Living Faith is a declaration of faith of the Presbyterian Church. You can download it at presbyterian.ca. We suggest you read the passage being discussed each month.
Previous articles in this series can be found at pccweb.ca/presbyterianrecord. Living Faith 7.4 (preaching)
Marilynne Robinson, a novelist who knows more theology than most professors, has her chief character in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, an aged preacher, write for his young son: “A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.”
“Remarkable” is not always the first adjective we connect with preaching. I think I know why. In addition to the regular round of preaching anyone connected with the church endures, I calculate that in my teaching career I have listened to more than 2,000 beginner sermons (and have fallen asleep in only three). I know about the flawed or absent treatment of the biblical text, stumbling or droning delivery, incoherent structure, plain banality and bad grammar. (The line about falling asleep in only three is a boast not a confession.)
But every once in a while, even in class, something remarkable happens. A middle-aged woman hopes to become a chaplain because she doesn’t believe she has the gifts for preaching. But she wrestles with a text from the Bible and tries to connect it to the life of a congregation. Despite the struggle or because of it, she finds her word or rather a Word finds her. As Living Faith puts it, “The Holy Spirit enables God’s word to be heard in the word of preaching”… even by a professor made hard of spiritual hearing by 2,000 student sermons!
It is the ‘someone else’ who speaks in preaching, who makes a sermon remarkable. It may seem nothing more than 17 minutes of banality and boredom from one side and a weekly burden on another, but the third party, the Lord, is always passionate. This is true because the Lord is always passionate about those who may be saved through preaching.
The truly remarkable thing, then, can be stated very simply: God speaks through preaching. Theologian Karl Barth speaks of a threefold Word of God. The first and foundational Word is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. He is God’s irreplaceable Word to us. Other words, from nature or our own reason can supplement but never substitute for that Word. To Christ the Living Word, the Holy Spirit working through the written word, the Bible, testifies. Thirdly, when preachers proclaim the Living Word, appropriately attentive to the written word, their very human words can come to life, through the Holy Spirit, as God’s Word. This understanding goes back to the roots of our tradition in the Reformation. “The Preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God” (Second Helvetic Confession 1.4.). That, too, is a remarkable thing to consider.
This kind of theology ought to have practical consequences. We claim to value preaching, so what makes a competent or even good sermon?
Living Faith calls ministers, “servants of the word.” Servants are not free agents. They live under the authority of another. What they say ought not be a mishmash of their own reflections dressed up with a story about something that happened in the grocery store. Such addresses can sometimes be entertaining and occasionally wise but they are not good preaching. Living Faith also calls preachers “ambassadors.” Good ambassadors speak what their Master intends them to convey.
There is no particular form to a good sermon but there is a basic orientation. The first thing that Living Faith says about preaching is that it is “good news.” Many a sermon is not. The words “sermon” and “preaching” have received negative connotations because too many preachers have preached too many sermons primarily about what we ought to do (or not do) rather than proclaiming what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. The heart of our Reformed tradition is the recognition of the sovereign mercy of God to which we respond in joyful obedience. While a sermon can be about almost anything, our preaching ought to reflect that orientation.
Scottish poet Edwin Muir complained about the kirk of his day: “The Word made Flesh is here made word again.” But every once in a while, the line is not complaint but gospel truth, the Word Made Flesh is present once again in the word of the preacher. That Word will address the real needs of our hearts and of our society, including needs we didn’t know we had until we heard it. And it certainly will not be dull. Here is a more contemporary way of putting it, once again from Marilynne Robinson: “The Word that has seized the Preacher is, again, Christ.” And when that happens there is nothing better on earth, and, I should think, nothing very much better in Heaven.
If I have one piece of advice to both preachers and hearers after much of a lifetime teaching preaching it is: This is remarkable stuff. Don’t be easily satisfied. Don’t settle.
