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The 'Best' Is Yet to Be: The Pursuit of Preaching Perfection in Light of the Ineffable Word
Beverly Ann Zink-Sawyer
Samuel W. Newell, Jr. Professor of Preaching and Worship
Inaugural Address
February 20, 2008
The 'Best' Is Yet to Be
It happened one morning last spring. I was trolling the stacks of homiletics books in the library when I looked up and saw it: a large volume with blue binding and gold letters on the spine proclaiming, "The 100 Best Sermons of the 19th Century." Hmmmm…I thought to myself. The 19th century was pretty long—a hundred years, to be exact—and given the fact that it was the most mission-oriented century in Christian history, we're talking about a lot of sermons from which to cull the "100 Best."
Okay, I'll confess. Even before I reached up to take the book—this book (SHOW BOOK)—down from the shelf, I had a pretty good idea what I would find inside. Or, more accurately, what I wouldn't find. I suspected I would not find anyone who looked like me or my colleagues Rebecca Weaver or Carol Schweitzer. Even though, as many of you know, I've spent most of my academic career researching the work of well-known women preachers of the 19th century. But I really didn't expect to find a sermon there by Anna Howard Shaw or Lucretia Mott or Catherine Booth. Nor did I expect to find in that book the sermons of preachers who looked like my colleagues Katie Cannon or Brian Blount. Even though the roots of today's vibrant African-American preaching tradition are spread all over the 19th century. No, I really didn't expect to find there a sermon by John Jasper (a Richmond native!) or Richard Allen or Sojourner Truth.
Well, my hunch was correct. When I opened the book and looked at the Table of Contents, I found there a roster of the "usual suspects": the big name preachers from the big name churches, all male, white (as best I can tell), British and North American. The list is a veritable "who's who" of the men who wrote the books and garnered the publicity—who, indeed, had important and helpful things to say about Christian faith amidst the vicissitudes of the 19th century. But all of it got me to thinking: What makes a sermon a "best" sermon? And, even more interestingly, WHO gets to decide?
As you might imagine, there is no shortage of opinions out there as to what the best sermons look like. Ask three Presbyterians to describe the "best" sermon, and you'll get four different answers. Indeed, sermon beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Defining the best sermon is not unlike the Supreme Court's famous debate about pornography in the 1960s. In the midst of the deliberations over precisely what constituted pornographic material, Justice Potter Stewart admitted that he might not be able to define it, but, he went on to say, "I know it when I see it." The same could be said for the best in preaching. We might not be able to define it, but we know it when we see it.
So where do we begin our quest for the best Christian sermons—those familiar spoken expressions of the gospel that have been part of Christian worship since at least the 2nd century when Justin Martyr wrote the first description of worship practices? The logical place to begin such a quest would be the New Testament. There's just one small problem: Jesus who "came preaching," as Mark's gospel tells us, didn't really leave us any sermons. Well, there is that so-called Sermon on the Mount, which surely would make the "Top Ten Sermons" of all time. But scholars debate about precisely which teachings in the New Testament really constitute sermons. We probably have sermon "fragments" in the Pauline epistles and in the missionary preaching recorded in Acts. But beyond the texts that we desperately try to identify as sermons, the truth is Jesus and Paul and the New Testament writers have left us few examples of what a sermon should look like. As O. C. Edwards writes in the most recent comprehensive history of preaching, "There is a sense in which everything in the New Testament is preaching. And yet, paradoxically, there is another sense in which none of it is."1 That reality is both bad news AND good news. It's bad news because we have no examples of what a sermon should look like; it's good news because we have no examples of what a sermon should look like! So preachers can't compete for the title, "Preacher who preaches most like Jesus or Paul." God deliberately left us, I believe, to figure out, by the power of the Spirit, what the most effective—and most faithful—Christian proclamation should be.
So the "quest for the best"—that is, the challenge to figure out how to capture the essence of this new faith—began in the earliest gatherings of Christian converts. The kerygma, the proclamation, the good news of the resurrection, was entrusted by Christ himself to the women who found the empty tomb. Those astounded women were, of course, the first Christian preachers—closing the case, I might add, on the question of women's right to preach! If that Easter Day proclamation was to be heard and believed, it needed to be shared. And so small groups of Christian believers gathered to tell and retell what they had seen and heard: to ponder the story of salvation and ways of living into that story. They shaped their gatherings according to what many of them knew best: synagogue worship, where, according to liturgics scholar Hughes Oliphant Old, "preaching played a major role," exhibiting "theological depth and literary refinement."2 The most common style of synagogue preaching was much like the expository preaching still heard today. In fact, some synagogue sermons discovered from that era even had three points—although I don't know if they concluded with a poem! And, interestingly, preaching was not limited to professional rabbis but included a large group of men who had dedicated their lives to the study of Scripture, reflecting the belief in Judaism that the study of Scripture was not the exclusive purview of any professional office but "the sacred duty and the heavenly delight of every devout Jew."3
Modeling the only pattern for worship most of them knew, then, the young Christian community adopted both the content and the style of synagogue preaching. But they read and interpreted those ancient scriptures with new eyes: eyes of faith that saw Jesus as the One promised in the words they had heard for so long. And, as an expression of that faith and a witness to the gifts of the Spirit, everyone shared in the act of proclamation, confirming the fulfillment of the Pentecost promise that "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Acts 2:17).
It wasn't long, however, before "Christianized" styles of synagogue preaching gave way to the pressures of syncretism, causing the Christian community to look not only back to the synagogue but around to the Greco-Roman world in which it existed, finding itself smack in the middle of the golden age of oratory. The "best" preaching of the apostolic and post-apostolic eras quickly became defined more by rhetorical style than by content. What was once the simple recitation of the story of Christ's resurrection and the re-interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures was kicked up a notch by the so-called "enlivening techniques"4 of classical rhetoric, providing the form and vocabulary that we use even today in our practice of preaching.
Even as Christian proclamation was finding its identity, however, other significant changes were occurring in the young church: changes that would have a consequential effect on preaching. Evidence shows that the earliest church leadership "was collegial" with the worship assembly "presided over by a group of elders, some of whom took turns preaching."5 But the church quickly moved in a different direction, Hughes Oliphant Old notes, "investing the preaching office in a single figure who would eventually be called the bishop."6 And so, as with many things in the church, the complications for preaching came with the rise of an educated, separate class of church leaders known as "the clergy." Where once the privilege of scriptural interpretation and proclamation was shared among at least a group of preachers, an established clergy and a powerful church hierarchy wrested that privilege from the hands of the people. There were some exceptions to these rules. Bishop-approved preachers, including lay men and even women of religious orders made significant contributions to the church's proclamation. But, for the most part, the people had little voice in what was proclaimed and how. And so the true sense of the sermon as "homilia," a discourse or conversation between preacher and people, as the sermon was described by the mid-2nd century, was lost. The question of "who decides" what the best preaching looks like was pretty much decided by the 3rd century of the church—and it did not include the voice of the people.
But the coup de grace for the voice of the people in preaching was the creation of the first preaching textbooks. The question of who decides what the "best" preaching looks like was answered decisively by those who literally "wrote the books." From the first systematic statement of homiletical theory contained in Augustine's On Christian Doctrine at the end of the 4th century to the proliferation of "homiliaries" or sermon collections and preaching aids in the Middle Ages to the Ecclesiastes of Erasmus in the 16th century, the "best" Christian preaching followed the wisdom of the authorities of each era as contained in the preaching textbooks. Erasmus dedicated Ecclesiastes, his last and longest book, to the art of preaching, insisting that, "[s]ince preaching is so important, it should be done well." He went on to say, "If elephants can be trained to dance, lions to play, and leopards to hunt, surely preachers can be taught to preach."7
Even as Erasmus was writing his preaching textbook, an ecclesiastical earthquake continued to rumble under his feet. The Protestant Reformation would leave little of the church unchanged, not the least of which was the proclamation of the word. The Reformers restored the Bible to the hands of the people, giving them unprecedented access to the reading and interpretation of scripture—and the Reformers restored the centrality and significance of preaching in the worship of the church. As my colleague Dawn DeVries notes in her book on The Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher, "Preaching in the Reformed tradition is not primarily didactic but sacramental: it is a means of grace, not simply a method of instruction…. The Christ who redeems us is present in the church today through the proclaimed Word." 8
And so, with new understandings of proclamation and new voices invited to proclaim, the general consensus as to what the "best" sermons looked like for centuries of Christian worship was exploded by the myriad expressions of Reformation faiths. By the time we get to Protestantism's arrival in North America, we are greeted with what Swedish historian Yngve Brilioth called "an impenetrable forest to the outsider," a forest comprised of "a multiplicity of denominations,…an almost endless variety of spiritual types and varied educational standards…, and [a] highly developed cult of the spoken word in a young democratic community."9 Impenetrable indeed. Not at first, of course. There was a brief period of Puritan consensus as to what sermons should be: mostly doctrinal, and admonitory, and always delivered by the clergy. But the intractable Puritan hold on preaching was bound to implode—and it did, giving way, eventually, to the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, and to the countless expressions of Protestantism that define American religion today. This "impenetrable forest" of preaching traditions represents, in large part, a referendum of the laity on the preaching and practice of the church. As early as the turn of the 18th century, lay men and women, black and white, slave and free, young and old, native and immigrant claimed their places in shaping Christian proclamation. They listened, they learned, they were led by the Holy Spirit in unprecedented displays of personal witness and scriptural knowledge.
The good news for preaching at the beginning of the 21st century is that there are countless acceptable ways to proclaim the gospel—and there are more voices than ever before in the "homilia," the conversation about what preaching should be. Yngve Brilioth should see that "impenetrable forest" now! The downside of this surfeit of homiletical riches is that it has become more difficult than ever to discern what the "best" preaching looks like.
Okay—so I guess by now it's time to acknowledge the "elephant in the room." Some of you might be thinking that there is something oxymoronic in talking about the "best" sermons. For too long, preaching has been a competitive sport—rather than the life-giving, grace-filled proclamation of the word of God. We might even be forced to admit that there's something discordant if not downright offensive about books of "best" sermons and preaching prizes. Can we really make such human judgments about so divine an enterprise as proclamation of the very word of God? I'm not sure we can, but neither do I want to let preachers off the hook. I don't want to allow those who are called to proclaim the very "mystery of God," as Paul described preachers in his first letter to the Corinthians, to offer to God anything but the best they have—even as God has offered us the best in Jesus Christ.
Is there, then, anything we can say about what makes a sermon a "best" sermon? I think there is. I think there are qualities that are essential to faithful, meaningful proclamation of the word of God—qualities that transcend denominational, cultural, and even theological differences. Your list might be somewhat different from mine—but hey, this is my lecture so you get to listen to mine! This is neither an exhaustive nor prioritized list, but see how yours compares.
The best sermons proclaim the gospel more than they preach the Bible. I am indebted to my mentor at Vanderbilt University, David Buttrick, for helping me understand sermons as proclamation of the gospel story rather than the text. Now, before my Bible colleagues start throwing hymnbooks at me, I acknowledge that all Christian proclamation must be grounded in scripture. But too much preaching has focused on "the content of passages of Scripture," as Edward Farley puts it, when what is preached should be "the gospel, the event of Christ through which we are saved."10 That gospel, that good news, the "event of Christ through which we are saved," as Farley calls it, is always larger than any discrete text we engage. And now at the risk of inviting my liturgics colleagues into the hymnbook throwing, I fear that our admirable emphasis in recent years on lectionary preaching has resulted in the inherent danger of focusing too narrowly on texts while missing the gospel message. Some of us know first-hand how texts have been used to hurt and divide, to limit and oppress. We know too well how texts can be preached while completely missing the gospel. So the best sermons are attentive to the intentions of texts while always interpreting them in light of the saving work of the gospel.
The best sermons take that gospel, that good news, and make it our story, as well. They "name grace," as Mary Catherine Hilkert puts it, in the midst of the realities of our lives.11 Perhaps that's where much otherwise-good preaching fails: in not making a credible case for the modern usefulness of the ancient words of scripture. In an essay on preaching from 1928, Harry Emerson Fosdick famously declared, "Only the preacher proceeds still upon the idea that folk come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusites." "What all the great writers of Scripture were interested in," Fosdick said, "was human living, and the modern preacher who honors them should start with that."12 The "project method" of preaching Fosdick developed in response to his concern has been challenged in the decades since. But I think he was on to something: the fact that we have failed as preachers when we cannot identify the "deep resonances," as Fred Craddock calls them, between contemporary life and the stories of scripture.13
The best sermons evoke those "deep resonances" through the personal witness of the one preaching. What's new in homiletics today is what's old: a recovery of the role of the preacher as witness, the one who gives personal testimony to the truth of the gospel. The best sermons are embodied in the faithful life and truthful witness of the one who proclaims. Like the women charged with the good news of the resurrection on Easter Day, the preacher must have seen and experienced the gospel firsthand—otherwise the proclamation is in danger of becoming nothing more than an "idle tale," as those women were accused of telling, or a "God delusion," to use a recent phrase. "Armed with the rediscovered reality of our own experience," David Buttrick believes, "we will speak to congregations so they will nod their recognition and realize deep meanings within their own lives." "Simply put," Buttrick goes on, "preaching will be renewed by truth. Not by marketing, not by management, not by homiletic techniques,…but by telling truth."14
The witness the preacher offers means telling the truth in a personal, passionate way. I read a lot about preaching in preparation for this lecture, as you might imagine. But the most interesting thing I read came from a lecture on "Successful Preaching" delivered in 1870 to students at Union Seminary in New York by the Rev. T. L. Cuyler, a Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn. In his lecture, Dr. Cuyler gave the young men advice on the content and delivery of sermons and on personal attributes of the pastor. He then made this interesting statement (which I read from the original text, lest you think I'm making this up): "The men who have produced the greatest effect in the pulpit—Chalmers, Lyman Beecher, Spurgeon, Guthrie, etc.—have been men who had great volumes of animal heat."15 For months, I've pondered exactly what "animal heat" has to do with preaching. But I think it has to do with the sense of passion that must undergird our words. Those who preach must believe that our very lives—and the lives of those who hear us—depend on this message—and not only believe it, but live it.
I read a tribute to Sam Newell by his friend and colleague, Sam Spencer, former President of Davidson College and chair of our Board of Trustees when I was called to Union many years ago. Dr. Spencer spoke of Dr. Newell's eloquent and winsome preaching of Christian love. "Then [Sam] came down from the pulpit," Dr. Spencer noted, "and showed us, in his everyday life, its full meaning. For all of us who knew and loved him, he made our troubled world a better place. His example gives us hope that we can do the same."
In pursuit of that kind of authentic witness, the best sermons often defy all homiletical criteria as to what the best sermons should be. Some of us have preached sermons that would have failed to meet the most basic standards of Homiletics 101; all of us have heard such sermons—and yet, somehow, the gospel was proclaimed. Sometimes the words of the sermon speak not because of but in spite of the preacher—for the word we proclaim is an Ineffable Word, unable to be tamed, domesticated, or squeezed into our humanly-devised containers. Those are moments when, as Karl Rahner put it, "the Holy Spirit runs ahead of the preacher."16 Richard Lischer of Duke University tells the story of a sermon preached in his church at the baptism of a baby—not an unusual worship occurrence, except for the fact that the baby's mother had been buried the day before. We can only imagine the conflicted emotions held within the walls of the sanctuary that day. The pastor, uncharacteristically, came down from the pulpit, took the baby in his arms, and preached the sermon while pacing up and down the center aisle, "as if to reinforce," Lischer says, "Bonhoeffer's definition of the sermon as Christ moving among his people." Through tears, the preacher claimed the promises of God for that child and commanded the congregation to remember its responsibility for her. "Technically," Lischer concludes, "it was not a perfect sermon, only the right sermon for us."17
The right sermon for us. The best sermons are embodied in the truthful witness of the preacher and embedded in the life of the congregation. They grow out of the daily "homilia," the conversation, the discourse that occurs as preacher and people together seek to live faithfully into the promises of God. As a result, the "best" sermons are not always the best in terms of any technical standards. But, as Joseph Sittler declared in his Beecher Lectures on preaching, "Where grammar cracks, grace erupts,"18 In a similar vein, Reinhold Niebuhr swore he would "never aspire to be a preacher of pretty sermons. I'll keep them rough," he said.19 Indeed, there is a roughness, a "messiness" inherent in even the best preaching: the messiness of life as frail human beings in the presence of an omniscient but forgiving God.
But the best sermons are not content to leave us in the despair of reality; the best sermons offer a vision of a new world. Too much preaching, my fellow Presbyterian Ernest Campbell asserted, is "a dull defense of the past rather than a daring march into the future."20 The best sermons should inspire us to live into God's future "fiction,"21 as Walter Brueggemann calls it: a new way of imagining the world, a world that we cannot see but can only imagine, a world shaped by resurrection hope in the face of the persistence of death. That resurrection hope, that gospel, that good news, provides what Herman Stuempfle calls an "antiphon to existence"22 : a different sound, a different way of being in the world. The great Gardner Taylor uses the image of the watchman from the prophet Ezekiel to describe the role of the preacher as the one who "is expected to scan the hills and to peer toward the valleys with the eye straining to see the rim of the horizon."23 The watchman warns of impending danger, but the watchman also imagines what is to come. Is giving voice to a new world on the horizon easy? No. Is it dangerous? Yes. In fact, it is what our own president described so well in a recent sermon as "sheer looney tunes." And yet, that's the work we've signed on to do: what martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero called "the hard service of the word."24
I do have a vision of the "best" sermon. Actually, it's not my vision—it comes from John the Revelator. Listen:
"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
'Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne,
and to the Lamb!'
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God." (Rev. 7:9-11)
Maybe you noticed: there is no sermon in this text—for the best sermons usher us into the very presence of God where we are rendered silent before the Ineffable Word. The ultimate goal of our proclamation and worship, says Hughes Oliphant Old is "the experience of being so overwhelmed by God's glory" that we "fall down before [God] in awe."25 Yes, the "best" sermon is yet to be. And I'm convinced we won't hear it here on earth. Until that day, we preach and pray, we listen and learn. We engage in "homilia," in conversation, in discourse, as preachers and people, the community of the baptized. And we glimpse the new world for which we keep our eyes fixed on the horizon when we gather at this Holy Table.
I close this message in traditional homiletical fashion: with a poem—a prayer for the preacher found in "Listen Lord—A Prayer" from God's Trombones by James Weldon Johnson:
"And now, O Lord, this [one] of God,
Who breaks the bread of life this morning—
Shadow him in the hollow of thy hand,
And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil.
Take [her], Lord—this morning—
Wash [her] with hyssop inside and out,
Hang [her] up and drain [her] dry of sin….
Put [her] eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let [her] look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy Salvation,
And set his tongue on fire.—Amen."
1O. C. Edwards, A History of Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004), 6.
2Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church: Vol. I: The Biblical Period (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 102.
3Ibid., 109.
4Edwards, 9.
5Old, 268.
6Old, 268.
7William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer, eds., Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 203.
8Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 104.
9Yngve Brilioth, A Brief History of Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 171.
10Edward Farley, “Preaching the Bible and the Gospel,” in A Reader on Preaching: Making Connections, David Day, et. al., eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 67.
11Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1997).
12Harry Emerson Fosdick, “What Is the Matter with Preaching?” Harper’s Magazine (July 1928): 6.
13Fred B.Craddock, “Preaching: An Appeal to Memory” in Mike Graves, ed., What’s the Matter with Preaching Today? (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 60.
14David Buttrick, Preaching the New and the Now (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 138.
15T. L. Cuyler in Successful Preaching: Addresses (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.), 47.
16As quoted in Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1997), 43.
17Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 40.
18Joseph Sittler, The Ecology of Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 56, 57.
19Reinhold Neibuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), as quoted in Willimon and Lischer, eds., Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, 145.
20Ernest T. Campbell, “A Lover’s Quarrel with Preaching” in Mike Graves, ed., What’s the Matter with Preaching Today? (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 55;
21Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 10.
22Herman G. Stuempfle, Jr., Preaching Law and Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 48.
23Richard Lischer, ed., The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching, Augustine to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 105.
24Ibid., x.
25Old, 219.
