I keep getting thrown back on this question: What is a sermon?
It came up for me again listening to Andy Stanley preach on TV.
Andy Stanley is a much more engaging preacher than I have ever been. He is a much more successful pastor and author than I imagine I’ll ever be. But I don’t think I’d be a good fit for his congregation.
I don’t come to this conclusion just from watching the sermon this weekend. I’ve read one of his books and watched a few of his sermons online. This weekend just reminded me and dredged up that nagging sermon question.
Stanley was preaching on the story of Esau selling his birth right to Jacob for a bowl of stew. It was funny, touching, and well organized. He brought it all down to a single focus and an easy to remember message.
And at the end, I did not feel as if I’d experienced a sermon. That may have been because what I watched was a preacher speaking outside of the context of a worship service. All I got was “the message.” And I was watching on TV not as part of a congregation, so part of my sense about it might come from these factors.
But I don’t think that was all of it.
My problem is that I cannot name what it is about the sermon – or other sermons of this kind – that leave me feeling like something other than a sermon has just taken place.
And how arrogant of me is that? Stanley has tens of thousands of people who listen to him preach. He has published books about preaching. What do I know about it?
Well, not much. I can’t even tell you what a sermon is.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
This love we believe to be the medicine of life, the never-failing remedy for all the evils of a disordered world, for all the miseries and vices of men. Wherever this is, there are virtue and happiness going hand in hand. There is humbleness of mind, gentleness, long-suffering, the whole image of God; and at the same time a peace that passeth all understanding, and joy unspeakable and full of glory.
John, you are speaking to many of my “wonderings” lately. Get out of my head!
As I navigate the provisional process in the North Georgia conference, we’ve been reading lots of the standard texts and having lots of the standard conversations about ministry: nothing earth shattering, but I suppose it is useful to discuss these things in a group setting. All those books and conversations run together for me, but I believe it was Adam Hamilton’s Beyond These Walls that opened this question for me. In that book (I think), Hamilton talks about the different aims of preaching, and the one thing I found missing in his description of the aims of preaching–and the one thing I find missing from churches like North Point (Andy Stanley’s joint) is an actual “sense and taste for the infinite” as Schleiermacher would have said.
In short, it seems that when I hear sermons like Andy Stanley’s, it is almost as if he expects for me to go out and find an experience of God for myself, as if the sermon is not a proper place for me to experience God. I’m supposed to experience God in the music, perhaps, but not in the sermon.
My bias is showing, of course, but I tend to think that evoking a sense of the divine is much more difficult than putting together an easily digestible message. Digestion is important, of course–I am thinking about Dan Dick’s post this morning about the importance of all five aspects of communication theory–but until you allow the Holy Spirit in, you’ve written a very good Rotary speech rather than a sermon.
If it sounds like I am saying that the preacher has an obligation to do some legwork upfront to ensure that the Spirit makes it into the sermon, well, I am. I believe it was Tom Long who told our class in seminary, “The Holy Spirit never rejects good preparation.”
I will try to extract myself from your brain presently.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply to an ill-formed question.
When I reflect on my own practice of preaching, I had a set of unwritten rules that almost always shaped my work.
1) Start with the text. (I just could not preach by starting with a topic as so many of the big-name pastors do.)
2) If at all possible, develop a one sentence theme for the entire sermon that starts with the word “God” (or Jesus or The Holy Spirit) and uses an active verb.
For instance, my sermon on David and Goliath had as its theme sentence: “God uses what we have to get done what God needs done.” Not a great sentence, but it puts the focus of the sermon on God, not on us.
3) Remember that this is good news.
I’m not sure that gets to “the sense of the divine,” but it does have the effect of putting the Bible first, putting the focus on God, and making the declaration of good news the reason for speaking at all. As you can tell, I often did not do much with the whole “application” aspect of the sermon, and I think perhaps the people at the church I served may have longed for more of that.
What I can’t figure out, though, is what makes what I did, what you aspire to, and what preachers like Hamilton and Stanley do the same activity.
It is almost as if “a sermon” is whatever a preacher says in the midst of a worship service. Maybe that is all the definition we need.