It was in 1910, when I was transferred from Crossen on the Oder to Danzig, that I really found out what preaching meant.
I had gone to Danzig very reluctantly. The Reformed congregation to which I was assigned numbered barely 2,000 souls, scattered throughout the city and its suburbs. Of “reform” there was not a trace. People were prosperous and worldly, that was all. And the small congregation was lost in the huge church of SS. Peter and Paul. A magnificent musician, Professor Fuchs, sat at the powerful organ. But he was not interested in the service. During the sermon he read his Schopenhauer.
From the first day I realized that everything depended on the sermon. The members of the Reformed congregation were not to be counted upon—with a few exceptions, of course. Those who came to church did not come to take part in the religious life of the congregation. As for the non-Reformed, they would not so much as set foot in a Reformed church. They did not want to have their children confirmed there, and they definitely did not want to attend the Communion service. Those who came, came exclusively for the sermon. There were no workers among them, or members of the lower middle class, who went to their own parish churches. The only people who came were the well-educated, for whom membership in a congregation meant nothing, but who were looking for a preacher who had something to offer them. It was sheer coincidence if one of them happened to belong to the Reformed congregation.
I made few personal contacts. I had no idea who was at service. Some wrote to me after my sermons, and such letters occasionally led to contacts. But basically I was thrown back upon myself. I tried to put my time to good use. I began to learn to preach.
I always found preaching hard. Even as a student at Wittenberg I envied those of my fellow students who were glad when their turn came to preach in the Schlosskirche, over Luther’s tomb. I was never glad. I felt too inadequate to be able to hand on to the congregation, with authority, the word of the holy God—for that is what preaching really is. This sense I have retained right up to my old age.
It was easiest, of course, to preach to the kind of educated congregation that was slowly building up in Danzig, or the kind I later had in Berlin, at Heilsbronnen. Sermons before such congregations certainly required the most careful preparation, but nevertheless one was addressing communicants from the same world as the preacher. They lived with the same issues, even if they did not arrive at the same conclusions. They listened to the words of Holy Writ with the same assumptions. They understood quickly what the preacher meant, even if he did not always express himself with complete clarity.
Preparing a sermon was always hard for me. But once I began to speak from my pulpit at Heilsbronnen—with people standing all the way out to the vestibule, sitting on the altar steps, often on the steps leading up to the pulpit too, with the altar beautifully adorned, with many faces familiar to me from my Bible classes or from house visits—then it was easy to say what I had to say at the command of my God.
Nevertheless I would often go home from service depressed. For I could not preach as the strict Lutherans preached. Once, the president of the Westphalian church, who was a Lutheran of that stamp, was sitting in the sacristy during a festival service at which he was to preach the second sermon. He saw his young colleague who had preached the first sermon wiping the sweat from his brow as he descended from the pulpit. “You are sweating, my brother?” he asked in a tone of reproach. “Only falsehood brings out the sweat!” That was the Lutheran principle: God’s word is efficacious of itself; the preacher should not try to make it more efficacious by his own efforts.
I could not preach like that. I had to preach with body, mind, and soul, as the Apostle Paul says, in intimate contact with the congregation. I had to demand something of the congregation. I had to be able to see in their faces whether what I said in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ was reaching them or not. And from the way the congregation said the Amen I had to be able to sense whether the sermon had gone home. With the Amen I was released from the inner tension in which I had lived during the preceding twenty-four hours.
Today it is not uncommon to hear it said that the liturgy is more important than the sermon, and that a feeling for the liturgy should be reawakened in the Evangelical Church.
I do not deny that these liturgical endeavors have their significance. How often have I longed for purely liturgical services myself! For instance, at sessions of the synod, after four to six days of incessant talk from early morning to late evening, I often found it intolerable to listen to yet another sermon at the close of the proceedings. Could we not for once have an hour of reflection at a liturgical service without human speech?
But it is not my own wishes that I have to consult, least of all at services which I am conducting. I have to think of the congregation. I am the last to overestimate the imporance of sermons in the inner development of the church and in the practical application of the Gospel to the life of our people. It should not be imagined that anything decisive can be given to people in a fleeting half-hour on a Sunday, especially when attendance is irregular. Something effective can occasionally happen, but each time it is the result of a special grace of God.
As for “famous pulpit orators,” these are the worst, and their importance has been vastly exaggerated. In the 1880s, Berlin had more brilliant preachers than it ever had before, or since. There was nothing unusual, in those days, in seeing dozens or, rather, hundreds of people waiting before a closed church door an hour and a half before the beginning of the service in order to secure their places. And it was precisely at this period that parish life decayed and Berlin became a worldly city. The Rhineland, on the other hand, always had remarkably few pulpit orators. But parish life flourished, both inwardly and outwardly. The same is true of the Moravians. Famous preachers, whether they will it or not, gather an audience rather than a genuine congregation. They attract people who care more about the manner than about the matter of a sermon; people who in running after a famous preacher evade their duty to their own parish.
Power Of The Average Sermon
The important thing in the Evangelical Church is the sound, average sermon. But the average sermon requires diligence and concentrated spiritual power. That is the only kind of sermon which will carry conviction.
I was thankful that for years I could minister to quite unpretentious congregations. I was never tempted to try to preach like a Rittelmeyer, for instance, who always showered upon his congregation a veritable cornucopia of modern literary allusions and brilliant reflections, and made it quite clear that he was fully conversant with the problems of modern art and science. The rest of us, to be sure, might almost envy him the number of cultivated persons he drew to his pulpit. Yet the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a very straightforward affair, and it is this that everyone needs for his salvation, old and young alike and in every walk of life, however exalted and however lowly. I was happy if I chanced to notice a fourteen-year-old nudging his little brother at some point in my sermon as though to say: “Do you hear? That’s meant for you!”
When I was still a boy, a curious law suit took place in Berlin. A young officer had gone to church in Charlottenburg with a detachment of soldiers. They found themselves at a service conducted by Pastor Kraatz, a very liberal minister. The preacher’s critical comments on the Gospel shocked the officer, who came of a very strict religious family. Finally he could stand it no longer. He signed to his men and they all left the church together—and their departure, as is customary with soldiers, was not made altogether without noise.
The liberal church council initiated proceedings for disturbance of a public religious service. The pastor was called upon to testify. The judge asked him to state what he considered to be the purpose of a sermon. The pastor replied that the purpose was for the preacher to “discuss religious questions” with the congregation. To those of us young people who had not rallied to the standard of liberalism such a definition was shocking.
The advent of the National Socialists in 1933 marked the beginning of the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), and with it a turning point in the history of the sermon.
The pastors who had accepted National Socialism were, at Hitler’s behest, calling themselves “German-Christians.” Many of these German-Christians—and important ones among them—let themselves be carried away by their political enthusiasm, quite heedless of the scriptural text. For instance, on Good Friday, there would be a description of the arrest of Jesus. “Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.” To which the preacher would add: “Such a thing could never have happened to Adolf Hitler!” and he would go on about German loyalty, about the fighting courage which National Socialism had restored, and so forth. Or again—this was a particular favorite with the German-Christians as a text for sermons in 1933—“But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory!” The words “through our Lord Jesus Christ” were suppressed. And the fact that the whole verse deals with victory over sin did not trouble them. The victory, as they saw it, was Adolf Hitler’s victory of January 30, 1933, and the victory of the National Socialist movement.
Nor did they shrink from altering the text when it suited them. For instance, the opening words of St. John’s Gospel would now be cited as reading: “In the beginning was the people, and the people was with God, and the people was God!”
Getting To The Essentials
Now people began to open their eyes. Up till then they had felt unsure.
Now it was clear to everyone. When Karl Barth called upon the theologians to “get down to essentials,” his call found a resounding echo among both pastors and congregations. What people wanted to know was not what Pastor X thought about political, religious, or other problems, but what God’s eternal word had to say to them in their need and temptations. Quotations from modern poets stuck in pastors’ throats. Congregations no longer wanted to be told that they might believe this or that because Goethe or Wilhelm Raabe had said something of the sort—something more beautiful and impressive, even, than the New Testament. No, people now wanted to hear what the Church of Jesus Christ proclaimed to them as the word of God.
Overnight the collections of Rittelmeyer’s sermons, which previously had gone through edition after edition, were discarded and forgotten. It was the substance that mattered once more; and that, generally speaking, is how it has remained to the present day.
One result of this new frame of mind was the renewed popularity of what theologians call the homily. This is a sermon in which the text is analyzed sentence by sentence, rather than as a whole, and in which not much time is devoted to its practical lessons.
I have never used that form of preaching. To my mind a homily has a purpose only when the members of the congregation have the text open before them and can follow the exposition verse by verse. This occurs in some British congregations, but not here, unfortunately. And only rarely is the text so well known—the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, for instance—that the congregation can follow the preacher point by point. In other cases the precision and acuity of the homily are lost on them. The homily is suitable for the Bible class, not for the parish service.
I have the impression, too, that with this type of sermon the pastor tends to stick too closely to the text itself and fails to make the connection with the practical life of the congregation. Even if he tries to relate the text to present-day reality he will often not get beyond generalities.
I have always regarded the sermon as a vehicle for pastoral care. It should reach the members of the congregation in their daily duties and needs. That is why it has to be practical. For the parish pastor, the substance of his sermon is constantly supplied by his daily work of pastoral counseling. The pastor who has no parish has to search further for a subject. But no sermon should be without pastoral impact on daily life. During the sermon the listener should form resolutions. “He who does not have a God to thread his needle, does not have a God to give him salvation either,” wrote Elise Averdieck in her old age. That is the spirit in which a sermon should be preached.
I remember an incident which took place at Lauenburg in 1913. We were having our big annual mission celebration. Dr. Axenfeld, the director of the Berlin Mission Society, was staying with us. In the morning I had to preach the regular Sunday sermon. It was certainly not a good sermon, for I had not had enough time or peace to prepare it. After the service Axenfeld put his hand in mine and said, “I was so happy; you demand something of the congregation.”
My principle regarding a sermon has always been quite simple and straightforward. When the wife comes home and her husband asks her (or the other way round, as the case may be): “What did he say?” she should be able to reply quite definitely: “He said this.” Perhaps the text was so simple that she can repeat it. That is good. Perhaps the preacher gave an illustration or told a story which she can relate in her turn. That is also good. And it is also helpful if the pastor organizes his sermon under clear headings and recapitulates those headings toward the end.
The pastor should prepare his sermon in writing. If he cannot do so because he is too busy, then he must make it an iron rule to write out at least every second or third sermon. Otherwise he will inevitably slip into monotonous chatter.
The art of preaching begins with the translation of the written word into living speech. The written and the spoken word are two fundamentally different things. The written word moves in relative clauses and paragraphs. The spoken word requires short sentences, clear associations. It uses emphasis to express many things which in the written word have to be explicitly formulated. Very few people have the gift of delivering a written text so that it comes alive. Sermons that are read are nearly always boring.
In our day, people will not tolerate the old-fashioned oratory in which every word was so polished that the text had perforce to be committed to memory verbatim. We have become too sober and realistic for that kind of thing. Today the only possible way to preach is to master both the over-all theme and the details of the written sermon, to memorize certain important phrases but to develop the sermon itself from the pulpit. It is an art that comes naturally to very few. Most preachers have to acquire it laboriously over the years. The preacher who prides himself on jotting down brief notes and then speaking freely will soon show his superficiality. A sermon is not an address before a meeting. It is bound by its scriptural text. It undertakes to proclaim eternal truth in the name of God. The man who treats it lightly is not fit to be a preacher.
The Glad Message Of Grace
This truth, be it added, is the glad message of the grace of God which in Jesus Christ has become final reality. It is a message which includes moral imperatives. But sermons on morals, unrelated to the Gospel, should never be preached from a Christian pulpit. And if this glad message also contains words about God’s judgments which man must ultimately face, it is still a message of joy, and that fact must emerge from every sermon. I rarely preached a penitential sermon. I could never get over what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “lest that … when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.” But the penitential sermon in which the preacher declares himself at one with those to whom he is speaking is actually no longer a penitential sermon, for it must of necessity end in a glorifying of God’s grace.
Let those who feel themselves called upon to be prophets preach penitential sermons! We simple servants of God should preach in such a way that those who listen to us may always feel: “We are the Saviour’s joyful people!”
Of my own sermons, I shall here mention three.
The first of these was the sermon of March 21, 1933, which the National Socialists and later the Communists held so strongly against me. To the end of my life in the ministry I abided by what I said at that time.
The second sermon relates to July 1, 1937, when Niemöller was arrested. The day was a Thursday. On Sunday I had to conduct the service in his place.
People streamed into the church. Two overcrowded services took place in succession. My text was from Second Timothy, where St. Paul speaks of the sufferings he has undergone. The text was not deliberately chosen but taken, I believe, from the Bible reading for the day. (The sermon is no longer in my possession.) In the sermon I adhered strictly to the text. Each word was carefully weighed. The congregation followed the sermon with palpable emotion. Niemöller’s name was not mentioned till the final prayer.
The church was swarming with agents of the Gestapo who were immediately conspicuous by their irreligious and sometimes boorish behavior. A couple of courageous women stopped some of these “Stapisten,” as we called them, after the service, and asked them what they had to say about the sermon. They could say nothing at all. They admitted that not a word could have been construed as hostile to the State—although of course everyone in the church sensed what was behind the words.
At first nothing happened. Ten days later I was arrested—for the third time. The sermon had been taken down by faithful members of the congregation and reproduced. They had meant well. They had not yet learned that under a totalitarian regime one should commit nothing to paper, at any rate not under the author’s name or without his permission. Inevitably the notes of my sermon fell into the hands of the Gestapo. Grounds for prosecution had been provided after all.
A couple of days later I was brought before the magistrate who was to determine whether the police custody should be followed by a bench warrant or not. To that extent judicial forms were still observed.
The judge had the sermon before him and now began to go through it sentence by sentence. “You refer to the Apostle Paul all the time,” he said, “but in fact you always mean Niemöller!” There was a grain of truth in what he said. This is the way the congregation had understood the sermon, and I had known that they would so understand it.
Nevertheless I could in good conscience give the judge a little lecture to the effect that a sermon belongs to the service and must be interpreted within the framework of the service. If a National Socialist trial judge subsequently goes through every word with a blue pencil, an interpretation will emerge which does justice neither to the preacher nor to the congregation.
This seemed to make some impression on the judge. After a half-hour’s talk, he suddenly informed me that he would not issue a bench warrant and that I was free. In a short while I was outside in the street and could telephone my wife to tell her of my release.
Later I learned that the news of this unexpected release aroused something of a storm within the Party. But this time they did not dare rearrest me, as they had already done once before.
The third sermon was delivered on May 20, 1945.
On April 25 the Russians had marched into Berlin. For two weeks we had had to live in cellars, constantly threatened by hostile visits by day and by night.
In the meantime we began to rebuild our ecclesiastical organization. On May 7 the Consistory was reconstituted in Dilschneider’s parsonage at Zehlendorf. We met every day. And one of our first decisions was to hold a big service in the church of St. Matthew in Steglitz on Whitsunday, May 20, at which the new church leadership would appear before the congregation. I was skeptical. Transportation facilities had not yet been restored. It was impossible to publish announcements. Who would come?
But as we made our way on foot from Lichterfelde to Steglitz, we saw our congregation flocking in the same direction—groups of people from Nikolassee, from Schlachtensee, from Zehlendorf, from the heart of Berlin. They were undaunted by the long trek, an hour, two hours through the ruins of Berlin. They could not all fit inside the church. But the building, after all, had no windows, and the doors would not close. So I preached my sermon to the packed congregation and beyond it, to the many whom I could not see.
I had never experienced such an atmosphere before or since. The people’s faces still bore the marks of the shock of the recent past. At the same time they were buoyed up by a new hope, a new resolve. Everything was destroyed. But the Church of Jesus Christ remained. With it and in it they were prepared to make a new beginning.
The text was taken from the second part of the Pentecost story: “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.” We recalled the Whitsunday, twelve years before, when Pastor von Bodelschwing, newly elected Reich Bishop, had preached in the Zion Church in Berlin, and all the sufferings the church had undergone in those twelve years. And then I called upon the community of the faithful to help the new church leadership: “Help us to trust in the Holy Ghost. Help us to pray that the Holy Ghost may come upon us, too! Help us to do the deeds of the Holy Ghost!”
Dr. Otto Dibelius, Evangelical Bishop of Berlin, has spanned in his ministry two world wars and the division of his homeland. This article is reprinted from the forthcoming book, In the Service of the Lord: The Autobiography of Bishop Dibelius (Copyright © 1963 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.), by permission of the publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
