On sermons: a rant

A guest-post by Aaron Ghiloni

I know preaching. For four long years in Bible college I heard 14 sermons each week. Count ’em:

• 1 at Sunday morning church
  
• 1at Sunday night church
  
• 1 at Monday morning chapel
  
• 1 at Wednesday morning chapel
  
• 3 at Wednesday night church (the pastor’s son tended to fit at least this many sermons into one go)
  
• 1 at Friday morning chapel
  
• 6 in Homiletics courses throughout the week (where the homiletical advice was – and honest to Jehovah, I’m quoting verbatim – “If you’re not sweating you’re not preaching!”)
  
• I’m not even counting listening to Jack Hayford and Chuck Swindoll on the radio each night.
  

Since then, as I’ve wandered through sundry denominations, I’ve heard the sermon in nearly all its forms: a 15 minute homily is far too long, while a 45 minute “message” is plainly unanointed. A lifetime pulpit pounding and sanctified lecturing has led me to one obvious conclusion: 

There should be a moratorium on the sermon. Let’s go straight from the Gospel to the Creed and cut the drivel in between. I may have heard fourteen sermons a week in Bible college, but I don’t remember the one I heard last week.

Preaching puts me to sleep which, by my definition, is the last thing preaching should do. The sermon should be revelatory – generating ambiguity, disrupting expectation. (Okay, so I stole this from Rowan “Ray-of-Darkness” Williams, but since this rant is about sermons, stealing someone else’s ideas is acceptable.) But, in fact, we already know exactly what to expect – fifteen minutes of nothing. Edward Schillebeeckx says the service of the word should be like the “roaring of the lion” – it is more like the yawning of a sloth.

Amen!

Ironically, most preachers genuinely believe they are above-average public speakers. (They can’t all be right, can they?) And as Gabriel Moran notes, most preachers also believe that all theology is homiletically-centered. Demurring, he says: “Probably only a clergyman could believe that preaching is a good model, let alone the best model, for understanding the religious life of mankind. It would be a near impossibility to find any non-clergymen who think of preaching and sermonizing as significant at all. Most people who give a thought to it conclude that preaching is an anachronism which is allowed existence because it bothers no one. However, if one’s professional life is centered on any activity, it is possible to view the whole world in light of that endeavor.”

Preach it, Brother!

Each brand of Christianity has its own formulas, but here is the structure of a typical, Anglo-mainline sermon:

First, a joke. (Most likely the joke is taken from internet or, if the preacher is retired, from Reader’s Digest. Most likely the main character in the joke is a religious person, and in all likelihood a member of the clergy.)

Second, a repetition of what has already been testified to the Scripture readings. (At this point the congregation is silently wondering how a sermon that started off so witty got so boring so quickly.)

Third, an unacknowledged regurgitation of the latest book the preacher feels proud of having read (connection to Scripture texts will be vague; connection to joke will be nonexistent).

Fourth, clichés. That’s how it always ends.

Amen!

Clichés, truisms, platitudes – no sermon is complete without them. If the structure of a sermon is clichéd, than the content and delivery of the sermon are all the more clichéd. There are many sorts of clichés packed into one sermon.

First, there are the pious clichés. They’re credal: God is love; God loves you; Jesus loves you; this church (no, this “community”) loves you; change is coming; everything is holy; be astonished at small graces; be ready for change which, after all, is coming because God loves you. We have a passé theology.

Next, there are the anecdotal clichés. These are easy to spot: they inevitably put the preacher into a tight situation in which he, after a protracted struggle, is proved a hero. A story about one’s kids is common too, but never as homiletically reliable as the first-person tall tale. We have a religion of anecdotes.

Finally, there are the rhetorical clichés. You know them: the feigned eye contact; the “practical turn” where we find out what it all means in “real life”; the open-ended question; three points and a poem; alliteration; the comfy conviction (being somber helps church people relax). We have an unimaginative art.

Oh, now I remember: the last sermon I heard was the one I gave. (I had to end with an anecdote about me.)

An Easter dying

A funeral homily by Kim Fabricius

After surgery in May 2008, followed by chemotherapy and a promising prognosis, a scan disclosed that Gwyn’s bowel cancer had spread, incurably. Early in 2009 his decline accelerated, and by March Gwyn was confined to bed. He died at home, just after Easter. For the homily (given after tributes from Gwyn’s two sons), the names have been changed.

Several times a week earlier this month I shared in a rare and poignant experience: the dying of Gwyn James. But while T. S. Eliot called April “the cruellest month,” this year it was also an inspiring one.

Rare and poignant, because nowadays personally nursing the dying is the exception, usually we wait for the phone call from the hospital or care home; while preparing the dying for death – well, our modern obsession with youth and health has turned that venerable ministry into an embarrassing oddity, thanks but no thanks.

A rare and poignant experience, then, but also an inspiring one, because though Gwyn knew that he was dying, he approached his earthly end only with gratitude for what had been and serenity for what will be; and indeed an awesome experience, because in the puny presence of death, the immense presence of God, the room silent and still, as if the world were pausing, paying its respects, and angels were holding their breath, waiting… And the bond between us: reading scripture – psalms, and, latterly, Holy Week and Easter narratives; shared prayers of loss, of letting go, and, as we held hands, of embracing the promise of life, not just beyond death, but in the very midst of dying. No fear, total trust, and the peace of Christ. Around noon on the day Gwyn died, Rachel [Gwyn’s wife] joined us. It was a holy moment. In the verse of Rainer Maria Rilke:

O Lord, grant each his own, his death indeed,
the dying which out of that same life evolves
in which he once had meaning, love, and need.

These were especially precious times for me as Gwyn’s minister. Gwyn always denied that he was a “spiritual” person. Well, so much the worse for “spirituality”, with its now fashionable veneer of enchantment. All at chapel knew Gwyn, quite simply, as a Christian, a man of a simple, (if you like) flat-cap faith, one on whom the only spirit that matters – the Holy Spirit – rested: a person of scrupulous integrity, straight yet not stern (he relished a good French vintage!), whose Yes was Yes and No was No, who took both his promise as a church member “to live in the fellowship of the church and to share in its work”, and also his promise as an elder “to perform [his] duties … faithfully”, with the utmost seriousness, and who deployed his considerable practical gifts on behalf of the Synod as well as the local church.

But the incident that I will never forget, and that for me captures the measure of the man, was a visit I paid to Gwyn almost twelve years ago during the URC’s discussions on human sexuality. Gwyn had very strong views on the matter, and it was more than just a disappointment to him that after a thorough debate the URC in general, and Bethel in particular, took an inclusive view. Indeed he searched his conscience as to whether he could remain an elder, or even a church member. So I went to see Gwyn for what I hoped would be a conversation but what I feared would be an impasse issuing in a resignation. We talked frankly, but amiably; we disagreed implacably, but respectfully. And the result? Unlike other church members that I’ve lost, for demonstrably insupportable theological reasons, Gwyn, with tradition on his side, yet saw that the local church is bigger than the minister, or even its present membership; but even more, and most significantly, (as Rowan Williams puts it) he saw that we must “turn away from the temptation to seek the purity and assurance of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided … in the trust that … the confronting of wounds is part of opening ourselves to healing.” It was like, Wow! This is what being members of the body of Christ is all about – speaking the truth to each other in love, seeking the truth with each other in love, and, despite dispute, continuing to recognise each other as friends of Jesus whose divine grace is stronger than human disagreement.

That incident remains, for me, a parable that helps to sustain my ministry. But I’m sure you could all write your own personal parables, which begin: “The kingdom of God is like this: there once was a man named Gwyn James…”

Falling over things in the dark

Many thanks to Kim for his generous review of my chapter in the new book, On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays, ed. Matheson Russell (Cascade 2009).

New books on Karl Barth

Lately I’ve received copies of some very nice new books on Barth – including the following:

• David Gibson and Daniel Strange, eds., Engaging With Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques (IVP and T&T Clark – the American edition is better, since it comes with Oliver Crisp’s painting on the cover)
  
• Paul Chung, Karl Barth: Karl Barth: God's Word in Action (James Clarke and Wipf & Stock)
  
• Edwin Chr. van Driel, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology (OUP)
  
• Mark S. Gignilliat, Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah (Ashgate)

And here are three forthcoming volumes to look out for in the coming months:

• The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon (WJK)
  
• Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (WJK – I’ve read this one, and it’s an exceptionally good analysis of the Church Dogmatics)
• Gordon Watson, The Trinity and Creation in Karl Barth (ATF Press; a book by a fellow Aussie theologian, to be released at the Barth conference in Auckland next month)

The best-ever title for a blog post

Halden offers a superb meditation on 1 Corinthians 13, and his reflection has the best title of any blog post I’ve ever read. I hope many of you pastors will use this as your sermon title next time you preach on 1 Corinthians 13. Perhaps your next wedding sermon...?

Flu pandemic: on journalistic discourse

Here’s a telling illustration of the way the news media uses language: a report on swine flu yesterday said that the virus “is feared to be the worst outbreak since the SARS pandemic failed to actualise in 2003.”

A pandemic that failed to actualise? I guess that’s on the same semantic level as a “non-actual death” or a “non-actual pregnancy”.

Come to think of it, this kind of language could come in very handy on your CV: “I have also written three books that never actualised – and one of them even received a non-actual book prize...”