In Season and Out of Season: Crafting sermons for all occasions

By Jeremy Davies

A wise and practical guide to preaching in the Anglican tradition, illustrated with examples, that will inspire confidence and hone skills. It explores key aspects of preaching including: the importance of Scripture, the use of story, preaching at rites of passage, preaching through the liturgical year, and engagement with the wider world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848256040

Jeremy Davies

Jeremy Davies teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds.

Book preview

Introduction

This book explores what kinds of sermons are required for different needs and occasions as well as what must be central to any act of preaching. It is not offered out of any sense of its enduring value, its literary merit or the quality of its intellectual grasp. The sermons included as examples have been compiled out of a sense of the importance of preaching as an ephemeral art – literally a thought for the day or maybe for the week – and not to be taken less seriously or regarded as trivial because its audience is this small congregation or because the arena is that small country church. For the context of the sermon is both this local community (which is none other than the holy common people of God in this place) and also the larger liturgical framework in which God’s Word in scripture is proclaimed and the sacraments of his grace are celebrated. If such is the weekly context within which the sermon is to be delivered who dare say that the work of preaching, however ephemeral, is unimpor­t­ant? And if in addition you believe, as I do, that God takes whatever is offered and uses it abundantly, beyond all our imagining, then whatever is offered in preaching with humility, sincerity, love and care, however manifest the flaws, will be used abundantly by God. This accounts for the fact – which is the experience of many preachers – that a sermon regarded by the preacher as poor in the extreme, by any objective criteria, has been the means of grace and sometimes a life-transforming experience for some individual in the congregation.

This is not to advocate complacency on the part of preachers, as though to say God will use my feeble offering: it is up to him, there is no need for me to sweat over the sermon. The preaching ministry is an essential part of a priest’s (or a deacon’s or Reader’s) commitment within the community he or she serves. The priestly task is to preside at the altar, to preach week by week, to be a person of prayer and to be a pastor to the people. All four of these commitments interlock and are the ways in which the ministers of the Church help to build up the people of God. Preaching is part of the pastoral engagement with the community. We will not be equally skilled as preachers, but the art and discipline of preaching need to be given a priority in the repertoire of ministerial gifts which is often not afforded them.

The flaws in the examples included here will become all too apparent to the reader, as they became apparent to me on rereading them. I have not tried to revise them or exclude the particularity of time and place that occasioned them. That, after all, is the point of this volume – to convey the sense of immediacy and locality and contemporariness within which the preacher tries to incarnate the sense of the eternal and the holy and the utterly other. Rather I have added notes as a way of trying to recall the context and the moment in which this or that homily arose. So they are far from being a blueprint of the art of preaching. I cannot be proud of the blemishes which they contain, but by way of making a virtue out of a necessity, I hope that the very ordinariness of the contents and the lamentable thinness of the theology and the reflection will, nevertheless, act as an encouragement to others.

Of one thing I am convinced, and that is of the unique importance of preaching. Preaching is not lecturing or in a narrow sense teaching; it is not acting or dramatic performance; it is not compering a chat show or leading a discussion group or a Bible study; it is not a seminar or a medit­ation. A sermon may have the character of one or more of these styles of communication but it is not comprehended by any of them. Preaching has its own unique character and in the range of human communication, although it has similarities with other forms of discourse, there is no substitute for or alternative to it. Preaching is primarily proclamation; the proclamation that the God revealed as Father through the life, dying and rising to new life of Jesus Christ continues to engage with the human community, and becomes known as the sense of God is recognized and responded to in the shaping of human lives. Within the performance of the liturgy, the reading of scripture and the celebration of Eucharist both hark back to the story of the purposes of God worked out in human history and brought to their extraordinary climax and fulfilment in the life of Jesus. But neither scripture nor eucharistic celebration is simply or primarily about the past. They are the articulation of God’s loving purposes for his creation from the beginning to the end of time. And the sermon is the proclamation of those same purposes cast in the idiom of this moment for these people in this place, as a way of holding on to the hem of Jesus’ garment, and causing him to turn where we are, so that his healing and vision and call to follow can be made to us in our time and place. That, it seems to me, represents a high doctrine of preaching, and demands from those who dare to speak in the Lord’s name upon his holy day (or any other day for that matter) a humility, a daring and a self-offering that only God’s grace can inspire.

What is offered here is more a reflection on the art and craft of preaching than a model for its practice, and an attempt to formulate some principles concerning the preaching task and, at the same time, offer some practical suggestions, which, if they do not command assent, may at any rate provoke thought.

In each of the eight chapters, a different aspect of preaching is considered. Each aspect, illustrated by two or more sermons on the theme, carries, alongside, a commentary on the text that tries to articulate the context of the sermon, the reasons for the particular style and some comment on the content.

The first of the eight chapters is entitled ‘Preaching the Scriptures’ as a way of recognizing the starting point for all preaching, though some sermons may be more explicit in their exploration of a biblical theme or passage of scripture than others.¹ Often people say we never hear a real teaching sermon these days. Maybe that is more a reflection of a particular interpretation of the word ‘teaching’. This chapter highlights the import­ance of taking seriously biblical, doctrinal or ethical matters, and offering some reflection on the human issue seen through a biblical lens, albeit within the very limited compass of a 12- to 15-minute utterance.

The second chapter is called ‘Preaching Outwards’ and is intended to remind preachers and congregations that if worship of God is the beginning and end of our human endeavour, then mission and care for the world for which Christ died are the daily preoccupation towards which our contemplation of God commits us. The great Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, said: ‘To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.’ Our commitment to prayer and worship is not at the expense of, or a substitute for, our commitment to the way the world is, our responsibility for our fellow men and women, and the care of our environment. Indeed our membership of the Church launches us, as an inevitable consequence of our being ‘in Christ’, into the predicament of being human. This section deals with questions of politics, ethics and social policy and the prophetic voice of the Church.

The third chapter is called ‘The Sermon as Story’ and it aims to recognize and respond to the needs and wide imaginative compass of children and young people. I suppose such preaching could be open to the charge of being patronizing, of talking down to children from an adult height. I hope the examples included here escape that charge. I really needed to find a way that opened up vistas of the imagination (my own as much as anyone’s) in which matters of substance and truth could be handled without pre-empting the discussion or foreclosing the argument. The story – as Jesus, steeped in the rabbinic tradition of storytelling, knew well enough – seemed to be a way in which I could get on to neutral ground and which my young (or indeed not so young) congregation could comfortably inhabit and explore with some degree of independence.

The fourth chapter is entitled ‘Preaching and Rites of Passage’. There is some disagreement as to whether one should preach at baptisms, weddings and funerals. Isn’t such an intrusion taking advantage of what is essentially a private and personal moment of family grief or happiness? To which my reply, increasingly, is – ‘Precisely’. There is great skill in preaching sensitively at such moments that recognizes the private, personal and intimate nature of the feelings that abound, and the high emotional charge that such family gatherings often generate. But the rite in which one is engaged is not a private matter simply. For all its intimacy it is a proclam­ation of the gospel and as such is located unambiguously in the public domain. Preaching at such moments (which is more than eulogy, anecdote or reminiscence) can and should introduce to the celebrants or the mourners a dimension of being human that looks beyond this particular moment to the human lives that must be constructed in the face and through the experience of meetings and partings, births, deaths and marriages. Preaching at such moments, often nowadays with a congregation unused to church attendance, provides a preacher with an opportunity to talk about the Christian hope and to make ‘God-talk’ an important matter worthy of serious attention. Preaching at the occasional or pastoral offices, as these rites of passage are called, allows a preacher to evoke a sense of God for those beyond his or her normal reach.

‘The Voice of this Calling’ is a chapter that continues the reflection on liminal moments particularly for those called to ordained ministry in the Church. The shape of the professional, ordained ministry has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, and I guess will change even more dramatically in the next 50 years. There is no doubt a place for a sermon that tries to envisage the way in which the Church of the future and its ministry should develop. I hope that the examples of preaching that are offered here are not deemed to be inimical to such development, even though they very deliberately enunciate a view of ministry that challenges some of the presuppositions of some contemporary expressions of the Church and its ministry.

The sixth chapter is entitled ‘Preaching the Liturgical Year’ and reflects on sermons that focus on the great festivals, celebrations and holy days that constitute the fabric of the Christian proclamation. These festivals, which punctuate the Christian year, tell the story of our redemption in Jesus Christ and offer opportunities for the preacher to relate that story to the seemingly unholy demands of twenty-first-century living. ‘Only connect,’ said E. M. Forster as a prologue to his novel Howards End, and that remains the challenge not only for novelists but for preachers too. Part of the preacher’s task as an apologist for the faith is to make the connections between the life of faith and the daily encounters and experience of men and women. In fact I have chosen to reflect on one particular season of the Church’s year (namely Advent to Candlemas) rather than offer a comprehensive treatment that would have required a whole book in itself.

Inevitably sermons will occasionally reflect the privilege of being a pastor to people at times of great need. Both in the pastoral situation and in the preaching that arises from it, the priest/preacher is drawing on spirit­ual resources as he or she tries to make sense of the experience of human joy and suffering that often and almost inevitably brings one to the possibility of encounter with God. This seventh section is therefore concerned with ‘Preaching and Spirituality’.

Sometimes the preacher is confronted with an occasion outside the bread and butter of his or her ministry when a sermon is required that speaks to a larger or at least a different constituency from normal. Maybe it’s a creation festival when ecological groups and green activists and local farmers, many of whom will have nothing to do with the Church, and are probably suspicious of the Church’s track record on such issues, are drawn to a festival service. It might be an annual gathering of a national charity, or a judges’ service and the preacher happens to be the chaplain to the high sheriff. Or it might be one of those occasions like Remembrance Sunday and Harvest Festival when the Church provides the forum and the opportunity for the local community to come together. ‘Preaching for Special Occasions’ explores the attempt to rise to those particular challenges.

I found it difficult at the time of preaching (and find it more so at some distance from the moment of preaching) to assess the effectiveness of the sermon. What may emerge from this audit is a sense of some of the objective factors that may contribute to effective preaching. Is a sermon coherent, for example? Is it theologically intelligible (or even just intelligible)? Is it honest and if so to what? Does it provide spiritual nourishment? Is it self-indulgent, too rhetorical, too academic? Through the flaws in one’s own sermons one may discover clues about interpreting God’s Word for the people to whom one ministers that offer hope for the future. Such is the nature of God’s grace.

It is customary to acknowledge the author’s indebtedness at the outset. In particular I wish to recognize the contribution that many people have made since I was a boy to my sense that preaching was an important part of making the gospel live, and vital in bringing the people of God into a sense of their common purpose and vocation. It will become clear from the text that I was a cathedral chorister in Wales, and, though I cannot now remember the details of their sermons, I have retained a clear sense of the power, both in terms of oratory and content, of the preaching of the cathedral’s dean and canons. Even choristers can be moved, influenced and moulded by the power of preaching!

The most direct influence on my own appreciation of the power of preaching was that of Michael McAdam, chaplain of Hurstpierpoint College in Sussex where I was at school from the age of 13 to 18. His sermons were models of lucidity and lightness of touch that engaged his audience, even the most sceptical and hard-nosed of adolescent boys. I remember humour in his preaching, brilliant illustrations, occasional drama, direct appeal. But always he managed to elucidate the biblical text in such a way that religion and the sense of God seemed to be entirely relevant to the lives we were leading then, and might lead in the future. When as a university chaplain I went to help him in his parish of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, I found that his sermons (then to very different congregations) had all the quality – the simplicity and depth – that I had so much admired in them as a schoolboy. He once wrote to congratulate me on a number of sermons of mine which appeared in a book called Reflecting the Word. I was embarrassed because one of those sermons contained an idea and a phrase that I had remembered from one of his school sermons. He either hadn’t spotted the plagiarism or was too kind to mention it!

At Cambridge I was exposed to a lot of fairly dry preaching both in the college chapel and from the pulpit of the university church. Without doubt the most significant preacher whom I heard was the Dean of Chapel of my college, John Bowker, whose approach both in the pulpit and in private conversation always assumed that his audience were his intellectual equals. As a result what we heard was demanding stuff, intellectually precise, beautifully crafted, poetically phrased and recognized by those who heard (even when we couldn’t always understand) as important. In contrast to the substantial sermons at a college evensong, the short homilies that Bowker and Geoffrey Styler (another Corpus don and New Testament specialist) preached at the Sunday 8 a.m. Communion services were models of depth in brevity.

It was Father Norry McCurry, my training incumbent at Stepney, who made me see that sentiment and emotion and occasional flamboyance in the pulpit could be hugely effective. Douglas Webster, in my curate days a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, taught me the importance and the delight of using scripture seriously and resourcefully in preaching, and Trevor Huddleston (to whom tribute is paid elsewhere in this book) combined in his preaching a sense of the holiness of God and the holiness of our fellow men and women and – most of all for him – the holiness of children who were his icons of the Kingdom.

Some time after I arrived as Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral the former Prime Minister, Edward Heath (who moved into The Close as a resident and near neighbour on the same day), complained bitterly that one of the reasons he had come to Salisbury was to hear fine preaching, but we never seemed to have distinguished visiting preachers. To which I replied that it was with preachers as with politicians, that their fame did not necessarily mean that they had anything to say worth listening to. Fortunately he laughed, but I think he got the point – or indeed both points! Enough to say that I have always been edified, moved and challenged – and never ever bored – by the preaching, Sunday by Sunday, of my cathedral colleagues whose dedicated sense of the importance of preaching has been, and still is, an inspiration to me. Comparisons are odious but three preachers in particular have left their mark on me, as they will have on others. John Austin Baker and Sydney Evans (Bishop and Dean of Salisbury, respectively, when I arrived in 1985) must be regarded as among the finest preachers of their generation – scholarly, reflective, occasionally passionate despite the urbanity of the language, and utterly committed to making the connection between the God they believed in and the world beyond the shrine. Dean Evans’s successor was Hugh Dickinson who during his ten years as Dean made the Salisbury pulpit a space for the human imagination to grow, and the human conscience to engage, not least in reference to the pressing social, political and ecological issues that confront us.

To all these priests and preachers, who must stand as distinguished representatives of the many men and women whose preaching has shaped my own sense of God, I acknowledge my indebtedness and gratitude.

Notes

1 The sermons in this book straddle the period when the Church of England used the Alternative Service Book and, from 2000, Common Worship . The biblical texts on which the sermons are based reflect at some points the themes provided by ASB and at others the ‘in course’ provision of Common Worship .

1

Preaching the Scriptures

‘I do like a text,’ commented a retired bishop in our congregation. He said it with an air of nostalgia as though hearing a sermon introduced by a text was something of a rarity these days. He, I felt sure, would always have preached from a text as his way into the passage of scripture and the theme of the sermon. I suppose the truth is that we need a peg to hang our thoughts on and if scripture is going to be a central ingredient in the homily (as I believe it should be) then a text is a good way of introducing it. Or maybe not. Scripture may be more often a real turn-off rather than an enticement to imaginative reflection. That is a terrible thing to say when you think how action-packed, how varied, how humane, how moving, exciting and challenging page after page of the biblical narrative are – both in the Old and New Testaments. Of course there are longueurs, bits that are frankly unreconstructed in their social or moral outlook, or sections that are incomprehensible. But taken all in all, the Bible is an amazing book (or more accurately, a series of books) whether or not one claims it to be the inspired Word of God. Perhaps that’s the problem. We just make such inflated and exclusive claims for our holy book (as we do for the rest of the ecclesiastical shooting match) that our contemporaries cannot take it or us seriously. Without being read, the Bible is dismissed as boring, irrelevant, illiberal and out of touch. It is not the Bible’s fault. It is ours for our complacency and overfamiliarity with a book we feel we know so well that we can ignore it. Or, even worse, we use it with such arrogant certainty about its meaning that we are forever using it to score points over other people.

Maybe a text of scripture is not the most user-friendly way of introducing the curious outsider or the scripturally suffocated to the treasure trove that we believe the Bible to contain. We need to be more subtle. And finding a non-biblical way into the sacred text may