Why Can’t the LCMS Preach?
I read T. Gordon David’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2009) almost ten years ago. Somehow, I forgot about it and I don’t think I even had it in my preaching bibliographies, but recently, when considering the topic of preaching in the 21st century, I re-read it. In my estimation, it has aged well. All of David’s arguments are even more obviously confirmed by experience and observation and his solutions ring true as well. I am not going to review the book or summarize it for you here. Instead, I urge you to read it. What I write here is a reaction and response to what he writes and some harsh words customized and directed at my own church body;s body of preachers. I know they will not be fun to read and I know that I live in a glass house. I hope, nonetheless, that you will bear with me and if you need to throne a few stones of your own my way, I am ready, I pray, to receive them.
Here is the first problem: our preaching is not nearly as good as we think it is and we treat the topic too lightly. We suffer from the Kruger-Dunning effect and a severe lack of humility. We are naively prone to believing the pious compliments of our hearers who are just being nice. We might spend some time on the way to shut-ins musing about our craft, of which we assume ourselves to be masters or at least far better than average, but we rarely, if ever, engage the topic in a serious or scholarly way. We do, on occasion, invite a homiletician to address one of our conferences and despite the fact that we find what he says interesting, we rarely do any follow up work on our own. In short, we don’t read homiletics books, nor do we read poetry, literature, or give much consideration to the art and science of composition or rhetoric. We don’t read or listen to many sermons either.
This is gross and unfitting for the high office in which we serve. We need to do better. We owe to our God and His Word and to the people that hear us.
After we acknowledge the first problem, we must come to grips with the second. We are barely literate. We are unaccustomed to deep reading or to real engagement with texts. David, like Neil Postman and others, gives a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that this is a societal reality and problem. We have been mutated by radio, television, and now the internet. We process pictures and soundbites not language and ideas. We don’t know how to contemplate. Anyone alive today, for whom that is not true, is an anomaly of his own making and choice. Almost without exception, he did not learn to read in school. There he learned to search for information. He certainly did not learn how to read from watching films, cartoons, and video games. We are not the men our ancestors were and that severely hinders our ability to read the Scriptures which are blessedly missing pictures and paragraph headings (or, at least, they should be).
This is how we know that our preaching is not good as we think it is: all our sermons sound the same no matter what the passage. Our thesis, in every sermon, is a barely tweaked version of “Jesus forgives your sins.” If you are reading this and you despise Caemmerer’s Preaching fop the Church, I suspect that is because you do not understand him and you do not understand him because you have no training and only your innate abilities in rhetoric and composition. Don’t believe me? Check out this analysis from David Schmidtt https://ctsfwmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/CTQ/CTQ%2074-1%2C2.pdf
I could rally more evidence, but if you can’t see it by now, you probably won’t. This critique I am making of preachers is rightly being made by all sorts of cultural critics.
If you’re still reading, the question is likely, “What can we do about it?” Repent. I don’t mean that flippantly. I am serious. Repent and confess: “I have not worked at preaching as hard as I should have. I have been arrogant and proud. I refused to listen to expert advice from others and thought I was an expert myself. I want to do better.” Frankly, what preacher could say that is untrue of himself? It certainly is true of me. Thank God, that He works despite us, and that neither our salvation nor that of our hearers is based on our efforts or abilities. Jesus died also for preachers.
And then, in that spirit of humility, set your will to doing better. David gives some suggestions for cultivating the ability to read deeply. I am running of his with my own emphasis.
Cultivate the Imagination
First of all, resist the cultural trend of image based media. Read books. Don’t just listen to books, actually read them. Set a timer and read straight for 25 minutes without interruption. This can and should be done with the Bible, of course, but also with literature of various types. Cultivate an imagination in reading. We often hear an appeal to the imagination of the preacher in how he will express what the Bible says, but I think we need it first in how he reads. We need to be able to hear the words in our heads in such a way that entire worlds are built. Reading deeply means reading under the text and between the lines.
Take the example of Simeon in Scripture. Luke does not tell us either that Simeon is old or that he dies shortly after the baby Jesus is brought to the Temple. While we don’t want to be dogmatic about what we don’t know for certain, it ought to be clear that this is what Luke is implying. If Simeon were only 12 years old when this happened and then lived another 100 years after this and fell away from the faith, the story makes very little sense. The fact that we can’t be absolutely dogmatic about the age of Simeon must not keep us from recognizing what Luke is telling us and how it applies. If we only read for information and facts, we miss this.
We also need active, informed imaginations to learn how to read the Bible for theological truth. I suspect that we have unwittingly been forced into a historical box by the higher critics. Largely denying the Divinity of Scripture, they became interested only in finding historical truth and ended up denying much of it. We responded by insisting on historical truth but sometimes losing the reality that “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan” indicates more than simply a geographical fact. The Jordan river recalls the history of Israel. That history is meant to inform how we understand His anointing. There is theological meaning deeper than simply the facts. Our dogmatic tradition and recent history, and a lack of nuanced thinking, can make us insist that there must only be one literal meaning to any given passage or word so that we lose the forest for the trees and silence God in favor of “history.”
We need to spend way more time being creative in how we read the Bible, making sure we actually hear what God is saying than we do in being creative in how we talk about it or in our search for illustrations.
Cultivate a joy in language
Read poetry out loud. Read fiction. Read biographies. Read dogmatics. Slow down Facebook and news. Even the best written news pieces are meant to be thrown away. Read things that are meant to endure. Instead of deciding for yourself what you like, buck the trend and listen to experts. I don’t mean to say that there is no place in the world for Van Halen, but you should be embarrassed that you don’t enjoy Bach as much as you enjoy Van Halen. You should be able to recognize that your tastes are a tyranny of self. Instead of insisting on them, you should cultivate a taste for things that are recognized as excellent by people who truly know what the word means. You can learn to appreciate and enjoy Bach with effort. You can do the same for Shakespeare and Frost.
Poetry, I think, is especially important. We need to love words. We need to love it when the exact right word is put into the exact right place. We need to laugh at real humor and leave behind the filth of our culture that infects us. Shakespeare is funny. Kipling is funny. Jesus is funny. But it is hard to see when your brain is used to being spoon fed everything and relies on filth and shock for amusement.
Write a manuscript
Ditch the theory that your sermons are better if they are conversational. The problem with your non-manuscript sermons are legion, but for now let it be noted that they lack composition. You haven’t done the hard work of figuring out what is truly significant and then how to say it best. You are just talking. That is fine in Bible class or Confirmation but not for sermons. Sermons need to be elevated speech. We need to engage the entire writing process. There needs to be time spent in research, gathering ideas, and taking notes. There needs to be time plotting an argument, outlining, and considering structure. There needs to be a thesis, an actual point that you want to make and a desired outcome in your hearers. There needs to be time actually writing and then lots and lots of time spent revising. Those things aren’t completely linear. We can jump around in them some and they don’t always have to be formal but they all need to be done if we are to have an actual sermon that has something to say.
The characteristics of good public speaking are important also. If people can’t understand what you’re saying because you are mumbling or distracting them with your terrible grammar and pronunciation, it won’t matter what you say. But, at the same time, if you don’t have anything to actually say, if you don’t have an argument to make, it won’t matter how well they hear each word. It is possible to compose a sermon but then to use the manuscript lightly in the pulpit or even to rightly be moved by the Spirit during delivery to go off script, but the sermon needs to be composed.
Most of us will have to put some real effort in here. Along with learning how to read, we need to learn some rhetoric and we need to learn how to compose. More could be said about why we should do this and also how we might do this. Again, David does more of both of those things and so do a host of other commentators. Ironically, for all the damage that digital media has done to our abilities in these things, it also offers us easy access to training and help in cultivating them. So let’s do it.