The question every preacher has to ask himself is, “Is this the best I can give?” If the answer is yes, that is all we can do.
—Gardner C. Taylor
As a young man, I recoiled from the idea of being a preacher. I wanted to go to law school and become a criminal lawyer. My boyhood friends in Louisiana tried to discourage me from that idea; at that time no black person had ever been admitted to the Louisiana bar, and my well-meaning friends asked me where I was going to practice law—in the middle of the Mississippi River?
In my senior year of college, I was admitted to the University of Michigan Law School. But before I left, I had a fearful automobile accident; it touched me at the very center of my being, and through that experience I heard the Lord’s call to the ministry. I felt both an enormous relief and a great embarrassment—for several years.
So I did not start off with any great confidence or sense of appreciation and awe about being a preacher. I wasn’t sure it was a worthwhile thing for a young, healthy, thoughtful man to do. Even when I came to Concord Baptist at thirty years old, I still had some of that in me.
While I’m a better preacher than I was thirty years ago, I’m not as good a preacher as I want to be. After many sermons I still think, I didn’t get at it the way I should have. Now and then I get a wonderful sense of having been delivered fully through a sermon, but it doesn’t last long, and by Tuesday or Wednesday that sermon begins to look awfully wooden and stale.
Still, I know I’m a better preacher than I was when I started. I have a sense that I’m preaching closer to the heart of the gospel. But that doesn’t mean Sunday mornings come any easier. Here is my weekly journey of moving from idea to Sunday morning.
Beginning the journey
I think of a sermon as a journey, a trip I want to make. I want to know where I’m starting, how to get there, and where I’ll end up. Getting an idea is the beginning of that journey.
I rarely know what I’m going to preach about on the Monday or Tuesday before a Sunday preaching date. But by Tuesday night—and this is a mystery to me—some idea will come. An idea may spark by looking through some of the things I’ve read, or by what Alexander Maclaren called “sitting silent before God.” I also find ideas in preaching books. In his book Designing the Sermon, James Earl Massey wrote about “opening men up”—it’s a great passage that sparked a sequence of thoughts in my mind. In my reading, one sentence will often set off a chain of reflection. Whenever I read anything, I think, How does this relate to my preaching?
I also get ideas from talking with people. I used to play golf with the former president of a bank here in New York. He’s a good man, although not particularly religious, and he told me one day he saw the stage play Your Arm’s Too Short to Box with God. He told me how moved people were at a certain point in the play, and then he said, “But you know what bothers me about black people? They depend on Jesus to do everything.”
I started thinking about that. Later I developed a sermon about that idea and sent him a copy. My thesis was that yes, black Christians do call on the name of the Lord often and depend on him greatly. But often they are the same people who are buying homes, sending their children to school, and making decent lives for themselves. They have done more concerning the practical things that matter than all of the social clubs, fraternities, banks, or other black institutions.
Once I have an idea rolling around in my head, I initially study Sunday’s text without dipping into the commentaries. Only then do I see what others have to say about the passage. I might go to Joseph Parker’s Preaching Through the Bible, Maclaren’s Expositions, Calvin’s Exposition of the Scriptures, one of Barclay’s commentaries, or The Interpreter’s Bible. Sometimes I look at the critical commentaries and research the original language.
I may find the Scriptures don’t say what I thought they did; I have to be open to the possibility that I may have to change my idea. I am not free to flit about the Scriptures looking for favorite notions; I’m liable to become a Johnny-one-note. Even in topical preaching, I must stay true to Scripture.
The spirituality of the preacher
Perhaps one of the most important but often neglected parts of sermon preparation is our spiritual life. The apostle Paul says, “Lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (1 Cor. 9:27 kjv). It’s easy to get so engaged in the mechanics of preaching that one loses the vitality of it, the center.
I recently read in the book of Ruth where Naomi says, “I went out full, and I’ve come back empty.” That’s the story of life. It’s also the story of preaching; we must keep ourselves full so we can empty ourselves in the pulpit.
But there are times when I have what my wife calls preaching plateaus, in which everything is flat country. That happened more when I was younger, when I’d hit preaching slumps in which the stream didn’t flow, the wheels didn’t turn for three, four, five weeks. I learned to look inward at those times and offer what I was passing through to God. I tried to believe by the promise of the Word that those sermons spoke to somebody who was having in some sense the same kind of experience.
When this happens, I often study the history of preaching. I don’t see how any preacher can stay flat when he reads of Jean Massillon preaching the funeral of Louis XIV before all of the crown heads of Europe. From the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral, he looked out over that royal gathering for a moment and then said, “Brethren, in the hour of death, only God is great.” Anybody who stands in that tradition must feel good about the calling.
Preparing to apply
In addition to finding a sermon idea and studying Sunday’s text, each week I must spend time making the connection between Sunday’s text and the world of my listeners. Kyle Haseldon, once an editor of the Christian Century, had a saying about the Scripture being the “revealant.” There is no such word in the dictionary, but it’s a good word: what is revealed, over against that which is relevant. The preacher’s job is to see how these two things intersect and report on it. Karl Barth spoke about standing in the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Sometimes this connection is easy to make, given my circumstances. Once I had to talk earnestly with the Lord about my nagging worries for my wife. She was in excellent health at the time, but after forty years together, I figured something would happen sooner or later. She had been so much a part of my life that it was almost unbearable for me to think of our separation.
I had to ask the Lord to deliver me from this terrible shadow. In thinking about this, I realized that these same worries affected others in my congregation. I had to open myself before God and, one Sunday, give voice to these fears in the light of the Scriptures. This is what the preacher is called to do.
Sometimes my sermons consciously address certain needs; other times, though, it happens mysteriously. The Word of God breaks through the preacher by the power of the Holy Spirit. Other times, in spite of the preacher, the people will be ministered to. Occasionally a parishioner will say at the door of the church, “You spoke to me; this was my problem, and you spoke to it,” and the preacher didn’t mean to speak to that problem at all.
Writing the sermon
I try to determine my introduction by Thursday night. By Friday night I like to come within a page of completing a full manuscript of my sermon, although I don’t use it in the pulpit or memorize it. Some of the material is lost in actual delivery, but material I hadn’t planned on comes to me while preaching. The one makes up for the other.
Sometimes, when the momentum is flowing, I’ll write the conclusion on Friday at two or three in the morning. But if not, then I’ll leave the conclusion for Saturday morning. On Sunday morning, I listen to spirituals and gospel music on my stereo. They help me get into a cadence, which is part of my background. Even before getting up, I often go through the sermon in my mind to see what grasp I have of it.
I read over my sermon three times: twice on Saturday, once to proof it because it has to be typed later and the second time for absorption. I’ll also read it over before I leave the house Sunday morning. Once I get to the church, I see several people about the announcements, and then about 10:30 a.m. I seclude myself in my office and don’t see anyone else until I go to the pulpit at 11:00. That is the moment of truth; all the apprehensiveness comes to a head.
On my way to church, I sometimes pass laborers on the street and wish I were doing anything except having to get into the pulpit again. But once I arrive and the music and hymns start, something happens. Bob Gibson, the great St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, said the hardest thing about baseball for him was getting to the ballpark and putting his uniform on. Once he did that, it was a joy.
I give many secular addresses on public platforms, but I never feel as tense about them as I feel about a sermon. Preaching is a different ball game from public speaking.
The delivery
Black preachers used to have a formula for delivering a sermon: “Start low, go slow, get high, strike fire, retire.” I can’t offer a formula for how I deliver a sermon; it depends on the sermon, on the mood of the preacher, on the mood of the congregation. But I can offer three components of my delivery that I monitor to help me, as Paul Rees once said, move people up as close to the heart of God as they can be moved and then leave them there.
Openings. A preacher has three or four minutes, hardly more than that, to interest people. If I miss them in those first three or four minutes, I’m finished. Their minds have gone off somewhere. There are thousands of techniques preachers can use to communicate more effectively: the rhetorical question, the incident out of life, the illustration from literature, the dramatic pause. The techniques cannot be used mechanically; yet they have to be planned by the preacher as a living part of the sermon.
Chemistry. Once I get into the sermon, I try to get close emotionally to the congregation. Any movement on their part, for example, bothers me greatly, because I have to feel they are right there with me. What I am delivering is not an abstract lecture, but a communication about a life-and-death matter.
In a black congregation, there is often a vocal response to the preacher, though not as much as there was once. I enjoy that. We had a Canadian guest preacher at Concord one Sunday when I was gone, Frank Zwackhammer, and Frank told me later he must have been laboring a point a little too long because one of our deacons said out loud, “All right, we’ve got that. Go on.”
There’s an invisible, mysterious interplay that goes on between pastor and people, and I can feel whether I’m getting to the people or not.
Words. T. S. Eliot spoke of his work as “a raid on the inarticulate.” Preaching is a raid on the inarticulate and the inexpressible. Words are the currency in which the preacher deals; we must be careful not to deal with them loosely, because if they are debased or devalued, there’s no other currency in which to deal.
A preacher should revere language. There is no excuse for sloppy language. Words must make definite suggestions, not only in their definition but in their sound. There are words that caress, words that lash and cut, words that lift, and words that have a glow in them.
But I’d like to add a caveat: words also can reveal the heart. A remarkably gifted colleague, Sandy Ray, was at Cornerstone Church in Brooklyn for thirty-five years. I listened to him year in and year out, and I never heard a false note or saw a false move. I never sensed that this man was playing to the galleries.
But I know also a preacher of enormous talent whose preaching, although attractive, has never achieved the force, the thrust, which I thought was in him in his student days. I listened to him two or three years ago, and I think I found out why—he’s using fancy footwork, he’s showing he can do it. I’m sure he doesn’t realize it, but there’s always half a smile on his face as if to say, “Watch, now, what I’m going to do.”
In my early years I had a fascination for form and eloquence that was, I’m afraid, not heart deep. At one point, I wanted to take elocution to train my voice. My wife discouraged me from it, so I never did it. Her reasoning was that preaching never ought to be a finished thing, a polished performance. She was right.
Evaluating Sunday morning
I rarely feel satisfied with my preaching, even though I feel an enormous sense of relief afterward. Now and again, I get a foreshadowing of what my preaching ought to be, and I strive to preach that way all the time. That, of course, is impossible, so I have to make peace with reality. But I always push to give my best.
Arthur Gossip reports a mystical thing that once happened to him in a Scottish church. As he came down the pulpit stairs after preaching, he met a Presence who said to him, “Was that the best you could give me today?” Gossip said he went back in the vestry and wept.
That’s a question every preacher has to ask himself, “Is this the best I can give?” If the answer is yes, that is all we can do.
We must, eventually, come to terms with the unique preaching gifts God has given each of us. When I first came to New York, I was privileged to be a colleague of some of the greatest pulpit figures of this century. They were all great men of God, but they were all different. Robert McClacken preached with a probing wistfulness. George Buttrick was a man in touch with the tides of current thought, yet always subjected them to the scrutiny of the Scriptures.
Paul Scherer was grand and expansive. One of his students asserted that when Scherer said “Good morning” to you, it was an occasion; his preaching was almost Shakespearean in its manner. Sandy Ray had a gift for observation of human nature, of taking simple things and giving them eternal meanings. He used to say, for instance, that some of us are ocean liners and we sail great waters; and some are little tugboats; but the only way the ocean liner can get to port is with the help of the tugs.
A preacher has to find what he or she is all about on the inside and work with that flow. Arthur Gossip used to say he would preach to himself, and then find out he had preached to all other people. Now a preacher can’t become simply an echo of his own eccentricity, but one has to come to grips with self first.
When one has found that acceptance, that person has come into an incomparable authenticity. I have never known a preacher who did not have a unique power if he or she would allow it to shine forth. I had a student at Colgate-Rochester who stuttered—sometimes even when he preached he stuttered. But there was a force in the stutter that caused people to almost stand up in their effort to help him. It wasn’t for effect; it would have fallen flat had it been that. But he could draw forth an interest in his preaching that few could do.
With all the doubts and uncertainties I’ve had, I’m more and more thankful the Lord made me a preacher. I remember reading a sentence from Wordsworth that led me to consider what I would do when my ministry faded “into the light of common day” as he put it.
Well, my preaching has long since faded into that light, but whenever I come down from that pulpit so weary that I never want to preach again, the Lord finds some way to revive me and usually makes my next ministry opportunity one of my most exciting ones.
Copyright © 1995 by Leadership/Christianity Today
