Preaching Palm Sunday: Sermons worth listening to
Whew!
I thought I was giving myself the somewhat simple task of pulling together a collection of good Palm Sunday sermons to share to inspire preachers in the preparation of their Holy Week homilies this year. I did not realize what a daunting task this would be. I have listened to, or attempted to listen to, well over a hundred Palm Sunday sermons. I have watched hours of videos. In the end, what I have found is a handful of pretty good sermons; a fair amount of sermons that are just OK (not offensive or bad, but not exactly inspiring); and an overwhelming deluge of sermons that are just terrible (for various reasons).
Palm Sunday is obviously a tricky service to preach, especially for preachers in liturgical traditions like the Episcopal Church, where the service has two very different gospel readings, memorializes two very different events in the life of Jesus, and has two starkly different moods. Add to that the dynamic of having (usually) slightly better attendance by visitors and major services planned for the week ahead, and the preacher has been given a daunting task indeed. It is easy to see why Palm Sunday, of all Sundays, has more than its share of weak sermons.
Below is a collection of sermons that I think are above average for tackling the content of Palm Sunday with the right tone and that weave the various scriptural and theological strands of the service together effectively. Of course, no sermon and no preacher is ever perfect, but these are worth listening to. I apologize in advance for including one of my own sermons in the mix, but after reviewing so many, I do think that it does a decent job. There have been plenty of my past sermons, however, that would not have made the cut.
I also want to offer here a few words of advice for the Palm Sunday preacher, and this is based upon all of the sermons I reviewed to compile this list. I wouldn’t describe these as rules, more like suggestions. The Holy Spirit may lead you to do something differently, and if you can pull it off, more power to you. The “good sermons” I have linked to below, don’t necessarily follow all of these suggestions and they still do a good job. But based upon listening to a lot of terrible, or uninspiring, Palm Sunday sermons, here is my advice to preachers:
Begin with the Passion, NOT with the Palms. The last thing your congregation will have heard before you ascend the pulpit and begin your sermon will be the retelling of Jesus’s passion and death. Start there. Despite commonly referring to the day as “Palm Sunday,” it is really the Passion that is of utmost importance today. Yes, you will talk about the Passion again on Good Friday. It’s OK. You can talk about it more than once. The earliest Christian lectionaries include the Passion reading as the gospel for this Sunday, so it would seem that our tradition does not want us to consider Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of David in a way that is divorced from his suffering and death and I think that’s right. When Cranmer created the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, he dumped the Palms but kept the Passion. The Passion was more important. You can take people back to the palms, processions, and shouts of ‘Hosanna!', but at least start by in some way acknowledging the gravity of the story that was just told in the Passion Gospel. At least pay attention to the mood in the room when you begin your sermon.
No jokes; no perky “good morning!” See above. Your congregation JUST heard about their Lord and Saviour being laid in a tomb. There are plenty of times when humor and lightheartedness are helpful and even important in the pulpit, but Palm Sunday and Good Friday are definite exceptions. At least pay attention to your tone of voice. You can make kind and gentle remarks without appearing flippant.
Don’t over-explain. With so much going on in the Palm Sunday liturgy, and so many rich symbols, there is a definite temptation to turn the sermon into an adult-forum or a Sunday school. Try to resist this temptation. You don’t need to explain the historical significance of every symbol in your sermon. Yes, you will have visitors that don’t go to church every Sunday. Just let them enter into the drama of the story and the liturgy. You probably don’t need to say “Today is Palm Sunday and today we blah, blah, blah…” Use your sermon to help the congregation to experience the story of Jesus, who is the crucified Messiah, on a deeper level, or simply sit down and let the Holy Spirit, the gospel and the liturgy preach the sermon for you.
Palm Sunday Sermons Worth Listening To:
Rowan Williams
Kara Slade
Robert Barron
Mia McDowell
Sermons worth listening to
This is the first in what I hope to be an ongoing series of posts on “Sermons worth listening to.” As I mentioned in my last post, even a dull sermon can be redeemed by the Holy Spirit, but it is refreshing nonetheless to hear sermons that really “get the job done.” These are sermons that instruct, inspire, uplift and facilitate an encounter with the God of scripture. The following is a collection of sermons that I think are worth listening to. They are not presented in any order. All of them are good; some of them are exceptionally good. They represent vastly different preaching styles and the preachers come from different backgrounds and different church traditions. Some of these sermons are decades old; some were preached very recently. They all were preached in different contexts and address issues that were pertinent to their time and place, and yet, each one still speaks a word to the Church that is in some way timeless. These are not all sermons that I could myself preach, and I may not agree with every word uttered by each preacher, but in some way, when all the “amens” have been said and the sermon has ended, I feel like the disciples on the road to Emmaus must have felt: not only that the scriptures have been opened and explained to me, but that in that opening of scripture I have actually met the Lord again, and walked with him down the road a while.
Fleming Rutledge
2. Thomas Long
3. Vashti McKenzie
4. Fred Craddock
5. Peter Anthony
6. Luke Powery
7. William Cliff
8. Otis Moss, III
9. Katherine Sonderegger
10. Gardner Taylor
The Blanche Devereaux Rule
I love to hear a good sermon. On a personal level, as a Christian, a good sermon can inspire me and deepen my faith just like it can for anyone else. But on a professional level, as a preacher, a good sermon can give me scriptural or theological insights and demonstrate rhetorical techniques that I can then incorporate into my own sermons and share with my own congregation. We shouldn’t simply mimic or copy other preachers, but we can definitely learn from them. We can learn from the masters of the art; our preaching can be shaped and enriched by theirs. We can also learn from bad preachers too.
In addition to listening to ourselves preach, I think it is critically important for preachers to regularly listen to other preachers preach. I admit though that this can be a somewhat masochistic endeavor at times. There are so many bad sermons out there. It can be painful to sit and listen to another preacher spew pointless drivel or make (what we may consider to be) obvious theological or scriptural mistakes. But still, the practice of listening to other preachers’ sermons (even the dreadful ones) can make our own sermons better.
I have a little rule that has helped me in many areas of life. It has especially helped me to redeem many hours of listening to bad sermons. I like to call it the Blanche Devereaux Rule.
In season 6, episode 19 of the classic sitcom The Golden Girls, Blanche Devereaux, a notoriously “social person” is upset because a date has cancelled on her.
Blanche: For your information, I'm upset because I had a date, and he called and canceled.
Dorothy: Oh, honey, I'm sorry. Was it anybody special?
Blanche: Well, that's not the point. He might have taken me someplace where I'd meet someone who is.
Even if your date isn’t that special, along the way you may meet someone who is. That is the Blanche Devereaux rule in a nutshell. In the show, the joke is about Blanche being superficial, but in my life at least this simple rule of unintended consequences has redeemed a lot of time (and a great many dull sermons). Sometimes the preacher that you are listening to may not be that special, but that preacher just might take you to a place where you will meet someone who is.
A sermon may be dreadfully boring or uninspiring, but if in my ennui I am lead down a path where I have an idea, or an insight, or an encounter with the Holy Spirit that leads to a good sermon, then my time has not been wasted. I certainly don’t go looking to listen to bad sermons anymore than Blanche went looking for bad dates, but they inevitably happen. The Holy Spirit can still show up though. Sometimes I may feel convicted to preach the exact opposite of something I just heard, sometimes I may want to take a preacher’s idea and go in a slightly different direction, sometimes I may want to preach on a prayer in the back of the prayer book that I was led to out of desperation and boredom at what the preacher was saying. Who’s to say that each one of those instances isn’t the Holy Spirit at work? I believe it is, and that is good news whether you are standing in the pulpit or sitting in a pew. God comes to meet people. Sometimes it may be through your best efforts; sometimes it may be despite them. Sometimes your sermon may not be that special, but that doesn’t mean that someone sitting in the pews won’t hear one that is.
Take the time to listen to other preachers on a regular basis. For preachers working alone as the sole clergy in a congregation this can take some intentionality, but it is worth the effort. Naturally you will want to seek out the best preachers and the best sermons, but don’t be dismayed when you encounter those that don’t quite hit the mark. Remember the Blanche Devereaux Rule: the preacher you are with may not be that special, but he or she can still take you someplace where you will encounter the preacher who is.
Listen to yourself preach
Listen to yourself.
The easiest thing that any preacher can do to improve their preaching is simply to listen to themselves preach. Not just once or twice, but habitually. You can have brilliant biblical interpretations and theological insights to offer your congregation, but if they can’t hear you, if they can’t understand you, if they are lulled to sleep by your monotone voice, or if they are constantly distracted by something that you are doing, then all of your excellent content (and hard work) will be for naught. Good content matters. It matters deeply. But part of the preacher’s job is getting that good content off of the page or out of their heads and into their listener’s ears. You need more than a microphone to make that happen. You need an understanding of how your voice works and of how you actually sound when you are preaching.
I know that many people don’t like to hear the sound of their own voice. I didn’t at first. All I can say is, get over it. Preaching is too important to let self-consciousness keep you from being the best preacher you can be. The only way to truly know how you are coming across to the members of your congregation is to sit in their pews for a while now and then. It’s true, you can’t fix last week’s sermon, but you can make next week’s better. And the great thing is, that much of the improvement is likely to happen automatically, just by making yourself aware of the distance between what you were trying to say and how what you actually said came across.
Sermons are not essays that you read out loud. Regardless of whether your sermon is preached from a written text or from content that you have organized in your head, the method of delivery and proclamation is still the same: the voice. And the method of reception is still the same: the ear. Now you may publish and distribute the written text of your sermon, and that’s lovely. I have been greatly blessed by reading sermons that were written long before the invention of the tape recorder or video camera, but still, reading a sermon is not the same thing as actually hearing it preached. There is just so much content that is conveyed by the voice that cannot be captured in the printed word alone.
At least once a month, take a few minutes and go and listen to one of your own sermons. It’s really not that hard. Given that so many of us now regularly broadcast or livestream our services post-pandemic, this should be easier than ever before. But even if you don’t broadcast your services, it is worth buying a mini voice recorder to record yourself regularly. When you start listening to yourself preach regularly, you will start composing your sermons for the ear and not the eye. This means that you will understand when words need to be repeated, or when your vocal tone or inflection needs to change. You will understand when you need to slow down and when you need to speed up, and when you need to take a long pause. You are also likely to learn that the microphone isn’t always your friend, and sometimes you just need to project your voice. You will learn how to convey the content of your sermon more effectively.
Preaching is sacred speech. It isn’t meant to be a show or a performance, but a good preacher still needs to know how to use the tool (the voice) that God has given him or her to proclaim the gospel with, and that takes practice and reflection. It takes listening as well as speaking.
Listen to yourself preach. It will make you a better preacher.
Introducing Preaching Companions
What is Preaching Companions?
Preaching Companions is a monthly peer-group of preachers listening to each others’ sermons and offering constructive feedback and support.
There is no charge.
There are no grades.
There are no long-term commitments.
We are simply a group of active preachers seeking to preach the gospel to the best of our ability and are willing to listen to the feedback and advice of our peers on ways we can improve. If you think you might be interested, please take a look at our guidelines for participation below.
Preaching Companions Guidelines
Participants will select one sermon that they have given from the previous month. After the first of the month they will send us a link to a video of this sermon. At the end of the first week of the month The Pulpiteer will compose an email that consists of links to all of the videos and send this out to the group. On or near the last week of the month we will have a scheduled zoom call and offer each person constructive feedback on their sermon.
It is not necessary for each person to participate every month, however, out of consideration for everyone’s time if you submit a sermon for the group to watch, it is expected you will be present for the zoom call. If you can’t make the call at the end of the month, then please don’t submit a sermon that month.
Sermons may come from any context (Sunday morning, midweek, weddings, funerals, major feasts, etc.) but participants in the zoom call should submit a sermon of some sort and should indicate in some way what scripture readings were offered during the service. Ordinarily, everyone who is present to offer critique should also be receiving critique. This is meant to be a group for mutual support (and mutual vulnerability) and therefore everyone participating will need to be open to giving AND receiving feedback.
Participants should be committed to Christian orthodoxy, broadly speaking. While there is ample room for diversity and disagreement on biblical interpretations and styles of churchmanship, and while mutual respect is to be given over disagreements over some matters of doctrine, basic creedal Christianity is expected to be the norm. Participants are reminded that in their ordinations they affirmed their belief in the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God and committed themselves to uphold the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church. Sermons should reflect these commitments even when trying to advocate for change or reform. Clergy from other Christian denominations are welcomed to participate; however the same commitment to a broad creedal orthodoxy is expected.
Feedback will be offered by participants both on content and style. For this reason, videos of sermons are preferred. Participants must be committed to offering critique that is constructive and to being respectful of their fellow preachers. All of us, at one time or another, have delivered a sermon that simply didn’t hit the mark. Humility and respect both in giving and receiving feedback is essential.
Arguments about pronouns and Divine gender are to be avoided. We respect that preachers will be preaching to different congregations in different contexts. Arguing about pronouns for God is rarely helpful and does not always take into account these local contexts. Plus, there are many ways that a preacher can broaden a congregation’s understanding of God rather than simply referring to God as “she.” Simply stated let’s not spend too much time here and respect a preacher’s choice to use what works for them in their context.
Finally, preachers are encouraged to submit “hits” as well as “misses.” In other words, don’t just submit your best sermons, but also submit sermons that just didn’t go quite the way you wanted or hoped. We are all here to grow and improve and not just to congratulate each other!
Our first zoom gathering will be on Tuesday, March 19 at 11:00am.
To participate in this meeting please signup below. You will then be sent an email and will be invited to submit a video link to a sermon by March 1st. Very recent sermons are always preferred. You will later receive an email with links to all participants’ sermons. Please view all the sermons before joining the zoom call.
Santa’s list of naughty preachers
The list you DON’T want to be on!
Please don’t make the baby Jesus cry by being one of these preachers. Santa may just have a lump of coal with your name written all over it!
1. The Shamer
We all have that relative or friend that likes to shame us for not calling them, EVERY TIME WE CALL THEM! It never makes you want to call more often. In fact, it usually does quite the opposite. Christmas and Easter are two times when we see lots of folks that we never see any other time of the year. DO NOT be tempted to point this out to them. Not even as a passing joke. Nobody wants to be shamed for not going to church, especially while they are sitting in church. It doesn’t matter if the only reason they are there is because grandma wanted to come, or they just wanted to hear the music, or see dress their kids up in cute outfits. None of that matters. We never know how God may be working on someone or how the spirit may touch them during the service. We never know what seeds we may be planting. We also don’t know who may be despairing inside and needs to hear a message of hope or feel a sense of connection. Just welcome people and love them. Don’t make a big deal out of the fact that you haven’t seen them in a year. Don’t mention it at all. Yes, as a clergy person it can be very frustrating and disheartening for people to only darken your door twice a year, but shaming people for not coming will never make them want to visit you more.
2. The Experimenter
Do not bring a dish of experimental sweet potatoes to Christmas dinner! Use the recipe your grandma gave you. There is a time and a place for trying new things, but Christmas probably isn’t it. Now is not the time to introduce some novelty or gimmick to your Christmas sermon. Considering using props? Leave the toys under the tree. Want to do something responsive with the congregation? My response is: NO! Doing something interactive with children is one thing, but when it comes to what is being offered to the adults in your congregation, I’m willing to bet that most folks aren’t coming to church on Christmas looking for something entertaining or unique. You don’t need to be a clown, or a comedian, or a singer, or a poet. You don’t need to do something original or try to come up with some new take on the gospel story. The fact that my local hardware store sells inflatable nativity scenes is evidence that the world hasn’t grown completely bored with the story of Jesus yet, so we don’t need to treat it like it is a tired old tale.
3. The Heretic
The Heretic is often seen walking hand-in-hand with the Experimenter. Maybe it is a shared desire to appear edgy or cool. The Heretic fancies him or herself to be insightful or innovative. Their new interpretation of the story of Jesus will be just the key that will make the gospel acceptable and interesting to a world that no longer believes in magic. But the joke is almost always on them. Scratch the surface of any new interpretation of the gospel and you are likely to find a very old heresy. Preachers who try to make the story of Jesus more edgy, usually end up make the story quite tame…and boring. What could be more yawn-inducing than a preacher trying to imply that Mary wasn’t a virgin or that people in the ancient world didn’t understand where babies come from? People have been trying to explain AND EXPLAIN-AWAY the Incarnation for over 2,000 years. It is highly unlikely that your original insight is going to be either original or insightful.
4. The Know-it-all
Spare me your Greek, your Hebrew, your Latin and your ten-dollar words. It is entirely possible, necessary even, to make the gospel story intelligible to the average person in your congregation WITHOUT dumbing it down. Preachers who feel the need to constantly prop themselves up on fancy words and who try to dangle their seminary education in front of others in order to be admired, seldom appear more intelligent for doing so. The same is true for preachers who revel in trying to deconstruct the nativity story. You think you know better than the early Church about when Jesus was born and where? You think that most of our Christmas traditions were simply stolen from pagans? Well, your popular theories may very well be built on less evidence than the gospel itself. In any event, discussions that may be perfectly good for an in-depth bible study, may be wholly inappropriate for a Christmas Eve sermon. Know the difference. And remember that Know-it-alls are frequently toppled from their towers and proven to be the Know-not-quite-alls that they actually are, so it is best to approach the pulpit with a great deal of humility.
5. The Scrooge
Some clergy just insist on peeing on anything that is popular. Hymns, songs, traditions, you name it, if it brings joy to enough people some jerk is going to stand up in the pulpit and denounce it. Mary did you know? Ornaments with Santa kneeling in front of the manger. Mariah Carey. Christmas is always going to be a mix of things that we love and things that we find annoying, but the sermon is not the time to go trotting out your negative opinions about everything. Some people are never happier than when they are stealing someone else’s joy or poo-pooing something that is popular. Just stop it. I’m not saying that the church needs to embrace every secular tradition or every popular religious tradition, far from it. But don’t be a joy-stealer in the pulpit.
The fact is, I think that The Scrooge is what all naughty preachers become in the end: the person who just doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, the joy and the wonder that is right in front of them; the person who tries to steal joy from others. The gospel story, as it is, is a reason for joy and wonder. I don’t need someone to give me reasons to doubt it; the world has given me plenty of those already. I need someone to give me permission to believe. I need a preacher to direct me to the magic and the joy and the wonder and the hope that is already and always present in the story of Jesus. I don’t go to church looking for something new; I go to church looking for something that is timeless. The gospel is timeless. So avoid Santa’s naughty this year and just tell people the miraculous and mysterious story about God being born as one of us. Don’t shame or lecture the guests that God sends to your door, for whatever reason that brought them there. It is no sin, when people come to you looking for comfort, to serve them comfort food. You don’t need to be original or creative, you just need to love the story yourself and still see the magic in it.
Keep it simple, keep it joyful, and keep it miraculous. You may just give one of your best sermons and avoid a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.
Where the best sermons come from…
So I started this website and blog back in August. I had (and still have) a list of articles waiting to be written on a host of subjects related to preaching. It is now November, and this will be my first new post in two months. What happened?
Life.
A lot of life has been happening over the last couple of months, specifically the life of a rector. We have had six funerals, a wedding, a major parish outreach event that got cancelled because of flooding, a major parish outreach event that DIDN’T get cancelled but GOT flooded, an ongoing issue with vandalism and theft that has necessitated repeated calls to the police, a broken boiler, a leaking roof, and what else? I honestly struggle to remember at this point. This is of course all in addition to just the normal Sunday masses, weekly worship and bible study, Sunday School, Children’s Prayer Breakfasts and day to day administration and pastoral care.
Then there is my own life that has been happening right alongside parish life, with raising a toddler, dealing chronic pain and health issues (both my own and issues of loved ones), trying to take a vacation and visit family, and just generally dealing with the day-to-day stuff that we all deal with. Then the dog died. Sigh.
So, as I said, a LOT of life has been happening over the last couple of months. Please don’t take any of this as a complaint or a whine though, because it’s not meant to be. I am blessed. I have a wonderful parish with devoted and capable people. I have wonderful staff members and volunteers. For the first time in my ministry, I have a curate who is excellent and helps to share the workload of parish priestly ministry (including preaching). I have a wonderful husband (who understands this job because he is a rector too), a beautiful child, and family and friends that continually offer love and support. As I said, I am blessed. Many people have it MUCH worse, and everything I just listed above can be pretty much par for the course for any rector working just about anywhere. There is just a lot more to keeping a parish going than many people realize, even under the best circumstances.
So, the thing I haven’t had in abundance lately is much free time to think and write deep thoughts about the art of preaching. In fact, some of my own sermons over the last couple of months have been the proverbial “Saturday Night Specials,” when the first chance I have had to organize my thoughts has been when I finally crawled into bed on Saturday night. It’s not ideal, but sometimes it just is. You do the best you can. In seminary I imagined that my sermon preparation time would look a lot like Yentl pouring over the holy books, comparing translations and ancient commentaries for hours on end and getting into spirited debates with colleagues; or maybe like some dusty old professor sitting by a fire reading classic Christian texts from the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Well, it doesn’t quite work out that way, at least not for most of us. You can try to manage your time all you want, you can schedule sermon prep, you can delegate responsibilities and you can set good boundaries. These are all great things and you SHOULD do them. But just be prepared to hear the Devil’s laughter when you do. Because boilers and copiers and rainstorms and roof leaks and sickness and death DO NOT care about your schedule. Sometimes a Saturday night may be the only time you get. It’s OK. God works miracles with what we give him.
Now obviously I take preaching very seriously. I think that sermons can be critically important encounters with the God of scripture, and they always deserve more attention than we preachers are able to give them. We preachers have an obligation to make sure that what we are saying from the pulpit is accurate and scripturally defensible at the very least. But there is not, in my experience, a direct correlation between the length of time preparing a sermon and the quality of that sermon. I have heard plenty of terrible sermons that the preacher obviously spent a lot of time on. Preaching isn’t always easy, but sometimes we make it MUCH harder than it needs to be.
Here is what I really came here to say: the best sermons come from a lived faith. Period. Preachers who I know to have a deep and vibrant faith that infects their entire lives tend to preach better sermons. Your personal faith will affect the quality of your sermons more than the amount of time you spend staring at your computer screen. And by “personal faith” I don’t mean your personal opinions or unique interpretations of scripture. I mean your faith in Jesus Christ; Your faith in the Resurrection; Your faith in the truth of the Good News. That faith is where good sermons come from, not gimmicks or clever jokes. Naturally I believe that theology matters, scripture matters, and history matters, but it is crucial to remember that this is a sermon, and not a term paper that you read out loud. Knowing Greek is great, but it is no substitute for really knowing Jesus. Preachers who look for and find Jesus in their daily lives tend to be better at helping their congregations do the same. That is why the best sermons come from the lived faith of the preacher.
What this means in practical terms though, is that good preaching doesn’t take less preparation time, it takes more. If your own personal lived faith has a direct effect on the quality of your sermons, then everything you do to strengthen and nurture that faith becomes a part of sermon preparation. Saying the daily office and/or engaging in some form of regular, prayerful scripture study (that is more than looking at the readings for Sunday), that’s sermon prep. Seeing Jesus at work in the lives of your congregants, that’s sermon prep. Reading books that nurture your faith and deepen your understanding of God, more sermon prep. Going for a walk to clear your head and pray for guidance, sermon prep. Trying to find God in the midst of broken boilers and dirty diapers, yes that is sermon prep too. Everything I do to nurture and strengthen my own faith is sermon prep, even if on the surface it has nothing to do with this week’s gospel reading.
I don’t encourage anyone to wait until Saturday night to start writing Sunday’s sermon. Having specific days and/or hours during the week where you regularly sit down and study Sunday’s scripture readings either alone or with colleagues is a good thing and preachers absolutely SHOULD do it. But four or five hours with a text and a commentary is no substitute for a life lived in active relationship with the God of ALL scripture. The best sermons come from the faith that is already alive in you. So, say the daily office, study scripture regularly, and read (or listen to) good books whenever you can. Look for God in everything you do, no matter how mundane. Pay attention to nurturing and feeding your faith in God first and good sermons WILL come. That is where the best sermons come from.
Essential Reading: Life of Christ
Only two classes of people found the Babe: the shepherds and the Wise Men; the simple and the learned; those who knew they knew nothing, and those who knew that they did not know everything. He is never seen by the man of one book; never by the man who thinks he knows. Not even God can tell the proud anything! Only the humble can find God!
- Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
Comments like the one above are the reason why Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ is, in my opinion, one of the most essential books on any preacher’s bookshelf (aside from the scriptures themselves, obviously). Buy this book. Read it with a pen or highlighter in hand so that you may underline Sheen’s copious observations and asides that may serve as springboards or inspiration for future sermons. I don’t care if you think you are the most protestant Protestant who ever protested and have little to learn from a long deceased Roman Catholic bishop and television personality. You’re wrong. Because Bishop Sheen probably knows the scriptures and the story of Jesus better than you, or in any event he is probably a better storyteller, and that is what really matters here.
The first and most important book recommendation that I have for every preacher is not a book about preaching, it is a book about Jesus. Sheen takes a story that we all think we know and sheds new light all over it. He makes the story of Jesus come alive with his attention to detail and he leaves his readers with the clear impression that not only does he view the story of Jesus as a living story, but that he views the God of Jesus as a living God. This, above all else, is the job of the preacher: connecting the congregation to the story of Jesus and helping them to experience his story as a part of their story. Now, I should add, that I am not one of those preachers who thinks that every sermon needs to be focused on the gospel passage; I do, however, think that every sermon should use whatever passage of scripture is preached on as a window to the whole gospel story. As preachers, we always have a bigger story to tell than just what is printed in the bulletin on Sunday morning. That is why you need this book.
Bishop Sheen’s book is a composite sketch of the life of Our Lord. He does not waste time delineating which details come from Mark’s gospel and which details come from John’s, etc. His purpose is helping people to know Jesus, not helping them to know the authors of the gospels, and this is a difference that it would be good for preachers to be mindful of. If, in reading the quote from Sheen’s book above, your first thought is: “But the shepherds are in Luke’s gospel and the Wise Men are in Matthew’s!” then I have a piece of advice for you: Your congregation doesn’t care. Or at least, they probably don’t. They definitely don’t want this pointed out to them at length on Christmas Eve. Nor should they. Such distinctions might be a great topic for bible study, but a sermon isn’t a bible study. It is an encounter with the living Christ that takes place in the context of worship. The Jesus that we worship is the Jesus of all the gospels, not just one, and definitely not just your favorite. Fulton Sheen knows very well that the accounts of Jesus’s life do not agree in all of their details, but the story he tells is of one Lord and not four different Lords, just as there is only one Jesus that we encounter in worship, it doesn’t matter whether that encounter happens at the font, the pulpit, or the altar. When it comes to telling Jesus’s story, the preacher can learn much from Sheen’s habit of pushing the distinctions between the gospels largely to the side so that they don’t interfere with the ability to take in the story. You might have a good reason to do some “bible study” from the pulpit, but I doubt it. Save it for your adult forum or Lenten bible study. And please miss me with that mythical object of fantasy called “the historical Jesus.” Sheen doesn’t waste any time speculating about what “actually” happened apart from the gospels, and nor should you.
My copy of Sheen’s Life of Christ is heavily underlined, but there are also a few question marks and marginal notes for statements that I either don’t understand or that I am not sure I agree with. You will likely not agree with his every observation either. Read this anyways. I have still found more inspiration for sermons from this one book than any other book I own (outside of the bible itself). I will offer one caveat though: in the midst of so many observations about the life of Jesus that seem absolutely timeless, now and then Sheen reveals himself to be very much a product of a different time. We are all shaped by the times we live in, all of us, and Sheen is no exception. He was writing this book in the 1950s. He occasionally will say things that we probably wouldn’t say now, and occasionally it seems as if he is projecting the concerns of his own day back into the gospel (we all do this!). His preface is an excellent example. After a brief paragraph railing against communism, Sheen writes:
The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.
In many ways a brilliant passage, marred I think, by his use of the adjective “feminized” to indicate weakness. He clearly doesn’t know the women I know. But whether we like it or not, this sort of casual sexism was rampant in the age in which this was written. We simply cannot expect someone writing in the mid-twentieth century to sound like someone writing in the early twenty-first. Old books, and old authors, still have much to say to us though, even if we have to occasionally encounter comments that we find a bit challenging or even offensive. Sheen is inspiring, but not faultless. I remember watching an episode of Bishop Sheen’s “Life is Worth Living” in which he made an extremely negative and uncharitable comment about homosexuals. I think he was wrong about that, but I don’t think he’s wrong about Jesus. I’m not looking for a dead Roman Catholic bishop from the 1950s to affirm my sexuality. I can find that elsewhere. What I am looking for, whenever I pick up Sheen’s book, is wisdom from someone who has a deep, deep understanding of Jesus’s story, and skill in sharing that story in compelling ways. And that is what I find. It really is a must read for any preacher, because telling the story of Jesus IS YOUR JOB, and Sheen can help you do it better.
In Defense of Pulpits
A symbol of an encounter with God.
I love old pulpits.
It doesn’t matter if it is a grand and richly carved pulpit in a medieval church in central Paris, or a humble, rough-hewn pulpit in a mountain chapel in Cades Cove, Tennessee, there is just something powerful and mystical about a place where God’s word has been faithfully preached. Sure, one could argue that they are just a piece of church furniture, a platform with a place for the preacher to rest his or her notes and bible, but for me at least, they are so much more than that. Good sermons have touched and enriched my life in ways that are, quite frankly, difficult to explain. They have led me, and continue to lead me, back to God. A good sermon can be a mystical, almost sacramental, thing. It can help us realize how the God of scripture is active and working in our lives. And if the sermon has power, as a point of connection between us and God, then the place where the sermon is given takes on power as well. It becomes a symbol of that connection. That is why pulpits have power. They are a symbol of an encounter with God. They represent the place where God’s story meets our story, where the God of scripture reveals himself to us through the words of one of his servants. Maybe there isn’t power in the wood, but there is power, divine power, in the word. It is the words that have been preached from pulpits that make them holy. Words of comfort, words of hope, words of warning; words that shape how and what we think of ourselves and the world around us. Words that direct us to God. When someone speaks from a podium, they can be talking about anything, but when someone speaks from a pulpit, they are talking about God. Whether they are grand or humble, the true power and significance of pulpits comes from being a place where people meet God. Pulpits matter.
Where is the pulpit in your church?
In my church, the pulpit stands to one side in the crossing, right at the point where the nave of the church meets the chancel. It is a common placement for pulpits in Anglican churches, although this wasn’t always the case. There was an architectural trend in many Anglican churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of making the pulpit the central focus of the congregation’s attention. So instead of the altar being front and center, as is the case my church and in most Anglican (and of course Roman Catholic) churches today, what you had was a large prominent pulpit right in the middle from which the scriptures were read and the sermon was preached. There are a few old Anglican churches around that still have this arrangement, and in many reformed traditions, such as Congregationalist and Baptist, this is the preferred setup, with the pulpit in the center. Maybe that is where yours is.
One of my ecclesiastical heroes is the Victorian priest John Keble, who in addition to being a poetry tutor at Oxford, was also appointed to a church in the quaint country village of Hursley, just outside of Winchester in England. When he got to his new church, he found a building much like the reformed parishes I just described with a prominent pulpit in the center. This was unsatisfactory for Keble, so he moved it. You see, as a poetry teacher, symbols meant everything to him, and the placement of the pulpit symbolized the role of the preacher. He didn’t want the preacher to be the main focus of the congregation’s attention; he wanted that to be Jesus. And for Keble, Jesus was most fully present to the congregation in the sacrament of communion. If Jesus is really and truly meeting his people in communion, then that is what should be front and center in the church. The preacher’s role, for Keble, was to be a witness; a witness to God’s presence in the midst of his people; a witness to an encounter with God; a witness to Jesus. That is why the pulpit, in Keble’s eyes, should be off to the side in the midst of the congregation. It is the place where God regularly encounters Christians on their journey between the font of their baptism and their ultimate destiny of being gathered before God’s throne. If the altar is the place where we as Christians most fully encounter Jesus, if it is a symbol of the Tree of Life and the Christian promise of heaven (as was Keble’s thought) then the pulpit should be in a place where the preacher can point people to Jesus, direct them along their way, but not get in the way.
One could, of course, argue that that is what all good preachers are trying to do, regardless of where they stand during the sermon: point people to Jesus. They invite people into a fuller life in Christ. The prevalence of “altar calls” in reformed sermons would seem to be a good indicator that even pastors delivering sermons from the very front of the church still see the sermon as an encounter with God that should lead to an even deeper encounter. Even if the pulpit is at the end of the aisle, it isn’t intended to be the end of the Christian journey. It is the place where we are called to go deeper.
Nowadays people don’t always see pulpits that way. They may not even recognize their importance at all. I have heard pulpits described as symbols of clericalism; a glorified platform that elevates the priest above his or her worshippers; a vestige of bygone days when God was seen as distant and unapproachable like so many high altars in grand cathedrals. Now, of course, I think most of this is nonsense. Why shouldn’t altars and pulpits be grand and lifted up? Why shouldn’t they be as beautiful as they can be? Is there any story more deserving of a glorious setting than the one that is told in our pulpits and on our altars?
I feel a great twinge of sadness whenever I see an abandoned high altar off in the distance, no longer a place of sacred encounter; now used primarily as a glorified flower stand, while God’s great banquet is celebrated down in the nave. It is the same feeling I experience when I see a pulpit standing alone and unused, looking down on a priest in the aisle reading his or her sermon from a borrowed music stand. It is a feeling of loss; loss of tradition; loss of respect; loss of glory and majesty. It feels like a loss to me when any place that has been a witness to God’s story and God’s grace is casually abandoned. It doesn’t matter if it is a pulpit or an entire church. It is a loss when the symbols of God’s grace are so lightly dismissed.
I think that for a generation or more, the Church has been told that we must make a choice between awe and intimacy. We can either worship God in settings that emphasize God’s grandeur, or we can worship God in settings that emphasize God’s humility, but we can’t have both. It is the tension between recognizing that God is immanent (present in the community and present in our lives) and transcendent (above us and beyond our comprehension). I think that it is time that we started calling this out as the false dichotomy that it is. It is a false choice between two aspects of our Lord that does not need to be made. Jesus Christ is both God and Man. He is both immanent and transcendent. Our response to him can be one of both awe and intimacy, at the same time. We do not have to choose between these two responses to God because as they are bound together in the person of Jesus Christ. We can celebrate communion at a high altar, recognizing the meal as a symbol of the eternal banquet of our Lord, filled with awe and wonder, and at the very same time we can experience God’s real presence in the gathered community giving us food for our daily journey. It is NOT either/or, it is both/and. The same is true for pulpits. God’s word can be preached from a platform that is grand and lifted up, and still I can experience that word as a humble message from a personal saviour. The God that we encounter in the sermon is a God who is both set apart from us, and in the midst of us. That is why pulpits are so wonderful: they bring the word of God into the congregation, and at the same time they physically remind us that the word is sacred and set-apart. It is symbolic of what a good sermon does: good sermons help us to see God at work in our daily lives AND help us to recognize those moments as encounters with a God who is holy.
Perhaps it is time for a long overdue caveat: obviously I recognize that Jesus didn’t preach from a pulpit. John the Baptist didn’t preach from a pulpit. Plenty of excellent sermons have been delivered in revival tents, and in church aisles, and in open fields, and plenty of terrible sermons have been delivered in pulpits. I would never go so far as to say that one must preach in a pulpit, because there are reasons not to do so at times; sometimes it is necessity, sometimes it is the Holy Spirit moving us to do something to make a specific point. A sermon can be preached anywhere, just like a baptism can be done in a river and Eucharist can be celebrated on a dining room table. God is never bound to work within our ecclesiastical traditions, but that doesn’t mean that traditions and holy symbols should be casually dismissed. God uses them too. They are a gift from God.
I say this because I have often seen pulpits abandoned or unused almost as a matter of principle by the preacher; as if the pulpit was something to be avoided rather than embraced. I have witnessed some ridiculous examples of this aversion to pulpits. One preacher stood immediately beside the pulpit, notes in hand, fumbling to find her place (and her point), not on the nave floor and not in the center aisle, but still refusing to step into the pulpit which was literally two steps away. Another preacher week after week walks down, grabs a music stand from beside the pulpit, moves it a few steps forward, preaches, and then puts the music stand back. All the while the pulpit stands there, unused, seemingly mocking the preacher, as if to say: “if only there was some piece of furniture that could help this preacher out.” When I have heard some priests sneer at the thought of preaching from a pulpit I have been left to wonder whether they thought pulpit preaching was above them, or beneath them. I often suspect the latter.
Preaching from the aisle, or anywhere else for that matter, is no sign of humility. As I said, there may be times when the Holy Spirit moves you to do something different, and a good preacher is bound to listen to that Spirit. There may be many good reasons to preach outside of a pulpit, but I don’t think humility is one of them. If your reason for not preaching from the pulpit is that you think it makes you look more humble, then I have bad news for you: you aren’t fooling anybody. I am reminded of the quote from C. S. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost:
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.
Lewis may not have been referring to preaching specifically, but I think the same principle applies. To preach outside of a pulpit is no proof of humility. If you are a truly humble preacher, your congregation will know it, no matter where you preach from. If you are full of conceit, preaching from the aisle isn’t going to help.
There are good reasons to preach from the aisle sometimes, but I don’t think there is ever a good reason to fully abandon the pulpit. It is still a potent symbol of a sacred calling. Even though John the Baptist didn’t use a pulpit, those of us who do step into a pulpit, are in a sense stepping into his shoes. He gave probably the greatest sermon in the history of the world. Standing in the midst of a crowd of people who thought he had all the answers, he pointed to someone else off in the distance and said simply: “Behold the Lamb of God.” Short and to the point, just like many good sermons are. John the Baptist was surrounded by people who came to him looking for salvation and answers, but he pointed instead to Jesus and said: “there’s your answer. Follow him.” John fulfilled the words of the Prophet Isaiah, by raising up his voice and saying: “Here is your God!” John is the preacher who introduces the real preacher. His job was to make the introduction. His role was to help people see that their God was coming to meet them, in fact he was already in the midst of them.
That is really what the preacher is meant to do; that is our job: point people to Jesus, and get out of the way. The preacher must keep his or her eyes peeled, looking for signs of the Lord’s presence and say to the congregation: “here is your God. The Lord is right here in your life, only you may not be able to recognize him. The Lord is just over the horizon; can you see him coming?” That is what the preacher is for: to help people meet the Lord; to help them recognize the signs and symbols of God’s presence, and in the Christian tradition one of the greatest symbols of an encounter with the God of scripture is the pulpit itself. That is why I want to begin any discussion of preaching by lifting up a piece of church furniture, that though it may be either simple or ornate, represents both a sacred calling and a sacred encounter.
John Keble got to build and move his pulpit where he wanted it, but I would venture to say that most of us don’t get to do that. The pulpit in my church wasn’t built for me. I am not the first priest to preach from it, nor am I likely to be the last. It is a reminder to me, every time I step into it, that none of this is actually about me. If I ever do get to build a pulpit though, I would like to leave inscribed inside a piece of solemn advice to every preacher that uses it afterwards:
This is not about you.
Of course, in order for the preacher to be continually confronted with that important reminder, he or she would need to be using the pulpit.