On the Weightiness of Preaching

I preached my first sermon when I was fourteen years old. Crammed inside the Genesee Road Church of God in the east suburbs of Flint, Michigan where I spent most of my childhood, I stood in front of a congregation of people, most of whom were saints with Bibles in their laps that were twice as old as the preacher in front of them. As the cassette tape which contains the archived copy of the sermon attests, I preached for just over a colossal 56 minutes on “Unlocking the Keys of Revival.” The congregation was immeasurably gracious to me, shouting and amen’ing throughout the long slog of a sermon, as Pentecostals generally do when one of our young cubs gets the Holy Ghost and a microphone. People came to the altar to seek the face of God. And I was forever in love with the art form that is preaching.

Now, twenty-three years later, my sermons have gotten quite a bit shorter and, I hope, a little more theologically refined. I’ve preached in front of scores in a megachurch and I’ve preached in front of eight faithful who braved a snowstorm in Michigan’s “thumb” to make it to the Sunday morning worship service where the young preacher had to be driven by his mom.

Throughout my life I’ve listened to sermons of every conceivable variety and in just about every imaginable Christian tradition. Thousands and thousands of sermons.

I’ve heard (and preached my fair share of) the “Three Points and Poem” sermon.  

I’ve heard the personal soapbox sermon.

I’ve heard the TED Talk sermon.

I’ve heard dialectical sermons and extemporaneous sermons. Expository, textual, topical, and narrative sermons.

Preaching is an art (and a discipline, called homiletics). But as we know, not all art is the same. There is a reason some artwork is prized so highly that it sits behind bullet proof, temperature-controlled environments in museums while others are propped up on clearance racks at TJ Maxx. Not all art is created equally, and much of it has to do with the artist.

Not all sermon “art” is the same either. There is a certain Je ne sais quois––an indefinable quality to the sort of preaching that cuts to the heart…

…the sort of preaching that causes those who hear it (and certainly the one who delivers it) to pause and take note that the Holy One is in our midst…

…the sort of preaching qualified in the Second Helvetic Confession: praedicatio verbi dei est verbum dei (“the preaching of the word of God is the word of God”). That is, a set apart kind of preaching where all recognize that the Spirit’s breath is carrying the very words spoken and burrowing them as a deposit within our souls.

What separates this kind of preaching from the TJ Maxx variety sermon­? The sermon that, once delivered, will be archived online, chopped up for social media content, and ultimately blown away as chaff with the passing winds of time?

There’s a weightiness to this sort of preaching. True preaching. Preaching as a Spirit-empowered artform. 

I believe that this sort of preaching isn’t qualified by the homiletic structure of a sermon––expository, topical, or otherwise. It isn’t qualified by punchy tweetable messages where theological insight is reduced down to something that can fit on a fortune cookie. It isn’t qualified in the relevance, the length of the sermon, the exegetical content to illustrative content ratio, the tradition of the church, the gender of the preacher, or anything else. 

True, weighty preaching is qualified in the wrestling of the preacher.

The Latin phrase that describes well this sort of wrestling is mysterium tremendum et fascinans, what R.C. Spoul translates, in relation to the holiness of God, as an “awful mystery,”[1] though I prefer the more literal translation of “a mystery that repels and attracts.”

It is a wrestling with which many of us who have preached are altogether too familiar. Martin Luther described his own wrestling well when he said,

Although I am old and experienced, I am afraid every time I preach.[2]

Luther’s fear did not come from stage fright. It came from the wrestling with the mystery that repels and attracts––a recognition of the holy task one is undertaking in the delivery of a sermon and in the complete inadequacy one has in doing that task justice. It is a realization that, upon opening one’s mouth to proclaim the Scripture, a preacher enters a holy tradition handed down to us by the Hebrew Prophets and the Apostles. 

The “awful mystery,” as Sproul calls it, recognizes that a preacher stands in a holy place to do a holy thing. There’s something about that realization that is repulsive, in the way Isaiah stood before the throne of God in his vision and said, “Woe to me, I am undone!” (Isa. 6:5). In this sort of sermon, there should be a great measure of trepidation and hesitancy to use the pulpit for personal soapboxes, to defend or aggrandize oneself, or to manipulate or verbally accost a congregation. It causes the preacher to recognize that all the platitudes and power statements and statistics and culture war mongering in the world don’t belong in this holy space in presuming the awe-striking task of illuminating the truth of Jesus the Christ.

There’s also an irresistible quality to it, that this responsibility which is so exhausting and conjures up so much inadequacy within us is also the thing that I can’t help but do. It is the feeling Paul expressed to the Corinthians when he said, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16)

A holy repulsion and fascination of the mystery of God is the wrestling that separates refined preaching art from motel art––for it is a preaching that has been refined in the fire of the Holy Spirit. It is born from pain and suffering, blood and sweat, and is evidenced with the walking of a limp to the pulpit rather than the arrogant strut of one who has it all figured out and can do it without the messy help of the Spirit’s anointing. A sermon can be long or short, but if it’s not born from wrestling, it’s not worth delivering. It can be relatable or filled with veiled parables, but if it’s not born from wrestling, it won’t do.

There’s something uncommon, something holy about the task of preaching and if we treat that task as anything but holy, all we do is waste everyone’s time––ours, the congregation’s, and the Lord’s. But to wrestle with the mystery of God’s greatness––his holiness––his goodness, to be repelled by it, to be irresistibly fascinated by it, and then to attempt to put that into words is precisely the sort of preaching to which God is calling preachers. Because it is in that preaching that he can show himself strong amidst our weakness.

[1] R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God, 2nd ed. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 1998), Kindle Edition. Loc. 414-429.

[2] As quoted in David Larsen, Telling the Old, Old Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2000) , 101.