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Sermons Do Not Need Introductions

The preacher comes to the pulpit with a sense of anticipation. Everything is ready.

Let us pray:

O Lord, who by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit has given us the Scriptures, give us now the light of that same Holy Spirit, so that we may hear in the Scriptures something we could not have told ourselves. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, the one Word of God, whom alone we must hear and obey. Amen.

Then, with care and attention, the preacher reads the Scriptures, if not a chapter then at least a full thought from each Testament, and in conclusion intones, “The Word of the Lord.”

And then that same preacher continues, “Did you hear the one about the guy who tried to get into heaven with a suitcase?” What is the preacher thinking?

Sermons have to get going somehow, but why would sermons need something that could meaningfully be called an “introduction,” especially in the form of a joke or a morality tale?

Prayers don’t have “introductions.” Neither do hymn texts. So why would sermons, if they are really acts of worship? I propose that introductions weaken sermons by interrupting the dynamics of worship and calling undue attention to the relationship between the preacher and the congregation. (I am convinced that relationship is the real subject of far too many sermons.)

I suspect sermons got their introductions from Aristotle and other ancient teachers of rhetoric. Aristotle (who, as Martin Luther pointed out, is not a father of the church) taught rhetoric for legislatures and courts of law, where one would make stand-alone speeches in an adversarial context. The speaker used self-deprecating remarks to placate adversarial hearers, and then described the points he intended to make.

But if the worship of a congregation is adversarial for the preacher and congregation, a sermon introduction is not going to help. The time-honored homiletical joke certainly will not help.

As worship has progressed to the moment of the sermon, the worshipers have already been interacting with God and each other. As the Scriptures are read, they are already interacting with them, asking questions, puzzling over oddities, applying insights to their own situations.

Sermons begin best when the preacher remembers that the word of God has already begun to resonate in the minds of the other worshipers and joins them in the middle of things as a kind of guide or host on a trip that is already under way.

A Definition

Christian preaching in the ordinary sense occurs in the weekly Lord’s Day worship of a congregation. On these occasions, God speaks grace and judgment to the worshiping, believing congregation by means of a human exposition of passage of Scripture. On the other hand, a preacher, called by God and the congregation to serve the Word of God among them, speaks to them from that passage of Scripture in his or her own words, as an act of their corporate worship.

Some Values

Suppose that among a preacher’s assumptions and beliefs concerning his or her ordinary preaching in the public worship of a congregation are the following:

• Preaching is an act of worship.
• A sermon is mainly an event rather than a document.
• The task of preaching is an office of the church, not a self-appointed enterprise.
• Preaching conveys a biblical message in a biblical way, not as an historical artifact, but as God’s word for this congregation.
• The Bible is both interesting and difficult.

Consider, as an expression of such assumptions and beliefs, the following passage from Heinrich Bullinger’s Seconed Helvetic Confession of 1561:

“THE PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD IS THE WORD OF GOD. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.”

This is a bold claim, but it is not overweening.

Hello world!

Must every preaching professor write a book about preaching? Maybe so. If nothing else, the tenure track demands it.

I’ve been a preaching professor for the last four years. Now I’m going on to try something else, so I don’t need to write a book anymore, at least I don’t need to in order to get tenure. For the time being I’m going to write a blog about it. That way I can try some things out.

In the last four years, I’ve suggested that preachers in my classes think of preaching as an act of worship, and then try to figure out how such preaching could be different from what happens in a lot of churches.

I have some ideas about that myself, and I’ll start trying to lay those out. I hope some preachers and hearers of preachers will come by and talk about some of these ideas with me.