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Class Notes

Homiletics P-131

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Preacher Creature class assignments, class notes and syllabus.

Syllabus

P-131 - Homiletics II

“Preacher Creature Class”

Catalog Description

P-131 3 hours Homiletics II (Prerequisite: P-130)

Purpose, function and structure of a sermon. Textual preaching, especially on parables, miracles, O.T. texts as well as texts for occasional sermons. The sermon as part of the liturgy and of worship. The polarity of Law and Gospel in all preaching. Sermon theory and delivery.

Objectives

Knowledge:

To learn how Law and Gospel work in the hearer’s life

To learn hermeneutical principles for common biblical genres

To learn the necessary components for developing sermon outlines

To learn to write in the oral style with clear and defined purpose

Skills:

To develop habits that keep the preacher informed about the world in which his listeners live

To develop composition skills appropriate to oral delivery and aural reception

To develop jargon-free writing habits

To develop skills that enable preaching from memory

Attitudes:

To see preaching as an opportunity for personal growth in faith

To be interested in the issues of this world while not being “of” this world

To aspire to be a servant to listeners through preaching

Course Outline

The Word of God, the Word of the World, the Sweet Spot and What’s In It for Me? (5 sessions)
Funeral Sermon (3 sessions)
Parable Sermon (4 sessions)
Hebrew Bible Sermon (4 sessions)
Miracle Sermon (4 sessions)

5 Required Texts

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although not a homiletics text, this anthology from the German theologian and martyr give insights on the reality of life in a fallen world

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest This devotional classic is not a homiletics text but picks at the preacher’s assumptions about faith and ministry. Those insights should influence sermons. Most class sessions will spend some time discussing the given day’s devotion.

Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath. This classic offers insights that can make your personal devotional life more meaningful and your public preaching more insightful.

Richard Lischer, Open Secrets. Lischer, a graduate of Concordia Seminary, recounts his first years in pastoral ministry.

Dale A. Meyer, “PDA’s and the Spirit’s Sword” (Concordia Journal; daleameyer.com) Composing and writing sermons in the oral style

Dale A. Meyer, “Vague Rumors” (daleameyer.com) A gleaning of homiletic insights from Walther’s classic “Law and Gospel”

Some Other Helpful Texts

Eugene L. Lowry, How to Preach a Parable (Abingdon) Parables are a difficult genre to preach and Lowry, a former Wenchel lecturer on our campus, gives helpful guidance.

Dale A. Meyer, “The Place of the Sermon” in Liturgical Preaching (Concordia)

Dale A. Meyer, various sermons posted (daleameyer.com)

Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (Riverhead Books) With short chapters that can be quickly read, Ms. Norris explores theological jargon. She shows how treasured expressions of faith don’t always communicate what we assume they’re communicating.

Thom S. Rainer, Surprising Insights from the Unchurches and Proven Ways to Reach Them (Zondervan) Congregations can grow and the pulpit can lead the way. This book should encourage LCMS seminarians and preachers.

William Safire, Lend Me Your Ears, (Norton) A great anthology of speeches and some sermons that Safire deems the best. Because secular speeches and sermons both deal in rhetoric, this volume can be instructive to the student of homiletics.

C.F.W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel (Concordia) The distinction between Law and Gospel is for us Lutherans the mechanism that makes the sermon tick.

Joseph M. Webb, Preaching without Notes (Abington) You don’t need a manuscript in the pulpit and people will appreciate when you preach at them.

William H. Willimon, The Intrusive Word (Eerdmans) Willimon, also a former Wenchel lecturer, is a premier preacher. This is well worth the time reading because it will plant some good ideas into your homiletical head.

Teaching Techniques

Class lecture, discussion and exercises; sermon preparations and deliveries; e-mail interactions. Significant time for casual discussion of faith issues in our hearers and in ourselves, discussion prompted by the Chambers text.

Evaluation

Class preparation and participation: 25%

Sermons: 75%

Agenda

March-May

Assignments:

1. Read Richard Lischer, Open Secrets

2. Write a 2000 word essay about how Lischer’s experiences challenge or contradict your expectations about pastoral care and preaching. Write your essay as though it were to be published, meaning that it should draw the reader in because you are honest, transparent and thoughtful. Don’t assume your reader is a church-goer. Due to daleameyer@aol.com by April 3.

3. Attend Bach at the Sem, March 16, 2008 at 3:00 . Write 300 words about the experience and submit to daleameyer@aol.com by Wednesday, March 19.

4. Outline, write, memorize and deliver a funeral sermon in class March 27, 31, or April 3. You will be assigned one of three funerals from Open Secrets (Darwin, pages 83-87; Annie, pages 139-142; or Buster Toland (pages 180-196). Text of your own choosing. Submit to daleameyer@aol.com after you have preached.

5. Read Elie Wiesel by April 7 and think about where God is when you need a miracle.

6. Deliver a miracle sermon April 21, 24, or 28. Text to be assigned.

7. Read Abraham Heschel, Sabbath, by May 1. Challenge your assumptions about time.

8. Deliver a sermon on an assigned Hebrew Bible text on May 5, 8, or 12.

9. Submit an essay on "Vague Rumors" by May 15. What surprised you about Walther's attitude toward preaching?

Class Topics:

March 3 – Class introductions; Bonhoeffer for March 3 (Just as I am?); the Word of the World
March 6 – Bring your Bible to class. Bonhoeffer for the day (Growing stronger under the load) the Word of God; the Sweet Spot (locus)
March 10 - Bonhoeffer W.I.I.F.M.? (thesis, outline; Read "Things Go Better with Coke" on website
March 13 - Bonhoeffer (Forgiveness is not...) Discuss the work of preparing sermons. You will find "PDAs and the Spirit's Sword" helpful (website).
March 17- No Class
March 27- Bonhoeffer ("Unity and differentiation of incarnation, cross and resurrrection); First funeral deliveries
March 31- Bonhoeffer Funeral Sermon deliveries
April 3 - Bonhoeffer (2 Corinthians 1:20); Funeral Sermon deliveries
April 7- No Class- Read Wiesel, Night, and think about where God is when you need a miracle.
April 10 - Bonhoeffer- (Wisdom of Solomon on 4:14) Assign miracle texts (1 Kings 17:7-16, John 2:1-11, John 9:1-41
April 14 - Bonhoeffer (How does a pastor act on resurrection?)
April 17- Guest instructor
April 21- Bonhoeffer (Integrity) 4 deliveries of miracle sermon
April 24 - Bonhoeffer-(Afraid of the world?) 4 miracle sermon deliveries
April 28 - Bonhoeffer (Meanings of Grace); Final 4 miracle sermon deliveries
May 1 - Bonhoeffer (The time of your devotion); discuss Heschel
May 5 - Bonhoeffer- (Your time zones) 4 Hebrew Bible deliveries
May 8 - Bonhoeffer- ("As One who serves") 4 Hebrew Bible deliveries
May 12 - Bonhoeffer (Praying the Psalms); final Hebrew Bible deliveries
May 15 - No class, but, submit to daleameyer@aol.com a 750 word essay about what surprised you about Walther's attitude to preaching from the website article, "Vague Rumors."

“Vague Rumors”

True, every person has heard a vague rumor that God has pardoned him, but he cannot arrive at any certainty about it.

(The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel, Dau, p. 179)

That’s not a bad description of contemporary American culture, even 120 years after C.F.W. Walther offered his Friday evening lectures on Law and Gospel to seminary students. Our American culture is rabidly spiritual, often in the silliest ways. That is not something we should mock, though it certainly invites it. God placed His Law in every heart, and though we know the innate knowledge of God has been grossly obscured by sin and that inborn Law is usually not recognized as something the Creator has put in us, it is still there, still God’s, still impelling people to come to terms with their brokenness and seek spiritual wholeness. Vague rumors of a forgiving, kindly God. Walther’s missionary spirit wanted to replace those vague rumors in his contemporaries with a Word-based certainty and he saw his young seminarians spreading out to do just that. This they would do most especially by preaching.

Among the various functions and official acts of a servant of the Church the most important of all, my friends, is preaching. Since there is no substitute for preaching, a minister who accomplishes little or nothing by preaching will accomplish little or nothing by anything else that he may do. (p. 247)

In one aspect the scope of this paper is narrow. In a casual conversation with Rev. Neil Schmidt, I mentioned that I had long wanted to go through Walther’s Law and Gospel to gather his incidental remarks about preaching. Since Walther so highly values preaching, it would be interesting to learn how he went about it. My interest is not so much how we use the Law and Gospel in our preaching but rather what Walther has to say about the mundane mechanics of sermon preparation and delivery. Rev. Schmidt kindly invited me to prepare a paper on that topic and here it is. But you cannot read Law and Gospel, or at least I cannot, without wondering how Walther’s big ideas apply to preaching and ministry today, 120 years later. So the second aspect of this paper is broader, more speculative. Do Walther’s views on preaching suggest how we in today’s vastly different context can replace vague rumors about God with biblical certainty?

To the first part, the mundane mechanics of preaching Walther incidentally mentions. The rhetoricians of classical antiquity understood five components of the speaking task: invention, disposition, diction, delivery and memory. Walther says nothing in Law and Gospel that explicitly harkens back to that Greek and Roman division, and I’m not going beyond Law and Gospel in this paper, but Walther probably was aware of that division. The ancient way had been declared legitimate for Christian homiletics by Augustine and its precepts openly dominated preaching for much of two millennia. In one way, the fivefold division is just common sense. If you’re going to speak in public, you have to do certain things to prepare and deliver. I’ll use that fivefold division to gather what Walther says.

First comes heuresis is what the Greeks called it; inventio the name used by the Romans. “Invention” or “Discovery” in English. This is the preliminary task of speech or sermon preparation wherein you discover, you “invent” in the sense of coming upon what it is you’re going to say. It’s not unlike the “discovery stage” in legal undertakings. About Walther’s view of finding the content of whatever it will be that you eventually preach, it would be a gross mischaracterization to imagine that his only concern in preparation was to sit in your study and correctly formulate the doctrinal content of a given text.

The preacher must understand how to depict accurately the inward condition of every one of his hearers. A mere objective presentation of the various doctrines is not sufficient to this end. A person may be orthodox, may have apperceived the pure doctrine, but he is not in personal communion with God, has not yet settled his account with God, has not yet attained to the assurance that his debt of sins has been remitted. How can such a person prepare a Christian sermon? Here is where the saying which was current among the pagans applies: Pectus facit disertum, that is, true oratory is a matter of the heart. Indeed, the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is properly learned only in the school of the Holy Spirit, in tribulation. (p. 53)

Here Walther speaks about the preacher’s heart, not the preacher’s intellectual understanding of the text and doctrine. He consistently does that, dividing head and heart, though I hasten to add he does not divorce head and heart. So, for example, he writes in one place that a certain type of sermon may, at best, enter their intellect, but it does not enter (the hearers’) hearts, where it ought to lodge (p. 182). “Vague rumors” are in the heart and so the pastor needs to preach the proper intellectual content down into that heart so that the Spirit can take up residence there.

To that end the preacher’s own heart is critical in this discovery phase, to coming upon the sermon content that the Spirit can use to dislodge those vague rumors. The preacher in his own personal devotional life should have experienced and should continue to experience his own wrestlings with Law and Gospel. The preacher should also know the hearers’ own struggles. To achieve that goal, he must know…dare I say it in this group?…he must know the hearer’s “felt needs.”

The Apostle Paul says concerning himself: “I am made all things to all men that I might by all means save some.” 1 Corinthians 9:22. This statement he wants every servant of Christ to take to heart. Its import is that a minister must not be satisfied with merely proclaiming the truth; he must proclaim the truth so as to meet the needs of his people. (p. 208)

Of course, Walther is not talking about “felt needs” in the way that much popular American religion does. “Is your felt-need a better marriage? Jesus has 10 steps for you” and such nonsense.

In your sermons you like to treat subjects like these: “The blessed state of a Christian,” and the like. Well, do not forget that the blessedness of Christians does not consist in pleasant feelings, but in their assurance that in spite of the bitterest feelings imaginable they are accepted with God and in their dying hour will be received into heaven. That is indeed great blessedness. (p. 312)

To replace vague rumors with certainty Walther invariably heads toward the objective word of Scripture, divided according to Law and Gospel, but we need to hear his insistence that the beginning of sermon preparation take into account the hearers’ condition, psychological and spiritual.

The greatest difficulty is encountered in dealing with true Christians according to their particular spiritual condition. One has a weak, another a strong faith; one is cheerful, another sorrowful; one is sluggish, another burning with zeal; one has only little spiritual knowledge, another is deeply grounded in the truth… In order that a pastor may correctly judge and treat people, it is of the utmost importance for him to understand temperaments. (p. 57)

Walther goes on in this passage to talk about personality types, sanguine, melancholy, phlegmatic and choleric. This psychological information, the manifestations of the hearers’ hearts, is something the preacher picks up by interacting with people during the week. In one passage Walther talks about a house call he made on a man who was so emotionally upset that he could not make a rational confession of sin (p. 253f.). These are not Walther’s words, but the sermon is to be the word of God spoken to the heart language of the hearers. To discover how best to make that application, the preacher needs to know his heart and his hearers’ hearts, their common humanity. Preach so that every hearer feels: “He means me.” (p. 53)

The ancients called the next division of the homiletical task disposition. Disposition, from dispono, how you put into different places what you’ve discovered from your interactions with your hearers and your intellectual work in the study. Now we are distributing the content of next Sunday’s sermon. Today we call it outlining. Three points that I have gleaned from Walther are relevant to current practice. The first is that you should plan your sermon with a clear purpose.

The worst fault in modern preaching, my dear friends, is this, that the sermons lack point and purpose; and this fault can be noticed particularly in the sermons of modern preachers who are believers. While unbelieving and fanatical preachers have quite a definite aim, -- pity, that it is not the right one! – believing preachers, as a rule, imagine that they have fully discharged their office, provided what they have preached has been the Word of God. That is about as correct a view as when a ranger imagines he has discharged his office by sallying forth with his loaded gun and discharging it into the forest, or as when an artilleryman thinks he has done his duty by taking up his position with his cannon in the line of battle and by discharging his cannon. Just as poor rangers and soldiers as these latter are, just so poor and useless preachers are those who have no plan in mind and take no aim when they are preaching. (p. 99)

When you page through Walther’s sermons, you immediately see that in every sermon he stated a title and the chief parts of the outline. I doubt that he would take it well that many sermons from students and pastors today have no title. That suggests that the preacher’s outline is not as well aimed as it might be. The preacher is not going to displace vague rumors with sermonic vagaries.

The second advice Walther gives about outlining is to avoid what he calls a “topographical division” (p. 25). This also says much to today’s preaching.

The Law and Gospel must be proclaimed, without mingling the one with the other.

You must not think that you have rightly divided the Word of Truth if you preach the Law in one part of your sermon and the Gospel in the other. No; a topographical division of this kind is worthless. Both doctrines may be contained in one sentence. But in your audience every one must get the impression, “That is meant for me.” (p. 25)

That is, Walther does not endorse the common view that the first part of the sermon should be Law and the second part Gospel. That common view could be defended by an appeal to Walther’s seventh thesis, but the appeal is a misapplication of the thesis. The thesis says, The Word of God is not rightly divided when the Gospel is preached first and then the Law; sanctification first and then justification; faith first and then repentance; good works first and then grace. That thesis should not lead, Walther would say, to an automatic first half law, second half Gospel, a “topographical division.”

The third point about outlining is application. An outline should include applications to the hearer’s life. In our own time some have taught that we should not make applications in sermons for fear that the people will deduce they are saved by their works, saved by practicing the suggested applications. But Walther made his calls on people, he knew their temperaments, and he was too much of a pastor to assume that the lay people could “connect the dots” from justification to sanctification. Applications should be made but they should be placed in the outline with great care. Walther quotes Gerhard:

“For this reason men should be exhorted, yea, urged to perform good works according to the norm of the Law. These works, however, must not be brought into the august place where our justification in the sight of God occurs.”

Then Walther himself writes:

Most urgent admonitions must indeed be administered to men, even after they have become believers, but these admonitions must not be brought into the solemn meeting where God justifies the sinner. (p. 38)

After those stages of discovery and disposition, the ancients listed diction. What words do you choose as you go from outline to manuscript? Yes, that is what Walther did; he wrote out his sermons. That comes to the fore most clearly in the introduction to the lecture of May 15, 1885 in which he refers eight times to writing the sermon.

Preparing to write a sermon…

When you sit down to the task of writing your sermon…

In a moment of inattention, when he is not on his guard and does not pray while he is writing his sermon….

In times of tribulation a faithful preacher is tempted to tear up the sermon he has written.

Walther understands the sermon is to be written out word for word.

He must most carefully examine everything that he has written down to see whether it is in harmony with the Word of God and the experience of Christians.

What would Walther say about today’s common practice of speaking off an outline? Walther does say:

Out upon ministers and students preparing for the ministry who go to work in a slovenly and careless manner, jotting down and reciting anything that comes into their mind, flows into their pen, and somehow leaps from the lips! That, as a rule, is what happens when the preacher extemporizes. (p. 297ff.)

Not every pastor who speaks off an outline is slovenly and careless, but Walther had more reasons for verbatim writing. The preacher needs to meditate beforehand on his diction and choose in an unhurried way exactly the right words for the point to be made. That is far less likely to happen when you are extemporizing off of an outline. He assumes that considered choice of words in one passage as he talks about confusing Law and Gospel.

When you frame your statement so as to commingle both (Law and Gospel), you produce poison for souls. (p. 35)

Verbatim writing is implied in the following quotation and comes, typical of Walther, out of the pastor’s heart for the salvation of the hearer.

A preacher must exercise great care lest he say something wrong. Again and again he must go over his sermon and consider whether everything is quite as it should be, that there is nothing in the sermon contrary to either the Law or the Gospel. (p. 54)

Style is a product of the words chosen. Those words, carefully chosen and reviewed, should be simple and easily understood.

Alas! There are other preachers, who, while they are believers, preach in such high-flown language that it passes the comprehension of the people. In such instances we behold the spectacle of a believing pastor and a congregation of spiritually dead people. Not only must we proclaim the truth, we must also speak a language so simple that a peasant listening outside of the sanctuary can understand it and feel himself drawn into the church. (p. 181)

Walther, I think, would take his feather pen and draw a line through sentences that are too poetic, sentences that reek of too much education, and sermons too filled with theological jargon, true that it all may be. Vague rumors are not chased away by inaccessible poetry, showing off your Greek and Hebrew, and other unintelligible jargon. Walther, as said earlier, does not betray an acquaintance with the ancient rhetoricians in his passing remarks about preaching in Law and Gospel, but his remarks about style are very consistent with the ancients, especially Aristotle. Like Aristotle, Walther understood that preaching is oral communication and the hearer is not a reader who has the time and perhaps not the education to pause and ponder a passage. This preference for a simple oral style is driven by his passion for the salvation of souls, just like his habit of writing out sermons verbatim.

This leads us logically to the final parts of ancient rhetoric’s five part division, delivery and memory. In that May 15, 1885 introduction Walther refers to several modes of sermon delivery. The spectrum of sermon deliveries goes from a wooden recitation of a memorized manuscript on one extreme, to a complete improvisation on the other. Walther is someplace in between. I did not find a passage in Law and Gospel that suggests that Walther memorized his sermons. The following two quotations from Law and Gospel suggest he was not averse to a manuscript in the pulpit, but felt free to depart from it and advised his students to grow in occasional extemporization.

If a minister who is otherwise conscientious has had the misfortune of putting something into his manuscript that is wrong and even saying it from the pulpit, he must, if he notices his mistake while preaching, immediately correct himself and tell his hearers that he really did not mean to say what they have just heard from him. (p. 296)

I am even inclined to say that a preacher must gradually become independent of his manuscript and thus give the Holy Spirit a chance to lay hold of him and suggest thought and words to him which had not come to him before. (p. 299)

Whatever the mode of delivery, it should have life. Even if he took the manuscript with him into the pulpit, Walther had thought so much on the sermon subject the last days that his eyes would have been on the hearers more than the paper. He did not approve the passionless preaching that has come to be associated with Lutherans by some people.

I do not what you to stand in your pulpits like lifeless statues. (p. 5)

The second requisite (the first is to “Preach the Word of God in its truth and purity”) for effective preaching is that the preacher not only himself believe the things he preaches to others, but that his heart be full of the truths which he proclaims, so that he enters his pulpit with the ardent desire to pour out his heart to his hearers. He must have an enthusiastic grasp, in the right sense of the word, of his subject. Then his hearers get the impression that the words dropping from his lips are flames from a soul on fire. …When the hearers get the impression that the preacher is in full and dread earnest, they feel themselves drawn with an irresistible force to pay the closest attention to what the preacher is teaching in his sermon. That is the reason why many simple, less gifted, and less learned preachers accomplish more than the most highly gifted and profoundly learned men. (p. 112)

In gathering Walther’s incidental remarks about preaching under the ancient fivefold division of the rhetorical task, themes bigger than the mechanics of sermon preparation and delivery keep emerging. The eternal importance of preaching comes out again and again, the duty that we give our hearers the pure rightly divided Word of God and that we give them that Law and Gospel in a loving, appealing, and humble pastoral way. Let me conclude with a thought prompted by the following quotation.

You are preparing to become pastors, my friends. Do you not sense the immense importance of this matter for your future vocation? Some one who is in anguish and distress will come to you. In every instance the cause of such anguish of soul will be that the Law has taken effect in your parishioner, and it does not occur to him that he can be saved by the Gospel. He does not think of that while he wails: “Alas! I am a poor sinner; I am worthy of damnation,” etc. (p. 63)

Do people “out there,” the lost, talk that way today? Do even our parishioners think and talk that way outside of church? The culture has changed a lot in the 120 years since Walther gave his Friday evening lectures. Certainly the dynamic of Law and sin in the hearer is just as Walther described it, but most Americans do not think or speak in the idiom that Walther imputed to the people of his time. If you and I assume that our hearers understand 120 year old idioms as we trained pastors do, we will miss the mark in our preaching. In the silly syncretism of contemporary American spirituality, we have the burden of explaining to our hearers how their condition manifests the work of God’s Law in their lives. We have to lead them to understand the exclusivity of the Christian message. Perhaps in Walther’s day the preacher could go straight to the bottom line that we are lost sinners before God and then present Jesus as our only Savior. Certainly in my youth the preacher could speak in that idiom and we hearers understood. Today’s sinners understand far less, if at all that “sinner in need of an eternal Savior” idiom. That’s why our preaching must also be teaching. In the very first line of Law and Gospel Walther says, If you are to become efficient teachers in our churches and schools…. (p. 5) To preach and teach the way Walther lectures us, we need to know our people’s heart and to know God’s Word of Law and Gospel. We need to study people, personally and psychologically, so that we can meet them where they are at, meet them for God and lead them to the objective Word of truth in Jesus Christ. What I’ve just said leads us back to discovery, to invention. When Sunday is over, we start thinking about the next sermon. Vague rumors are not easily replaced with truth. It’s our lifelong work.

PDAs and the Spirit’s Sword

A friend of mine with some 30 years experience in media, writing and reporting for major networks and now consulting, delights in goading seminarians. I occasionally invite him into my classes to talk about the “real world” of media, which happens to be a context of our call to preach. My friend takes special delight – is it sinister? – in telling the seminarians that he pulls out his PDA whenever the Sunday sermon loses his interest. He figures that whatever he does in the pew with his PDA has to be better than an unengaging media presentation, a.k.a. sermon.

Of course, many listening students think, “I’ll never be that boring.” Why is it that most of us have an inflated view of our preaching ability? That’s a subjective judgment, I know, but I’ve heard very few pastors voice dissatisfaction with their pulpit products. Providence , however, provides bubble busters. I remember one sermon in my last congregation. The church building was old, built in 1915, with a high pulpit that had me looking down on the people in the front pews. As I was holding forth, I noticed my wife and grade school daughter occupied with something other than my words of wisdom. So when I got home, I asked what they had been doing. Daughter Katie, still too young to be a skillful liar, blurted out, “We were playing tic-tac-toe.” Let’s face it, most of our sermons won’t make it into anthologies of history’s greatest sermons. I include myself here as well; I’m no Oswald Hoffmann.

Anthologies aren’t the goal anyway. The purpose is to be a pastoral proclaimer, a keryx, of the Gospel to the souls that have been motivated to come to church. That they’re pulling out PDAs or engaging in some other diversion, even listening mindlessly, should invite some self-examination on our Could it be that I’m not getting through to my hearers in the best way possible? Thom S. Rainer, dean of the Billy Graham School of Evangelism, led a project that researched why people had joined a church. The two leading factors identified were the pastor’s preaching and teaching, findings LCMS people like to hear. it wasn’t told to Rainer by new LCMS members. Rainer’s team interviewed people in churches that had a 20:1 ratio, 20 members to one convert. The national average is 85:1 and I’m told the LCMS ratio is 115:1. No LCMS churches were among the congregations he studied. (Thom S. Rainer, Surprising Insights from the Unchurches and Proven Ways to Reach Them, Zondervan, 2001). So let me try a If people are joining churches because of preaching and teaching, and if we in the LCMS have a splendid understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (which I believe we do, an almost incomparable understanding among Christian denominations), then maybe we LCMS preachers aren’t being the best proclaimers we could be. Don’t get defensive, brother. Martin Luther said that we should not pray the Lord’s Prayer when we leave the pulpit because we should not have preached any doctrine for which we need to ask forgiveness (“Against Jack Pudding,” 1541). The issue before us is not LCMS public doctrine which we proclaim Sunday after Sunday. I’m suggesting that we…at least, I, the inspiration of that tic-tac-toe game…could shape our sermons so that the Spirit has a sharper sword to work in the hearer’s heart. Will it be the Spirit’s sword or a PDA? part. Unfortunately, syllogism. style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Something

One of our faults is style, and that’s what this paper is about. Whoops! I ended that sentence with a preposition. We Missouri Synod homileticians have been conditioned to be so academic. We learned our Greek and Hebrew; our Luther, Walther and Pieper. Graduates of the old system learned German and Latin as well, and like it or not, read Plato and Kant and Donne and Skinner, like it or not. Books! “Build your library” was the old Concordia cry. It was all part and parcel of the good liberal arts education that was the basis and context for the study of theology. And when we wrote papers for the prof, we wrote in an academic style, thoughtful, well-researched papers (well, not always!) that he could read and ponder. I remember a professor at Concordia Senior College warning us that Readers Digest was good for the hoi polloi but had no place in our reading and writing. We were trained to prepare papers for the professor, papers abstract and propositional, written in an academic, literary style. Long sentences, complex sentences, and by all means remember that a preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.

Let me highlight two points from that last paragraph. We were trained to write for literate and educated people. I don’t know if the story is true, but according to seminary lore Jaroslav Pelikan once submitted a class paper in Latin, for no purpose other than keeping his marvelous mind occupied. Down at the pedestrian level where the rest of us live, we were put in the habit of throwing in Greek or Hebrew, German or Latin phrases into our papers because we were writing for a learned person. We usually knew what kind of degree he had or didn’t have. That orientation is fine for classroom exercises but transferring that style to the pulpit will unsheath PDAs faster than you can say, “the Greek word here is logos.” Guber down at the Mayberry garage won’t have a clue what we’re talking about…and, what’s more, doesn’t really care. The goal of Guber’s faith is salvation, not the theological training that we have. If we are faithful to the spirit of the gospel we labor to make things plain; it is our study to be simple and to be understood by the most illiterate of our hearers (Charles Spurgeon, in The Company of Preachers, Eerdmans, 2002: p. 317).

To be more accurate, I should have said that Guber won’t have a clue what we’ve written about. Not only were LCMS ministers conditioned to prepare academic papers for an educated audience, we were also trained in a style meant for reading, not for hearing. This is my second point. The style of written prose is not that of spoken oratory…. Both written and spoken have to be known (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1413b). Bringing a literary style into the pulpit reveals a false assumption about the communication process. When you’re the reader of a paper, article, or book, you can absorb the ideas at your own pace. Didn’t the Rams stink last year? Whoa! When the Rams popped up just now out of the blue, I bet you instinctively paused. Huh? What does football have to do with the subject? Reader, you’re right. The Rams have nothing to do with this paper except this: In the exchange you and I are having right now you have the luxury to pause, to ponder, and to proceed only when you are ready to do so. Far different is the transaction between a speaker and listener, oral and aural. The people in your pews can’t stop to ponder your last sentence. Well, they can, but if they do they’ll be left behind because you’ve moved on. They’ve no pause button they can push to stop the tape. By the way, keep in mind that many classic speeches and sermons that we read in anthologies were actually delivered in oral style and then reworked for reading. So when the Collect for the Word asks about the Scriptures that “we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,” it’s really covering two styles, literary and oral/aural. To feed the people the literary style from the pulpit can lead to aural indigestion.

Consideration of the hearer’s ability to process what you’re saying… Consideration, literally: You being considerate of that person who is giving to you of his or her time. The listener’s obligation to hear the Word of God does not authorize the inconsiderateness of poor communication. This consideration for the listener, Ph.D. or Guber, leads to the use of several devices. One is that the sermon will have some controlling literary device that will help the hearer follow your line of thought. A visual image that you play on throughout the sermon gives the listener a hook to hang your theological points on. Whoops, another preposition! Anyway, back in the days when I was delivering milk, there were always some fancy suburbanites who would write out their street number on their house. For example, instead of posting the numbers 230 for 230 Highland Drive , they would post “Two Thirty.” I always had to take a second to convert “Two Thirty” into “230.” We’re visual people. One of my first discoveries at the Lutheran Hour was that I needed to plant pictures in the imagination of the radio listener. That’s just as true for Sunday morning “live” preaching. A visual image is a most helpful literary device for the oral style. For example, a sermon about Jesus the light of the world will usually, though not necessarily, use the imagery of light and darkness.

The controlling literary device can also be memorable words. For example, a person could write a sermon on the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 under the title, “As We Forgive Those Who Sin against Us.” That portion of the Lord’s Prayer is not the text but it provides a memorable way to unfold the sermon. In both of the examples just given, the visual image or memorable words would be intimately related to the theological content of the sermon. That need not always be the case. A sermon on, say, “Coping with Tough Times” might be organized around the word coping, which has no inherent theological content but can be used to carry the goods of the text. Indeed, some kind of image or phrase is like the chassis on which the car is built. Without it, you’ve just got fenders and side panels and whatever, paragraphs about this and paragraphs about that without any obvious coherence. The controlling literary device helps hold the sermon together and, remembering that this is being received aurally, gives the listener an organizational principle to follow the development. This is far more effective than announcing three points, an old practice that doesn’t work too well in this era of personal digital assistants.

Consideration for the hearer will also lead to the use of illustrations. Much can be said about the proper or improper use of illustrations, but the relevance here is that illustrations give your hearer a rest, a pause button in the progression of the argument. The hearer will not stay with you for too many paragraphs of theological reasoning, good as it may be. That’s demonstrated even in literary style. Unless you’re a speed reader, and maybe even then, you pause from time to time to digest what you’ve just read. In oral style that pause for the recipient needs to be built into the script by you the author. Notice that I chose the word “script,” for a sermon is more akin to the stage than to the classroom. “The written style is the more finished: the spoken better admits of dramatic delivery” (Aristotle, Rhetoric,1413b). The use of several major illustrations provides pauses in which the hearer can listen less intently but still listen. That also creates “aha!” moments that bring to life the theological teaching of the previous paragraph(s) or set up the teaching of the following paragraph(s). To quote Spurgeon again: When an anecdote is being told (the listeners) rest, take breath, and give play to their imaginations, and thus prepare themselves for the sterner work which lies before them in listening to our profounder expositions (p. 318).

A third consideration for the hearer that we can script into our sermon is to be dialogical or, as it can also be called, dialectical or conversational. Whatever, the point is that you make a conscious effort to directly address the hearer. You know, my English teacher would be appalled. I just split an infinitive. Anyway, if you’re in the good habit of watching the crowd as you speak, you’ll sometimes see that it takes time for them to hear and process what you’ve said. Say something funny and there will be a moment or two before a smile shows up on their faces. Being dialogical helps assure that they’re with you before you move on to your next point. Various devices help this conversation of your words and their thoughts take place.

“You and I” is more engaging than “we.” When the listener hears “We are sinners,” it’s easy to think, “Yes, and ol’ Fred really is a big one.” When the listener hears, “You and I are sinners” it strikes a little closer to home. Ponder the diminished effect if Martin Luther King had said, “We have a dream.”

Questions should be used generously. The rhetorical effect of a question is to engage the hearer. Don’t you think so? The questions we ask should not spin the listener off on some thought apart from our purpose. So rhetorical questions are good. Many sentences that function well as indicative sentences would function even better in the form of questions. Without changing content, why not turn an indicative sentence into an interrogative?

Repetitions should be used. Thou shalt not covet was repeated so that the hearers would understand that they weren’t supposed to be enslaved to any person or thing save the God of the exodus. Comfort, comfort my people, is a repetition for oral emphasis. Sometimes the second repetition can be used for advancing the thought. We’ll see that shortly.

Anticipate the hearer’s thought process. “Isn’t God good?” you ask. The hearer may well think, “Yes, I suppose, but right now my life stinks.” So you deal with that thought. “Isn’t God good? Maybe you’re not so sure because….” This is called prolepsis, seizing on an objection before it has a chance to derail the listener.

Being dialogical has a theological basis. As Christ engaged the world during His visible ministry, His Spirit engages the ways of the world through our preaching. This is a back-and-forth between sin and Law, between works and grace, between Law and Gospel, between first use and third use, and so on. Talking “you and I,” asking questions, anticipating their thoughts…this grows out of the engaging nature of God’s revelation. It’s a homiletical extension of the considerate Christ.

So there you have some general observations. Failure to distinguish between the oral and literary style is the downfall of many an otherwise fine sermon. When the preacher gallops off down the path of his own thoughts, unmindful of the hearer’s ability to keep pace, that hearer sooner or later gives up. Out comes the PDA, tic-tac-toe, some other diversion, even mindlessness. You know that many a week’s schedules have been planned while you were preaching, any budget or relationship problems thought through, many stares at the slightly moving chandeliers… none of which were your purpose for the sermon but they couldn’t follow or chose not to follow your thoughts. When we create a vacuum by a use of a style not fitted to oral communication, listeners will inevitably fill that vacuum with some other mental activity. Oral style doesn’t mean an artless style. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence was not Paul’s disavowal of rhetorical art but of the techniques of a movement known as the “Second Sophistic” (1 Corinthians 2:1). Oral style is not artless, not thrown together during the sermon hymn. It is a demanding style, a style whose rigors are readily accepted by the considerate pastor of souls. Faith comes by hearing…. (Romans 10:17)

Let’s take this theory down to practice. A good student of mine submitted a draft for a sermon on the parable of the unjust servant. You know, the guy who was forgiven a great debt but then turned around and foreclosed on the guy who owed him two bits. Let’s scrutinize only the first two sentences of the draft sermon:

Did you hear the chains this morning? Did you hear the chains of imprisonment as the parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18 was read?

He’s done some good things here. He opens with a direct question, “Did you hear?” and used the second person singular or second plural. He’s repeated the question, using the second question to move the thought along. He offers a visual image, very good. These first two sentences are engaging but are still too packed for oral delivery. It’s always easy to be a critic but let me point a few things out.

While I give kudos to the writer for introducing the image of chains, which he used nicely throughout the sermon, I’ve still got a problem. I can’t grasp it as quickly as the writer assumes. “Chains?” I instinctively think. What kind of chains? For some quirky reason my own mind immediately goes to the chains you might put on your tires in winter. Obviously, that’s not what the writer meant. “Chains of imprisonment,” he clarified. I presume that means the ball and chain that prisoners used to wear, but who talks that way? “Chains of imprisonment” is poetic and, yes, there are times when a sermon will wax poetic, by using words like “wax” and other words that people don’t use in normal conversation. Better to wax poetic after we’ve taught our point, not before. While an educated hearer can process “chains of imprisonment,” it will still take a second of thought and poor Guber may not get it at all. Meanwhile, our preacher has gone on to some new point.

The words chosen for these opening sentences could show still more consideration for the hearer. “Parable” is church jargon. You’re going to have to listen a long time down at the coffee shop or gym before you hear anyone use the world “parable.” Wouldn’t the word “story” be more colloquial? “The unmerciful servant” is also jargon. True, it’s the unofficial title of Jesus’ story, but keep in mind that most folks don’t know what “mercy” really means. And more about the quick reference to the Gospel lesson (“Did you hear the chains of imprisonment as the parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18 was read?”) The reference assumes too much. At the beginning of the sermon the listeners probably don’t remember what the Gospel lesson was or care where it’s from. Not that they don’t care; they probably do but they’re bombarded by media throughout the week and things don’t sink in and stay. At this moment no one is asking where the parable…excuse me, story can be found. As your marvelous sermon unfolds they’ll probably want to know where it’s from so they can go home and meditate upon it. But at the beginning of the sermon, it’s not necessary. So while the student author was going the right way, his prof hadn’t fully taught the devices of oral/aural style. There’s too much here for a listener to grasp in the few seconds that these sentences require for delivery.

So how might we take those good thoughts that the student wrote and make them more effective? Visual image, questions, repetitions…let’s keep those and then play out the thoughts in a more leisurely way. Perhaps like this:

Did you hear the chains this morning? We’re all familiar with chains. There are chains we can put on tires in winter. There are chains we use to pull a car out of the ditch. There are chains that are on pulleys. There are also chains that are used to keep people in prison. Have you seen movies where slaves are chained? Have you seen TV shows where prisoners wear ball and chains? That’s the kind of chain I want you to have in mind for this sermon, the noisy, clanging chains that keep a person down. Did you hear those chains?

The next paragraph could then rehearse the parable so that the listeners have it in the forefront of their mind.

One consequence of this simpler, fuller style is that the paragraph becomes the basic building block rather than the sentence. A thought that we can communicate with a sentence or two in literary composition should often be given a whole paragraph in oral composition. An exercise I give to Hom II students on the first day of class is to ask them to take this one sentence, “Jesus died for your sins” and expand it into a full, almost half-page paragraph. I delight in watching them struggle! The reason for their struggle is obvious, all those years of writing literary academic papers. In that style you can write “Jesus died for your sins” and move on but in the pulpit that one sentence is too short and too familiar to register much of an impact. Hence, important thoughts need to be given a whole paragraph and a sizeable paragraph at that, not just a sentence or two. So the sermon will contain fewer paragraphs (I normally have only 6-10 paragraphs in my sermons) and therefore fewer substantiating arguments to the main theme. Sermons must have thoughtful theology but they aren’t summas of theology. Remember Guber.

When you begin to write the individual paragraphs, to write… Quintilian, the last great teacher of Greco-Roman rhetoric wrote, Give me a reliable memory and plenty of time, and I should prefer not to permit a single syllable to escape me (Institutes, XI.2.44). We must therefore write as much as possible and with the utmost care. (X.3.2). When you begin to write an individual paragraph the most immediate challenge is to design that paragraph to help you achieve your rhetorical goal. How will this paragraph move the hearer along your line of argument? Yogi Berra said, If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else. In the chains paragraph, the rhetorical goal was simply to plant a specific image in the hearer’s mind. I think of this not so much as writing the paragraph but constructing the paragraph. By this stage of sermon preparation you’re no longer thinking about what exegetical points you need to make. You’ve been there, done that. Now you’re executing your argument. Every paragraph should have a topic sentence. I ask my students to boldface the topic sentence of every paragraph, much as I’ve done in this paper and in my collection of sermons on the website. Then, using short sentences that are simple or compound, normally not complex, string together the individual sentences in your paragraph in some logical way. For example, the simple chains paragraph I wrote was structured with parallel sentences.

We’re all familiar with chains.

There are chains we can put on tires in winter.

There are chains we use to pull a car out of the ditch.

There are chains that are on pulleys.

The rhetorical effect of those three simple parallel sentences is to begin leading the listener through the “What kind of chains?” question. To be absolutely sure the hearer is picturing the chain you have in mind, three more parallel sentences are used.

There are also chains that are used to keep people in prison.

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