Anatomy of a Sermon
(Not) Explaining the Unexplainable
This past Sunday I was excited to preach my sermon, at least I was on Sunday morning. Saturday morning, though, had been another story. I knew what I had wasn’t really working, and I still wasn’t sure where it would all land.
Do people wonder what goes into sermon preparation? How does it all happen?
I’ve been preaching sermons for over 20 years now and I still marvel at how it all comes together. I’ve had different systems and methods over the years, but a few things came together in last week’s sermon that I found interesting as I reflected after the fact.
First, I need to share that I have been listening to the Audiobook of Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age by Andrew Root. It is more of an academic not super easy to read kind of book, but it is excellent. I can’t really go into much detail on it here, but I often think about the books that pastors and other speakers and writers read that are shaping the talk, message, or article that they are working on - and this book is doing something in me, for sure!
Yes, Root’s book is about the decline of Churches, but it is also in a much bigger way about the transcendence of God. There is a whole lot in the book about the indescribableness of God, how if God is truly God then God is beyond categorization, beyond explanation.
I don’t have the space here to get into it all, but God being God beyond even explanation causes a particular crisis for the preacher who is supposed to stand up every week and say something about God and have it somehow connect to the lives of people.
Last week, I was also going to a lecture at Providence College given by my friend and colleague, Dr. Rob Dean, who I know has at least one of Root’s books on the reading list for one of the courses he teaches. His lecture was titled “Imagining a Better Way: Towards a Theology of Transformative Preaching.” It was all about the idea of having a conversion of the imagination. Right up my alley.
The college is about a 45 minute drive from my house, unless of course it snows, which it did. Fortunately, there was a zoom option which I joined instead, and I was so glad I did.
I would have trouble putting into words everything Rob spoke about in his lecture, but it was really excellent. He quoted from a book by Walter Brueggemann that I hadn’t heard of, but it had an intriguing title—Finally Comes The Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. After Rob’s lecture, I checked it out of the library and started in.
The introduction in this book, published back in 1989, is brilliant. I immediately found the section Rob quoted from and also this gem:
The task and possibility of preaching is to open out the good news of the gospel with alternative modes of speech—speech that is dramatic, artistic, capable of inviting persons to join in another conversation, free of the reason of technique, unencumbered by ontologies that grow abstract, unembarrassed about concreteness. Such speech, when heard in freedom, assaults imagination and pushes out the presumed world in which most of us are trapped. Reduced speech leads to reduced lives. Sunday morning is the practice of a counter life through counter speech. The church on Sunday morning, or whenever it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.
Wow. I mean, this is how Brueggeman writes! There is a lot packed in there.
And what a task for sermons! It could be overwhelming, especially as I look back on some of my more fumbling moments as a preacher over the last twenty years, but also as I look ahead in improving this craft going forward.
I particularly like the line “reduced speech leads to reduced lives,” and how he identifies preaching as being “unembarrassed about concreteness.”
I think what he is digging at here is that there are a lot of sermons that reduce the gospel, or reduce the scripture, or reduce God (Andrew Root argues that secularism does this). Preachers, and listeners too, have often favoured explanation over mystery. We often hold the mistaken belief that everything (including God) can be explained, so by default sermons often take the mode of providing explanations.
This initially seems like a good move. Education is a very good thing, but so often we have done things like reduced the gospel or indeed reduced our lives to a list of directions (e.g. there have been lots of sermons with titles like “4 steps to healthier relationships” or some other life-lesson list).
Sermons like this with their relevant applications appear to make things more concrete, but they actually do the opposite. In them, we have reduced the faith for the sake of relevance and think that that is being concrete. But this results in lives reduced down to a set of principles and tasks. And we know that our lives most certainly are not a set of principles - they are far more.
When Brueggemann says good preaching will be “unembarrassed by concreteness,” I believe he means that we attend to the specific. If we have an image from the Bible about seeds being sown in soil, we will actually talk about the image as if it isn’t “just an image.” We will use language that actually embodies the greater reality to which we are attempting to point. The key is to use very specific language to get at that which is ultimately unexplainable.
This is exactly why “the Poet” is in the title of his book, because this is what the poet does. A poet attends to specifics, using often very concrete language, and in their using it some greater truths are mystifyingly conveyed.
Ah yes, and now of course I remember that also in the last couple of weeks, I listened to Joy Marie Clarkson’s podcast where she interviewed the poet and priest, Malcolm Guite, and they discussed Clarkson’s new book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer, about this very thing. I really must pick that book up!
Where do sermons come from? Even the form of them, the approach, and not just the content, are all shaped along the way from all kinds of places.
Going into Saturday, I thought I had a plan for my sermon. I even wrote about the direction I believed it was going in the weekly email we send out to our Church. There, I referenced this previous substack post and said that I would likely be talking about being saved from outside yourself by using the film A Man Called Otto as an example.
But then, I had this feeling that I was engaging in just the kind of reducing language of which Brueggemann warns. It was less living metaphor and more object lesson. The beauty and impact of the film was actually in the whole film in standing for itself, telling its own story, not in some lesson that we could “take from it.”
If I used it as a core example for the sermon then I would have to explain the film, and then work on connecting the themes of the film to the scripture. From there I would move into explaining the text and then provide a bit of an interpretation.
I do this fairly often in my preaching. I will even somewhere near the beginning of such sermons say something like “we are going to do a little Bible study here today.” I think I say this intuitively because I know that that’s exactly what we are doing. It is Bible study and not proclamation. It is not approximating poetry, nor is it “daring speech” as in the subtitle of Brueggemann’s book.
So, on a Saturday night, what was one to do? Take the whole thing apart and re-think, not just this particular sermon, but potentially future sermons that would have normally defaulted toward reducing rather than poetically expanding?
Yes. That is exactly what I was going to do.
Now, if you know my preaching you might want to object here and say, “No, you’re preaching is good! We need preachers who will explain things!” Let me reassure you that “explaining” didn’t disappear entirely from this sermon, but the structure of the sermon and the overriding mode of preaching changed significantly, and I think for the better.
I wasn’t precisely sure what needed to shift in this sermon. So I took a shower. Yes, I come up with ideas a lot in the shower and there is science to back me up on this.
The idea that came on this Saturday night in the shower was literally about water.
But first, a little more background. (Notice how much of this so-called “anatomy of a sermon” is actually about things kind of operating in the background? What goes into a sermon? Well, a lot!)…
The sermon was on Ephesians 2:1-10. In that text, death and resurrection are used as powerful metaphors for the life we are living. It is not talking about literal life after death, but is pointing to how we once lived a dead kind of life and then were raised into a whole new kind of life.
At our Church, during the season of Lent, we have been placing the baptismal font with water in it at the back of our sanctuary. While I was taking my shower, I got thinking that even though the text didn’t mention baptism, it did tap into the same powerful imagery that baptism signifies.
The Sunday before, I had been away from my home church to perform a baptism for a twenty-something man at the church where I assist as their interim moderator. I didn’t preach there, but I listened to Kevin Pauls, the leader of family ministries, give a sermon where he spoke about this particular imagery of baptism, namely death to an old life (going under the water), and resurrection to a new life (coming up out of the water).
In the shower, I was thinking not so much about what people need to hear or what I wanted to say, but more about HOW people hear. People don’t hear in concepts. They hear in specificity, in concreteness. People connect to image and story.
I thought my sermon was going to be about being saved from outside yourself. How it isn’t under our own power, but simply by God’s grace that we are saved. I thought that I would essentially just tell people that. Then they would understand the concept. But this is exactly the kind of reducing and explaining to be avoided. This isn’t how a transformed imagination comes about.
And then in the shower a new thought. This time, a story. A story about being in a lake or an ocean in a storm. A story where there had been a shipwreck and then someone rescues you, pulls you out from under the water. I got out of the shower and wrote the story down. This would be the opening of my sermon.
It didn’t fit perfectly with everything else that I had written before, but it was Saturday night so I figured it would have to do. I thought the story was good. It was less “hook” or “object lesson” and more getting to the very heart of how people really hear in image and story, using the concrete language of boats and storms and water and a lack of a lifejacket.
Then, lying down at night I had a further idea. I didn’t get up, I just thought to myself “if it is still there in the morning, it will be there. Just trust.” And it was. That doesn’t always work out, but this time it did.
The story wasn’t complicated. It was just the idea of being in a swimming pool, and how if you’d previously been in a shipwreck, and then years later you were swimming in a pool, you’d remember that time when you were rescued in the storm.
The end of the sermon would be about remembering the rescue in the waters, and how you would kind of re-enact that day by going under and coming up in this public swimming pool.
The opening story would be about a storm and then a rescue, salvation from outside yourself. The closing story would be about remembering the rescue, and about a kind of participation in the new life that was given to you post-shipwreck.
Even as I explain it here, it is nowhere near as powerful as just telling the stories. And even that is part of the point, isn’t it?
My sharing here is to give a bit of inside knowledge into how some sermons are formed. How so much goes into a sermon, even into the very shape of how to say something.
Maybe this has been helpful for you, and maybe not. If you’d like, you can watch the sermon on YouTube below.
If you’re a preacher yourself, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what goes into your preaching, or how your sermons have changed or are changing.