Читать книгу A Way with Words - Adam T. Trambley - Страница 11
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All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, forreproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
—2 Timothy 3:16
I KNEW I HAD to be creative. I was starting my new call in August. The vestry had impressed upon me the need to develop the congregation’s stewardship. The senior warden reinforced their emphasis by privately expressing concerns about being able to pay my salary after eighteen months unless something changed. Nobody, however, wants to hear the new preacher start begging for money out of the gate, nor does a winsome vision for the future start by focusing on financial fears. Most members of the parish had made pledges for the current year in November and were not likely to change them in the middle of summer. Confronting the issue immediately did not look promising.
I knew that stewardship development was more about fostering faith in the abundance of God than running a successful fundraising campaign. I decided that I could begin that work immediately if I approached it creatively. Rather than worry about how much people could give, I inserted topics into the sermons that the congregation would need if they were going to make more faithful pledges the coming November.
My first Sunday, the lectionary epistle reading was James 1:17–27, which contains an interesting phrase that in another context I probably would not have focused on. The end of verse 18 reads, “that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” Understanding this phrase required an understanding of the Old Testament concept of first fruits giving, and I believe first fruits giving is key to faithful stewardship.
That morning, I spent about 40 percent of the sermon explaining what first fruits giving meant in scripture, how the concept is generally used today for tithing, and what that might have to do with us being the first fruits of God’s creatures. From that explanation, I moved onto the central points of the James reading. While preaching the text of the day, I began the process of teaching the congregation the essential vocabulary of the language of stewardship.
The following week’s gospel was the passage about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed by a demon, followed by Jesus’s healing of a deaf man in the Decapolis. This reading is a difficult one to preach. Part of how I handled it, with stewardship in mind, was looking at the way we are challenged to share what we have. Jesus became willing to share his gifts with those who were not his people, eventually trusting that he could minister to all. I related that to our ability to trust in God’s abundance as we share what we have, even with outsiders and those whom society may not deem worthy. That provided me a way to highlight the work of the food pantry and the generous gifts the congregation made to ensure our neighbors had enough to eat. The primary sermon focus challenged people to deeper relationships and conversion of heart toward the other, but I was able to weave in one significant stewardship theme.
I continued this basic approach the next two months.
When the reading from James included, “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly” (4:2b–3a), the verses allowed me to spend about four minutes contrasting churches that ask God for new people to meet the budget and keep things the same versus those that ask God for new people to share our faith with and to prioritize our ability to do mission. Two weeks after that I included “withholding our tithes and offerings from God’s storehouse” in a list of sins as part of a sermon on God’s forgiveness and redemption. The following week’s gospel, on the rich man instructed to sell all he had and give to the poor, was a natural place to talk about money and discipleship.
Intentionality about stewardship throughout the late summer and early fall meant that when the traditional stewardship season rolled around in November, the congregation had already heard more about tithing and faithful generosity than they had over the past few years. I brought this extended sermon focus to its peak with a three-week stewardship sermon series, which was also new to the congregation. That coincided with the annual stewardship letter, inviting people to put their pledge cards for the following year in the offering plate on the last Sunday of the series.
I took three disparate approaches for the three sermons. The first sermon covered the week’s lectionary text on the widow’s mite and focused on God’s abundance. The second week, I requested permission from the bishop to use Malachi 3:7–12 as the first reading. Instead of focusing on the church’s need for our money, I talked about our need to give and God’s promises to take care of us when we are generous. Then, for the final week, I spent the sermon sharing my own stewardship journey, including my own significant struggles and setbacks as I learned to trust how God provided and cared for my family and me. I closed by sharing my family’s pledge with the parish.
While not even close to an eighteen-month-long sermon, this extended four-month focus allowed the congregation to move forward. Pledges increased, and we got on a solid financial footing for the next year.
Taking the Time to Teach and Equip
Teaching a new language through preaching allows people to become comfortable with new concepts in discipleship before they are asked to begin applying them. Setting a copy of War and Peace in front of a third grader and making them feel guilty for not understanding it will neither aid their comprehension nor make them particularly interested in picking the book up later in life. Too often, we as preachers can be guilty of employing a similar pedagogy that is not only ineffective but also lacks love for our congregation. I have sat through sermons in failing congregations where preachers have guilted their people for not doing enough evangelism work, without sharing any tips, techniques, or perspectives on how that particular parish might be effective in sharing the Good News.
Churches almost always have some crisis happening, at least when viewed from a slightly anxious perspective. The temptation for church leadership is to want the issue of the moment solved immediately, and to start exhorting the congregation to drop everything and fix it. Important congregational transformation is unlikely to occur in a week or two, regardless of how impassioned the preaching, nor is serving the problem up with a large side of guilt on a Sunday morning likely to help matters.
Teaching a new language to move people toward a congregational goal is a better option than guilt because of the assumptions it makes about the people in our pews. Too many mediocre sermons assume that people both know how to do something and have the resources to do it, but still choose not to. A long-term sermon assumes that people want to move where God is calling the church but are unable to get there. Instead of being afraid that the church is refusing to do what is necessary, the long-term sermon trusts the congregation enough to believe that as they grow in their understanding and capacity—their faith—they will also make choices to grow in their discipleship. As the cultural incentives of church attendance have declined in recent decades, the congregations with us on Sunday morning deserve our trust. With fewer motivations to come to church outside of a desire for a deeper relationship with God, we can be confident that those present will take the right steps when they are able.
If we believe that people will move forward in discipleship when they are prepared, our sermon goal becomes preparing them to move in the direction that is currently most important for the health and growth of the church. To live into a new direction, the people in the pews will need some important information.
Elements a Congregation Needs to Make a Change
The first, and possibly most important, need for people to live into a change is to understand why that change is important. This understanding is essential before people make any change in their lives and is doubly important when that change involves something with the layers of personal importance, family history, and institutional authority as their church. Even early adopters and change agents in other areas are often more conservative about modifications in their church life and personal pieties.
Preaching about the importance of change usually covers a variety of areas. The most important is a vision of how things can look for the congregation and the larger community when the change is made. When a congregation has had a reasonable degree of success in the way things have always been done, painting a picture of how things could be better is essential. This understanding for change is a practical one. Hand-inhand with the future vision, we must offer a description of ways that the current situation is not as good as it could be. Things may seem to be chugging right along, but many in the pews may not be aware of just how precarious things are. Or maybe what is happening is working well, but the community’s needs have become so much greater that the church is no longer living into the fullness of its mission.
In addition to the practical, any change in a church context also has a spiritual motivation. Discipleship requires us to grow as individuals and as communities. God has a call for each congregation, and every church will undergo a variety of transformations to fully become what God has created it to be. A central preaching task is helping our people hear God’s call through illuminating scriptural connections and the spiritual stories of the congregation itself. This spiritual underpinning is a key motivation for any change that will happen in the church context.
In addition to understanding why they need to change, people also need to know how to change. Teaching people how to make needed changes is, in some ways, a newer requirement of our preaching. In the past, preachers could expect that large portions of the congregation were able to learn something that they needed to know by attending church school sessions, parish meetings, and congregational trainings or other gatherings. Today in many congregations, the best or even only chance to teach a large percentage of the church is during the sermon; key leaders may not avail themselves of other opportunities. Even if the topics seem less “spiritual,” using sermon time to look at the practical way to implement a change may be essential for a church to live into God’s call. We can no longer afford the luxury of limiting the subject matter of our sermons when God is trying to get our people to grow.
Teaching people how to do something does, of course, includes a spiritual component. Talking about how to pray and create the spiritual momentum for congregational growth is essential. An important part of teaching people how to move forward is helping them understand that even the practical aspects of any changes are going to be done by cooperating with the work God is already doing. That spiritual emphasis may be paired with any variety of practical skills. Depending on the current focus, helpful sermons may walk people through putting prayer apps on their smartphones, giving people practice in naming a place they saw God working in their lives recently and sharing those God-sightings with someone else, or discussing the appropriate time to talk to someone on the vestry about a conflict in the church.
Addressing these topics is not something that can happen in a single morning sermon. Even a short series is likely inadequate to handle all aspects of what a congregation might need, although the sermon series can be a component of a larger initiative. A long-term sermon is the best approach to offer the needed theological rationale, practical vision, and concrete skills at an appropriate pace.
The goal of the long-term sermon is to allow time for the variety of information and application needed for a congregation to understand, get comfortable with, and be prepared to make changes. Instead of moving directly through information, a long-term sermon allows a preacher to introduce something in a small way and then circle back a couple of times while weaving in other relevant information that illuminates and reinforces the overarching goal. Such a practice assumes that the congregation needs to hear something several times to become comfortable with it. Preaching a consistent focus over a year or two also acknowledges that the average congregant is not in church every Sunday. Points need to be repeated for everyone to hear them, but preachers can’t just preach the same sermon over and over again until it reaches the whole congregation. If some key leaders miss a great sermon while traveling, that is a loss. If those same leaders miss a key point about the parish’s current focus during their trip, the preacher needs to ensure that the point is reinforced at other times.
Long-Term Sermons Integrated into the Weekly Sermon
Preaching a long-term sermon means that the goals for our weekly sermons will be slightly different. In seminary, most of us were taught to have a tight, coherent sermon. Many books on preaching rightly emphasize the effectiveness of having a single point for each sermon so that listeners know exactly what they are hearing and what the sermon is asking them to do. Some successful preachers argue that even the traditional “three points and a poem” sermon contain two points and one poem too many. As people’s attention spans shorten, a homiletic laser-focus is helpful.
While maintaining best practices in preaching is important, we also need to look at our sermons as contributing to something larger. A good comparison for a long-term sermon might be movie franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each individual film has to be coherent and excellent in its own right and on its own terms. No one mistakes Spider-Man or Ant-Man for the Guardians of the Galaxy. At the same time, each film contains content that moves the story of the entire franchise forward. In some cases, the whole movie plot is integral to the larger series. In other films, however, the plot may center on an unrelated escapade. Even in the seemingly tangential installments, however, something happens that connects to the wider picture. That connection could be a conversation, the introduction of a character, or even a short seemingly unrelated clip at the end of the credits. Both the film and the connection are important. A series of isolated great films will not move the overall story arc forward. Each story, even with different actors and directors, makes its own impact while serving the larger whole.
Sometimes our weekly sermon will dovetail perfectly with our over-arching focus. The example above about the rich young ruler being told to sell all he has and give to the poor during a stewardship arc is a great example. Usually, however, the point of our sermon will not line up so precisely, especially if we are preaching from the lectionary. To move forward, we need to find ways to incorporate some aspect of our larger goal into the weekly goal.
Many weeks, some aspect of the scripture readings connects with where we want the congregation to move. If the focus is on welcoming and hospitality, perhaps a character in the Hebrew Scripture reading exhibits hospitality in an interesting way or the Epistle lesson touches tangentially on the theme. Highlighting it for a minute or two as the reading is preached doesn’t detract from the sermon. Letting the camera linger a little longer supports the long-term goals without detracting from the coherence of the sermon. The ability to incorporate a long-term point can influence the direction of the current week’s theme without dominating it.
Other weeks, the scriptural passages may seemingly have nothing to do with the long-term sermon goal. Those weeks offer a couple of options. The easiest is to ignore the long-term focus for a week and pick it up again the following week. Not everything can, or should, happen every week. Sometimes the Spirit is moving in a different direction and God is ultimately responsible for giving the congregation what it needs. Ignoring the long-term focus is not the only faithful option, however. Most congregations are willing to follow a preacher, especially a preacher who is their pastoral leader, in more than one direction on a Sunday.
Some weeks, a sermon allows for an aside. A homiletics teacher might reduce a sermon grade for such detours, but these digressions can be meaningful for a congregation. A preacher can, in effect, say, “Let me pause for a minute to look at something else that I think is important.” If the main sermon can be tied up seamlessly around or in spite of the diversion, a congregation is probably willing to listen. Such asides can also happen at the beginning of a sermon in ways that do not interfere with the structure and impact of the week’s message. I have frequently opened a sermon by saying that before I begin to talk about this week’s gospel, I want to look at a particular thing that happened that week. When the introduction connects to something else in the parish or in recent sermons, such homiletical preludes can work. One effective technique is highlighting something in the parish that happened over the past week that embodied part of the long-term sermon theme. When the congregational activity corresponds to a point preached over the previous couple of weeks, finding a way to mention it is essential.
A final way of integrating part of the long-term sermon focus with the scriptural readings of the day is by preaching what amounts to two shorter sermons on the same morning. I have explicitly explained to the congregation that I was doing this on some occasions, while on others I have made a rather abrupt pivot using an admittedly inadequate segue. While this may seem to break all the rules, preaching two sermons backto-back has a number of advantages. Primarily, such practice treats the biblical text with integrity while also honoring the need to deal with an important aspect of the congregation’s life. The sermons need not be equal length, and I have done them with either sermon first. I can see how long I need to talk about something contributing to the long-term focus, and then start with those points or end with them, depending on the week’s theme. Usually the biblical text either lends itself to a more expository sermon that I would more likely put first, or it has a strong application that I would want to end with.
Some of you may be horrified by reading the above paragraphs. I admit that I would have been extremely skeptical of these techniques before I was the senior pastor and primary preacher of a parish for an extended length of time. What I have found is that structuring sermons in these creative ways has allowed me to provide the congregation with the information and encouragement needed to move them forward, and to repeat that movement over a number of cycles. Rarely, if ever, have I personally been able to achieve those kinds of results by focusing exclusively on my weekly preaching message.
Scripture, the Lectionary, and Long-Term Sermons
Scripture has its own integrity, and that integrity must be honored. Therefore, one important aspect of preaching that I do not advocate changing is how we deal with the biblical text. Certainly, preachers preach sermons that move in different directions from the same text. The needs of the congregation are important in determining which direction a sermon will take. The polyvalence of the text does not mean that any sermon can be preached on any text, however, nor does a long-term sermon focus provide an excuse for isogesis or sloppy scripture study. As preachers, we need to engage the text on its own terms before we bring our own needs and the needs of our congregation to it.
Even well-discerned needs, chosen in prayerful collaboration with the entire congregation, are still not an excuse to play fast and loose with the Word of God. Part of why I believe that asides, detours, or even sharing two sermons at once can be helpful is that we need to be clear what is part of the exposition and application of a scriptural passage and what is not. I would much rather say, “Our gospel reading says this; I also believe that is important,” than to say, “Our gospel reading says this and sort of, kind of says that if you stretch it almost or just past the breaking point.” Be clear about the distinction between what the Bible says and what the preacher says.
A long-term preaching focus does not supersede the lectionary for denominations like the Episcopal Church that use a lectionary for their scriptural readings and preaching texts, nor does it override other elements of the liturgical year. The lectionary’s strength is the ability to move through a variety of topics that a preacher might otherwise forget about or ignore. The liturgical year also ensures that all the important points of salvation history and the life of Christ are celebrated and emphasized. The church, in its wisdom, has provided these cycles to prevent preachers from focusing solely on their current great idea while ignoring everything else. Congregations need to hear sermons covering a wide variety of scripture, doctrine, and spiritual discipline on a regular basis, even while they may be consistently learning a new language in a particular area.
One or more of the lectionary texts will likely determine the focus for the sermon of the week. The texts from the lectionary will also be read out loud to the congregation in almost all cases. Even if, for some reason, the preacher decides to preach on a theme not covered by the lectionary texts, the people still hear the scripture readings themselves. Preaching on a theme not stemming from the readings is rarely helpful. For me, I have limited such preaching to congregational events like the Stewardship Sunday or Annual Meeting Sunday, or in response to an external event such as the bombing of African American churches or a rancorous election. In some rare cases, I have asked for permission from the bishop to substitute one of the lectionary readings to preach on a particular text, as I did with Malachi during a stewardship series. Again, I do this rarely and try to maintain the lectionary readings so the congregation still hears them. Even using the lectionary, I have been able to preach extended sermons consistently.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
What aspects of the extended stewardship sermon discussion struck you? Did any of the choices make you uncomfortable?
What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of breaking traditional homiletical guidelines in favor of incorporating long-term sermon material?
Are there particular times you think congregations need to hear practical visions of the future, theological rationales for change, or instructions for developing specific skills and practices?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of lectionary preaching? How might those weaknesses be ameliorated through an extended sermon focus?
Think about a time you have preached on something besides the scripture passages appointed for the day. What motivated your choice? What fruit came from that choice?
Practical Exercises
Think about a change you would like to see in your congregation. Write down the practical vision of how things would be different if the change were made, the theological rationale for why God is calling the congregation to a new place, and the practical skills the congregation needs in order to move forward.
Review some past sermons you have preached or heard. Find some assumptions made about the congregation’s understanding or capacity that may not have been accurate and outline a better approach for that sermon.
