Preaching:
Preachers other preachers read (and preach!)
I
talk to lots of clergy - in conferences and one to one – and have a pretty good
idea about their preaching styles, and the other preachers they read for inspiration.
An
interesting thing happened on the way to writing this chapter, Mothers’ Day 2014. My wife has produced one
of the two or three most popular Mothers’ Day sermons online. (Google those
words and you’ll find hers in the top four – out of one million). In the week before
every (North American) Mothers’ Day up to 5,000 people daily read her sermon. And
many preach it – some without acknowledgement. (Jan still smiles when she
remembers the apologetic email she received from an American pastor who did
just that – and was caught out!).
Some
people – I’m one of them – actually enjoy reading others’ sermons. When John
Claypool used to publish his each week, and sent them out once a month, I often
found myself dropping everything to read them. I’ve done the same with other
contemporary homiletical ‘greats’ like Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Barbara Brown Taylor, Frederick
Buechner, Tom Long, Eugene Peterson, Fred Craddock and William Willimon. And, a
generation ago, W.E. Sangster, James Stewart, and Helmut Thielicke. Before
that, F.W. Boreham and at the turn of the 20th Century the often-circumloquacious
but erudite but orthodox Peter Taylor Forsyth [footnote Jason Goroncy review].
And if you add the black preachers Martin Luther King and Gardner Taylor, (and, if you want a Pentecostal, TD Jakes), that
just about completes the list of English-speaking/writing ‘greats’ in the 20th and
early 21st centuries, in my view. (Oh, and don’t forget William Barclay, who in
his commentaries and one-page reviews in the Expository Times provided more preachable material than anyone else
in the 20th century.) [3]
So
how would you select the best Christian sermons ever written? A book was published
a decade ago in the U.K. titled Best
Sermons Ever collected by – wait for it! – the assistant editor of the
British newspaper Daily Telegraph,
Christopher Howse [1]. Here’s Howse’s list: Peter the Apostle, John Chrysostom,
St. Augustine, Aelfric, St. Bernard, The Homilies, Lancelot Andrewes, John
Donne, Jeremy Taylor, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Edwards, John
Wesley, Lawrence Sterne, Sydney Smith, John Henry Newman, Charles Spurgeon,
Martin Luther King, H.A. Williams, and Pope John Paul II.
Now,
class, what does that list suggest to you? We’ll come back to that. In addition
Howse offers excerpts from other sermons and prayers from people ranging from
St. Francis of Assisi, George Herbert, John Keble… to moderns like Mother
Teresa and Billy Graham.
First,
a little introduction to the ‘practical theology’ of preaching. What is
preaching supposed to ‘do’, if I can put the question into a utilitarian frame
of reference? I’d suggest the best preaching is didactic, prophetic, and
dramatic. [2]
Christopher
Howse would, I think, prefer three other adjectives – erudite, scholarly, and/or
‘literary’. In other words, he comes to this exercise as a literateur, rather
than as a homiletician. Notice the absence of modern American mainline
preachers in his list? Yes, perhaps Jonathan Edwards, ML King and Billy Graham
deserve a place, but what of the others most theologically-sophisticated
Americans are reading, like those mentioned above? (The answer, from my
experience of 8 – 10 trips to the U.K. for pastors’ conferences: on that side of
the Atlantic many have never heard of them). And I’m surprised W E Sangster
and James Stewart are missing.
So,
frankly, most of these sermons are of classical – rather than devotional –
interest only. Some of them are heavily impregnated with Latin phrases and
other obscurantisms. And some fit into the category of ‘Why use 10 words when
100 will suffice?’
One
of the best is a homiletical essay – Jonathan Swift’s ‘Upon Sleeping in Church’
. The text, of course, is about Eutychus falling out of the window, Acts 20:9:
‘The accident which happened to this young man hath not been sufficient to
discourage his successors’. But frankly, I’d go to sleep in some of these
sermons – especially Laurence Sterne’s on ‘Evil Speaking’.
And
some are both brilliant and scary. How about this, from Jonathan Edwards’
15-page sermon (without a title – but from one version of his famous ‘Sinners
In the Hands of an Angry God’ :
‘If
you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful
case, or showing you the least regard or favour, that instead of that, he will
only tread you under foot. And though he
will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, yet
he will not regard that, but he will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make
it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his
raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you, in the utmost
contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be
trodden down as the mire of the streets.’ [4]
No
wonder ‘revival’ broke out when people heard this sort of diatribe!
Some
excerpts and notes (many of these are in the category ‘they don’t produce them
like this anymore!’) :
*
Wesley traveled on foot or horseback 225,000 miles and preached 40,000
sermons!
*
Lancelot Andrewes mastered fifteen languages!
*
‘In Lapland witches sell winds’ (John Donne)
*
‘Celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual
sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but
marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house and gathers sweetness from every
flower… and feeds the world with delicacies’ (Jeremy Taylor)
*
‘It is my duty – it is my wish – it is the subject of this day to point out
those evils of the Catholic religion from which we have escaped’ (from Sydney
Smith’s ‘The Rules of Christian Charity’ !). Another profundity from that
sermon: ‘The evil of difference of opinion must exist – it admits of no cure’
*
‘When people say that I acted charitably towards so and so, what they generally
mean is that in fact that I hate his guts but managed to behave as though I
didn’t’ (H. A. Williams)
An
inspirational note from Martin Luther King: ‘Let us not despair. Let us not
lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced
mind can be changed, and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the
valley of hate to the high mountain of love… Let us have love, compassion
and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to
realize that… we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves.’
This
book reminds me of the 9 November 1895 Punch cartoon, which showed a timid
curate having breakfast in his bishop’s home. The bishop is saying “I’m afraid
you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones”, to which the curate replies, in a desperate
attempt not to give offence: “Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it
are excellent!”.
If
you are a theological or literary sophisticate who reads sermons without
wanting to be ‘spiritually challenged’ by them, this book is for you…
~~
[1]
You can sample his Blog here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/christopherhowse/100073110/hang-me-its-the-coen-brothers-folk-club/
[2]
See http://jmm.org.au/articles/8100.htm for
more
[3] http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/8527.htm
. This interesting list of the (twenty) ‘Greatest Preachers of the Twentieth
Century’ is regularly at the top of the 20,000+ ‘most-accessed’ articles on our
website – except in the week-and-a-half before Mothers’ Day (!). The Baylor
University list of ‘12 Most Effective Preachers’
actually listed a woman – Barbara Brown Taylor (http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=1036
). Google her sermon at Riverside Church in New York on the Good Samaritan for
an excellent example of modern, lucid, challenging preaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wds3OxzHNAI The best list of outstanding modern preachers
is the one comprising speakers at Yale’s Lyman Beecher Lecture series - http://www.library.yale.edu/div/beecher.html
~~
PTFORSYTH
(Goroncy) - wordy, erudite, knew it was acquiesce 'in'.
Goroncy:
PTFORSYTH astonishingly circumloquacious, as familiar with then-modern
'critical scholarship' as with English poets. Sermons three times longer than
they needed to be. Verbosity Petered out with Barth, Tillich, THIELICKE .
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