Sermons grow stronger by wrapping your mind around big ideas.
“I could never be a pastor,” said the man in a small group Bible study.
“Why not?” I asked, hoping he would wax eloquent about the long hours or the agony of being with people in their most difficult hours of life.
No such luck.
“Because,” he replied, “you guys must spend all your time trying to find a thousand ways to say the same thing. I couldn’t stand that kind of boredom.”
“Oh,” I retorted brilliantly.
After twenty-something years of ministry, I have accumulated more than a thousand ways to say the same thing. Creativity, I’ve discovered, is neither a spiritual gift nor a trick to find the right reference materials-at least that’s not my story. Nor have I found creativity a matter of one side of my brain working better. (I can never remember which side is the creative one; I’ve always speculated it was the side my morning coffee affected first.)
But my friend’s comment indicated one felt need of most pastors: we all seek fresh ways to explain the gospel over the years.
Freshness isn’t just stories
As she walked toward the church doors, she flippantly remarked, “Well, time to get back to real life.”
Those words stung.
I thought back over the years when I’ve been subtly chided for being a church professional: “As a pastor you could never know what ‘real life’ is.” Sometimes I’m sure the comment is meant as a compliment, that the church is a haven from the harsh realities of life. More often, though, I’ve taken that comment to mean that the church has created a miniature world different from the rest of creation, another way of saying, “Pastor Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
I’ve received other subtle indicators my congregation is not making the jump from Sunday sermon to everyday circumstance. Many have referred to my messages by saying, “I really liked the one about. . . ah … you know, the one that had the story with the bully and the coach.”
At first I believed comments like that made the stories all the more valuable, because at least they remembered the story. But then I realized many people couldn’t identify the significance of the sermon for themselves. I feared the only thing they were taking away was whatever made them chuckle.
Unless my message is simple-“Don’t commit adultery”-the more creative I get in my teaching, the less memorable and less digestible it seems.
While I’m still a storyteller, I’ve learned that only as those stories create a vision of God working beyond the church are they more substantive than cotton candy.
Back to the future
Around the time I was getting started in the ministry, the movie ‘The Bible” was released. I was excited; I could watch God’s Word. I loved God but hated reading. The reading I did was mandatory to prepare a sermon. I read technical exegetical books, commentaries, and joke books. If I was really desperate for stories, I would pore through The Reader’s Digest.
The upshot was a cutesy, half-hour explanation of one slice of the Bible on Sunday mornings. To prepare those sermons took relatively little time, and the rest of my week was free to answer other church demands.
For some reason, though, I slowly got interested in a broader category of learning. Maybe I wanted to recapture the days when the “parson” was the best read person in the territory. Or maybe I just learned to read because of my short attention span for any one subject. Anyway, Macbeth slowly grew interesting to me. So did philosophy, physics, history, and biology.
A few areas had always intrigued me, such as psychology and social theory, but the process of appreciating the classics became an almost romantic quest. The Bible had always been a part of my reading, admittedly more for obedience than for enjoyment, but reading Scripture concurrently with the great writings of the world opened me to new revelations.
I began to see how God’s Word is seen in all sorts of different fields. And as I see these connections, my listeners begin seeing the significance of God’s Word to their lives, too.
Algebra and the classics
My son, frustrated with algebra, once asked (actually screamed in a high-pitched voice), “It’s stupid to have to learn this stuff! When will I ever use this in real life?”
My answer to him became my answer for reading the classics in the various disciplines: “Even if you never use it per se, it is teaching you how to think. It is carving new ways of perceiving into your brain.”
I’m not sure he fully understood that answer-I’m not sure I do either-but I believe my preaching is vastly different since accumulating biblical wisdom that is mirrored in the arts and sciences.
Take my sermon outlines, for example. They used to go something like the old joke about the hurried preacher whose points were, “Nebuc-hada-nezzer. We all have nezzers. What should we do with our nezzers?”
I discovered a superficiality that leaked into my preaching when it was not interrupted by profound ideas. These ideas aren’t necessarily grist for the sermon but impact my ability to conceptualize the world.
Today’s sermon illustrations are different, too. While my wife may shoot me if I quote Emily Dickinson one more time, the images used by the masters of both the arts and sciences reveal God’s truths deeply and effectively. When we see the continual themes of sin, alienation, and atonement in Shakespeare’s later plays, we become aware that such themes are not of concern only to Christians.
When we see the paradox of relativity and quantum mechanics, and see that one of the cutting edges of physics is the discovery of order even in chaos, we sense that the God who continues to create (bara is not a periodic but a sustained verb in Hebrew) is not confined to the pages of Genesis. They are neither boring nor difficult for anyone to understand when they match the content of our exegesis.
Fingerprints of creation
I have found in my congregation smart people who are desperate to give themselves permission to believe without sacrificing their pursuit of truth. I know faith is never reached by reason, yet I see week after week the joy of connecting with God emotionally and intellectually.
Several specialists have approached me after the sermon to say, “I’ve studied that, but until today, would never have connected it to God.”
Most people are looking for a way to make sense of the world outside the church walls. With some perseverance on our part, visions of God’s involvement will come clearer the closer we look. The process is analogous to my son Josh’s recent expedition to an art museum. He had walked into an exhibit and saw, across the expanse, an entrancing portrait of a beautiful woman.
“Dad, she was so pretty,” he said, “that I walked closer and closer. As I approached, I noticed the texture was unlike a brush painting. The artist had repeatedly put his finger on an ink pad and, impression by impression, formed the entire picture with his fingerprints.”
So it is with preaching and a penchant for the arts and sciences: the closer one looks at God’s entire creation, the more one sees God’s fingerprint.
-Joel C. Hunter
Northland Community Church
Longwood, Florida
42 SUMMER/93
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
