Preaching is the Most Important Thing You Do

Six decades ago, I thought I was being ordained in order to be primarily a pastor. I’m the one who cares for a congregation in their need, occasionally teaches, counsels, comforts and prods. I was wrong. Of all the otherwise noteworthy things pastors do, preaching is the most important.
Jesus, the Word, came preaching (Mark 1:14). Although there is much that we don’t know about God, one thing we know from scripture and years of church experience: The triune God is a big talker. Insistently communicative, determined to make verbal contact.

Nobody has ever been born Christian. Nobody has ever told the good news to themselves. No one has ever drifted into the conviction that a Jew from Nazareth who was born surprisingly, lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly is the whole truth about God. Thus, from the first, Jesus delegated preaching to those whom he called (Mark 16:15), recklessly telling them “whoever listens to you, listens to me” (Luke 10:16). No way to work for this garrulous God without commission as spokesperson.

Preachers are those under orders – by God and the church – to speak up for God. While it’s a joy, in this numbingly narcissistic neighborhood, to have something to talk about other than ourselves, it’s also a heavy responsibility. Yet, as Karl Barth said, because of the vocative, voluble nature of the God who is, rather than the coy, taciturn, reticent God we wish there were, it’s easier for us preachers to tell the truth about God than about ourselves. Our selves are arcane, hidden, and evasive whereas a revelatory God is not.

Speaking Up for God
When I was starting out, somebody told me that interesting sermons, “begin with a question and then offer an answer.” Worse, later I was advised, “preach the questions, not the answers.

” My mind changed. During my preaching life I found that the gospel is not the answer most hope to hear. Open-ended questions are safer than the answer, “Jesus Christ.”

How can I have a more peaceful life? Where can I find healing for my personal trauma and pain? Wherein is peace in an upwardly mobile, privileged, upper middle class, therefore stress-filled world? What’s to be done about American, white, Christian racism? Why get out of bed in the morning?

Good questions. Alas, they are of little interest to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I discovered the truth (or, more likely, it found me) that the query of scripture, and the Good News borne by the Bible, is triune, theological: Who is God? (Ontological Trinity) What is God up to? (Economic Trinity) Followed by the anthropological: Don’t you want to hitch on to whatever God is up to?

I was Associate Minister (lackey stuck with youth ministry and running errands for the senior pastor) in a small Southern town. After a rousing rant on how Richard Nixon is ruining America… or maybe my theme was, “Follow me! Vanguard of racial justice.” Or, “Don’t you have a used coat that you can cast to a less fortunate neighbor?” Something prophetic like that.

As I stood at the door after the service, craving congregational reaction, pro or contra, Mrs. Bunker emerged, intimidating even though an octogenarian, predatory, under full sail, black hat, gloves, carved headed cane, contemptuous countenance. “You call that a sermon?” she smirked. “How old are you? Not more than 25, I’d say. Yet you presume hector from the pulpit? Proffering sophomoric advice as if you were a Methodist Freud? Really now.”

Somehow the Holy Spirit occupied Mrs. Bunker’s post-sermon devaluation enabling me to say to the Lord, but not to her, “Geeze. The old lady’s right.

“The sole subject that I had just spent three years in seminary pondering, the one area that I might – even in my callow youth – know more than she, the lone reason for a kid like me insinuating into a life like hers: Talk about God.

My mind changed about preaching. Mrs. Bunker and the Holy Spirit, working the word.
“How can merely mortal me presume to speak for God?” you ask. Truth is, I can’t. Only God can speak for God and, wonder of wonders, in preaching, even through your sermons and mine, God condescends to speak.

Karl Barth won the hearts of preachers by calling preaching an “impossible possibility.” We can’t preach, said Barth, and yet God commands us to preach. No word can be truthfully said about God that doesn’t come from God. Yet, the humanly preached word is, by the miraculous grace of God, God’s. Thank you, Second Helvetic Confession. Only God speaks for God and, in preachers, God speaks.

I work hard on my sermons, but my scholarly best isn’t good enough to preach God’s word. Therefore, we do epiclesis, begging the Holy Spirit to help us speak and the church to hear. Trouble is, because the Holy Spirit is one of the three, free, sovereign persons of the one Trinity, the Holy Spirit is under no obligation to show up just because we asked. It’s not a sermon until God enters and makes my Southern-accented, frail, elderly voiced words God’s word and God is free to show or not.

As Bonhoeffer said, there’s only one preacher, Christ. Luther said this one preacher, Christ, uses us preachers on Sunday to equip the whole church to preach God’s word to the world the rest of the week.

Your preaching has weaknesses? Take heart. No sermon is so sorry that an incarnating, relentlessly communicative God is unable to utilize your offering, no matter how pitiful. Your preaching, for reasons known only to the Trinity, is a major way God has chosen to love the world.

“You call this a sermon?” the Holy Spirit smirks, peering over your shoulder at your notes. “Give it to me, I’ll take it from here.

” As I’ve harped on with seminarians. “We’ve trained our congregations to expect a sermon to be about them and their alleged problems.” Preacher, do you really want to cast yourself as an economist, a self-help guru, a pop psychologist, or a marriage and family expert? Besides, you do well to distrust their self-assessment of their problems.

Why not engage, through your sermon, in a conversation they’ve been avoiding all week? Talk about the God who, in Jesus Christ, in Scripture, and now in your sermon, wants to talk to us.
About the same time of my assault by Mrs. Bunker (“Now, Miss Edith,” I said in response. “That’s Mrs. Bunker, young man,” she bit back.), I learned a hermeneutical principle that disciplined my study of scripture ever since: Scripture always and everywhere speaks primarily about God and only secondarily and then derivatively about us.

Alas, many of us have trained our listeners to think that sermons are mainly about them.

Therefore, they ask unbiblical questions like, “Does this make sense to me?” (Since I’m the judge of all truth.), “How can I apply this to get whatever it is that I think I must have to make my life worth living?” (Since my life, as it is, is all that God wants out of me.)

Scripture primes us to expect of preaching a reply to the questions: Who is God? What’s God up to in the world? After these theological questions, it’s okay to ask the anthropological, How can I hitch on to what God is busy doing in the world?

A sermon is more difficult than a university lecture because preachers have to speak for, to, and from the only God who ever talked to the likes of us.