From Chapter 4
1. Choose a Subject Worthy of Your Audience
Novelist Edith Wharton urges would-be novelists to choose a subject worthy of their audience.’ Wharton believes that “the literary artist seeks by instinct those subjects in which some phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically. . . in which there is a kind of summary of life’s . . . occurrences. “There are subjects trivial in appearance, and subjects trivial to the core; and the novelist ought to be able to discern at a glance between the two…” The novelist “learns . . . to resist surface attractions, and probe his story to the depths before he begins to tell it.”
In my view, a sermon dedicated to proving the identity of Jacob’s adversaiy at Peniel in Genesis 32 is not worthy of my audience. It is not of sufficient import. W hat is a worthy theme, however, is that God sticks with us in our struggles, whomever our adversary may be, and offers us a changed identity and purpose as a result of the struggle.
From McKenzie’s book “Novel Preaching.”
2. Pay Attention to Character
In the opening chapter of Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, the authors distinguish between escape literature and interpretive literature: Escape literature is written purely for entertainment—to help us pass the time agreeably. Interpretive literature is written to broaden and deepen and sharpen our awareness of life. Escape literature takes us away from the real world: it enables us temporarily to forget our troubles. Interpretive literature takes us, through the imagination, deeper into the real world: it enables us to understand our troubles. Escape literature has as its only object pleasure. Interpretive litera- j^ture has as its object pleasure plus understanding.”^
People, including myself, Hke lite fiction, in which the protagonist is a stereotype: a plucky, gorgeous romance heroine; a gritty, disillusioned excop, and so on. Such literature sells because it has an exciting plot with lots of action, as well as the assurance that the protagonist will not die at the end and will also get what he or she wanted from the beginning. The protagonist doesn’t necessarily change between the beginning and the ending, but the events do. It is escape reading, and we don’t expect the author’s arm to reach out from the pages and pull us into a transformative journey in which our values are questioned and replaced with deeper ones by the end.
An author of interpretive fiction would ask a preacher this: have you constructed your sermon with the aim that, by the end of it, your listeners have been changed and not just escaped?
Predictable plots, intact protagonists, and happy endings are fine for lite fiction, but more troubling for lite preaching. Lite preaching can take lots of forms. W e can tell people good news without showing them when, where, and how it can be true in their daily lives. We can tell people jokes and stories for their own sake. W e can tell people what we think they want to hear as if it were true. Lite sermons are the result of lack of attentiveness, and we know from chapter 2 that two obstacles to attentiveness are lack of discipline and lack of daring.
3. Pay Attention to Imagery
Superficial sermons often result when we mine the text quickly for an idea and then extrapolate it and string stories onto it like clothes hung out to dry on a clothesline. Fiction writers would encourage us to be attentive to the sensory world of the text and to any images that it holds. Once you start asking yourself about the significance of an image in context, your sermon begins to have potential, not only for clarity, but also for a depth encounter between text and life.
For example, suppose you are preaching on Matthew’s parable of the T en Bridesmaids (Matt. 25:1-13). They let their lamps go out. So what? Except that light is a symbol in Matthew’s Gospel for discipleship and faithfulness to Christ (Matt. 5:14-16).
Suppose you are preaching on Luke’s parable of the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5-8), which features someone standing on the doorstep seeking bread. If we’re in a hurry, we might ignore the metaphor or spiritualize it. If we slow down and go deeper, we’ll notice that bread is a pervasive, profound metaphor for sustenance throughout the entire Bible: manna in the wilderness (Exod. 16), “not by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4; Luke 4:4), and bread from heaven 0ohn 6:22-59). We’ll ask ourselves about bread’s significance in the Gospel of Luke, in the lives of our congregation, in our own lives.
4. Pay Attention to Setting
Superficial sermons can also result from the preacher’s lack of attention to setting. Actually, we need to attend to two settings. One is the setting n which members of the congregation conduct their daily lives. A second is the setting in which members of the original audience of the biblical text conducted their daily lives.
ry thinking like a novelist. Think and feel and study your way into the setting. It may be the decadence of the city of Corinth. It may be the nasty squabble between Jews and Gentiles that lies beneath the surface of Matthew’s Gospel. It may be the turmoil of the postexilic community, struggling with the question
“Why are we suffering?” that pulses through the pages of Job. Whatever it is, you need to allow it to come alive for your listeners. Our characters depend on it.
Kress calls on writers to understand their settings not just physically, but sociologically and economically as well. “Fiction is not sociology. But fiction, like sociology, is about human behavior.” T he author needs to have thought about the values and expectations of the setting so that he can portray how his characters are at odds with some aspect of their setting, or how it affects their strengths, weaknesses, and desires.^
The Sermon That Tries to Teach, but Is Incoherent. I spend a lot of time as a teacher of preaching trying to help preachers clarify the flow of their thought. Screenwriters call this the “throughline.”
The throughline is the plotline that answers the question, “W hat happens to the protagonist?” In a sermon it’s called the focus or the theme. It’s what the sermon is about, summed up in one sentence.
Novelists differ in the way they work, but many say they figure out the last scene of their novel first and then plot the whole novel toward it. The traditional, deductive, three-point sermon states its throughline (its focus) first. Preachers who favor inductive preaching (moving from the specifics to the general) work more like fiction writers; their sermons cut the focus from its spot as the first sentence of the sermon and paste it in as the last sentence of the manuscript. Everything in the sermon flows toward it.
When I edit students’ sermons, I write things in the margins in green (not red) pen like, “Why are you telling me this? W hy are you telling me this now? How does this relate to what has gone before?” “How does it pave the way for what comes next?” I’m articulating the questions our listeners unconsciously apply to our sermons as we speak them. A steady diet of incoherent sermons, sermons with tangled-up throughlines, leaves the congregation in a state of mental confusion.
There are several possible causes of the incoherent sermon.
1. It could be that you are tired and emotionally scattered. Get some rest.
2. It may be that you have too many themes competing for your attention. The answer to the question, “How many points should a sermon have?” is “At least one.” But you can have too much of a good thing. Pick the theme you can preach with the most excitement, and promise the others you’ll include them in another sermon on another day.
Clustering: Some fiction writers recommend an exercise called “clustering” to help you organize your thoughts when you have too many ideas vying to be the lead theme for your sermon. Pick a word that represents your central subject, and write it in the center of the page. Circle it. For two or three minutes, free associate by jotting down around it any word, image, action, emotion, or part of speech that comes to mind. Every now and again, circle the words you have written and draw lines or arrows between words that seem to connect. Keep going. Don’t worry about making sense. Take a few seconds to look at what you’ve done. Then start writing.
Lack of Desire
Your sermon may lack coherence because you lack desire. Let’s think like a novelist about this problem of incoherence, the sermon whose throughline meanders, or is scattered, disjointed, or in pieces. A fiction writer might suggest that the problem is that you, as the protagonist of your own sermon, are suffering from a lack of desire.
Janet Burroway tells us that “to engage our attention and sympathy, the protagonist in a novel must want something and want it intensely. A common fault in novice writers is that they create a main character who is essentially passive.” Could that be you in approaching your sermon preparation? I’ve been there. I’m not talking about times when I’m waiting faithfully for God’s word. I’m talking about times when, for various reasons, I don’t feel like preparing a sermon. My heart’s not in it. I don’t really want anything intensely except not to have to do it.
God’s Yearning: God is the protagonist of every sermon. The theological question we too often forget to ask is, “What is the character of God according to this text? And what does God want? That can sometimes be a troubling or challenging question to ask. It may call for a conference call between the text at hand and other canonical voices. The other question is, “W hat do my people want and need?” Those questions of divine and congregational desire can help bring coherence to a sermon that is scattered and disjointed.
But coming back to you for a moment. If your sermon is incoherent, it may be because you don’t have a high enough stake in it, or you haven’t allowed yourself to be addressed at your depths by the challenge and the good news that God is trying to convey to you through the text. You are not in touch with the one, intense, unifying desire that you yearn to have fulfilled by the end of the sermon. This isn’t the place to examine all the reasons that might be, but it might be. The reason my sermon is incoherent, scattered, in pieces, and disjointed may be because I am.
Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant’s House, quotes her writing teacher Allan Gurganus on passion in writing. “Allan always said that in order to move your readers, to put them through any kind of emotional state, you have to put yourself through ten times that much for it to translate to the page. That’s the physics of writing. If you’re a good writer, you intensely feel anything you write.
If you are afraid your sermon is incoherent, try applying the “physics of writing” to your manuscript. Consider the following character questions checklist:
1. What is your character as the preacher? What is the desire that drives your life?
2. Is God a character in the sermon? What is God’s character—that is to say, what is God’s desire?
3. Do you have a clear sense of how you hope the sermon will shape the character of listeners (influence their desires)?
4. How are you hoping listeners’ character will change as a result of entering into the sermon?