The preacher’s job, finally, is to look at every moment of time, every inch of space, to find there the old, old story and to keep reminding everyone who will listen that the curse shall not have the last word.
—John Ortberg
There is an old story about a mother who walks in on her six-year-old son and finds him sobbing.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
“I’ve just figured out how to tie my shoes.”
“Well, honey, that’s wonderful.”
Being a wise mother, she recognizes his victory in the Eriksonian struggle of autonomy versus doubt: “You’re growing up, but why are you crying?”
“Because,” he says, “now I’ll have to do it every day for the rest of my life.”
Preaching is like that. Sundays just keep coming. Like the Energizer power bunny. Like death and taxes and Slim Whitman Christmas albums. Some months, every other day is a Sunday.
One of the most celebrated of all I Love Lucy episodes features Lucy wrapping candy as it passes on a conveyer belt. In the mistaken belief that Lucy is handling the candy with competence, her supervisor throttles the conveyor belt up to warp speed. An occasional piece of candy gets wrapped, but most of them end up getting stuffed in her mouth or various other places on her person. There just isn’t time to handle them properly.
Preaching is like that too.
In a world where Sundays can’t be postponed, where they keep coming ready or not (usually not), how is it possible to move from survival mode to creativity?
God in every inch
Books of illustrations are generally the homiletical equivalent of canned sitcom laugh tracks. And television shows are okay once in a while, but if we use them too often in our sermons, people will start wondering what we do with our time. Having preschool children at home is better from a preaching standpoint, but it gets expensive after a while, and it’s hard to keep your spouse motivated to continue having them (unless she is unusually committed to the ministry).
Much of what I learned about the possibilities for creative preaching I learned from Ian Pitt-Watson, who teaches preaching at Fuller Seminary. And more important than any techniques was gaining clarity on what preaching is really about.
I had been brought up to think of preaching as teaching bits and illustration bits. You can teach people for a while, but unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people get bored, so you have to throw in illustrations at regular intervals to hold their attention. Illustrations are spoonfuls of regrettably necessary sugar that make the medicine of doctrine go down.
Ian pointed out that the Bible itself does not teach this way. If God were like most preachers, he would have laid out the Bible entirely differently: “My Attributes. Chapter 1: I Am Omniscient,” and so on. Instead, God chose to reveal himself in history, which is to say in stories.
In particular, Jesus taught in stories. This was not a concession to human weakness. To me there’s something arrogant about a preacher who boils down the parables to their “basic principles” as if the story is so much fluff that can be analyzed and safely discarded. Jesus was perfectly capable of laying out “Five Principles to Dynamic Praying,” and the fact that he didn’t should make us reflect.
Abraham Kuyper once wrote, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!'”
The reason for Jesus’ creativity and freshness in his proclamation was not that he was really clever at choosing illustrations. It was that he really did live in the kingdom of God, so that for him not an inch of space, not a moment in time, existed that did not speak about the work of God. So he could look at, say, a seed that must die in the ground before it yields life, or a woman turning her house upside down to find a lost coin, or a flower, or a sparrow, or a great party, and say, “Here is God at work. See him in this inch, this moment.”
Ian put it like this: “If we really believe that our crucified Carpenter is the agent of all creation … we must expect to find anywhere, everywhere, the handwriting of the Author of both the text of Scripture and the text of life—God in Christ revealing himself to us through the power of the Spirit.”
The phrase “creative preaching” then, is a redundancy. Preaching is what happens when I faithfully explain the text of Scripture and the text of life, when the world of the Bible and the world of the listeners collide in Christ. So my task is to find those things that will help me see Christ in the world and see my world in the Bible.
Two times alone
Only God can create ex nihilo. If I start with nihilo, I end with nihilo. I need at least a little chaos to hover over. Certain conditions do exist under which I’m more likely to be creative.
The first one is the most painful: I have to be alone a lot.
In a thoughtful book called Solitude, an English psychiatrist named Anthony Storr writes that the capacity to create is inseparably connected with the capacity to be alone, that often people who are frequently alone in childhood become supremely creative (C. S. Lewis is a well-known example). He even says, “It is not unknown for creative people, once they have achieved an intimate relationship, to lose some of their imaginative drive.” (I sometimes use this quote to explain why it would not be wise for me to spend all day helping shepherd the kindergarten class outing to Knotts Berry Farm.)
Creativity overlaps spirituality when we’re alone. Every character of great spiritual development in Scripture is marked by the use of and desire for solitude—particularly Jesus. (Storr speaks of prayer as the capacity to be alone in the presence of God.) Edward Gibbon wrote, “Conversation enlarges the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”
For me this means I need two kinds of solitude.
Utilitarian solitude is devoted to preparing sermons. I found, over time, this time was eroding to blocks of a few hours here and there, so now I devote one full day a week to being alone to work on the sermon. I may need to give it some other time during the week as well, but I find a day of utilitarian solitude is worth more than the same number of hours broken up during the week.
Perhaps more important, though, is nonutilitarian solitude. This is time alone, but not devoted to sermonizing or anything else related to my job. It is time set aside for praying or reflecting or looking at the ocean. The agenda is not to get inspirations or ideas for the church. In fact, its purpose is to free me from my compulsive need for ideas, to remind me that I am not my job, so that my preaching can be about Christ, not about my own need to succeed as a preacher.
Feeding on doses of joy
Being creative is much more likely to happen when I’m relaxed and joyful. This leads to a Catch-22: I tend to obsess over sermons, and the more I obsess, the less creative I am, which leads me, in turn, to become more anxious and obsessive.
I remember Saturdays when I’ve actually hoped I would get sick so I wouldn’t have to preach that sermon the following morning. (I would have begged off, but I couldn’t conjure up a creative enough excuse.)
I’ve since discovered a helpful insight: Even in a task as significant as preaching, while I have to take the subject matter seriously, playfulness must be part of the process.
Anthony Storr writes that there is always an element of play in creative living: “When this playful element disappears, joy goes with it, and so does any sense of being able to innovate. Creative people not infrequently experience periods of despair in which their ability to create anything new seems to have deserted them. This is often because a particular piece of work has become invested with such overwhelming importance that it is no longer possible to play with it.”
I’ve had days where sermons come with all the speed and spontaneity of Chinese water torture. I’ve also had days where they seem to write themselves. The most common variant for me is how relaxed and joyful I am when I sit down to write.
There is even some research to back up the joy-creativity link.
Some time ago a group of social psychologists gave people the task of finding a way of attaching a matchbox to a wall with no tools other than the box of matches and a candle. They divided the subjects into two groups: one group was shown a very depressing documentary before being given the task and the other watched Marx Brothers movies. Those in the latter group were something like ten times more likely to discover how to solve the problem. (If you send me a check for $9.99, I’ll send you the actual solution.)
What preachers need to be creative, then, may not be a better filing system for illustrations, or even an administrative assistant, but a good jester. For me that means I need to schedule sermon writing when I’m at my freshest. If possible, I try to make sure that I get to do something fun, or at least something that will put me in a relaxed mood, before I get started. Often I’ll begin by “mind mapping,” a kind of written-down version of free association where you put a word in the middle of a sheet of paper and then write whatever words come to your mind around it.
The freshness of the familiar
My creativity also increases, I’ve noticed, when I don’t pressure myself to be creative.
I had just moved to my first full-time job as a pastor, and our church was planning to host the monthly ministerial association get-together. I sent out invitations with a tongue-in-cheek postscript that both the pope and Robert Schuller would be joining us, but that in the event they canceled, everyone should bring outlines of his two best sermons: at least we could swap messages and not have to crank out new ones all summer.
To my amazement, one member of the group, at the close of the meeting, approached me and demanded to know when the sermon exchange would be made. Not only had he brought two outlines, he had made enough photocopies for everyone to take home!
The pressure to manufacture creativity can produce forced and pretentious preaching at best and tempt us to sheer plagiarism at worst.
In fact, pressuring myself to be creative caused me to miss for a long time one of the most powerful weapons of preaching—the familiar. It is, after all, the old, old story that we long to hear the most and, when told right, is somehow always new. Sometimes my horror of saying the obvious is a curse and not a blessing.
I discovered this, somewhat to my chagrin, after returning from a two-week trip to Ethiopia a few years ago. Not having much time to prepare, I simply told the story of the church in the book of Acts and relayed the story (largely the same one) of the church in Ethiopia. It connected with people at a level far deeper than what I usually experience with much more carefully prepared messages.
Fred Craddock wrote that preachers are called not only to speak to the congregation but also to speak for the congregation.
My job is not to say something no one has ever said before on a text no one has ever preached before. This syndrome Craddock calls “overlooking the treasury of the familiar.”
“No one builds a church,” he says, “by leaping off the pinnacle of the temple every Sunday.… If a minister takes seriously the role of listeners in preaching, there will be sermons expressing for the whole church, and with God as the primary audience, the faith, the doubt, the fear, the anger, the love, the joy, the gratitude that is in all of us. The listeners say, ‘Yes, that’s my message; that is what I have wanted to say.'”
Or as C. S. Lewis put it, Jesus’ command to Peter was, “Feed my sheep,” not, “Try new experiments on my rats.”
I’m often tempted to be creative merely for the sake of being creative. Nothing is more excruciating than the knowledge that you’re boring a roomful of people, except, of course, being one of those bored people in the room. In one of my first sermons, I knew how badly things were going in part because one of the listeners (and it was a small crowd) actually fell asleep. On the way home, I said to my wife, “Nancy, next Saturday, you’ve just got to get to bed sooner.”
But it isn’t safe to allow people’s response to be the ultimate criterion by which a sermon is judged. G. K. Chesterton wrote once that God shares with children the capacity to delight in what appears to be routine to people who are neither children nor God, but merely adults:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
“Say it again,” God says. When we say it again, when we get it right, it’s as if our words were being said for the first time. The old, old story has again become a new song.
Looking for the Prince to come
Preaching is the coming together of two worlds: the world of the Bible and the world of the listener. It is the intersection of two stories—God’s and mine.
When my oldest daughter was old enough to give me an excuse for doing so, I took her to her first Disney movie. I remembered vividly going with my own parents to see Snow White; it hardly seemed possible I could be going now with my child.
For Laura it was as if she entered into the world on the screen. She laughed at Dopey and got mad at Grumpy and cringed before the evil queen, with real tears running down her face. She had been transported.
And then Snow White began to sing, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and Laura’s eyes shone. She squeezed my hand and said, “Daddy, the prince is coming.”
But at one point the story goes all wrong: the bride tastes the fruit, falls under a spell, and then falls asleep. The dwarves cannot wake her. They, too, are waiting for the prince to come.
In this familiar fairy tale, I began to see hints of a deeper story, one that always and everywhere seeks to break through if only we’ll have eyes to see and ears to hear.
For we have all tasted the forbidden fruit, all eaten the poisoned apple. We have all fallen under the spell—the curse—and all fallen asleep.
The preacher’s job, finally, is not to figure out how to be novel or distinctive or say something no one has ever said before. Ours is a more humble one: to look at every moment of time, every inch of space, to find there the old, old story and to keep reminding everyone who will listen that the curse shall not have the last word. One day the Prince will come for his bride and take her home.
And every once in a while, in the midst of (and often in spite of) the preacher’s words, the Prince comes even now and kisses his bride. And somebody, somewhere, wakes up.
Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today
