Leadership Journal

During a recent vacation, my wife and I ventured across town to another church. The jammed parking lot and crowded lobby suggested a scintillating sermon. The preacher was articulate and entertaining. His sermon was biblical, with four crafted principles from the text.

But as we left that morning, I realized, as William Willimon has said, I got the sermon, but it didn't get me.

Fast-forward to a couple of days later, same vacation: Sitting under a thatched umbrella on a beach, I'm reading John Grisham's The Chamber, a novel about capital punishment.

Toward the end of the story, Grisham describes Sam Cayhall, the death-row inmate, taking off the clothes he has worn for so many years. His new clothes lying on the bed are for his execution in the gas chamber. The portrayal overwhelmed me, and I began to weep. As a tear rolled down my cheek, I silently asked the Lord to forgive me for my past hatred of death-row inmates.

It struck me that Grisham's novel had "got" me in a way the principled sermon I'd heard hadn't. I began studying what makes a good story work. As I applied the elements of plot to my sermon structure, they revolutionized the way I create and deliver a sermon.

A plot-based sermon is not one with more stories in it. It is not created by cramming more illustrations into a sermon or seeing the sermon as one lengthy illustration.

The very structure of a plot-based sermon is different. The difference between a plot-based sermon and a principle-based sermon is not hermeneutical but homiletical. A plot-based sermon still requires traditional exegesis; I still have to immerse myself in the text. But once I do my exegetical spadework, I head in a new direction. I steer away from principles and launch out into the realm of surprise, tension, and disequilibrium.

Obviously, this is easier with narrative literature, but every text is set in a context, in a story and a situation. And every situation has some disequilibrium or tension.

As I begin thinking about my sermon, I ponder what my audience might expect from this text. Then I do my best to avoid their expectations. As I start the sermon, I want people to wonder, "Where is he going with this?"

In The Homiletical Plot, Eugene Lowry illustrates with the old "Quincy" tv show (a more recent example is "Murder, She Wrote"). Both shows start with a dead body-no surprise there. The interest factor is the uncertainty-"Who did it?" "How did they do it?" "Why did they do it?" "How will Quincy or Jessica figure it out?"

In a recent sermon on the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12, for example, the congregation expected I would oppose the Rich Fool. So I showed how much I identified with him. I viewed him as a financially fortunate farmer: "The Rich Fool seems wise to us. He earned his money honestly. He was hard-working. He invested and expanded. He used his surplus to plan for his retirement. Money magazine would profile him as a financial ...