I still tremble a bit as I climb the steps leading to the pulpit. Just behind the knees, a shake that the robe--thank God--hides from the people of the pews. It is a feeling far beyond the fear of public speaking that others talk about. I'm used to standing in front of a crowd, reading a carefully studied passage or telling a practiced story. I've done it many a time as lector. But preaching is different. When preaching, I'm presenting a shard of my own faith, full of its mistakes and holes and weaknesses. And there they sit, spread out among the pews, the Church Expectant. While I babble, the congregation stares forward with expressions that run the gambit from "Go ahead: impress me" to "Aw, he's trying so hard".
While in the pulpit, my internal editor (we'll call him Ed) chugs along, reviewing the text, evaluating and discarding changes on the spot. Ed, mind you, has been doing this work for the whole week preceding and he has kept me up late Saturday night to make me rewrite a line, a paragraph, a page--ten or fifteen times. The text of the sermon never actually sits on the page, but in my mind, and the page, even a completed manuscript, is really just notes. The internal editor wants the final text, the one that comes out of my mouth, to be perfect, but the internal publisher (Pub?) keeps fighting it, reminding me to lift my head, to speak to the congregation, to explore this latest draft out in the open so everyone can hear it. Theirs is an argument that rages on during the fifteen to twenty minutes of preaching.
But before Ed and Pub get their say, the writer in me must do his work. This is a blog entry about writing, not preaching. Writing does not constitute the whole process, but it is the main process. After all, it is the writer in me that does the honest faith exploration. The writer who delves into my soul to steal away some new understanding of faith (note: In his comment on the Survey entry, Jared mentioned that a new knowledge should be achieved. Jared, my response to you is that a new faith understanding should be the goal. Intellectual or emotional or... what have you, it is a new faith understanding that reveals the intersection of Word and world in a sermon).
I start out the crafting of each sermon in two places. The first is the Biblical text--the Rule of the sermon. I earnestly believe that sermons should never stray from the Biblical parable, poem, story, or writing that gives them birth. In fact, I even feel that the first words of a sermon should nearly always be a discussion of the Biblical text. Not a story. Not a joke. And only rarely a quote. The Biblical text, memorized if there is time, should surround every crafted word of the final sermon text.
But to move the Scripture into sermon, I also like to review my personal homiletic theory--the whys, wheres, and whats of preaching. Maybe that sounds odd to you, reviewing a theory. Let me explain. In seminary, we were asked to come up with a "Function Statement" for each sermon during our first year of Preaching and Worship. The professors defined the "Function Statement" as essentially the purpose of the sermon. What the sermon was "supposed to do". They have since scrapped the practice, I've been told. However, each "Function Statement" that I wrote came out the same, or similarly to the ones previous. And it did help me to keep my exegetical wanderings and extended metaphors in check (I don't tell stories in sermons, often. It's an overdone practice that accomplishes less than people think). So, I developed my essential "Function Statement" into a personal homiletic theory and started using it to guide my sermon writing.
Here it is, as it has developed these last seven years:
A sermon wraps the Biblical text around a congregation so that we in the church can witness the connection between the world of Scripture, full of the stories of people of faith, with the world of our lives, full of the experience of people of faith. All people are people of faith, and good preaching offers that faith to be exposed and revealed, shifted and focused by the Holy Spirit. People who hear a sermon should be challenged, inspired, transformed and sent into the world ready to change themselves, their neighborhoods, and wherever God calls them to be.
I'm keenly aware that this is a tall order. But theories should be impossible. We deride them, saying, "In theory, that would work, but in reality...", but a good theory pushes reality. That's what my personal homiletic theory is meant to do: push my preaching. In crafting a sermon, I dig deeply into my self.
Here's a story from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life: an Eskimo woman and her infant became trapped on the shore of a lake one winter when the snows came early and blocked the mountain passes. Taking a knife, she was forced to cut a sliver of her own skin from her thigh and bait the fishing hook. Once she caught the first fish, she used a sliver of its gut to catch the next, and the next. When the passes cleared, she hiked back out, but forever had the scar on her thigh.
Crafting a sermon involves deep cutting. The words appear on the page slowly and painfully. But the good news is that the healing process can make faith more healthy, more alive. Broken and healed bones are quite often more strong than those never broken.
I've always enjoyed sermons that make me think a little differently about some story or some article of faith. But there is no real accomplishment there. A speech can be an intellectual exercise. Preaching should move you to examine your faith, your life, and your work. The Jesuits have three questions to reflect in their Spiritual Exercises: "What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?" The Spirit-filled sermon should empower people to ask themselves those same questions and then seek Spirit-led answers.
Comments