The Four Pages of the Sermon, Revised and Updated: A Guide to Biblical Preaching

Chapter One

FOUR PAGES: GRAMMAR AND THE PREACHING SCENE

It makes a huge difference whether preachers and teachers of preaching believe God acts and that Jesus is alive. The gospel, as understood here, assumes these truths and from them offers four grammatical principles to undergird sermons. Grammatical rules are generally not seen; they operate beneath the surface and below the radar, and the same is true of these components that undergird biblical preaching. We will call them Pages: Page One is trouble as identified in the Bible and Page Two is that trouble in our world. Trouble is whatever leads to death or puts the burden on humans to do something. By contrast, with grace, God accepts that burden in Christ. Page Three is grace in the Bible and Page Four is grace in our world. All biblical preaching can be helpfully analyzed in relation to these four. They are of relatively equal weight (though in faith grace is stronger), hence we may think of them as constituting four quarters of a biblical sermon, though arrangement and distribution may vary. In the same way that good grammar allows a sentence to make sense, these four elements enable the gospel to be preached as good news. They generate movement: from bondage in Egypt to the promised land, crucifixion to resurrection, sin to redemption, brokenness to healing, and so forth. Grammar makes for effective communication. Gospel is needed to nurture the church.

From a theological point of view, it is hard to argue with these four. If there are other standard grammatical options in sermons, they are not of the same priority.¹ For instance, a sermon may discuss world history, social customs, or world affairs, but in general, if the subject does not already fit one of our categories, it is theologically neutral and of less value. Of our four theological elements, can any be safely ignored? Trouble speaks to human need in the Bible and today—we cannot save ourselves. If we could we would not need a Savior. Grace speaks to God’s help, in the Bible and today. All together they speak of change, renewal, salvation, and empowerment. None is dispensable and all four facilitate the gospel.

These Four Pages commonly appear without order in sermons throughout time, though sequentially they make sense. Trouble to grace represents a biblical redemptive pattern, moving from a state of sin or brokenness to salvation or liberation. Preachers who have never conceived of the gospel in these terms, nonetheless typically use our Pages, though they may drift onto them like cars on black ice, often without warning or control. Overall sermon excellence starts with recognizing them, examining how each functions, and how together they provide measurable standards for teaching, practice, and evaluation, something homiletics sadly lacks.

What follows in this volume is the story of each of our four elements, why homiletics students, teachers, and preachers should know about them, what is at stake in each, and best practices with them. The story begins in the preaching scene today, six decades after strong winds hit the homiletical highlands.

I. THE PREACHING SCENE: WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

Four key movements have shaped the preaching scene today: propositional preaching, the New Homiletic, African American preaching, and the internet and social media.

A. Expository and Propositional Preaching

Throughout history, expository sermons have been the bread-and-butter sermons of the church. They expose or exegete (= draw out) the biblical meaning. Such sermons probe a text, lift up key words or verses, and give a full sense of what the text says. Typically, they move from exposition to application, from what the text said to what it says or means today, in the manner that some of Jesus’s parables move from text to explanation. The first biblically recorded example of this pattern is found in Nehemiah 8:7-8, The Levites helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

Expository sermons traditionally are deductive, they state up front a single idea, proposition, or doctrine, and then prove or argue it. The best-known contemporary book on expository preaching is by Haddon W. Robinson, who sees so much variety in expository preaching he says it is more a philosophy than a method.² It is preaching that communicates a biblical concept derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit applies first to the preacher, then through [to the] hearers.³

Propositional preaching is a larger category that includes expository elements but is not restricted to a single biblical text and might develop a topic. It relies on discursive reasoning and usually makes its case with points. They provide the movement of the sermon as in steps to a destination. Typically, there are three that give three pieces of evidence, or three ways of looking at something, or three stages in a logical argument. Three-point sermons have been around at least since the 1200s when Robert of Basevorn observed, with humor, Only three statements, or the equivalent of three, are used in the theme—either from respect for the Trinity, or because a threefold cord is not easily broken [Eccl 4:12], or because this method is mostly followed by Bernard [of Clairvaux], or, as I think more likely, because it is more convenient for the set time of the sermon.⁴ The form became stereotyped as three-points-and-a-poem. Why the poem? There could be several reasons: (1) it provided a convenient signal that the sermon was ending; (2) it presented an aesthetic, emotional, or transcendent component for the sermon; (3) it added classical rhetorical flourish so the sermon could end on a high note; and (4) the origin may connect with the influence of John Wesley, who sometimes concluded his own sermons by reciting or singing verses from his prolific hymn-writing brother, Charles.

Propositional sermons generally assume that every text contains a subject or idea that can be extracted, explained, and applied to the life and work of a congregation. Typically, the points are either driven by the biblical text, or by a teaching (i.e., doctrine) of the church, or by some contemporary topic. The points may be clearly identified, My first point is . . . , or they may simply underpin the argument without having attention drawn to them. The purpose is a persuasive argument. The movement is accumulative (as in Three ways to pray), or driven by logic (as in a syllogism, if A and B, then C), or progressive (as in three steps to effective social outreach). The structure is largely mechanical, like Lego pieces, and sometimes predictable, though the points themselves may be novel. It is also somewhat arbitrary that there are three points.

1. Text-Driven Points

The points often come from Bible verses. For instance, Paul says, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. . . . My proclamation was] with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Cor 2:2, 4). A sermon could be structured as follows:

Paul preached:

1. Jesus Christ (i.e., risen from the dead),

2. the cross (i.e., the Savior was crucified on the cross, a foolish notion to Greeks), and

3. in the Spirit (i.e., Christ is present now).

Application in preaching occurs when the relevance of a text for today is explored. In this case, application could happen three times, once in relation to each point. Alternatively, a concluding section of the sermon could apply the significance of Christ to the life and work of the congregation.

A variation on text-driven points is verse-by-verse preaching where the order of the points is determined by the logical or chronological flow of the biblical text.

2. Doctrine-Driven Sermons

Preachers through the ages have preached doctrinal sermons that might begin with a Bible verse that isolates a church teaching, and the doctrine then develops, perhaps with passing reference to several relevant biblical texts. John A. Broadus, whose Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870) is still used, provides this outline on the doctrine of the Word of God—a doctrine that is essential today for preachers to teach. His sermon addresses this question: In what consists the glory of gospel preaching? He gives a six-point response: In that it, 1) is appointed by the Son of God, 2) makes known the will of God, 3) promises the grace of God, 4) is performed in the strength of God, 5) is attended by the blessing of God, and 6) leads souls to the presence of God.⁵ He cautions that six may be too many points, and that if six are used they must follow one another closely. His book would have been a boon for Puritan preachers, if not for their listeners, who had to endure as many as sixty points and sub-points in total. Broadus recommends no more than four, and offers this three-point simplification of his six-point outline: the glory of gospel preaching consists, 1) in its establishment, 2) in its subject, and 3) in its operation and effects.⁶

3. Topic-Driven Points

Topical sermons are like doctrinal ones, but the focus is a social topic, and biblical texts may be employed at will. Ronald A. Nathan preached on the role of the Caribbean black church in Great Britain, and he based his comments on Philippians 3:13-14, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. The text was not the source of his points, though the text supplied the basic image of a race:

1. Keep your eyes on the prize (i.e., don’t get distracted by hate).

2. Run with the ball (i.e., the gospel is a call to lifelong commitment to truth and justice).

3. Be a team player (i.e., the gifts of the church must be offered to the community).

4. Stay within the rules (i.e., prayer and advocacy must go hand in hand).⁷

Much African American preaching uses an underlying propositional form, and it often does so with cultural flair and innovation. Perhaps sensing that three points can be too linear or mechanical, James H. Harris gives them movement using Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis.⁸ The conclusion may often come as celebration, which Henry H. Mitchell identified as the passionate, uplifting climax of the sermon.⁹ Three-points-and-a-poem and three-points-and-a-celebration are similar in basic concept (though not when experienced as performance)—did they share a history at some point? Propositional preaching can be excellent for teaching, as in an All Saints sermon by William B. McClain: (1) Those who have gone before us were faithful; (2) All the saints salute you; and (3) We dare not fail them.¹⁰ We will return to more distinctive features of African American preaching in a moment.

Propositional sermons often aim for a strong hook in a beginning that announces the theme and the upcoming argument. Conclusions often are used as effective summaries. Authority in expository, doctrinal, and topical sermons tends to be vertical, with the preacher above the people as the teaching elder. Traditionally, if stories were used they were moralistic illustrations serving points, more addressed to the head than the heart. Today, much has changed in the propositional world. How points are emphasized can vary, story is now more frequently a shared narrative experience, and PowerPoint can add additional components.

B. The New Homiletic

Propositional preaching can be excellent for teaching—two and a half centuries later, preachers still recite John Wesley’s memorable stewardship outline, Earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can. But by the 1950s and 1960s, strong winds were sweeping the homiletical highlands, and for some people the clothes on propositional preaching were feeling a little thin. Preaching was excessively heady, too reliant on information, argument, and intellect—too much like a lecture. The high pulpit seemed ten feet above contradiction. Not every text has three points. Not every text can be reduced to a single proposition or concept. (Fred Craddock once compared the process to boiling tea and preaching the stain in the bottom of the cup.¹¹) Fresh alliteration, like Pray, Prepare, Praise, did not necessarily make the weekly sermon form seem varied. Books of sermon illustrations provided stories that often seemed canned, artificial, or corny. As illustrations, they did exactly that, they illustrated, they simply added a picture to a point that was already intellectually established and stood on its own. They were not actually needed for the argument. They popularized what was said and made it more accessible. Some said they dumbed it down. What was needed in preaching was not just fresh paint on the walls, a renovation was needed that rethought the entire preaching moment. The foundation was set for the New Homiletic.

The New Homiletic is an innovative school of preaching that began in the 1950s and took a holistic approach to preaching. It adopted an integrated understanding of organic form, imagination, language, metaphor, narrative, image, performance, the Word as event, inductive learning, horizontal authority, social context, justice, transformation, and the like. In the subsequent decades, changing understandings affected preaching across the theological spectrum. Most of the innovation was complete by around 2008. By then, most key insights had been made. New paradigms do not just suddenly appear, they evolve, and they also do not just end. The value of the New Homiletic continues today as scholars and preachers further appropriate its teachings, and occasional books still add to it.¹² It makes preaching experiential.

One of the new movement’s first green shoots burst forth from the homiletical soil in 1958, when H. Grady Davis claimed, A sermon should be like a tree, / It should be a living organism.¹³ Romantic ideas of organic unity had been in the air since the early 1800s and were promoted in new university Departments of Literature since the 1920s, but Davis was the first to put them front and center for preaching. He said the sermon should grow, its twigs and blossoms unfolding naturally from its inner life, rooted in the eternal Word and in loam enriched by death.¹⁴ This understanding of sermon design he summarized and presented in the form of a free-verse poem. Even using the form of a poem to demonstrate what he meant by organic growth was revolutionary. It represented a radical innovation and signaled what would become a key principle in the new movement: form is not separate from function. They are related. In this case, his poem grew in the same tree-like way that sermons are to grow. It did what it talked about, it embodied what it meant. The implications are large: (1) The form of a biblical text affects its meaning. (2) The form of a biblical text affects the form of a sermon. (3) The form of a sermon affects the meaning it renders of a biblical text. (4) The form of a sermon affects the theology it expresses.

In 1969, David Randolph was the first to call the various fresh initiatives a New Homiletic, drawing on a then-current school of biblical thought known as the new hermeneutic.¹⁵ His term New Homiletic did not become widely used until the late 1980s, however.¹⁶ Terms like narrative, story, and inductive sermon became common. We can number some of the ways in which his predictions proved accurate:

1. "[P]reaching must be understood as event in contrast to ‘mechanistic’ preaching which views the sermon as a construct of parts."¹⁷ In other words, something happens in preaching, the sermon grows, understanding deepens, people are transformed, sermons are not primarily imparting information. The sermon creates an effect, What happened in this sermon?¹⁸

2. It is biblical, designed to bring the word of God to expression.¹⁹ Its subject is nothing other than reality as exposed by the biblical text.²⁰ Randolph said, The sermon should not be on a text but from a text. . . . [It] is not to be an exposition of the text but an execution of the text.²¹ By this he meant not just that preaching should be expository, but that it should do what it speaks about and bring about the intention behind the text. Leander Keck advocated renewal of the Bible for the pulpit.²² The eventual publication of the Revised Common Lectionary, based on the three-year Roman Catholic Lectionary after Vatican II, did much to assist this renewal in many denominations.

3. It is theological and Christ-centered. Randolph affirmed John Wesley’s purpose of preaching, To invite. To convince. To offer Christ. To build up; and do this in some measure in every sermon.²³ Not all scholars in the new preaching movements made this as explicit a goal as it was for many African American preachers and others, like Bryan Chapell.²⁴

4. It deals with a concern to be shared rather than a topic to be explained. The sermon . . . does not arise from religion in general and address the universe.²⁵ Religious experience is not necessarily universal, the same everywhere. The preacher listens to the people throughout the week and speaks to their concerns. The sermon is more a shared conversation than a lecture.

5. It moves to confirmation from affirmation, rather than to evidence from axiom.²⁶ Here Randolph anticipates Fred B. Craddock’s As One Without Authority (1971). Propositional sermons are deductive and linear, stating the conclusion at the beginning and then proving it. Craddock advocated inductive sermons that make a series of affirmations from experience that narrow down to an understanding at the end. He thought the sermon should mirror the journey the preacher takes during the week in gradually coming to understand the text.

6. It is contextual, and "seeks concretion by bringing the meaning of the text to expression in the situation of the hearers, rather than abstraction by merely exhibiting the text against its own background."²⁷ The sermon addresses real needs of listeners in specific cultural and social contexts. It reflects life as it is experienced by the listeners, instead of offering general truths derived from the biblical situation.

7. It seeks forms . . . consistent with the message it intends to convey, not necessarily those which are most traditional.²⁸ In other words, concerning sermon form, one size does not fit all.

Randolph mentioned two other practices of preachers, but he did not fully anticipate their importance for the New Homiletic as it would develop. One was the need for preachers to be poetic, passionately in love with language,²⁹ sensitive to image and metaphor. The other was the developing significance of story: single, several, or at least as a major part of a sermon. His notion of story departed from the canned sermon illustration that tacked a moral on the end, but it did not yet recognize the pedagogical, sociological, and historical significance of narrative. He did recommend the value of seamlessly weaving didactic elements into the narrative itself.³⁰

By the time he wrote, the culture at large had largely turned to story in the growth of mass media, film, and advertising. A story or narrative may be defined as a rendering of events that captures life as it is often experienced. The civil rights and feminist movements depended on story, holding up the stories of racism and sexism that stain history and the present. Television reporting brought stories of the Vietnam War into living rooms back home with a clarity and horror not experienced before. Story, long associated with fiction in academic contexts, became seen as a vehicle to communicate reality. Story can consist of one or several episodes. It moves by plot, a logical progression of events, rather than by a logical progression of points. It involves tension: something happens to upset the way things were and some resolution is sought. Story includes character and emotion, it brings people to life through words. It favors concrete sensory language and details of events over abstractions about them. Film and television set an even higher visual standard for story.

During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the changing preaching scene was identified with story and poetic sensitivity to image and language. Henry H. Mitchell, a leader in the New Homiletic, highlighted how in black preaching, imagery and biblical storytelling were fused with the experience of the people.³¹ Increasing numbers of women in ministry, along with men, found they could better identify with preaching that used stories and images. Stories gave sermons emotional and spiritual components often lacking in sermons based mainly in logic. Former models of sermons seemed too male, too vertical in authority, too much based in argument, and not enough tending to nurture. Women especially needed new sermon models. Christine Smith saw the sermon as weaving, Jana Childers claimed it as an incarnational event and compared it to embodied performance in theater, and Nora Tubbs Tisdale saw it akin to circular folk-dancing that relied on the stories and theology of local people.³² Feminist and womanist scholars raised issues of embodiment, authenticity, accountability, oppression, empowerment, women’s ways of knowing and living, social justice, and the like.

Interest in narrative extended far beyond homiletics; it was in the academic halls and affected nearly every discipline. Philosopher Stephen Crites in 1971 wrote a key essay claiming that humans experience life as a narrative, as though it has a plot. Narrative he defined as the formal quality of experience through time.³³ He said that stories have the capacity to replicate and generate experience: Stories, and the symbolic worlds they project, are . . . like dwelling-places. People live in them.³⁴ Biblical scholars focused anew on how Jesus preached and on his parables as metaphor and story. Scholars from anthropology to theology held up narrative and thick description to portray the experience of various groups that historically were silenced or oppressed. New theologies appeared that were largely based in experience: black, feminist, liberation, womanist, mujerista, Min-Jung, gender, postcolonial, and so forth. These perspectives in turn influenced preaching in both propositional and New Homiletic preaching camps.

C. African American Preaching

As the New Homiletic developed, African American preaching was becoming more widely recognized in the culture as a whole, partly through radio and television. Preachers like Jim Forbes at Riverside Church in New York City brought the black tradition with them to high-profile, largely white congregations. Not all African American preaching is the same; it is diverse, and like any preaching it is not uniformly excellent, but many people consider some expressions of it that reflect an oral heritage to be among the best today. Through the internet, it is now known around the world. It draws on its African roots, on West African parables,³⁵ on a strong tradition of folk and oral (unwritten) preaching, on singing of spirituals and gospel songs, and on experiences of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression. It shares history with white preaching, particularly expository and propositional sermons. In turn, it had impact on and was influenced by the New Homiletic.

1. Many African American preachers never lost the art of storytelling that the New Homiletic struggled to revive. Black storytelling culture not only retold Bible stories in vivid language and imagery, it did so from memory or without notes, and it performed them with dramatic use of voice and gesture. Henry Mitchell advocated becoming the biblical character, presenting events as an eyewitness with keen attention to detail.³⁶ Preaching of this sort enrolls the congregation in the story—the story becomes their own, in the way that slaves in America knew that in the Bible, they were Israel in Egypt, and Pharaoh lived in the plantation white house. John Jaspers, Harriet A. Baker, and Howard Thurman became models for preaching with imagination, depth, courage, and vitality. Ella Pearson Mitchell’s portraits of biblical characters in story often followed the pattern: how things were, what went wrong, and how things turned out.³⁷ Frank A. Thomas identifies principles shared both with Aristotle and Eugene Lowry’s The Homiletical Plot³⁸ in his design for sermons: situation, complication, resolution.³⁹

2. African American preaching often has a musicality to it that echoes and inspired jazz, the blues, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, Motown, hip-hop, and rap. This musicality includes intonation, that is, the fall and rise of the voice, and call and response, plus what is variously referred to as tuning, whooping, singing, humming, moaning, or rasping. This musicality is linked with the role of the Spirit, as was plain in the description from Jarena Lee (1783–1864) of what happened when she preached: "a wonderful shock of God’s power was felt, shown everywhere by groans, by sighs, and loud and happy amens. I felt as if aided from above. My tongue was cut loose, the stammerer spoke freely; the love of God, and of his service, burned with a vehement flame within me—his name was glorified among the people."⁴⁰ James Weldon Johnson in 1926 drew attention to music in his collection of black folk sermons, God’s Trombones,⁴¹ followed more recently by Teresa Fry Brown, Weary Throats and New Song,⁴² and Kirk Byron Jones, The Jazz of Preaching.⁴³ White homiletician Eugene Lowry, in various piano performances at the annual meetings of the Academy of Homiletics in the 1990s, drew comparison between sermons in the New Homiletic and jazz, eventually writing about it in his The Homiletical Beat: Why All Sermons Are Narrative.⁴⁴

3. Related to music is the poetry and rhetorical sophistication of much African American preaching, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech at the Washington Monument. The language is concrete, visual, sensory, gritty, melodious, and memorable. It has many of these same features of language that the New Homiletic recommended to its preachers to prevent them from sounding like an essay.

4. It is contextual. It takes seriously the specific situations of the black community, telling it like it is, and finding in the Bible a mandate for social justice. The civil rights movement awakened many Eurocentric preachers to stories of racial injustice and hatred that had been formerly silenced. Much African American preaching continues to model how Christian faith and piety can be effectively wed with Christian duty and social justice—in many churches it is one or the other.

5. It is theological, God is at the core of the sermon. Henry H. Mitchell identified celebration as the passionate, uplifting climax of many African American sermons. Celebration focuses on God’s saving actions: Only positive truths about God through Christ give healing and empowerment, causing great rejoicing and praise.⁴⁵ Mitchell continues, The first person into the waters of ecstasy should be the communicator of the Good News.⁴⁶ He holds up celebration as something for all preachers to emulate in ways appropriate to their own cultures and traditions. Congregations, he said, need to feel something, they, do what they celebrate.⁴⁷ Frank A. Thomas continued his emphasis on celebrating God.⁴⁸ Warren H. Stewart Sr., in the first book on black hermeneutics for the pulpit (1984), held that in the black tradition, God was the point of departure.⁴⁹ Cleophus J. LaRue highlighted God’s action as the heart of black preaching—people expect to be assured and reassured that God has acted and will act for them and for their salvation.⁵⁰ Recently, Gennifer Benjamin Brooks has held up the importance of preaching grace, even from difficult texts.⁵¹

6. Much African American preaching is in the oral tradition without manuscript. Much white preaching became tied to the page in the movement to public education in the 1800s, and struggles now to get off it. With segregation, African American communities were denied educational opportunities, and the negative impact of the page by cruel irony may have been less. African American worship services and sermons tend to be longer than Eurocentric ones, and require sustained oral gifts. Preachers demonstrate through frequent practice that the rules for oral speech are not always the same as for the written page. A single theme is important for both. However, preachers trained for writing essays must unlearn some essay rules that work against preaching, like do not repeat, give just the facts, eliminate details, do not dwell on specific situations, cut description, avoid feelings, and do not record conversations.

African American preachers were instrumental in helping to shape the New Homiletic, even as they were already practicing many of the things that it taught and adopted some of its other teachings.

D. Modern and Internet Ages: The Social Context of Preaching

We have seen that preaching changed radically in the last half century, in part with (1) PowerPoint, (2) development of the New Homiletic, and (3) exposure to and appreciation of African American preaching. Preaching has also changed with (4) the cultural shift from the modern to the internet age, which we consider in two parts: how the internet age thinks, and how it affects preaching.

1. The Internet Age Affects How Humans Think

The term modern refers to what emerged out of the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Associated with philosophers like René Descartes and John Locke, it is characterized by full confidence in reason and logic. In medieval times, legitimacy and authority rested in fixed dogmas and tradition. In the modern world, science, evidence, and historical arguments became the new authorities. Society valued progress, freedom, individual liberty, democracy, tolerance, unity, and knowledge. Authority continued to be exercised in hierarchical ways. Subjective and objective were assumed to be legitimate categories. Truth could be fully known, possessed, and articulated. Biblical texts could have single meanings. Parts fit neatly into a unified whole. Focus was on individuals and individual disciplines as opposed to systems.

The New Homiletic, in its small way, pointed to how tensive language works, and differences in how people think, for instance with metaphor and metonymy, to be discussed in chapter 3. The internet and social media draw even greater attention to how people think and how these thought patterns are influenced by technology: communication is often in short bursts or tweets, topics jump around, links are often favored over arguments.

Forerunners of the internet began with computer technology in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1990s that the transformative impact of the worldwide web on society and culture fully hit, about the same time prototypes of smart phones appeared. Human thought patterns have been altered. Concentration patterns are shorter. People are less patient with reading long arguments. Deep reading is often a struggle. They want small doses of material in short bytes. Memorization has largely gone by the boards; anything can be looked up online. The mind is freed for other things. Now people carry a good part of their memory external to their body in tablets that have ability to access information. The need to describe things with words is lessened with the ability to make digital video recordings. Humans are gaining facility in managing vast amounts of information, yet, so far, the internet provides little in terms of discrimination of information, its reliability, or its truthfulness. People now question what knowledge is. On the internet, people tend to seek affirmation of their own perspectives. Social media operates on likes, and people tend to operate in social media bubbles of like-minded people, where diversity and tolerance may be shut out.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the same years