The sermon is where we tighten the focus on our congregation, on our situation. It’s where everything gets down to us.
—John Killinger
The pastors of the church I grew up in didn’t know much about worship. They invariably followed the pattern they had inherited from the past: two or three hymns, an offering with a prayer, special music, a sermon, an invitational hymn, and a benediction. Fortunately, the music was usually spirited, the prayers and the sermon were earnest, and we had a sense of being in the presence of God. That, after all, is what worship is all about. You can have the most cleverly designed worship program in the world and still fail if there isn’t a sense of that all-important presence.
But I have learned, over the years, that a well-planned worship service can usually help people to know they are in the presence of a transcendent being. The Holy Spirit works in wondrous ways, I know. Yet I believe that the Spirit can work better on me as a pastor and preacher when I am in the quiet of my study, thinking about the Sunday service and the sermon I have to preach, than when I wait for our encounter on Sunday morning with hundreds of other people present. If I seek the Spirit’s leadership in the planning of worship and the sermon, I am freer when the moment of encounter comes, and we can really “get down to it,” as the jazz musicians say.
Worship and preaching are inextricably linked, whatever some preachers think. The entire worship experience is something we offer to God—including the preaching. The hymns and prayers and special music aren’t mere preparation for the preacher’s art. They are open communication between God and God’s people. When the preacher stands to preach, it is like the moment in a choral concert when the spotlight shifts to a soloist. The soloist isn’t there alone and doesn’t sing in a vacuum. The soloist merely has a special part at a particular moment in the concert. It is the concert that matters most, not the soloist.
Conducting the tour
I don’t plan worship and preaching independently of each other. It’s almost as if they’re in colloidal suspension until suddenly they both appear. Our church uses a fairly consistent format for worship, so I normally think about how to make each element of the service a part of a journey that we will all take together.
For starters, I assume people enter rather cold, unprepared, and we have to give them something in the beginning that will get them up and going. Many come to church frazzled, without a sense of high expectancy. This puts weight on those of us who plan worship to meet their needs and provide the kinds of surprises in which the gospel can be heard. My job as their tour conductor or storyteller is to help worship happen even if they didn’t expect it.
Of course, the needs of individual worshipers vary greatly. That’s why I don’t usually follow a single theme in planning; if I do, I may suit a few persons and miss all the others. What I’d like worship to do is focus on God—on God’s greatness, God’s majesty, God’s graciousness, God’s abiding love—and let other things sort of cascade around that.
My sermons always follow a particular line of thought. Sermons don’t do much if they’re not focused. But they are always set in the context of a worship service that is general enough not to leave anybody out. Say I’m preaching on loneliness, for example. I’ll try to make the sermon as wide as possible in order to speak not only to those who know they are miserably lonely but to those who are miserable but don’t know it because they’re lonely. And I’ll set all our loneliness in the larger context of our loneliness for God, our need for the divine and transcendent in our lives.
I may mention loneliness in the morning prayer, but only as one aspect of the prayer. And one or two of the hymns may have something to say about loneliness. But in general the hymns will range over many other topics, and the responses will come from the large, catholic tradition that doesn’t focus on a single theme. People who didn’t come to church feeling lonely won’t go away sensing that the worship wasn’t for them, that they couldn’t “dig” it because it was oriented toward something they weren’t really feeling in their inner beings.
Even the announcements are part of the worship journey. I know a lot of pastors have relegated announcements to the beginning or end of a service because they want to keep worship “pure” for God. But I have always purposely kept announcements in the middle of the service as a moment when I can relate to the congregation in a light, friendly way. The personal warmth and humor of this time provide a brief rest for the congregation in the building intensity of the service.
Shakespeare, you remember, used comic interludes for this purpose. He’d have some very serious business going on—people plotting to kill other people, people being estranged from their children or parents—and he’d interrupt that with comic relief, something that permitted the audience to pause and catch its breath. Shakespeare knew his business. He realized that people can attain greater dramatic intensity, can go deeper into heavy stuff, if they have such moments occasionally to rest them along the way.
Recently I was introducing new members and their sponsors. When I came to the last sponsor, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the man’s name. I finally said, “And the next person you all know.” I went on quickly with the announcements, and by the time I got through, I remembered the name. I apologized and made a joke out of this old man’s not remembering names anymore. Everyone laughed. It was a human moment that rested us before we went on to more serious matters.
Tightening the focus
Preparing our people for the sermon is as necessary as preparing the sermon. I can feel whether the members of my congregation are ready for my message by the way they have responded in the singing, especially the doxology, which immediately precedes the sermon. The volume and enthusiasm are a key to their readiness. If these are high, I know they are ready to settle back and listen with eagerness.
I normally read the Scripture with a calm, gentle voice, trying to read it, as one old Scotsman put it, as though I were listening to it and not as if I had written it. In the quietness and mood of gathering intensity, now I’m ready and the congregation is ready. I can sense if that feeling is ever missing. Usually it isn’t, but I am greatly put off if it is. I may in that case even request that the congregation sing another hymn, or perhaps a little chorus, something that will put a better edge on things.
The best way to ensure that people will be ready for the sermon, aside from the quality of the worship service itself, is to preach consistently the very best sermons of which we are capable. It’s a lot like going into a restaurant to eat. If you’ve been there before and had a delicious meal, you’ll be eager to go there again. But if the fare has been dull and tasteless, you’ll not be happy to be there. If we set the very finest meals before our congregations Sunday after Sunday, they’ll look forward to tucking their napkins under their chins and having another each time they come.
Our preaching, like any other element of worship, must be truly good to contribute to the sense of spiritual encounter that builds throughout the service. The sermon, as Theodore Wedel liked to say, is where the gospel gets transubstantiated. It’s where the gospel becomes truly incarnate. The hymns and prayers represent the general church, the sense of worship in all the ages, and so does the Scripture reading. But the sermon! The sermon is where we tighten the focus on our congregation, on our situation. It’s where everything gets down to us.
A worshipful sermon is one that begins somewhere in the human situation recognizable to the congregation and then leads them to a place where revelation occurs. I try to invite the listeners on a journey with me, and somewhere along that journey there’s an epiphany, a manifestation of something higher than all of us. I can’t say where it will be; it’s unpredictable even when I’m writing the sermon. I’ve got a diverse group of people—a caravan, if you like—and I’m beckoning them with the storyteller’s art to keep them intrigued, like Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, and different people have their epiphanies in different places. Some people attain a sense of transcendence faster than others. Some people get there faster one day than they do another.
I almost always start a sermon with a comment or a story that is easy to get into, that is revealing of human experience. For example, when I preached a sermon on the third commandment, about not taking God’s name in vain, I began with a comment from Ruben Alves, the Brazilian theologian. A friend once told Alves that not taking the Lord’s name in vain simply means not using the Lord’s name unless you’re serious about it. I said that probably catches a lot of us, who are casual churchgoers not really committed to the Lord, who may use a little profanity now and then, and maybe even ministers who speak too glibly about the name of God. I wanted them to see that we are all guilty, even those of us who act and speak so piously around the church. We all treat God’s name too lightly.
I usually design my sermons to reach a high moment near the end. I employ illustrations as resting places along the way—to provide breathers—and then keep working on the intensity until I reach a peak toward the end. But I don’t stop there. I want to “cultivate the quiet close,” as James Stewart of Scotland once called it. I taper off gently, hoping people can interiorize the sermon, and lead quietly into the devotional hymn.
A few times I have surprised my congregation with an altar call, with good results. We don’t usually have such invitations in the Presbyterian tradition. In a way, that is good; we don’t wear out the vehicle, the way it often seems to be worn in churches that exercise such a call every Sunday. But I do try to lead my people to a decision-making moment in every sermon, and hope they will make inward decisions that will change their lives. I try to lead them to this through the words of the sermon and then let them make their commitment to God during the last hymn, so that the sermon will continue to work on their lives when they go home.
But we can’t program exactly where the gospel will be heard. We must simply preach sermons that have a lot of theological integrity and hope that people will enter some door along the way that will lead them down the hallways to the heart of what we’re trying to do.
Preaching ought to be like a ball of yarn you can grab hold of any place and follow to its ultimate core, which in the case of preaching is a well-articulated theology. I hope that every sermon I write, whatever its text and whatever its showcase material, is true to a consistent theological center in my thinking. Every statement, every illustration, every aside, ought somehow to be traceable to that center, that core. That way, people can get to the center no matter where they take hold, no matter what door they enter.
Fully alert
As worship director, the pastor can make several mistakes. The first is in attempting to be too dramatic. Drama is important, and there is a discernible dramatic pattern to the unfolding of worship. But any good actor will tell you that restraint is a large part of high drama. The dramatic schema must be there, but it must not appear to be there. I remember Madeleine L’Engle lecturing once about writing. She said, “If I want to write about passion, I write it with ice, not fire.” Restraint. Holding back. Not permitting a slobbering enthusiasm to substitute for the real substance of what we’re doing.
Another mistake is inadequate preparation—not constructing the prayers with genuine care, for example. I didn’t always write out my pulpit prayers. I grew up in the hills of south central Kentucky and had never seen anything but a Southern Baptist worship service before I went to Harvard and encountered George Buttrick. I wondered why everybody thought he was so important, because I hadn’t even heard of him. But Buttrick transformed the way I saw things. He said that if you’ve got time to write out only the prayers or the sermon, write out the prayers. I understand now what he meant. The prayers are critical to the mood of the service. Their phrasing, their rhythm, their substance, may be easily missed if done extemporaneously, on the spot. You have so little time, in a prayer, to gather up people’s unspoken thoughts and present them to God. Some people are good at doing it extemporaneously. But even those people would probably do a better job if they spent some time preparing their own spirits, then concentrating on the words and substance of the actual prayers.
Inadequate preparation also impairs the sermon. It isn’t easy to spend the kind of time and sweat that disciplined preparation requires. I can understand why many preachers take the easy way out. And some preachers really thrive on the sense of discovery that occurs occasionally when they are up in front of a congregation preaching and they suddenly say something that is revelatory to them as well as the congregation. What they don’t realize is that these moments would come a lot more often if they only applied themselves to their craft in the study. They wouldn’t ever prepare a sermon without experiencing this sense of visitation.
I worship all week as I prepare my sermon, because I know I am doing it before God. I pray for understanding and illumination. I can be writing a sentence and suddenly some phrasing, some way of putting an idea, will flash out like a divine manifestation at me, and I’ll say, “Thank you, God,” and type furiously to get it down before it is gone. I’ll continue to think about that all day and the next day and the next. And when I preach it on Sunday, I’ll enjoy it again, and inwardly I’ll thank God again for it.
When you really prepare your preaching week by week, you feel a lot like an athlete training for the big event. When you get into the pulpit, it’s like taking the field. You feel your whole being poised for what you are about to do. Your body, your mind, and your soul are all alert, and the adrenaline begins to flow. You become an offering to God with your total being.
You’re not free to do this when you’re unprepared and have to think your way along through the entire sermon, stammering and stuttering.
Freshening the format
Accurate feedback is critical to the improvement of our worship. My wife has always been my most trustworthy critic. I’m sure, as Thomas Hardy put it, that she sometimes “tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” especially when she thinks I’m feeling particularly vulnerable or sensitive. But in general she has been a fine barometer of how things have worked in a service. We talk informally about everything—not just the sermon, but the hymns and the prayers and all the rest. I learn a lot from that, because she’s a very discerning person.
Another way to ensure honest feedback is to invite a colleague who’s sensitive to worship to give a frank appraisal. Consultants are useful in other spheres of our lives. Why not in our churches’ worship? We ministers could do each other a lot of good by visiting each other’s churches and offering our professional appraisals of what does and doesn’t work well in the services.
But improving our worship doesn’t necessarily mean we need to change our patterns. It isn’t usually the format that people grow tired of; it’s the routine, insensitive way the format is handled. There is genuine value in having worship patterns remain fairly stable, so that people feel secure with them. Constant fiddling with the format can be confusing and unsettling to them. The important thing is to find a sound liturgical pattern and then work hard at keeping its parts fresh and vital. That’s why we should spend a lot of time on our prayers and sermons, and why our musicians should work so hard on their music.
In my churches, we have varied our formats occasionally in order to remind people that formats themselves are not sacrosanct. Worship is something we create for God. But because we create it, we can do it in other ways.
Some pastors are born innovators and offer something new to people every Sunday. One of my former students, for example, preached a sermon recently that was based on the thought of Paul Tillich. He knew his congregation hadn’t read Tillich and possibly wouldn’t understand Tillich if he quoted him. So he planned a fascinating sermon that actually began with him, the pastor, attempting to share Tillich’s ideas. Suddenly a voice on the PA system interrupted him. “Hey, what are you trying to do to those people?” it asked. The minister stopped. “What do you mean?” he asked. “They can’t understand Tillich,” the voice said. “They don’t care about what he said.”
Appearing irritated, the minister continued. Again he was interrupted by the voice, protesting that people couldn’t follow the abstract thought of a theologian like Tillich. “But,” protested the minister, “I’m just trying to tell them that …” And he explained what he was trying to get across by using Tillich’s ideas. “That they can understand,” said the voice. “But that’s what I was trying to say,” said the pastor. “They can understand it the way you put it,” said the voice, “but not the other way.”
By the time the sermon was over, everybody had heard the message and understood it. People had also realized that it was the minister’s own voice, prerecorded, they were hearing over the amplifying system. They loved the sermon, and wanted to know when they could hear another one like it.
Such experimentalism is good and is especially welcomed by some congregations, especially in collegiate settings. But it has been my experience that most congregations are comfortable with settled liturgical formats. What they want is fresh prayers, fresh sermons, fresh music within those formats. That is why we need to devote ourselves to creating meaningful worship, to keeping all these parts of the service crisp and new.
I have a friend who is a columnist for a large metropolitan newspaper. “I have the same amount of space every week,” he says. “What I have to do is sit down at my computer and produce something that is interesting and readable, that will grab people’s attention and make them think about an issue. Otherwise they won’t read the column, even if they read it the week before. I may be forgiven if I botch up a column now and then. But if I do it consistently, people will stop reading me altogether, and the newspaper will jerk my column.”
This is true with preparing the parts of the worship service. People will forgive occasional lapses. But what they want, week by week, is a sense of freshness and meaning in the parts of the service they are accustomed to. They may not take us off the job for not giving them what they want. But they will certainly not be happy if we disappoint them too frequently.
The player’s temptation
Worship will always be different for me than for my congregation. It’s the difference between a player on the field and a spectator in the stands. The person on the field is one with the crowd, in a sense, and yet is also conscious that he or she is making it happen for the crowd.
There’s no getting around the fact that the attention of the congregation will be on the preacher, the way it is for the athlete. In fact, if I’m up there preaching and don’t have their attention, I feel bad. But having people’s attention the way we do can be a subtle form of temptation, and this has ruined a lot of preachers, who begin to preen themselves on being seen by others, on being the focal point of everything. They forget that God is our focal point, and they set themselves in place of God.
It is important not to succumb to a sense of showmanship in the pulpit. I think of Laurence Olivier, the famous British actor. Olivier could milk a part for everything in it. But he never became a showman. Not in the crass sense. He was an artist. The difference between a showman and an artist is that the showman puts on a show and everyone knows it, while the artist paints a picture and draws people into it so that they are no longer conscious of watching something, they become part of the process.
Phillips Brooks, the great New England preacher, once said that shy people make the best preachers. He himself was a shy man. Shy people interiorize a lot. They meditate and reflect. When they preach, they know how to get inside people’s minds. They are more skilled at this than extroverts, who spend less time trying to understand what others are thinking and feeling. To perform well as preachers, shy people must be well enough prepared to subjugate fears and timidity. When the message begins to flow, they forget that they’re shy.
We all face the temptation to try to make ourselves look better than we are. We learn to do this even when we are children. Ministers, being human and wanting the congregation’s approval, are always tempted to present themselves as smarter or wiser or more compassionate than they really are, and sermons are opportunities for doing this.
I’m often asked, “Is it all right to allude to yourself in a sermon?” My answer is, “Yes, it’s all right if you remember one thing: Don’t try to make yourself look good.” In fact, we can very profitably use personal allusions in our sermons if we use allusions that show us in a human light or in a bad light. This reminds people that we all stand under the need of God’s grace, even the preachers.
It’s important not to use the sermon to puff yourself. I have heard preachers who name-dropped, for instance. You know what I mean. “I was having dinner with Colin Powell the other night, and we were discussing Desert Storm.” That sort of thing. It becomes tiresome and represents the preacher as a social climber or an egocentric person. If we are going to be autobiographical, we should aim at being truly honest about our feelings and show ourselves for the doubting, struggling, feckless creatures we really are.
The trick is to be transparent to the presence of God, so that as we draw people’s attention, we really remind them of God, not of ourselves. When they leave church on Sunday morning, they should be saying, “Don’t we serve a fantastic God!” not “Wasn’t the preacher brilliant today?”
At the risk of reiterating what I have already said, one of the most important factors to me is the thoroughness of preparation, so that when I preach, I’m leading people on a journey that becomes more and more intense until they suddenly have their epiphanies, their meetings with God. If I have prepared as I should have, and have done my part right in the service, they have forgotten me by that point. Like a hypnotist, I’m a mere voice guiding them on a trip where they have a rendezvous with God.
Trying to be quiet
Even after many years in ministry, I am painfully aware of the distance between my spiritual life and where I ought to be as a preacher who dares to say anything about God. Like so many preachers, I fear that I may have even dulled my own sensibilities for the holy by speaking about it so often. That happens, you know. You handle the important things so frequently that you become inured to them. You trivialize them and forget how to fall down in awe and trembling.
Once I wrote Corita Kent, the famous nun who made those beautiful posters, and asked her to come to Vanderbilt University to lead some worship experiences for us. I received a postcard from her. All it said was: “Dear, I am trying to be quiet.” It was a beautiful statement. It has haunted me for years.
The mere fact that you are put on a pedestal as the people’s spiritual example is one of the most damnable things that can happen to you. You become a spokesperson with something to say on every official occasion—even some unofficial ones—and the speech comes easily to your tongue and lips. Eventually you are lulled by the sound of your own voice, by the high-sounding phrases of your own pronouncements. You begin to think, as other people do, that you know what you’re talking about.
Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, once advised a young poet that if he ever became famous, he should “take another name, any name, so that God can call you in the night.” I think about that. It is a liability to be well liked as a preacher. You may lose your own soul, your own sense of what is truly spiritual.
I like to hear some preacher speak who is just beginning his or her ministry—somebody who is still struggling with the issues. Then I think I have a chance to hear something authentic. I become wary of preachers who have been at it too long. We are inclined to pontificate, to speak as if we really understood. And that can be disastrous for us.
We should all be more like the little priest in Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, who prayed, “Lord, send me back to seminary, for I am a danger to souls.” That kind of sensibility would make better preachers and leaders of worship of all of us.
Copyright © 1995 by Leadership/Christianity Today
