1. Enlist a Guiding Image or Metaphor to Organize and Unify the Sermon
Ask yourself if an image in the sermon wants to be moved from the body of the sermon to the introduction, to become the guiding, unifying image of the sermon. See if an image has arisen in your thinking, either from the text or everyday life, that would qualify as a guiding image for the sermon that you introduce at the outset. This often happens, fiction writers say. They discover, three-quarters of the way through a novel, that a metaphor, image, or theme keeps tapping them on the shoulder; they then rewrite the whole work, threading the image through to make it more prominent.
In my Palm Sunday sermon in chapter 6, “Silent Disciples, Shouting Stones,” the shouting stones became the guiding metaphor in a sermon that took the shape of a series of scenes, each featuring a nondisciple who was loyal to Jesus in ways that the disciples were not.In “My Favorite Angel” (Matt. 28:1-10) in chapter 6, the abruptness of the angel’s message and the focus of his mission made me think of a UPS driver who is not on your porch to chat, but to offer you something important that it’s up to you to open and use.
2. Check the Sequence of Your Scenes
In our sermons, we often state a main idea and find brief stories to illustrate it. F.A. Rockwell -a fictional writer-would tell us, instead, to think of our sermon as having a plot and to break it down into scenes.
T ry thinking about the progression of portions of your sermons as a fiction writer would, as scenes. In some, you might do some teaching in the framework of a setting, dialogue, or image. Other sermons might take the shape of an anecdote or first-person experience. But try thinking of your sermon as progressing as a sequence of scenes, each with a specific purpose and sequence. Then make sure your scenes make sense in the order in which you have placed them.
NoveUst and screenwriter Raymond Obstfeld points out that “the word ‘scene’ comes from theater, where it describes the action that takes place in a single physical setting.” H e advises his students to “think of each scene in their work as an inner tube designed to keep the larger work afloat. T he more memorable scenes there are, the more we see the entire structure floating in front of us and, therefore, the more we appreciate the whole work. The fewer memorable scenes there are, the quicker that work sinks to the depths of mediocrity.”*^
This would be a good mental exercise for the preacher who fears her sermon may be incoherent. T ry stepping from inner tube to inner tube across the river and see if you can navigate the journey without falling into the water.
According to Obstfeld, a scene ought to focus on a specific purpose. Among these purposes are as follows:• To give the reader information necessary to further the plot• To show the conflict between characters• To develop a particular character by highlighting a specific trait or action• To create suspense**^
Obstfeld recommends that once we’ve written a scene, we reread it and ask ourselves four “Focus” questions.
The Plot Focus
1. The purpose of this scene is to___________.
2. The Character Focus-When the reader finishes this scene, he should feel____
3. The Theme Focus: When the reader finishes this scene, he should think ______
4. The Suspense Focus: When the reader finishes this scene he should wonder______
W hen you finish reading a scene, says Obstfeld, ask yourself,
• Is this scene necessary?
• Does it really matter?
• Does whatever happens deserve its own scene?
• Could the information be placed in one of the neighboring scenes?
Skip Press, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwritingy adds two additional questions for us to ponder with regard to scene and coherence
:• How does the end of this scene propel us into the next one?
• Is this scene memorable apart from the overall movie?*
Karl Iglesias, in Writing for Emotional Impact, challenges screenwriters to “think of your script as a house of cards, each scene a card. If you can remove a scene, and the house still stands, in other words, if the story still works without it, that scene doesn’t belong in your script.”
The Sermon That Is Coherent but Boring
Robert C. Dykstra, who teaches pastoral theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, in his book Discovering a Sermon: Personal Pastoral Preaching suggests that the tendency to bore others is a sign of psychological distress. By contrast, the tendency to be bored can be the beginning of a healthy curiosity that leads the preacher into a way of living that Dykstra calls “playing witness to life . . . bearing witness to God’s grace at work in life around us.”
I started preaching the summer before I started my studies at Duke Divinity School and took a preaching course. I was serving the Page- Roseland Charge, which consisted of two small churches near Aberdeen, North Carolina. All I knew to do was explain things to people and watch their faces. When they looked bored. I’d toss them a story. My sermon form was to lead the congregation on a forced march through a barren wilderness of concepts with periodic stops to distribute candy bars.
hat’s one way to be boring. There are lots of other ways. I’ll leave you to speculate about how I know this. One other way is to suffer from term-paperese, a condition in which we confuse the genre of term paper with that of sermon. Its sermonic symptoms are passive voice, weak adjectives and adverbs, brittle qualifying phrases, obese sentences, and anemic, abstract language. T he overall effect is listener numbness.^^
Another way to be boring is to slip into a humorless, judgmental spiritual state through overwork and underprayer, through a life lacking in imagination and joy. Yet another way is to suffer from anhedonia, a loss of pleasure in living, often cited as a sign of depression. All of these conditions require treatment.