Editor’s note: Calvin Miller reviewed Eugene Peterson’s new book, The Unnecessary Pastor, in the Summer 2001 Leadership. Now Peterson turns the tables.
Did you know that an angel has recently been sighted who has the specialized assignment of helping preachers get their preaching back? His name is Sermoniel, the Angel of Homiletics.
He is especially astute in detecting homileticus horribilis, a virus that infects an alarming number of pulpits. The men and women who occupy these pulpits are especially at risk, often developing sermonic sclerosis, the leading cause of death among preachers today.
And did you know that the fat cows of Bashan, so dear to the heart of the prophet Amos, have begun appearing in congregations across the country? They compose an informal order of lay critics devoted to the improvement of sermons. They are a tactless bunch, and pastors take no pleasure in having them around. But they have enormous value—they know how to get a preacher’s attention.
Sometimes they say just the right thing in just the right way, the meaning of which would be obscured if said nicely. One named Emma Johnson has lately come into some prominence.
Pastor Sam will already be well known to you, if not in name, at least in feelings and circumstance. Sam is one of us, ordained to stand in a pulpit each Sunday to do, in the angel’s words, “the loneliest, cussedest, blessedest work in the world.” But Sam isn’t doing it very well. And he knows it. But Sermoniel, the Angel of Homiletics, and Emma, the Bashan bovine, show him what to do about it. With Calvin Miller, they take him in hand and make a preacher out of him.
Miller is one of the funniest, most perceptive, serious, and passionate preacher/pastor/professors in the country. In The Sermon Maker (Zondervan, 2002), Miller takes on a huge subject that vitally concerns every preacher and every Christian who slips into a pew—the sermon.
Sermoniel, Emma, Sam, and Calvin collaborate in writing a book to rescue those perishing from sermonic sclerosis. This is serious business indeed. But the gravity, the sheer weightiness of the subject, doesn’t weigh the reader down. There is not a sluggish or ponderous sentence in the book. The rapier wit stings us to attention; the dance of metaphors releases adrenalin.
In one sense, the book is not about homiletics. There is little in these pages about technique, no tricks guaranteeing interesting sermons, no effusions over the largesse available to the preacher on the information superhighway.
Miller and friends show us that sermons are born in a passionately felt and pursued need for God. If there is no personal need for a savior, a comforter, a sovereign, there is no sermon. No amount of technique or rhetoric can substitute for this perpetually renewed and nourished passion.
They also insist that sermons, like the Scriptures that shape them, are narratives. Sermons require personal, narrative speech. Do we want to involve our listeners? Then go easy on the abstractions and propositions. Forget about cleverly fooling around with words to get attention. Nobody makes a better case for narrative preaching, while acknowledging our resistances and hesitations, than Calvin Miller in these deft and sparkling pages.
There is more: The story of Sam’s rehabilitation is told on the lefthand pages; the righthand pages have quotations appropriate to the story from some of our finest and most thoughtful American preachers while Miller carries on a running commentary with them. The result is most satisfying—we are invited into a conversation with respected peers who share our conviction that “Preaching is neither a career nor a finished art. It changes and retreats, advances and lives.”
Eugene Peterson, professor emeritus, Regent College,Vancouver, British Columbia
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
