasks to compose an effective sermon.
I assured the students that as they absorbed the process of sermon building at this measured tempo, they were like student chefs acquiring the slow and steady skills of fine cooking at Le Cordon Bleu, the famous Parisian culinary institute. They would learn to cherish each ingredient and would master the intricate process of preparation. But then I quickly warned them, “In this class, you may be like students at Le Cordon Bleu, but when you are a parish pastor, you will feel as though you are working at the Waffle House.”
What I meant was that French chefs may enjoy much marinating time — but for working preachers, Sundays come all too rapidly, “like telephone poles whipping by on the highway when you’re driving 60 miles an hour,” as the accomplished preacher Ernest T. Campbell once quipped. My hope was that well-trained preachers would retain some of the patient skills and the standards of excellence of the gourmet chef, even as they fry the eggs and sling the hash browns to prepare sermons in the demanding environment of weekly preaching.
Good preaching is precisely what it looks like: hard work done under pressure.
Good preaching is precisely what it looks like: hard work done under pressure. A faithful sermon dives deep into the bottomless pool of a biblical text, retrieves the pearl of great price and surfaces to proclaim both the beauty of the pearl as well as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the great price. This work requires rolled-up sleeves and commitment to the labor of sermon creation, week after week. When I was in seminary, one of my textbooks advised that a good sermon requires an hour in the study for each minute spent in the pulpit. When I became a pastor, though, and discovered that administrative tasks, hospital visits, Bible studies, parishioners’ crises, weddings, funerals, meetings and dozens of other responsibilities were flying at me from every direction, I realized that any textbook author who thought I had 20 leisurely hours to spare for working on a 20-minute sermon had evidently never been within shouting distance of a real church and, indeed, probably lived in a climate-controlled greenhouse in the seminary courtyard.
Maybe 20 hours a week was unrealistic for most pastors, but good preaching does require time, energy and dedication.
Even so, the textbook had a valid point about the work of preaching. Maybe 20 hours a week was unrealistic for most pastors, but good preaching does require time, energy and dedication. As a young pastor, I especially admired the preaching of the Lutheran seminary professor Edmund Steimle. His sermons showed all the signs of deep scholarly engagement, even as he expressed them in the gritty, streetwise language of one who knew his way around the jagged edges of real life. I once had the opportunity to meet Steimle and, knowing that he had begun his ministry as a parish pastor, I asked him if he thought a busy minister like me could possibly preach anything close to the profound sermons I had heard him deliver.
“Tom, let’s be honest,” he replied. “Parish preaching is hand-to-mouth. It’s hand-to-mouth, but you have to keep at it. Find an hour here, two hours there, and keep at it. It matters.”
Does preaching really matter?
With the church undergoing both upheaval and apparent cultural decline, I wonder whether many preachers these days find that the ministry of preaching simply feels futile. Preachers stand in the pulpit, open a vein and preach their hearts out — but the congregational needle seems to barely budge.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about preaching for The Christian Century magazine. Whatever I said was evidently controversial enough to conjure a few impassioned letters to the editor, pro and con. Most of the letters were interesting, making good points in response to what I wrote. But the letter that completely flummoxed me came from a pastor in the Midwest who said, in essence, that she could not understand all the fuss. Preaching and worship, she declared, are no longer where the action is for the church. Time spent on preaching and worship, this pastor harrumphed, is basically squandered time.
Really? Worship, including preaching, is the central raison d’être of the church. Everything the church is and does comes from the fact that it stands humbly before God in prayer, praise and listening. How did this pastor come to think that the main action lies elsewhere? Perhaps her argument was simply theological confusion, or maybe she had been lured to an empty place by the legitimate criticism that the church is often too insular and neglectful of its mission outside the walls. Now, for her, nothing that happens inside the walls of the church matters, and everything that matters happens in the streets.
I worry that for many pastors, the daunting task of weekly preaching has become a constant reminder of the sad exhaustion that can creep into their ministries more generally.
But I detected something else in this pastor’s lament: weariness, and perhaps a note of despair. I worry that for many pastors, the daunting task of weekly preaching has become a constant reminder of the sad exhaustion that can creep into their ministries more generally. Those who pastor small, aging flocks in a vast secular meadow often find it hard to tell whether they are doing well in ministry, whether ministry is making a real difference or whether their work is simply propping up a sagging institution that is bound to fall eventually. As for preaching, regardless of whether the preacher labors all week on a sermon or scratches down a few hasty ideas before turning off the television on Saturday night, the congregation’s response on Sunday at the door seems about the same. If the people are as satisfied with fast food as they are with a lavish Sunday feast, we tell ourselves, then why not pop something quick into the homiletical microwave? Preachers begin to lose faith in the power and efficacy of preaching. It is no longer “where the action is” — no longer worth the hard work and prayerful devotion.
My colleagues in the field of homiletics are keenly aware, of course, that preaching in today’s church faces strong headwinds and that preachers are often discouraged. They generate a steady stream of books advocating that preachers can turn things around by learning better communication approaches from poets, filmmakers, comedians, actors, storytellers or therapists. But the fact is that we preachers will be renewed and refreshed not by a change in technique but by changes in ourselves. The path to a stronger pulpit goes not through the media lab but through the confessional.
In the confessional, we might realize that we have sinned by coveting a time when the pews were more packed and when the ears of hearers were more open to the preached word. Such a time never existed, not really; if we imagine that it did, we are surely chasing an illusion.
When Richard Lischer at Duke Divinity School was asked to contribute an article on preaching to the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Interpretation, he listened to a few dozen taped sermons preached in 1947, the year the journal was founded. He heard ministers preaching in the aftermath of World War II in a time when the forces of good had prevailed, in a world where churches seemed full of attentive congregants and where the prospects of human mastery of the future seemed unbounded. Those sermons, Lischer said, “breathe a sense of confidence in the clarity and rationality of the Christian faith. This is a message that makes sense, they seem to say, and it is going to get through.” One might imagine that these old preachers were filled with humble joy as they preached the Gospel to people who were ready to hear, who shared their values and convictions. But instead, as Lischer saw it, “the preachers sound terribly sure of themselves – even pompous – perhaps because they are under no necessity to qualify their assertions.” So in a post-war time when the church seemed to be riding high, to be congruent with the best values of the culture, many preachers became foolishly pompous and cocksure. Those open ears were too frequently filled not with gospel words that challenged, but with words people already complacently affirmed.
The worst of times, the best of times
We might think today that we are preaching in the worst of times, in the hardest, most Gospel-resistant age imaginable. But we are actually preaching in the best of times: an era when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is clearly radically counter to society. The Gospel is not what people already affirm; it is not merely the best wisdom our culture can offer repeatedly to listeners in bland sermons with a little “God talk” added as a whipped topping.
We might think today that we are preaching in the worst of times, in the hardest, most Gospel-resistant age imaginable.
“Gospel” is a strange word from a realm beyond — a word from God, a death-defying, life-giving truth announced to a world that everyone can see is choking on lies. And we get to preach this Gospel. Perhaps we preachers will realize what is at stake in our preaching – will realize how hungry people are to hear the real Gospel in all its brave wildness – by paying attention to that breathless, expectant silence just before we speak the first sentence of a sermon. As Frederick Buechner described it in Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale:
“The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now, he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute, he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening, including even himself.”
Imagine the congregation as the first words of the sermon are about to be spoken. They have been torn apart all week by the toxic false speech of politics. They have had their egos seduced by the cooing of commercials that assure them they deserve more out of life — even when, down deep, they know they are being lied and condescended to as faceless consumers. They have logged on to social media, where anonymity hides destructive combat. They have been overwhelmed by the cruelty of human beings toward one another, by a brutality so constant and relentless it finally breaks down their resistance, their humanity, leaving them to lapse into willful inattention or even hopeless surrender. And there stands the preacher about to preach. Maybe this time a word will be spoken that is unlike those other words — a word that restores life and summons hope. Maybe this time they will hear such a word. Maybe this time.
The role of the Holy Spirit in preaching
In the confessional, we also discover our own sin of trying to exercise mastery over the fate of the Word we preach. We want to see immediate results; it is only natural. A plumber applies a little sealant, turns a wrench and the leak stops. We envy the plumber; we want that kind of verification that preaching the Gospel actually works and produces outcomes. Such desire in preaching, however, is a sin best left in the confessional.
I long ago wearied of conversations among ambitious preachers in which somebody says something like, “You know old so-and-so was a great preacher. I mean, he filled the pews at First Church every Sunday.” Baloney! P.T. Barnum concocted schemes that filled seats. Preachers have a riskier mission. We are to walk the high wire of witness, to preach the Gospel and to trust the Spirit.
And the Spirit, as Jesus taught both Nicodemus and us, is a divine wind that “blows where it chooses” (John 3:8). So in seeking to learn as much as we can possibly know about faithful preaching, we who preach must also remember the truth about preaching that we can never know: namely, what the Holy Spirit does with the words we preach. We emerge from the confessional as preachers ready to give our energies once again to faithful preaching — but also as homiletical agnostics, equally ready to admit that we have no idea where the Spirit will take our words.
In the fourth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells three parables about seeds. All three parables are deep and wide, and they express many truths. But whenever we hear about sowing seeds in Mark, we know that much of those truths concerns preaching. In Mark, to sow seed is to preach the Gospel. One of those parables speaks a word that the discouraged preachers today perhaps need to hear most. It’s a story about someone who scatters seed on the ground. Once the seed is spread, the rhythms of daily life click into gear. Jesus says the sower “would sleep and rise night and day” — a sentence that beats with measured cadence, that maybe even sounds a little sing-songy, both in English and in the original Greek. But as the sower goes about the ordinary rhythms of life in this parable, we realize, if we listen closely, a second rhythm at play in the parable. While the sower sleeps and rises, night and day, the seed – unseen and apart from the efforts of the sower – “would sprout and grow.” And get this: Jesus makes a point of saying that the sower “does not know how” this happens (4:27).
Agnostic. The sower does not know; the preacher does not know. “How did your sermon go yesterday?” someone asks.
“Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not in my hands,” we answer.
The plumber stops the leak in the faucet and gets back in the truck, satisfied to know how the leak happened. The preacher, however, sleeps and rises, night and day; they go to committee meetings, comfort the bereaved, visit hospital rooms, plan the stewardship campaign, march with parishioners for racial justice and lead Bible study, all while not knowing what happened to the seed sown in last week’s sermon and in all the sermons preached before. But God knows, because the sermon is lifted in the wind of the Spirit. It is the Spirit who germinates that seed in places and in lives where we might least expect it. For us preachers, this is our best and deepest hope. The Holy Spirit is working the garden with us, stimulating the seed of the Gospel to sprout and grow, and we have no clue how this happens. In the Spirit’s own good time, the seed emerges as a ripened plant, and we are left humbled and amazed.
A pastor I know stood at the graveside of a faithful church member and prayed that God would “grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” As the service ended, she reached out to grasp the hand of the grieving widow.
“Carl was a faithful man,” the pastor said.
“Yes, he was,” the widow replied. “But perhaps you don’t know, he had his doubts, serious doubts. People didn’t know it, and probably would not have guessed it, but he often struggled with his faith.”
“But he remained faithful to the end,” the pastor said.
“Yes,” agreed his widow, “and the reason, I think, is that every time he was about to give it all up, you would say something in a sermon. It always came at just the right time, and he would find the encouragement to hang on. He clung to things you said in your sermons.”
Someone scattered seed. The seed sprouted and grew, but the sower knew not how. Thanks be to God.
