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Every Sunday they do it again: four or five hundred thousand ministers stand before listeners and preach a sermon to them in the English language. If the sermon works—if it "takes"—a primary cause will be the secret ministry of the Holy Spirit, moving mysteriously through a congregation and inspiring Scripture all over again as it's preached. Part of the mystery is that the Spirit blows where it wills, and with peculiar results. As every preacher knows, a nicely crafted sermon sometimes falls flat. People listen to it with mild interest, and then they go home. On other Sundays a preacher will walk to the pulpit with a sermon that has been only roughly framed up in her mind. The preacher has been busy all week with weddings, funerals, and youth retreats, and on Sunday morning she isn't ready to preach. Miraculously, her rough sermon arises in its might and gathers people to God.
Strange things happen when a minister preaches. After the service, people thank the preacher for things she didn't say, or for things she did say but hadn't understood as well as the listener had. Our words can be "wiser than we are," said Ben Belitt, and never more so than when the Spirit of God is in the building. On such occasions, as Barbara Brown Taylor (1993) writes, "something happens between the preacher's lips and the congregation's ears that is beyond prediction or explanation."
But the unpredictability of the preaching event gives no one license to wing it. Faithful preachers work hard on their sermons, understanding that although a fruitful result may be God's gift, hard work is the preacher's calling. To help with this calling, authors write books that address every conceivable facet of preaching. Leona Tisdale (1997) writes of the preacher's calling to exegete not only Scripture, but also her congregation, so that her preaching achieves a genuinely local character. Never letting go of the universal gospel, the preacher must theologically and artistically customize her presentation of it to fit these people at this particular time in their history. In fact, the preacher's goal is to become the congregation's ethnographer to such an extent that if one Sunday morning she stirs up old ghosts or tamps down new fears she knows exactly what she is doing.
Other recent authors ponder how to preach to particular sections of an audience, such as the elderly, whose hard-earned wisdom may be losing ground to a muddle-headedness that threatens to overtake it (David G. Buttrick in Carl, 1997). Looking at an audience two generations younger, William Willimon, dean of the chapel at Duke, reflects on preaching to college students who are the children of divorce or neglect. Many are children of absentee parents who never anchored them in faith or in virtue, who perhaps never even spoke seriously of these things. Such students now live off their disinheritance, and they sometimes show it by blending detachment and longing. Generally speaking, today's college students don't vote or follow the news from Kosovo ("or wherever"), but they do cleave to their friends. Some of them also believe in angels. Some get drunk a lot. One of Willimon's friends, a rabbi, remarked to him that a good number of college students—children of the children of the sixties—are looking for their parents (Willimon in Callen, 1995).
Besides thinking of her audience, the preacher must also consider her message. Will she preach the goodness of creation? Will she move behind sin and grace to preach nature, sin, and grace? And will she develop an artist's eye for God's goodness in places where nobody is looking for it (English, 1996)? On the other side of the page, how about the Bible's "texts of terror"? Should a minister preach the Bible, including its hard texts, or preach the gospel (Hilkert, 1997)? Do the hard texts sometimes set us up for hearing the gospel? How will the preacher handle passages such as the terrible ending of Psalm 137 that seem to work against the message of Jesus?
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