On our Preaching Crisis
Note: This blogpost has been sitting in “drafts” for a long time. I have been slowly revising it, and considering when to publish it. Dr. Eckardt stole my thunder with his excellent piece “What Preaching Is Not.” We are saying a lot of the same things, and this was not owing to any conversations that we have had about it. But I think this demonstrates that this is an issue that many of us are noticing. - Ed.]
As long as any of us can remember, we have been hearing about the need for better preaching in the LCMS.
We do have excellent preachers, of course, but we also have some incredibly bad ones. And the latter should never be. Our laity have the right to expect excellence in their pulpits. Our Lord calls us to that very thing. Preaching is one of the main things that pastors have to do. It is not the only thing, of course. We teach in the classroom. We give pastoral care in the home, the hospital, and the death bed. We give godly wisdom to those who are getting married, we bring the hope of the resurrection to those who are grieving, and we bring the salve of the Gospel to those who are struggling with sin and guilt and shame. We conduct liturgies, including the Divine Service, and in that context, we distribute the Lord’s body and blood. But the Sunday Mass is not just Holy Communion, for it is the Divine Service of Word and Sacrament. It is also preaching.
The Service of the Word is primarily the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of the sermon. And all other aspects of pastoral ministry assumes and demands biblical literacy. It is our sword, and we are called to be proficient in wielding it.
One of my homiletics professors was, at the time, a guest professor at Fort Wayne: The Rev. Prof. James Busher (he did not even have his doctorate yet). His class was extraordinary. He told us up front that this was not going to be about eye contact and outlines. And it wasn’t. It was a course on how to read and meditate upon the text in preparation for preaching. Some of my classmates were whining about it. But good preachers are not made by teaching eye contact and how to make an outline. Seminarians are graduate students with college degrees, and as such, ought to know the basics of public speaking. And if you don’t, you can learn that at a community college, online, or at a local Toastmasters.
To be a preacher of the Gospel, you have to know the Gospel. To proclaim Law and Gospel, you have to know Law and Gospel. To preach the Word of God, you need to know the Word of God.
And this is, in my opinion, the problem. We need to know the Word of God much better than we do. We pastors (yes, myself included) should be interacting with the Word of God constantly: reading it, meditating upon it, musing upon it, pondering it, singing it, memorizing it, studying it, and incorporating it into our day to day life. That doesn’t mean just reading the text and parsing it out in Greek. That doesn’t mean reading your pericopes in isolation. It means knowing the entire Bible - its overarching narrative, its structure, turns of phrase, and how even the obscure parts point us to our Lord and His salvific work. As one of my shut-in parishioners put it, we need to be “hanging out with the Psalms.”
Bo Giertz wrote a book called Preaching from the Whole Bible that takes the one-year series and provides a list of peripheral scripture to incorporate into one’s reflection and preparation for preaching. This can be a helpful resource for drawing other parts of the Bible into one’s preaching.
I find that most bad preaching makes ample use of “illustrations.” There are books of “sermon illustrations” you can even buy with all of the hackneyed apocryphal tales that tug on the heartstrings. You should spend your money on a Bible instead. One of the worst sermons that I ever heard was uploaded as an audio online (almost 20 years ago). The pastor (who is thankfully long since retired) yammered on for twenty minutes about fried chicken and pizza, what he likes, and how other people like their fried chicken and their pizza. He did not mention Jesus until the last minute of the sermon. It was awful and infuriating. I’m sure he thought it was relevant and folksy. I’m sure he felt that he proclaimed the Gospel. But this sermon was simply terrible. There is no excuse for that kind of thing.
You may have heard a recent sermon in which the preacher spent an interminable amount of time explaining the Star Wars trilogy, realizing that his audience largely consisted of people born decades after the movie was made. The reason he did this was so that he could drop a one-liner about Star Wars and apply it to the long ending of Mark’s Gospel. Really? Does this guy think this is what the Lord God Almighty called him to do? It was shameful.
Having sermons online also provides other countless examples of pastors blowing it. They expend valuable time talking about inanities and irrelevancies: sports teams, pop songs, references to Lord of the Rings and (of course) Star Wars and Harry Potter and Marvel movies, and every manner of attempts to interpret scripture by popular culture instead of by scripture.
Instead of the Packers or Iron Man, you should incorporate the apostles or King David. Instead of cracking jokes, you should be treading on demons. Instead of seeing yourself as a stand up comedian, you should see yourself as a messenger tasked with urgent news: the oracles of God centered on the cross and the blood of the Lord in whose stead you stand.
We are not therapists, life-coaches, or motivational speakers. We are the prophetic voice of God, charged with the high privilege and urgent burden of preaching the Word.
And here is the problem as I see it: biblical illiteracy and a lack of faith in the efficacy of the Word of God to carry out the purposes for which God propagates it.
If you yammer on about the Seahawks or sandwiches or a Seinfeld episode, it is probably because you are spending way more time in front of the TV or the kitchen table than you are immersed in God’s Word. We pastors must not only read our pericopes, but the entire Bible. Again and again, year after year. It is an investment of time and of our very lives. The old IT slogan is true: GIGO: “garbage in, garbage out.”
If you read the church fathers (and you should!), you will find them citing scripture again and again, and you can tell that it is simply how they spoke and wrote. They spent so much time in the Word of God that it shaped their speech patterns and how they illustrated their homiletical points. St. John Chrysostom is known for his eloquent sermons, as well as for his disdain for the theater. He would be appalled at some of our current preaching that lifts illustrations from trashy, lowbrow (and even anti-Christian) Hollywood movies.
I’m not so doctrinaire as to say that one can never, ever use a non-biblical reference in a sermon. But such usages should be sparse (if used at all), passing, and understood by one’s hearers. Better, however, is to cut that out entirely, and find something from the Bible to use instead.
Of course, our hearers will have a vast range regarding their own levels of biblical illiteracy. That is why we are preachers and not simply lectors. We explicate the Word, not merely parrot it. We can refer to other parts of Scripture, engage in brief teaching, and explain and apply the connections. By way of example, I recently preached on the Parable of the Sower, and referred back to Ezekiel and the dry bones. That was not the Old Testament lesson for the day, but it served as a “sermon illustration” about the efficacy of the Word, and provided another opportunity to preach on the resurrection. If you do this enough, brother pastors, your hearers will learn not only these biblical accounts, but how they are all tied together. The Bible is not a big mysterious book of unrelated stories. It is, rather, all about Jesus. If you instead offer a lame story about your golf swing, your hearers are likely to remember your advice about how you fixed your slice rather than how the blood of Christ atones for them, and how they and their loved ones who hear and believe the Good News will rise from death.
And here is another thing that tells me that pastors are not in the Word of God enough: the old canard that sermon preparation should take an hour for every minute preached. This is nonsense. If it is true, it means you are a bad preacher and don’t have time for other tasks in the pastoral office. I suspect that in most cases, it is really just a fib to make parishioners think the pastor is busier than he really is, or that he is working harder than he really does. I understand that the pastor’s first few years as a preacher will be harder. But that said, you do not have an infinite amount of time. You must learn to handle the Word of God efficiently through familiarity.
You should be able to preach a solid impromptu sermon on any biblical text if necessary. In a pinch, you should be able to preach a very good sermon with only a half-hour preparation. In ordinary circumstances, should be able to preach superlatively based on your own personal command of scripture and your erudition in diligent reading - theological and non-theological. Dr. Weinrich reminded us seminarians in his class that preachers are communicators. We are wordsmiths. We bring the Gospel to people by means of language. Even more important than being an expert in Hebrew and Greek is to achieve masterful fluency of English. And this is done by constant reading, writing, and preaching, over and over again, year after year. The pastoral life is a constant intake of a diet of words and an ongoing exercise of the mind in writing and speaking. Hour upon hour of passive, slack-jawed television-watching and putting on a certain color shirt and yelling for a bunch of millionaires playing with a child’s toy will deliver just the kind of crummy preaching that we have all heard far too often.
And if you cut out all of the secular analogies out of your sermon, you will shorten it considerably - allowing you more time and opportunity within your sermon to preach on the Bible instead.
As a practical matter, I recommend the One Year Bible. It is a disciplined resource that allows you to read the Bible through, cover to cover, in a year. If you don’t like that plan, or you want to include the Apocrypha, there are other annual plans out there. If you do that, ten years from now, you will have read the Bible through ten times, as opposed to just hitting a few pericopes here and there. We have resources available to us that Bishop Chrysostom could not imagine: such as hearing the bible read to us on-demand using various devices, not to mention libraries of sermons from the course of centuries available to us in written and narrated form.
Finally, we need a sense of seriousness. Our culture has lost that. We value casualness and humor. There is a time and place for that. Humor can even be employed in preaching - though again, I think it takes great care and discernment. But don’t forget that the pulpit is a serious place, because the Word that you are proclaiming is the most powerful weapon you will ever wield. It can raise the dead and it can cast into hell. Any sermon might be the last one that any of your parishioners ever hear. And when you are in the pulpit, gentlemen, you are engaging in spiritual warfare. If your sermon inspires complacency in the demons it is only because you have not given Satan anything to worry about. I guarantee that no pestilent spirit is going to slink away in fear because you have revealed from the pulpit that you like pepperoni and green peppers on your pizza.
But if you are wielding the sword of the Word, deftly handled, and proclaimed with confidence in the Word by whom all things were made, you will indeed breathe the Spirit into dead bones, and they will live.