A Homiletical Checkup

Some years ago, during the annual convention of the American Medical Association, a small group of doctors were listening to a lecture on a highly specialized facet of their task as “heart men.” The lecturer asked how many of them had had a heart examination in the previous twelve months. If Time’s reporter can be relied on, not a man was able to lift his hand!

Preacher-man, go thou and learn what this meaneth!

Try starting with this: Am I authentic? Am I holding to an authentic concept of preaching? Am I in the grip of a conviction that the sermon is not an essay but an event? It is God in action, through his Word, by me, in the context of that continuing community of faith which is his Church. The message of the sermon is first an evangel and then an ethic. Both are forever linked with the person of Christ. As I afterward vivisect my sermon, I should be able to say what Alexander Whyte said of his Saturday walks with Marcus Dods: “Whatever we started off with in our conversations, we soon made across country, somehow, to Jesus of Nazareth, to his death, and his resurrection, and his indwelling.”

The sermon that misses here simply misses. It is inauthentic. It is “phony.”

Or try this: Am I specific? Granted that I emphasize the biblical centralities: God, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, grace, repentance, holiness, the Church, prayer, missions, the last things. What now searches me is the query: In what particular ways are my people to be helped by this sermon? Or—as a variant—how can this sermon show one or more of the concrete forms assumed by man’s rock-bottom sin of pride? Although the original setting was private, Nathan’s approach to David, with its unavoidable “Thou art the man,” must be approximated in the sermon unless the whole affair is to be frittered away in nebulousness. Am I content, for example, to go “cliché-ing” on “the importance of prayer” without addressing myself to the specifics that are in the wondering minds of the listeners: How do we learn to love prayer? How can we live on intimate terms with our Lord?

The sermon-dish is not the only one on the congregational table; but because it is an important one, it had better be something more than a platter of platitudes.

Or, try this: Am I catholic? Let the “c” remain small—this has nothing to do with the Vatican. A quick glance at my Thorndike “Desk Dictionary” yields, as definition “3” under “catholic,” “of the whole Christian church.” Our own definition in the present case is even broader: “of the whole of Christian truth.”

For example, when did I last preach a sermon on the biblical doctrine of “providence,” or “common grace,” as some prefer to designate it? To be sure, the Redeemer-redeemed relation is what finally the Bible is all about. But the Creator-creature relation is not therefore unimportant or less meaningful. Indeed, so magnificently careless of our historically conditioned pedanticisms is Holy Scripture that on occasion it has no hesitancy in employing the father-son figure as descriptive of the human community. When St. Paul talked to the Athenians about “God’s offspring,” it was not of the community of Christians that he was speaking but of the community of men.

Instead of ridiculing the “Fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of man,” preachers are needed who will explain it, giving it its wide meaning under the doctrine of creation and its narrower meaning under the doctrine of salvation.

If God’s house on a Sunday morning is not a classroom in sociology, neither is it a hermetically sealed cloister for other-worldly saints. It is an armory where the soldiers of Christ are helped by the preacher to accouter themselves for all holy warfare in all realms of their living and at all levels of their experience. “The suspicion,” warns J. S. Stewart, “that the Church of Christ lacks zeal for social righteousness can be terribly damaging.” That suspicion is abroad—ironically enough where the churches are most orthodox.

It would help to wither the suspicion if a lot of ministers would inject into their preaching a biblical catholicity of topic and treatment.

Is my preaching on center—not “dead center” but dynamic center? Is it authentic?

Is my preaching structured so as to turn generalities into particulars? Is it specific?

Is my preaching making full use of what God has revealed in Christ through Scripture, so that “the whole counsel of God” is declared? Is it catholic?

Who is for checking up on himself?

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