Chapter 2: Preaching to Everyone in Particular
Every Sunday, around lunchtime, in the homes of many a church family, the sermon blame game kicks off. “There was nothing in it for me, today,” a congregation member might grumble; “They didn’t seem to be listening at all, this morning” the preacher might lament. The problem is that, in all likelihood, each is correct. The difficulty for the preacher is that only one of them has a job to do with regard to the sermon, and it isn’t the listener. Pope Francis[1] rightly said "the faithful ... and their ordained ministers suffer because of homilies: the laity from having to listen to them and the clergy from having to preach them!"
It is not only preachers who bemoan the disconnect between the knowledge of those they teach and their behaviour. Often what people know has no direct impact on what they do, so at one and the same time a congregation can advertise that all are welcome, while tutting furiously at the parents of a restless toddler. There is a gap between “knowing” and “doing” that preachers try to fill, often without success.
Congregations are not unwilling. According to research almost 100% of the congregation looked forward to the sermon. Politicians and others can only dream of such figures. Yet only 17% felt that preaching made a difference to them[2].
What is going wrong with preaching?
Too often preachers adhere, consciously or otherwise, to the model of preaching in which God tells them what to say, they say it and the congregation had better listen up. The preacher is given, in this model, privileged knowledge and contact with God that nobody in the congregation enjoys. While it is not my intention to engage in a debate concerning the ontology of preaching, I do want to suggest that culturally a position defined by authority is, nowadays, regarded mainly with suspicion. The model of preaching I have outlined was first proposed in 1962[3]. In 1962 the first episode of Z Cars was broadcast; Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev danced together for the first time; the new Coventry Cathedral was consecrated; The Beatles played their first session at Abbey Road Studios. The world was a very different place! People are no longer willing to accept as authoritative, institutions that enjoyed privileged positions back then. Despite what a particular church might believe, or think it believes, about authority, imperious sounding sermons feel something akin to stroking a cat backwards – nobody can say why it isn’t right, it just doesn’t feel right.
Maybe one reason why preaching doesn’t seem to make a difference, is that it isn’t really heard in the first place. The message is somehow diverted.
Preachers need to avoid refraction. In hydrology, refraction causes a wave to divert; in optics refraction changes the appearance of something; in acoustics refraction changes the way something sounds. In preaching, refraction does all three. Refraction causes stories from Scripture to change direction, to look and sound different from the original. It is refraction that enables Western congregations to interpret Jesus’ words in Matthew 26:11 “the poor will always be with you” as “you don’t need to do anything about the poor”. When past or present experience does not match what is being said, the image from Scripture blurs or distorts. I remember someone suggesting I read Psalm 91 when my daughter was very seriously ill. There I was,being encouraged to believe that we should not fear the terror of the night, that we need not fear pestilence and that God would give his people long life, when it was acutely plain that that coming night would be very testing, that the pestilence was rendering my daughter’s body helpless and that not only might life not be long but that it was possibly not going to outlast the week.
The path of communication is littered with previous understandings and experiences that refract and distort the message as it travels between speaker and hearer. Preachers need to take account of refraction.
Relevance is an oft proposed solution – find out about the people, speak about their lives, and so on. Writing the sermon becomes rather like building a spider’s web, where a number of threads reach out in different directions from the centre. The points of contact, however, either become so specific that they exclude some, or so tenuous that the whole web fails. Congregational research reveals how many single people suffer in silence as preachers again and again use illustrations concerning marriage or families. In addition, attempting to be relevant on the basis of little information can betray a complete lack of understanding.
Preachers might bemoan the lack of cohesion between what the congregation knows (or at least what they have been told) and how they behave, but often this disjointedness begins with the preacher. Over the past few years many of my students have conducted small pieces of research into the topics of sermons in their churches. There have been the exegetical and apologetic; those focused on prayer, or holiness, or discipleship, or the church leaders’ latest project. At the same time the main problems on the minds of those arriving for worship on a Sunday have been things like how to handle a dishonest colleague; what to do with a quarrelsome neighbor; how to decide on residential care for an elderly spouse … None of what they heard ever helped them with lived experience.
And yet, God became incarnate. One of us, so that the Divine partook of human life.
How do we earn a hearing? Having a well crafted sermon is not enough, if it is not heard.
Relevance is not enough. It joins particular points to a centre, and even possibly to another point, but it does not cause an effect.
I believe the answer is Resonance.
Resonance produces sympathetic vibration, so that sound is intensified and prolonged. When a stone is dropped into a still pond, it produces resonant waves. Not all go directly to the edge, some arerouted around rocks or branches, they may be reshaped, take longer to reach their goal, but they do not stop or disappear into nothing for quite some time. A resonant sermon will function like dropping a stone into a still pond. It will cause an effect both close to where it drops and further away, and in all directions.
Whether what is described in the sermon was experienced by some with hope and some with desperation, resonance still occurs.
I preached once about Jesus settling an argument among his followers by putting a child in the midst of them[4] and telling them that if you want to be first you must be last. As part of my sermon I told a story about my then eighteen month old grandson and me stalking deer in a local park, and being ignored as we stood watching them because, apparently, people assumed we had not really seen anything. At the end of the service somebody thanked me for identifying so clearly with the marginalized.
Resonance reaches beyond specifics, resonant waves reach into the hidden corners of people’s minds and hearts before they can stop them, even if they wanted to. Resonance can say two things at one and the same time, reaching people from very different places in life as it does so.
One Easter I was preaching on the Road to Emmaus story[5]. I wanted people to realise how hopeless the two disciples felt, a number of people in the congregation were going through difficulties at the time and I did not want to make light of them by over enthusiasm. I made use of a personal experience I had had fairly recently:
Convinced that she was going to die, she said goodbye to each of us. Her hope was gone, ours was fading.
We were taken into the sensitively darkened relatives' room, with the sympathy biscuits and comforting coffee. Consultants told us of their confidence that she would eventually recover.
Within us, at one and the same time, were the pain of desperation and the little light of hope. Even the tiniest glimmer of hope is not overwhelmed by pain until the very last moment, when every hope is gone.
That is where these two disciples were. All hope gone.
I am not interested in resonance as a tool for preaching. I care about resonance because it is an excellent tool for pastoral preaching. Because if we are simply dropping a well-formed stone into a pool, rather than trying to string together complex ideas and lives, we are able to reach everyone seated before us in expectation.
Preaching pastorally is essential to closing the loop between knowing and doing. It is the type of preaching that raises the “so what?” question. But if the preacher tries to answer it, the possibilities are closed down rather than opened up. Adults do not learn because they are told things, however eloquently. Adults learn either because they need to (the issue is personally relevant) or because of experience (particularly if the way they see or do things now doesn’t seem to work). Adult learning is problem-, rather than content-centred. The role of the preacher, then, is not to answer unasked questions, but to raise problems hearers might want to explore. “Have you ever wondered whether things might be different?” is very different from “Jesus came to change the world.”
RS Thomas in his poem Folk Tale deals resonantly with the question of why we pray when we seem to see no answer. He does not mention doubt, or disappointment, or searching for God, but his conclusion resonates:
I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.
The gap between knowing and doing, between faith and discipleship, that pastoral preaching should seek to fill is not closed by more and more information. Knowing and doing are joined by owning the story, being part of it. If congregation members see themselves in the preacher’s narrative, they are in a position where knowing becomes effective.
[1]Apostolic Exhortation, EvangeliiGaudium,
[2]Research from CODEC and The College of Preachers 2010
[3]Van Allmen,Preaching and Congregation
[4]Mark 9
[5]Luke 24