The Preaching Life

by Eugene L. Lowry

“The Preaching Life” is a regular feature of Preacher’s Magazine where readers are privileged to sit in the classroom and read insights on current preaching models from some of North America’s finest preachers. This workshop is presented by Dr. Eugene L. Lowry, professor of preaching at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri.

I have often noticed that the sermons that seem to “fly” as some might describe it, and ones that “crash” as many of us all too often experience it, turn somehow around a single factor that can be observed in the preparation process – and hence guessed in advance. When in our preparation we continue to look for things to add to the sermon – an extra illustration here and another supplemental text there – likely, the sermon is in trouble come Sunday. In fact, the sermon probably does not need additional illustration or other text for that matter; probably it needs some kind of internal expansive force. Without accurately naming the need, however, we hope the addition of another piece will get it going. It seldom does.

On the other hand, when the preparation procedure involves deletion, trimming, and pruning, likely, good things are in store when Sunday comes. Such a sermon, as Robin Meyers describes it, is not so much “worked up” as it is “worked out.” Again, interior energy is present, and wisely, we know how to remove factors that are in the way.
The centrality of movement. You can feel it inside Craddock’s observation that preaching depends not just in getting something said but in getting it heard. Paul Scott Wilson named it well when he said, “We want something that will encourage us to think of the sermon . . . as growing, organic, or living, as having movement and rhythm.” Hence, we may choose to “talk about the flow.” To do so is not simply to be “fiddling with sermon form.” Such issues as order, arrangement, and pattern, says M. Eugene Boring, “help the sermon to flow” toward the desired goal of “bearing the hearers along with its movement.” This is but one reason why “the form of a sermon,” as Tom Long confirms, “is itself a theological issue.” At its deepest level, sermonic movement has to do with working with some kind of life force, which just may issue in a live birth.

Basic to sermon movement – whether of ideas, action, images, or story – is a principle regarding sequence. “Change the order of the phrases and ideas,” notes Craddock, “and you have a quite different message.” And sequence is seldom natural or innocent. Sequence is strategic.

One could speak of the basic musicality of any sermon. Music, after all, is also an event-in-time art form, with melody, harmony, and rhythm coming sequentially. No one builds a song; it is shaped and performed. In the classroom I like to move to a piano and announce to the class that I am about to play the melody notes of a favorite hymn. With one finger of my right hand I play the following:
CCCCCCDDDFFFFFFFFFFFGGGAAAAAAAAACCC

After feigning shock that no one could name this well-known hymn, I announce it to have been “Amazing Grace.” “Well,” I admit, “I didn’t play the notes in sequence.” Without proper sequence it is in fact not “Amazing Grace.” A joke beginning with the “punch line” is not a joke; the story of Noah building the ark beginning with a completed ship is not a story of Noah building the ark. Content and form are inseparable. There is no such thing as formless content. We may have poorly formed thought, but never no-formed thought.

When the subject at hand is evocative preaching that might just dance the edge of inarticulatable mystery, this point cannot be overstated. One cannot garner some ideas and then see how to serve them; one finds their potential placement in the interior energy of the temporal sequence called the sermon. “The rationalist notion that we have preformed thought,” observes Buttrick, “which we can put into word containers for shipment to someone else’s mind is simply not true.”