Every Sunday they do it again: four or five hundred thousand ministers stand before listeners and preach a sermon to them in the English language. If the sermon works—if it "takes"—a primary cause will be the secret ministry of the Holy Spirit, moving mysteriously through a congregation and inspiring Scripture all over again as it's preached. Part of the mystery is that the Spirit blows where it wills, and with peculiar results. As every preacher knows, a nicely crafted sermon sometimes falls flat. People listen to it with mild interest, and then they go home. On other Sundays a preacher will walk to the pulpit with a sermon that has been only roughly framed up in her mind. The preacher has been busy all week with weddings, funerals, and youth retreats, and on Sunday morning she isn't ready to preach. Miraculously, her rough sermon arises in its might and gathers people to God.

Strange things happen when a minister preaches. After the service, people thank the preacher for things she didn't say, or for things she did say but hadn't understood as well as the listener had. Our words can be "wiser than we are," said Ben Belitt, and never more so than when the Spirit of God is in the building. On such occasions, as Barbara Brown Taylor (1993) writes, "something happens between the preacher's lips and the congregation's ears that is beyond prediction or explanation."

But the unpredictability of the preaching event gives no one license to wing it. Faithful preachers work hard on their sermons, understanding that although a fruitful result may be God's gift, hard work is the preacher's calling. To help with this calling, authors write books that address every conceivable facet of preaching. Leona Tisdale (1997) writes of the preacher's calling to exegete not only Scripture, but also her congregation, so that her preaching achieves a genuinely local character. Never letting go of the universal gospel, the preacher must theologically and artistically customize her presentation of it to fit these people at this particular time in their history. In fact, the preacher's goal is to become the congregation's ethnographer to such an extent that if one Sunday morning she stirs up old ghosts or tamps down new fears she knows exactly what she is doing.

Other recent authors ponder how to preach to particular sections of an audience, such as the elderly, whose hard-earned wisdom may be losing ground to a muddle-headedness that threatens to overtake it (David G. Buttrick in Carl, 1997). Looking at an audience two generations younger, William Willimon, dean of the chapel at Duke, reflects on preaching to college students who are the children of divorce or neglect. Many are children of absentee parents who never anchored them in faith or in virtue, who perhaps never even spoke seriously of these things. Such students now live off their disinheritance, and they sometimes show it by blending detachment and longing. Generally speaking, today's college students don't vote or follow the news from Kosovo ("or wherever"), but they do cleave to their friends. Some of them also believe in angels. Some get drunk a lot. One of Willimon's friends, a rabbi, remarked to him that a good number of college students—children of the children of the sixties—are looking for their parents (Willimon in Callen, 1995).

Besides thinking of her audience, the preacher must also consider her message. Will she preach the goodness of creation? Will she move behind sin and grace to preach nature, sin, and grace? And will she develop an artist's eye for God's goodness in places where nobody is looking for it (English, 1996)? On the other side of the page, how about the Bible's "texts of terror"? Should a minister preach the Bible, including its hard texts, or preach the gospel (Hilkert, 1997)? Do the hard texts sometimes set us up for hearing the gospel? How will the preacher handle passages such as the terrible ending of Psalm 137 that seem to work against the message of Jesus?

Several of the recent books urge preachers to emphasize particular biblical themes. Thus Walter J. Burghardt (1996) argues that, properly understood, social justice is the Bible's big idea and that preaching it therefore counts as an act of mere Christianity, not liberal politics. Burghardt makes his case in a book he has entitled Preaching the Just Word. Here just is a Catholic adjective, not an evangelical adverb, with the result that, in Burghardt theology, "just sharing" has little to do with spiritual "schmoozing" and much to do with softening our hard hearts, opening our closed hands, and making common cause with people God loves, especially "the bedeviled and the bewildered." Citing Isaiah, Jesus, and Chrysostom ("the poor are a venerable altar on which we must heap our offerings"), Burghardt encourages preachers to present biblical justice as God's shalom, the webbing together of God and all creation in harmony, fulfillment, and delight. When we see justice in this big "covenantal" framework, says Burghardt, we will quit calculating what people deserve and start imagining what they need. He adds that we should particularly imagine what children need, and people with aids, and prisoners on death row. We should think of the elderly: "There they sit in the nursing home, watching and waiting, waiting for someone they carried in their womb to visit and 'watch one hour' with them." All along, we should think beyond the lives of human beings and get enthusiastic about the flourishing of the whole creation. The earth is the Lord's, after all, and so God makes covenant in Genesis 9 not just with Noah, but also with "every living creature." Accordingly, we ought to undertake earth-keeping sheerly as a matter of justice.

Though Burghardt says little about the sovereign grace of God in the establishment of shalom and much about human responsibility in this project; though his book therefore moves naturally toward the imperative mood, its tone is passionate, not shrill. The author doesn't lobby for particular political solutions to complex social problems, and he reminds preachers that their expertise typically lies elsewhere. When he comes to the church's most agonizing issues, such as the nature of her hospitality to gay and lesbian persons, Burghardt proposes humility. He proposes that ministers listen long and preach short. In sum, what Walter Burghardt wants is biblically passionate preachers who can kindle a flame of love in listeners who might otherwise think of compassion as a moral handout, or social justice as a euphemism for "rerouting hard-earned money to loafers." If preachers and listeners will keep an eye on biblical shalom, they should be able to see why social injustice is a disaster, and why glory shines from such a basic kindness as helping a refugee get access to a telephone.

Recent books discuss the preacher's audience, message, and social location. They discuss biblical theology, hermeneutics, and how to define a preachable text. They debate whether the contemporary habit of preaching from the common lectionary has had the happy effect of forcing preachers to handle some of the Bible's less fingerprinted passages, or whether lectionary preaching has yielded boring sermons by preachers who couldn't find anything lively to do with an assigned text. One book (Norrington, 1996) wonders whether we ought to have sermons at all, arguing that modern Christians take preaching much more seriously than did the prophets and apostles.

But to read a stack of books by some of the acknowledged masters of homiletics is to discover that the hottest is sues in the discipline center on sermon design. For the last quarter-century, prominent writers have united to reject "deductive" or "discursive" or "propositional" de signs, as well as a formal style of rhetoric that often goes with them. According to these writers, such approaches represent the lost cause of the "old homiletics," which is now being replaced in the "new homiletics" with various "inductive" approaches that give sermons a more narrative and colloquial sound, especially when their rhetoric matches their design.

THE WAY IT USED TO BE

What did a sermon sound like when seminaries still taught the old homiletics and preachers still designed sermons in sonata form—that is, with a statement, development, and recapitulation of a theme, finished off with a practical application to the lives of believers?

As a boy in the early 1950s I be longed to a church whose minister wore a tailcoat when he preached. Dressed in a cutaway coat and striped trousers, our minister would stand in his pulpit and deliver sermons as stiff as his collar. These sermons typically began not with a story from history or an observation of current events, but with a businesslike statement of the preacher's theme and of the three "points" or subdivisions by which he proposed to develop it. Like many of his colleagues, our minister would often start in this way no matter what biblical literature he was preaching. Thus a sermon on the parable of the Prodigal Son might have begun as follows:

Beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ: my theme this morning is the Justification of Guilty Sinners. Three points, beloved, under the head of God's sovereign justification: firstly, its origin in the divine decree; secondly, its forensic realization in the satisfaction of Christ's righteousness; thirdly, its vindication in the eschatological glorification of the elect in life eternal.
Firstly, then, its origin in the divine decree . …

A heavy-duty sermon of this kind, thick with its Latinate language and dogmatic purpose, would partially eclipse Jesus' story of a man who had two sons. Instead of drawing us into the story, and then moving us along inside it, our minister would use the story to illustrate some doctrinal truths he had brought to it from the Canons of Dort or from the Systematic Theology of Louis Berkhof, and he would perform this task with a good deal of theological zest. (Berkhof, by the way, sat at the end of a row on the south side of our church, benignly absorbing his own theology as it was preached to him.) In general, our preacher's aim in those days was not to tell stories, but to teach Reformed doctrine, which he did with such gusto that when men from our congregation hunted deer in November with their Baptist buddies, they would sit in the woods arguing with the Baptists over the meaning and member ship of the covenant of grace. (Everybody agreed that deer weren't in it.)

Sunday after Sunday our minister proclaimed Reformed doctrine with "a mighty clarity." He did this until he came to a juncture in the system where two of the doctrines clashed, at which point he would declare a mystery and strongly recommend that we adore it. Along the way, he sought to sharpen our understanding of Reformed doctrine, and of its advantages, by exposing the errors of non-Reformed Christians and especially of Catholics, who, for some reason known only in Rome, stubbornly conflated justification and sanctification.

When I was in the third grade, I thought a sermon was simply another piece of heavy weather that children had to endure. While the minister filled the sanctuary with his whences and thences and wherefores, a boy of eight could doodle on a bulletin, or make a fan out of it, or just sit there, waiting for the sermon to subside. What made matters tricky was that our minister liked to divide his three points into subpoints, and then gather up the subpoints in a sort of coda at the end of each point, with the result that he kept raising and dashing the hopes of us youngsters. We would hear such phrases as "In summary, I say to you, be loved," or "to whom be glory forever and ever," and our hopes would rise like a Mannheim rocket. Surely the morning sermon had nearly blown itself out! But then our minister would pause, reach for his glass of water, and say, "And, now, for my second point . …"

At the end of the century it is hard to find homiletic events of the kind I've just described. Nobody preaches in a tailcoat anymore, or in language to match. In deed, in some church settings the language has loosened up so much ("Lord, just help us, Lord, to just plug in to where you're at") that we yearn for middle ground between the kind of language that goes with tailcoats and the kind that goes with tank tops. Perhaps good pulpit language ought to find a level I'll call "upscale casual" or, maybe, "L. L. Bean colloquial." This language possesses a quality that the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II describes as "noble simplicity," and we can find it in the sermons of such accomplished preachers as Barbara Brown Taylor, Eugene Peterson, and Deborah Block.

A couple of sharply written books (Jacks, 1996; Eslinger, 1996) advise preachers on the kind of pulpit language and sermon strategy that fit a contemporary narrative style. Robert Jacks tells preachers how to write for the ear, not the eye. He wants them to prepare sermons that speak naturally, using stories, dialogue, and sentence fragments just as a person would in good conversation. Looking for noble simplicity, Jacks cautions preachers against teen-speak ("I'm, like, 'Awesome!' and he goes, 'Whoa!' ") and also against an essaylike formality expressed not only by the use of whence or thence, but also by the use of so innocent a conjunction as for. According to Jacks, we might not notice the awkward formality of this conjunction in a preached sentence such as "Let us trust God, for we know God's love is true" till we compare it with ordinary speech, in which none of us says "Let's go to Gagliano's tonight, dear, for we know their cannelloni is delicious." The preacher who writes for the ear also remembers that congregations can't hear commas. Thus, to save his congregation confusion, the preacher should avoid such sentences as "Jesus Christ, says the New Testament, died for you." Congregations can't hear certain consonants very well either. Thus, no risky locutions such as "half-asked questions."

In Pitfalls in Preaching, Richard Eslinger places his theory of preaching within the new homiletics, and then offers preachers one savvy counsel after another, including the judgment that the sermon, like the road to Emmaus, ought to lead to the Communion table. Following David Buttrick, Eslinger also offers linguistic advice based upon his conviction that congregations don't hear individual items in a string, not even a short string. Hence the preacher ought to delete "doublets" such as "justice and peace" and talk about one thing at a time. Moreover, in the interest of pulpit etiquette and general wisdom, the preacher should observe such commandments as these:

• Don't top a biblical story with a better one from Annie Dillard;
• Don't obstruct the flow of your sermon with an illustration so big that it becomes an embolism;
• Don't presume to read Jesus' mind, and especially not if you read banalities there ("The little boy Jesus sat on a sand dune outside his native hamlet of Nazareth wondering why all men weren't brothers");
• Don't manipulate congregants by asking them to raise their hands in order to answer your questions;
• Don't tell stories about yourself all the time, and certainly not ones in which you win big or lose big. Stories of the preacher's triumphs sound self-important, and stories of his failures distract a congregation with anxieties (Is our preacher ok? Does he need to go to that detox center again?).

But beyond their interest in a sermon's language, books in the new homiletics focus especially upon a sermon's form and dynamics. In doing so, they reject most of what my boyhood preacher assumed as normal. To begin, many books in homiletics of the last 25 years reject sermon designs in which the preacher announces a theme up- front and then sets out to develop and apply it. This old method (perhaps it goes back to Luther) was practiced until, say, 1960 not only by Western Michigan Calvinists but also by all kinds of other Protestant ministers, including liberal ones who used it to teach liberal doctrines.

Recent books disapprove. "Deductive" preaching of this kind, says Fred Craddock in a pioneering book of 1971, works against the way we live. According to Craddock we live inductively, moving from particular experiences to the general truths that we learn from them. That's why wisdom is so hard to teach to a youngster. You might teach her a proverb such as "the more you talk, the less they'll listen," but chances are a youngster will still have to learn it the hard way, just as the author of the proverb did. Similarly, says Craddock, a sermon with a natural flow will move from particular observations or experiences toward some kind of conclusion, and maybe not a tidy one. According to the new homiletics of such writers as Craddock, Lowry (1997), David Buttrick (1994), Richard Eslinger, and Lucy Atkinson Rose (1997), sermons should therefore sound less like essays and more like odysseys. They should sound like stories, poems, parables, "plotted narratives," or even conversations, and thus follow the shape of the nondiscursive genres of Scripture; that is, the ones that do not proceed by arguing for a thesis. In a much-discussed option, David Buttrick wants a sermon to zig and zag as a human consciousness does when reacting to a significant event.

In any case, sermons designed according to the new homiletics always move, and not by argument or by application of a thesis. Instead, the sermons tell us what happened, and what happened next, and who said or did what to make things happen. They also suggest what it felt like to experience the things that happened. Otherwise put, sermons constructed according to the new homiletics display a dynamic sequence of linked "frames" or scenes that reminds us more of a film than of a still photo (Buttrick, Eslinger, and Wilson, 1999).

Accordingly, the new books want the preacher to end with her conclusion, not begin with it. As Eugene L. Lowry explains to preachers, if you announce your conclusion at the outset you spoil your sermon's suspense as surely as if you begin a joke with its punch line. Better, says Lowry, to follow the ancient wisdom of storytellers and conceal your conclusion by means of a "strategic delay." Make people wonder and make them wait. Play a string of seventh-chords and, like Bach in the C major prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier, resolve them only at the end. That is, follow the prophets and Jesus by telling stories whose meaning doesn't come clear right away. Thus, in 2 Samuel 12 the prophet Nathan tells King David a short story of a rich man with "many flocks and herds" and a poor man whose "one little ewe lamb" drank from his cup and nestled in his bosom until it had become "like a daughter to him." Garnishing the account with such gemutlich details, Nathan sets up the king for righteous anger at the point in the story when the rich man steals and kills the poor man's single lamb so as to spare his own stock. Nathan deliberately incites indignation in the kind heart of his sinful king (compartmentalizing is no modern invention) before he finally sticks the king with the point of his story: "You are the man."

Black preaching has practiced the new homiletics for decades, but with its own acoustics. Kenneth Woodward (1997) writes that black preaching is "a highly relational folk art that can't be duplicated in a white church, even by blacks," and that black preaching does not travel well because it needs the black congregation, rich in its stores of cultural wisdom and expectation, to join in duet with the preacher. In the "call and response" of black preaching, a congregation pushes the preacher through valleys ("Help him, Jesus!"), along some detours ("Take your time!"), up the mountainside ("Don't be afraid!"), higher and higher till the preacher reaches his peak ("Say it! Say it now!"). None of this would work without the strategic delay. Imagine our loss if Martin Luther King, Jr., had stood before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, and had begun his speech with the triumphant hope of the old Negro spiritual: "'Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

With the strategic delay, says William B. McClain (1990), classic black preaching presents an unmistakable trajectory:

Start low; go slow;
Go high; strike fire.
Sit down.

THE ELOQUENCE OF THE PROVISIONAL

According to Eugene Lowry, what's crucial in a sermon is its dynamic tension and resolution—what Lowry calls the move "from scratch to itch." In Lowry's scheme, the preacher starts with characters or a situation in which she spots trouble, or ambiguity, or discrepancy. The preacher then notes certain complicating factors in this situation ("the plot thickens"). At a climactic point she suddenly shifts the account (the "turn" or the "gasp," as in Nathan's accusatory disclosure), and then resolves the main tension into a new situation that usually involves the growth of the main participants. And, of course, "the main participants" include listeners.

But even at the end—that is, when the sermon resolves its conflict, or discloses its secret, or scratches its itch—we will not find ourselves in perfect repose. The reason is that the new situation resolves something for us, but not everything. We still itch a little. And this is by the preacher's design. The preacher's hope is not to tidy everything up at the end and send us home with a packaged truth or two. Indeed, Lowry insists that the aim in preaching is not primarily to expose and apply biblical or doctrinal propositions (propositions are suspect or even verboten within the new homiletics), but rather to "evoke an event" or stimulate an encounter by making "gestures towards the ineffable with the finest words that can be used" (Browne, quoted approvingly in Lowry). The preacher's task is to deliver the sermon, but the preacher's goal is to proclaim the Word of God so as to generate a transforming encounter with the mystery of God. Whether a sermon will reach its goal is unpredictable. As Lowry has it, "preaching is an offering intended to evoke an event that cannot be coerced into being." To avoid coercion, the preacher must shy away from a frontal approach to truth—the approach, Lowry imagines, of biblical literalists who believe in propositional revelation. Instead, the preacher must come at the mystery of God sideways, making full use of "analogy, metaphoric tease, and the 'tensiveness' of parabolic thought." By this in direct approach, says Lowry, borrowing his phrasing from Buttrick, the preacher may "dance the edge of mystery." Otherwise stated, in the event of preaching and listening we may find ourselves "so close to the heart of some matter" that "we dare to move toward the eloquence of the provisional" (Lowry's italics).

Readers may find themselves struck by the potentially misty quality of sermons designed in this way. After hearing one of these sermons, could you bring the gist of it home to your spouse who was sick with the flu? Moreover, do sermons of a poetic temperament fit all kinds of biblical literature? Could someone effectively preach a big social justice text by dancing the edge of mystery? The biblical prophets often approached their topic with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. Should they have danced around it more? When we ourselves preach against racism, should we gesture toward the ineffable or speak out very plainly?

I should add at once that while Lowry winces at any attempt to proclaim "the right propositions," he also rejects what he calls irrationalism. He rejects doctrineless relativism. He rejects any homiletic position that wholly dispenses with truth claims. But he insists that the preacher must find ways to combine aesthetic, ethical, and visionary modes of expression with more rational and explanatory ones, so that when the gospel truth comes home it does so in a dynamic and evocative way.

Fair enough, and readers who are familiar with the sermons of, say, Frederick Buechner know what Lowry has in mind. In "The Magnificent Defeat," for instance, Buechner shows us Jacob at Peniel, wrestling with God till dawn:

The darkness has faded just enough so that for the first time he can dimly see his opponent's face. And what he sees is something more terrible than the face of death—the face of love. It is vast and strong, half ruined with suffering and fierce with joy, the face a man flees down all the darkness of his days until at last he cries out, "I will not let you go until you bless me."

Thousands of young preachers have tried to imitate such virtuosity, and without much luck. Buechner is almost inimitable, and bad Buechner imitations are very bad sermons, full of mystifying wisps and vapors. But Buechner's own sermons, for all their suggestiveness, usually deliver real freight. In fact, alarmingly enough, a Buechner sermon usually delivers a proposition or two. And so in the sermon about Jacob, the author ends with an unmistakable message: God, our "beloved enemy," defeats our old self, and by this magnificent defeat gives us victory.

There they are, a pair of declarations, and, in a book published shortly before her untimely death, Lucy Atkinson Rose rejects them. According to her theory, sermons ought to resemble conversations as much as possible, and especially open-ended ones. Indeed, she regrets that as recently as 1984 the regnant homiletical theory was that "a sermon should contain a message or an idea." In her view—more extreme than Lowry's—preachers should not deliver messages. They should not make claims. Rose rejects both "propositions," by which she means the main claims in the theme-and-points type of sermons, and also what is "propositional," by which she means "truth that is ex pressed in a statement." If I understand her, Rose rejects any use of assertions, claims, declarations, or statements—that is, the kind of thing that could be true or false. Traditional preaching that makes a claim or contains a message has been superseded, says Rose, and properly so. She concedes that traditional preaching "does still work for some people" and should therefore not be wholly excluded, but she worries that the use of truth claims within sermons might signal the preacher's hierarchical assumption of objectivity and certainty. Such a preacher assumes he possesses truth and that his congregation doesn't. He thinks his job is to "transmit" this truth and their job is to believe it. But such an assertive posture, says Rose, privileges the preacher and silences or excludes certain listeners, especially women. Alternatively, such assertiveness on the part of a preacher may cause women to become dependent upon the preacher.

Rose also worries that sermons employing statements might strive for clarity of thought and expression, and that this attempt might exhibit an assertive edge all by itself—as if the preacher were to shake a bony finger in people's faces and say, "Let me make one thing perfectly clear."

To soften matters, and bring the preacher and congregation into dialogue where neither is privileged, Rose recommends the use of "poetic, evocative language" within sermons and a nonassertive conversational style in which no conclusion is sought. With such an approach, the preacher no longer declares anything but rather "invites to the sermonic round table the experiences, thoughts, and wagers of all those present and even of those absent." We might say the preacher proposes to the congregation in a respectful, gently interrogative fashion, and the congregation proposes back to the preacher—perhaps in a postsermon adult forum, or the like. When the preacher proceeds in this way, distinguishing proposals from propositions and meshing old words of Scripture with new words of contemporary experience, then the sermon's words will "dance from our deeps to the surface and back, from our centers to the periphery and back, inviting Mystery to be part of our always-too-small stories."

Five comments: First, along with Rose we should sense danger when a human being undertakes to speak for God. The "folly of preaching" includes the danger of tyranny. With this in mind, we naturally recoil from ignorant assertiveness, coercive assertiveness, macho assertiveness, and other homiletic oppressions. Preachers who are full of themselves instead of the Spirit of God sometimes patronize or even assault their congregations, pushing people around, making up their minds for them, accusing them while excusing themselves. Arrogance is an ugly sin, and pulpit arrogance is a particularly ugly sin. "The corruption of the best is the worst," and Rose is right to post warnings in this regard.

But, second, does the recognition of such danger require the elimination of all assertions from sermons? What if the preacher's assertions are sensitive, inclusive, pastorally mature? What if they are biblical and true ("love is patient")? Wouldn't these qualities allay a number of Rose's concerns? Consider two summary propositions with which Barbara Brown Taylor concludes a sermon on the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: "God is generous, and when we begrudge that generosity, it is only because we have forgotten where we stand." Is it really conceivable that there is something amiss in the sheer form of these declarations, and that Taylor should have converted them into, say, questions?

Third, it looks like we're stuck with propositional expressions or statements in sermons, regardless of anybody's hesitancy about them (Rose isn't alone here). Mainly, it's awfully hard to get anything said in a sermon—or in the monthly report of your checking ac count—if nobody may use any statements at all. Imagine a sermon without a single statement. Imagine a whole sermon that consists entirely of questions, commands, optatives, and ejaculations. Wouldn't a sermon of this kind taste too much like clam chowder without the clams? Maybe a preacher could try to split the difference between the forbidden declarative mood, on the one hand, and the permitted interrogative mood, on the other, by raising her inflection at the ends of statements in the recently popular fashion ("Hi, my name is Tiffany? And I'll be your server tonight?"). But without the option of using any real assertions the preacher might still find herself hamstrung:

Elijah was a prophet of the Lord? And the prophets of Baal weren't? Are you listening, folks? Please listen now! Would that some of us had been there to see God send fire on that soggy altar! Holy smoke!

A few rounds of this, and people might feel a bit cranky.

Fourth comment: Besides incidental claims ("Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran"), the Scriptures are full of summary propositions, and it is hard to imagine why a sermon would go wrong by following Scripture in using some of them. Biblical authors use such propositions to start an epic ("In the be ginning, God created the heavens and the earth"), or to refocus a letter at its midpoint ("God has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation"), or to climax a hymn ("The greatest of these is love"), or to congeal centuries of experience in a proverb ("Pride goes before destruction"). Biblical authors use summary propositions to do such things all the time. Would it not be perfectly natural for contemporary preachers to follow suit? In fact, for discursive texts, maybe a preacher should try the old theme-and-points approach, employing it with noble simplicity. Good doctrinal preaching gives ministry some spine. One of the strengths of a confessional tradition is that it disciplines the preacher's reading of biblical texts with wisdom distilled from millions of the faithful. The preacher needn't succumb to his own whims or sentimentalities in preaching the power and love of God out of Scripture. He can declare what the whole church declares: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord."

But (fifth comment) whether a preacher discloses her theme early or late (and Lowry persuades me that late is generally better), it's important to insist, I think, that the mere statement of a theme cannot sensibly be called presumptuous. After all, the preacher is only trying to say in other words what the text says. She is trying to transmit not her own thoughts, cooked up from scratch, but those of Scripture, which is her community's book. She's especially trying to preach the gospel out of Scripture, which is her community's message for the world. In any case, she stands under the claim of the gospel just as her congregants do. As Thomas G. Long (1989) has it, she is "the one whom the congregation sends on their behalf, week after week, to the scripture," authorizing her to bear witness to what she finds there. If this arrangement involves hierarchy, then the hierarch is God, who speaks in Scripture, not the preacher, who testifies to what she has seen and heard. By such testimony God chooses to speak to us, and especially to our hearts. As Jonathan Edwards wrote, the reason we preach Scripture instead of merely reading it is that we want the Word of God to start our hearts again.

In a rich and finely balanced book—one of the best of the recent ones—Paul Scott Wilson (1999) endorses many of the new approaches to preaching, but he also holds out for some old ones. For example, he wants dynamic, filmlike movement in a sermon, but he also wants sermons to confine themselves to one clearly stated theme, representing "one main path through the heart of a text." He welcomes stories within sermons, but he also wants a theological frame to hold our stories and to keep them from wandering. He encourages the use of imagination in preaching, but not unbridled imagination that just "lets the horses out of the corral."

In a refreshing feature of his book, Wilson strongly recommends to ministers that they preach about God. Gesture toward the ineffable, as necessary, but speak of God. Respect God's mystery and our finitude, but preach about God. Admit our sin, our corruption, and the corruption of our knowledge of God, but do preach what we know of God: God's mercy, God's wisdom, God's Messiah, God's Spirit, God's enthusiasm for losers and nobodies. After all, as Wilson re minds us, the Bible's big story is not human sin, but God's redeeming grace centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the preacher must find excellent ways to tell this story and preach this gospel.

Yes, indeed, and Wilson offers a big book to help. He offers a scheme (his "four pages" of trouble, old and new, and God's address to each), a global focus, and a wide range of homiletic wisdom, including thoughtful ambivalence about the preacher's role in addressing perennial dilemmas. At minimum, the compassionate preacher will acknowledge the dilemmas Christians face every day. He will acknowledge, for example, that Christians may have to choose between simple jobs, in which they may keep their purity, and high-impact jobs, in which they have a chance to make a major contribution to the kingdom of God, but in which they may also have to get dirty once in a while. (Perhaps here is a place to respect Rose's desire for sermons that help a congregation focus its conversations, and that resist the temptation to seek early closure on these conversations.)

In any case, Wilson's book and another beautifully wrought work by Charles L. Bartow (1997) remind the reader that preaching is at least a craft, requiring an eye for raw materials, a knack for shaping them, a dissatisfaction with poor work, and a painstaking readiness to improve it. But preaching is worth the trouble only if, beyond craftsmanship, it is a divine ministry, a divine address, a form of God's speaking. Properly understood, a preached and heard sermon may then become a means of grace to us who, like Jeremiah's King Zedekiah, secretly wonder whether there is "a word from the Lord" and especially a word of grace.

I think we have to concede that while we wonder about this word, we probably want it less than we think. The reason is that a word of judgment may sting us, but, as Dostoevsky knew, a word of grace may devastate us. A word of grace may cause in us a self-knowledge we cannot endure until our self is changed.

And so the preacher has to take care what she says and—drawing upon all available wisdom—how she says it. Fortunately, these days she has a lot of books to help her.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is dean of the chapel at Calvin College.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Books Mentioned in this Essay

Charles L. Bartow, God's Human Speech: A Practical Theology of Proclamation (Eerdmans, 1997).
Frederick Buechner, "The Magnificent Defeat," in Thomas G. Long and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., ed., A Chorus of Witnesses (Eerdmans, 1994).
Walter J. Burghardt, Preaching the Just Word (Yale, 1996).
David G. Buttrick, A Captive Voice (Westminster John Knox, 1994).
David G. Buttrick, "Threescore, Ten, and Trouble: A Biblical View of Aging," in William J. Carl, ed., Graying Gracefully: Preaching to Older Adults (Westminster John Knox, 1997).
Fred B. Craddock, As One Without Authority (Phillips University, 1971).
Donald English, An Evangelical Theology of Preaching (Abingdon, 1996).
Richard L. Eslinger, Pitfalls in Preaching (Eerdmans, 1996).
Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (Continuum, 1997).
G. Robert Jacks, Just Say the Word: Writing for the Ear (Eerdmans, 1996).
Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Westminster John Knox, 1989).
Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Abingdon, 1997).
William B. McClain, Come Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion (Abingdon, 1990).
David C. Norrington, To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church's Urgent Question (Paternoster, 1996).
Lucy Atkinson Rose, Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church (Westminster John Knox, 1997)
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Cowley, 1993).
Leona Tubbs Tisdale, Preaching As Local Theology and Folk Art (Fortress, 1997).
William H. Willimon, "Hunger in This Abandoned Generation," in Barry L. Callen, Sharing Heaven's Music: The Heart of Christian Preaching (Abingdon, 1995).
Paul Scott Wilson, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Complete Guide to Biblical Preaching (Abingdon, May 1999).
Kenneth Woodward, "Heard Any Good Sermons Lately?" Newsweek, March 4, 1997, pp. 50–52.