When Bad Sermons Happen to Good Preachers

As long as there are sermons, there will be bad sermons. And I hate preaching a bad sermon.

I hate it because preaching is such a vulnerable activity. If I lead a meeting poorly or have a bad counseling session, it's known only by a limited number of people. A bad sermon is like a car wreck—everyone slows down to see what happened. You don't want to seem callous, but it's irresistible.

I hate it because there's no one and no thing to blame. If a tennis player hits a bad shot, he always looks at his racquet, as if it's the racquet's fault, as if the string tension had suddenly and mysteriously changed. If I preach a bad sermon, what am I going to look at—the Bible?

I hate it because at our church we usually do four services on a weekend, and after the first one is over, I know I have to go through it three more times, bad sermon or not.

I hate it because of what's at stake. When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human. I know, I know—pastors are fond of trotting out "the-sermon-I-thought-was-the-worst-is-the-one-someone-told-me-changed-their-life" stories. That sometimes happens. Shaking a frozen laptop to get it unstuck sometimes happens too, but I wouldn't recommend it as a general strategy. As a rule, bad sermons tend to help people less than good sermons.

And yet they keep coming.

I have been preaching for 30 years now. I pray for guidance, I read about preaching and listen to good preachers, and I try to improve, but I have yet to find the formula that will guarantee effectiveness every time out. I still find myself preaching sermons now and then that are far too abstract, or where I try to force humor, or where I'm just nagging, or where it's not clear what I'm expecting people to understand or to feel or to do. I have moments when an idea that seemed so powerful as I was preparing it fails to connect with real-life people at all.

This doesn't just happen to me. It happens to the best preachers I know, the ones I couldn't preach like in a million years.

Bad sermons don't stop coming. But I think about them differently now than I did when I first started preaching. There are a few good things that can come when bad sermons happen.

First, they keep preachers humble. It's a strange way to make a living—standing up and claiming, "Thus sayeth the Lord." After I give what I perceive to be a few good sermons in a row, I can begin to believe that I have this preaching thing figured out.

And then a homiletical belly flop reminds me of what I should always remember: "Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord." This is not the sort of craft than is meant to be mastered and manufactured.

If my words are to be offered at all, they are to be offered in a deep sense of dependence. And of course, if I have any sanity at all, that will begin to extend to the rest of the words that I speak; because in a real sense we are all proclaiming whatever gospel it is that we really believe all the time.

Second, bad sermons are also a wonderfully concrete reminder that I am not the sum total of other people's opinions of me. Sermon failure is public failure, and public failure can be a wonderfully freeing thing.

A pastor friend talked this week about giving a sermon that caused a large percentage of his congregation to leave the church. He was depressed for a few years after that, but he knew he had to preach even if people would not like what he said. That takes courage.

Paul wrote that the Corinthians used to talk about how much better he was as a writer than as a speaker ("not very impressive in person"). This may not have been Paul's thorn in the flesh, but it certainly stuck in his craw. His preaching once put a guy named Eutychus to sleep—I have done that too, though without the fatal-window-fall-resurrection part afterward. Timothy was too young; Peter was too "unschooled and ordinary." Even Jesus, after his first sermon, antagonized the crowd so intensely that they wanted to kill him. Our sermons are publicly graded, and not all will be praised.

Third, bad sermons are also a wonderful reminder of grace. When I finish a bad sermon, I want to hide like Adam and Eve after eating the forbidden fruit—for the same reason. I feel naked. In that moment it helps me to actually stop and think the thought (sometimes I'll write it down): God still loves me.

One of the spiritual disciplines I'm working on these days is the discipline of sticking around and talking with people after giving a message that felt like a miss. Because my call is to love people, not to bask in doing well or hide after doing badly. And the wonderful thing about Sundays is that they keep coming, like waves on the ocean. You have to get back up on the horse after you're thrown.

Bad sermons happen to every preacher, even good preachers. They can teach us to depend on a sovereign God. They can liberate us from human approval. They can proclaim grace. They can thicken our skin and toughen our faith. They teach humility. And they are part of the price we pay to do what we do.

I still hate them, though.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California.