(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for How to Preach a Sermon, originally shared on December 14, 2020. It was the seventy-second video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Think you don’t need to know how to preach a
sermon unless you are a clergyperson? Think again. Today, we will consider how
to craft a sermon to help you be a better evangelist, and a better listener.
Well, the pandemic has been strange all the
way through, but now hospital ICU’s are fill up all over the country. No room.
Dr.’s and nurses are exhausted. They say that we can go to our hospitals if we
are sick or injured and they’ll find room. But, it may not be in a room
designed to take care of you. And this all because some people refuse to do the
simple things necessary to literally save lives and return our economy to, at
least, the New Normal. It seems like the people who are complaining the loudest
about the current restrictions are the same people who refuse to do the simple
things they can do to make them end. It’s a strange time.
Today, I’d like to share with you some ideas
on how to preach a sermon during the pandemic and beyond. Now, you may think, “I’m
not a preacher. What does that have to do with me?” If so, I’m glad you asked. 😊
Some of us are set-apart for Word and
Sacrament ministries. All of us are preachers in some ways.
I’m going to talk about doing both, to help
us all understand the sermons we hear by having some insight into how they are
created, and by getting some insight into how all of us preach the Word, and
how to do it better.
John Godfrey Saxe said, “Laws, like
sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”
I suppose the same could be said about preaching.
The danger is dwelling too much on the
mechanics of how sermons are created is that it can produce listeners who only
hear the words, not their meaning or theirs power.
Francis of Assisi is often credited with
saying, “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary use words”. Except he
never said that. He often emphasized the importance of living one’s faith, but
he used a lot of words to emphasize that.
We do find that idea attractive, though. It
makes us feel less guilty about not talking with people about our faith for
fear we will be embarrassed by some question we can’t answer, or that we will
be thought intolerant or divisive at work, or that we will stereotyped and
isolated by our friends and family. We want to feel that we are good about
ourselves and superior to those hypocrites who say they believe, but don’t act
like I do.
Some say, I don’t talk about my faith, I
show it in my actions. That has always interested me because talking about
Jesus is a form of action. At some point, words are necessary. We wouldn’t know
the gospel unless someone hadn’t used words.
Actions, by themselves, may make us think
that we are good persons, but they don’t say anything, in themselves, about
Jesus.
Even the story about “I was hungry and you
fed me, I was naked and you clothed me” at the end of the gospel of Matthew,
presumes a faith that finds its natural outcome in love and service toward
others. Otherwise, the news that its not faith but doing enough good works to
get into heaven is very bad news.
Without naming the name of Jesus, without pointing
people to the origin of our good works in a living relationship with the one
true living God, that is, faith, we, are just a social service agency, or a
political advocacy group, or a family of people who use religions language.
There’s no need of a cross for that.
Here’s a riddle: what do you get when you
cross a Lutheran with a Jehovah’s Witness, someone who goes door-to-door, but
doesn’t say anything. I suppose that could describe a lot of denominations, but
I think that is fits mine.
[***What do you think? How do you
share your faith?
Share your thoughts in the
comment section below and we’ll respond to every one.]
Sermons are proclamations of our faith for
the building up of the Church and for the sake of the world. As I mentioned
last time, the Bible says that they are to be proclaimed as the very words of
God.
How does the preacher communicate something
that comes to him/her from God, as them, a human being, to another human being.
How does the creation convey something from the Creator to another creation? Do
you shout, do your pour on the emotion, do you embody reserve?
People today evaluate preaching on basis of
how a sermon makes them feel, not whether or not it is true or spoken in the
power of the Holy Spirit. We have entered so far into our spiritual decadence,
I think, that many of us don’t have a clue on how to gauge that, and don’t
think we need. I think that one of the
greatest advantages for being considered a good preacher today is most people’s
incredibly low expectations for what a sermon is or what they should expect to
hear and experience.
In the generation before me, many preachers
built their sermons around a formula: three points and a poem.
Charles Merrill Smith, in his book, “How to
Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, offered this formula” “Make them
laugh, make them cry, make them feel religious.”
Is that it? Is that how to preach a sermon?
Here’s what I think is the preaching process
that leads to proclamation whether you’re in a pulpit or on the street:
1. 1. Pray. Pray that the Holy Spirit would guide
and inspire your preparations and your delivery. The Holy Spirit makes anything
that is going to happen, happen. Your preparation is important, but the Holy
Spirit makes proclamation happen.
2. 2. Plan your time. Pulpit preachers: read the
Bible passage you will be preaching on early in the week. Let it percolate.
Make notes during the week as ideas occur to you. Look for stories. Think about
something in your life and your world to make it relatable. Try to keep them all
in one place.
The rule of thumb taught in seminaries used
to be one hour of preparation for one minute of speaking. What working pastor
has that much time? Do as much as you can, and don’t worry about it too much.
As Leonard Bernstein once said, “To achieve great things, two things are
needed: a plan and not quite enough time”.
If your preaching takes place in ordinary
conversations, be ready with the whole counsel of scripture. I heard a mother who
had a son playing for USC and another son playing for UCLA in last Saturday’s
game talk about the way she raised them. One of her teachings to her sons was,
“Always be ready. If you’re always ready, you never have to get ready.”
Peter wrote, in his first letter:
*I
Peter 3:15b-16a
3. 3. Do your exegesis. Exegesis is the analytical
study of the text you will be preaching on. It often includes reading the text
in the original language, studying what it meant at the time it was written,
the historical and cultural context, the way in which it was put together, its
literary form, and so on. You have to know what the message is before you
preach it; you can be thought to be an excellent speaker while proclaiming the
wrong message. Understand the truth through exegesis, and then use the stories
and examples you have developed to illustrate it.
One of my colleagues said that exegesis is
like underwear. Everyone wants to know you’ve got it on, but no one wants to
see it.
If people are seeing it, a sermon is going
to seem like an academic lecture. Like the young preacher who went to the
prestigious Morehouse University and came to his first church wanting to make
sure that the congregation understood his excellent education and knowledge.
The longsuffering congregation put up with it, knowing he was young, until one
Sunday an old deacon, during the prayers, asked, “Lord, send us more of your
Word from your house, and less from Morehouse.”
People don’t care what you know until they know that you care. Care
about them, and care about the Truth you are proclaiming. Preach the gospel.
4. 4. Preparing the manuscript: There are very fine preachers who speak from a full manuscript, some from an outline, and others without any notes.
I started out as a manuscript preacher. I wrote everything out word for word. In fact, the first time I preached at my home church, I was really nervous. My family would be there, my friends, my former Sunday School teachers, the pastors, the church staff. I think it was over Christmas vacation of my first year that my hometown church pastor asked if I would preach at the Watchnight New Years-Eve service. He said he’d like me to do a homily. That means “short”. So, I asked him how long it should be, and he said, “About 12 minutes.” “Fine”.
I worked on that sermon and timed it at exactly 12 minutes. On New Year’s Eve, I got up to preach. I finished the sermon, sat down, and looked at my watch. Six minutes. I thought I must have been really nervous. I asked my mom if I seemed nervous. “No,” she said. “You seemed fine.”
I looked at my manuscript. I had written it on six sheets of paper, front and back. Then I realized that I had written the sermon on both sides of the pieces of paper, but I had only read the front sides. Somehow, it all held together. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit. We can only hope that people will hear what God wants people to hear through our proclamation.
I eventually went to an outline, then a more bare-bones outline on the front of one page, and then an outline with all the stories circled in read. I wrote the first letters of each story down the left side of the page and memorized the letter with an anagram. I made a mental picture of what that page looked like and fixed it in my head and put it in the pulpit for me to deliver the sermon.
Then I read an article on Narrative Preaching, a style of preaching where the whole sermon is a story. One sentence in that article changed the way I preached. It was, “If you, after 5, 10, 20 or however many hours you spend preparing a sermon, can’t remember it, how do you expect anyone hearing it one time to remember it after hearing it one time?
I started leaving the outline in my office and became a noteless preacher.
Here I divulge a secret for anyone who heard me preach when I served a congregation in San Dimas: when we started using a screen and multi-media for worship, I did the multi-media and used lots of slides for my sermon. I had a clicker in my hand and could advance the slides myself. The slides were often pictures that reminded me of a story I wanted to tell. Those pictures kind of served as notes, even when I didn’t have any.
Now, Sally and I are retired and when,
before the pandemic, I was asked to preach somewhere, they usually didn’t have
as robust a multi-media platform as we used in San Dimas, so I was back to
stories and circles fixed in my mind.
Pretty soon, we are hoping to have purchased
a camera, so that we can easily record small clips of these videos at a time,
and then edit them together. It will look like I’ve memorized the whole thing.
Now you know. 😊
I also didn’t put the sermon together until
Saturday afternoon. Sometimes I would do it overnight, between catnaps. That
way it would be totally fresh when I delivered it on Sunday morning.
5. 5. Delivery: know your congregation or the
people with whom you are sharing your faith: look at them, see what is
connecting and what isn’t, remember how they respond, but don’t take your
estimations too seriously.
I learned this on Internship when there were
Sundays that people came out and said things like, “Fine sermon” on days that I
hadn’t preached.
There were also days that I thought the
congregation would be carrying me out of the church on their shoulders when the
reactions in the line of people shaking my hand to leave were totally flat.
There were Sundays that I knew I was being boring. I bored myself! Yet, people
filed out with exuberance. “You hit a homerun today, Pastor!”
Genuine respect for you as a preacher is
possible, but it has to be earned. There has to be a certain trust and respect
between pastor and people. If you are not a clergyperson, you have an advantage
here. People are more likely to take the word of a credible witness, like that
of a friend or a family member, over a clergyperson who, especially if they are
not Christians, and those are the people they are trying to reach, tend to
believe a pastor is just doing their job, or they only want a bigger
congregation and more money.
Added to that, in our culture, people don’t
always know how to recognize what is respectable. Fred Allen, the early 20th-century
comedian, once said, “The most important thing in Hollywood is sincerity. So,
when you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
They say that conman can look you straight
in the eye and convince you they are telling the truth.
Think about newscasters and politicians. Why
are we inclined to trust them? Because they look us right in the eye when they
speak. If their heads were down and they were reading from a page, would we
think that they were trustworthy, or that they were just doing a job they get
paid for?
Of course they don’t have ½-hour of news
memorized. They are reading it off of a teleprompter. Some pastors are doing
the same for their pandemic video sermons. They are looking, or almost looking
at you right in the eye.
6. 6. The Aftermath. There is an element of
adrenaline and a spiritual rush to preaching, wherever it takes place. But, a
pastor or an evangelist is like anybody else. They go home to an ordinary,
though fulfilling, human life. It takes some emotional resilience. But, that’s
the life of a contagious Christian. Let your faith be viral. You are a
preacher. Always be ready to share the living hope that is within you.
7. 7. Pray. Pray that the seed you have planted take root. Pray for those who have expressed resistance to the Gospel and to you. Pray that the Holy Spirit might flow in them, like streams of living water, and bring them the joy of new life in Jesus Christ.
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