SermonStudio

"Why should I listen? I've heard so many of his sermons I know
what he's going to say anyway."
-- An usher who regularly "ducked out"
for a cup of coffee during the sermon.

What keeps people listening to a sermon? One basic answer is:
curiosity about how it will end. Once the sermon becomes
predictable, people's attention drifts off.
A good sermon must have flow or movement. A film, television
program or story grabs our attention early on, and we are caught
up in wanting to know how it comes out. Narrative preaching
appeals to people not only because it is based on stories from
life itself, but we listen to stories to see how they end. One
can build in this same kind of movement into a sermon and keep
the audience's attention.

The "Movement" Of The Sermon
A sermon is made up of different components, pieces, or
chunks. To hold the audience's attention, these pieces have to be
arranged so that they unfold with a sense of movement or
dynamics. Charles L. Bartow, who taught speech and homiletics at
Princeton Theological Seminary, urges preachers to listen to
their own sermons for such a movement:

Principle number one for the listening preacher: Attend to the
movement of thought in preaching and be prepared to move with it,
for preaching that is true preaching will never let you rest
content with some static arrangement of ideas.37

David Buttrick suggests we look at our sermons as a series of
"moves," as a developing narrative. "Preaching involves
plotting," he says, and "plot is all-important."38 Eugene Lowry,
Professor of Preaching and Communication at the St. Paul School
of Theology in Kansas City, is convinced that "the term plot is
key both to sermon preparation and to sermon presentation."39
After a few years of preaching I discovered that I had fallen
into a pattern, where the chunks of my sermon were almost always
arranged like this:
*Review of the text, its setting and message;
*Reflection of the human situation today;
*Comments on how the text addresses this situation, what the
text says for us today;
*Some kind of illustration or story showing how this actually
worked in somebody's life.

That's a good flow, but I realized how predictable I was
becoming. Whenever a preacher becomes predictable, the audience
tends to think, "Here he goes again; we've heard this before."
Curiosity keeps an audience's attention. The listener wonders
where the pastor's going with this idea and how it will come out.
Vary the format of your sermons. One obvious possibility was to
reverse my usual flow, so the sermon looked like this:
*Telling a story or illustration.
*Making a connection from this story to show how it
illustrates a circumstance about our lives.
*Returning to the text and making clear how it affects this
particular circumstance from today's life.

One can use many other pieces -- comparison with other Bible
passages, a look at another episode in church history, a
description of how life might be, and so on. Variety and change
will keep people listening.

Tension
Interest is maintained by tension. With their shortened
attention span, the attention of today's audience drifts off if
they sense that you've made your point. That's why a sense of
movement is so important. If listeners are wondering, "How's all
this going to come out?" they lean forward on the edge of their
seats and listen.
Academic, written prose tends to lose this sense of movement
and tension. In composition class we are told to put the
important elements of the sentence at the beginning, so that the
eye can get the point immediately. Even in paragraph
construction, the first sentence should be the theme sentence, so
that the basic idea is stated first. One can read much faster
that way, because one can read just the first sentences and skim
the rest. Tension is eliminated in favor of immediate answers.
That style might be suited for the written communication of
information, but it deadens an oral speech. Why listen any more
if you've already got the point? In speaking, even when you have
stated your point, you want the listener to wonder what you're
going to say about it.
A sermon should be constructed to maintain tension. A good
sermon contains a problem or a complication which the sermon is
wrestling with. The dynamic of a sermon is to address that
problem. Eugene Lowry calls it the "homiletical bind":

Likewise a sermon in its essential form is a premeditated plot
which has as its key ingredient a sensed discrepancy, a
homiletical bind.40

Charles Bartow calls it the "fulcrum" or "crisis" point in the
sermon.41
There are many ways to introduce this problem, complication,
fulcrum, or crisis, such as the following statements:
*"No wonder the people around Jesus were surprised ..."
*"Do we really believe this in our age? ..."

*"At first glance these verses sound puzzling to us ..."
*"Consider how the values of our society oppose the Christian
faith ..."
*"Maybe we would prefer if Jesus had never said this ..."

Such statements immediately jar the listeners, and they will
listen carefully.
At a funeral for a middle-aged mother who left small children
behind, the pastor used Psalm 121 as the text:

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved,
he who keeps you will not slumber ..
The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade ...

Rather than speaking generally about our confidence in eternal
life than Jesus' resurrection -- the true but predictable, "safe"
theme -- the pastor confronted head-on the feelings of the
grievers:

As we think of Eleanor's last days and experience our own grief,
it's hard not to ask the question: Lord, did you fall asleep?
Lord, have you closed your eyes? Where was your shade as Eleanor
endured the radiation therapy? Where is your shade as we are left
exposed to the reality of Eleanor's absence? Lord, are you
sleeping?

No one's mind wandered as the pastor spoke aloud their own hidden
pain and anger. They listened eagerly, waiting to hear how she
would address the crisis in faith brought about by the young
mother's death.
There are several ways of maintaining tension. You may have
stated the main theme of your sermon at the beginning, then
introduced the complication, followed by the resolution. The text
itself may have suggested the problem, since the words and
actions of Jesus usually produced the problem or

complication itself. The opposition of the world or difficulties
in people's lives furnish plenty of problems.
Instead of stating the message of the sermon at the beginning,
then developing it, one can lead up to the point of the sermon.
Lowry describes such a form:

Like any good storyteller, the preacher's task is to "bring the
folks home" -- that is, resolve matters in the light of the
gospel and in the presence of the people.42

He proposes "five basic sequential stages to a typical sermonic
process:"
1) upsetting the equilibrium,
2) analyzing the discrepancy,
3) disclosing the clue to resolution,
4) experiencing the gospel, and
5) anticipating the consequences.43

Look For The Trouble
When we read a troublesome text, our first instinct is to
shrink from the verses which cause trouble. For example, on a
beautiful fall Sunday morning, the 21st Sunday after Pentecost,
how can one possibly stand before a hard-working, middle-class
congregation, all of whom are wealthy when measured on the scale
of most of the world's population, and preach on the Cycle C
Gospel, Mark 10:17-27, "It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God"?
I heard a sermon on that text, where the pastor had clearly
thrown up his arms in surrender. He skipped to the last verse,
"With humans it is impossible, but ... all things are possible
with God," and sought immediate refuge in the heart of his faith,
justification by grace: "On the basis of our own works we would
be judged and condemned, but we look for salvation to the grace
of God in Jesus Christ." It was a satisfactory

exposition on the doctrine of justification, but it avoided the
point of the text. We cannot read that text without confronting
and struggling with the question of wealth.
When the people in the congregation heard the text being read,
no doubt the words of Jesus jolted them, as they were forced to
ask themselves if their possessions were stumbling blocks in
God's kingdom. They sat down, wondering what the preacher would
say about these troublesome verses, but they left the church
empty when he steered clear around them.
If a reading causes trouble when you read it, it will no doubt
do the same for many of your hearers on Sunday morning. You have
the listeners' attention from the beginning. Plunge right into
the trouble and you keep their attention.
Of course it is easier to avoid the trouble. If you have not
given yourself time for preparation, you will sit at your desk
Saturday night still wondering what to say. At about 9:30 p.m.
you will give up and preach on one of the other texts, losing the
opportunity to guide the congregation through a tough passage. It
takes time, prayer, study and reflection to get through the hard
texts.
I remember working on Luke 6:17-26 (Epiphany 6), the
Beatitudes in Luke. On first reading I was bothered that misery
is praised ("Blessed are those who are poor ... hungry ... weep
... hated ... excluded ..."), while those who are satisfied are
condemned ("Woe to you who are rich ... full ... laugh ... spoken
well of ..."). Our first impression is that only those who suffer
can be Christians. What other reading could there be? The text
would level a severe judgment on my listeners, with no relief in
sight.
As I worked with this text the direction for my sermon came
from two insights:
*The context of the passage: This is early in Jesus' ministry;
he has just called his disciples (vv. 12-16) and now begins to
tell them what discipleship might mean for them.
*The phrase buried at the end of verse 22: "... on account of
the Son of man!" This phrase is behind each of the "beatitude"
verses as well as the "woe" verses.

That put the whole text in a different light. The primary issue
is not whether one is poor or rich, weeping or happy, but whether
we are followers of Jesus. The issue is discipleship. The
circumstances of our lives are the by-product of our following
Jesus. "On account of the Son of man" is the leitmotif of the
whole section. "On account of Jesus" we might be poor, unhappy,
reviled. If that's what discipleship causes, we can still rejoice
that the kingdom is ours. The joy of being a disciple enables us
to rise above those other circumstances. Suffering is not
whitewashed or minimized, but there is another dimension to the
Christian life: We are part of the kingdom through it all.
Conversely, woe to those who have everything, but are not part of
the kingdom.
The sermon's message was broadened beyond the narrow confines
of a superficial first reading. But it took time, prayer and
study to come to this deeper meaning of the text.
Sometimes the clash of a text with everyday life helps you
through the trouble. Preaching on the Friday after Easter 2, I
determined to follow the daily lectionary and was drawn to the
Old Testament text for the day, Daniel 3:1-18, the account of the
three Hebrew men being thrown into the fiery furnace. Two
problems were obvious:
(1) Many people face trials in their lives, even suffering for
their faith, and are not rescued from the fiery furnaces. (The
congregation had just observed Yom Ha-Shoah, the Day of the
Holocaust a few days before, and I wondered how today's Jews read
this passage!)
(2) The reading for that day was the first part of the story
and did not include the rescue from the fiery furnace. Can one
preach on half a story? The lectionary would finish the story the
next day, but I was preaching just the first day of the reading.
People listening to the text would wonder: Do such miraculous
rescues take place today, and how can one read only the first
half of the story?
The solution to the problem and the point of the sermon came
from the text itself. After hearing the mighty king

Nebuchadnezzar's ultimatum to worship heathen gods or die,
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednago responded that they would not
capitulate. "If it be so," they said, "our God whom we serve is
able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace." The reading
for that day ended with verse 18, as the three young men
continue:

"But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve
your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up."

The theme of the sermon jumped out with those first three words:
"But, if not ..." Those gallant Hebrew youth believed that God
could rescue them, "but if not," even if God did not do so, they
would stand firm. Faith does not venture forth with guarantees of
success, but it marches out in trust that come what may, God will
see us through even the jaws of death. Martin Luther went to
Worms in 1521 knowing the chances of being burned as a heretic
were fairly high. He survived the fiery furnace. Jan Hus traveled
to Konstanz a century earlier and was burned at the stake for his
faith. The endings of the two stories were different, but it was
the same faith which carried both men forward.
The sermon didn't need the rest of the story. The text ended
with the unshakable faith of verses 17, 18: We know that God can
rescue us, "but if not" we stand firm nonetheless!
Working through a troublesome text takes time, prayer and
reflection. But it can open up new insights and lift your
preaching out of worn-out ruts into new and adventuresome paths.
It will also enrich the listeners, because they too have wondered
about these difficult texts!

Remember The Skeptics
When I first started teaching homiletics, I told the students
always to preach with two assumptions in mind:

(1) Assume the congregation is half asleep. It may not
actually be true, but the assumption will make us better
preachers.
(2) Whatever interesting points you make from the text, always
assume some people need to hear the basic, central gospel of
God's love and mercy in Jesus Christ. We deal with many issues in
the course of a church year and give many interesting examples,
but the gospel must always be at the center. There are people in
every congregation whose souls are in agony, and they need to
hear the gospel of sin and grace this Sunday.
When I told my predecessor, Arndt Halvorson, about these two
assumptions, he suggested adding a third:
(3) Assume there are skeptics in the audience. Remember those
who are wondering if it's all true. This assumption will push you
to avoid easy cliches and deal head-on with people's doubts and
problems.
For example, you are preparing for All Saints' Sunday. You are
planning on concentrating on the text from Revelation, the
glorious vision of the saints in heaven. Your main point will be
that this vision of saints together in God's kingdom sustained
the early Christians under persecution as well as us today. The
sermon could easily become a pollyannaish description of how good
it is to be part of a parish family with the hope of heaven
before us, and so on.
Now think of the skeptics. There are some in the audience who
have experienced pain from fellow Christians. There may be some
who are desperately lonely and nobody in the congregation has
given them a second glance. There will be those who think about
the scandal of TV preachers and wonder if Christians are all
hypocrites. Some may experience far more support from their
bowling league than from fellow Christians.
Suddenly you're forced to think about people who are skeptical
of the Revelation vision. Cliches won't work anymore. The sermon
must plunge into these hard questions.
You discover the resources already there in the scriptures,
where saints are portrayed realistically as people who do fall
short of God's ideals. You see the Revelation vision as a

group of imperfect people who have been made part of the body of
Christ and who are all sustained by the guiding Spirit of God.
The church is not a country club for successful people, but a
hospital for sinners, all under the care of the great Physician.
With the skeptics in mind, your sermon takes on a whole new
perspective, one which sees Christians with stark realism, yet
with the promises of grace entering powerfully into the human
situation. The skeptic can say, "Yes, that's what we're like all
right, but thank God he's brought us together!"

"Flow" Sermon
In my experience, sermons do not usually fall into a three-
point format, and it violates the sense of the text if one tries
to chop a sermon into "points." More often the sermon takes on a
"flow," from one piece to the other. Rather than a bicycle-wheel,
with separate points radiating like spokes from a central hub,
the sermon is more like a string of beads, one piece after the
other. After selecting a main theme, I decided on the "flow" or
"movement" to drive the main theme home. The task is to put the
elements together so they flow well from start to finish. Then we
are back to "arranging the pieces," discussed above. Most
important is to keep the format flexible, let the sense and drama
of the text shape the sermon.

Opening Paragraph
With the short attention span of today's audience, the first
sentence and first paragraph are especially important. If they
don't grab people's attention, the whole sermon may never get off
the ground. A good beginning does two things:
(1) catches the people's attention;
(2) leads into the theme of the sermon.
It captures attention in different ways. It may plunge into the
text with some creative thinking or provocative questions. Or it
might paint a picture which fires the imagination. It may

be a story which strikes the audience and starts them thinking.
Another possibility is to use the introduction to heighten the
sense of expectation or tension in the sermon.
A good introduction not only leads into the theme of the
sermon, but actually becomes the theme of the sermon. A vivid
introduction which leads to, or illustrates, a side issue of the
text may actually detract from the main point of the sermon. The
introduction must lead to the main theme of the sermon for it to
be effective.
For example, I heard a sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent,
Cycle C, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32. The
preacher began something like this:

Many of us can look back on our life and see wasted years. I'm
embarrassed to remember how I loafed through high school and
college. I got poor grades in high school and then when I moved
to a college dorm I spent most of my time watching TV with a beer
can in my hand. I barely made it through college, and even then I
hardly knew what to do with my life. I got a job, but it wasn't
what I really wanted to do ...

The introduction rambled on a while longer, leading us through a
few more aimless years, including mention of a friend whose
straying life led tragically to his suicide. Finally came the
transition to the text:

The young man in our text wasted part of his life too ...

The problem is that the theme of the introduction -- wasting the
years of one's youth -- dominated the sermon, far overshadowing
the real message of the text, namely the father's loving
acceptance of his returning son. Listeners thinking about the
sermon later will remember the wasted years of the youth and the
tragic death of the other young man, rather than the father.
A good introduction may also accomplish a third purpose:
(3) provides an image which carries throughout the rest of the
sermon.

This third purpose is particularly helpful, because the
introduction itself contains the "red thread" which holds the
sermon together for the audience.
Scottish-born Peter Marshall, pastor of New York Avenue
Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., during the years of
World War II, was preparing a sermon about Abraham. His texts
were Genesis 12:1-3, the call of Abraham, and Hebrews 11:8, "By
faith Abraham ... went out, not knowing whither he went." He
needed an introduction to describe what it must have been like to
venture forth in faith when one doesn't know one's destination or
fate. This is how he began his sermon:

I do not know what picture the phrase "under sealed orders"
suggests to you -- to me it recalls very vividly a scene from the
first world war, when I was a little boy spending vacations at
the Scottish seaport.

I saw a gray destroyer slipping hurriedly from port in response
to some urgent commands ... I watched the crew hurry their
preparations for sailing, watched them cast off the mooring
hawsers ... saw the sleek ship get under way, as she rose to meet
the lazy swell of a summer evening ... Her Morse lamp was winking
on the control bridge aft, and I watched her until she was lost
in the mists of the North Sea.

She was a mystery vessel. She had sailed under orders. Not even
her officers knew her destination or the point of rendezvous. We
all start in life, going -- we know not where. It will be
revealed later. But meanwhile we must go out in faith -- under
sealed orders.44

The picture of the destroyer leaving port rivets one's attention
on what is to come. Your mind sees the gray ship disappearing
into the fog, and the tension of a mysterious war-time mission
captures you for the remainder of the sermon.

But this image not only introduced the theme of the sermon; it
became the theme of the sermon. Rev. Marshall reinforced the
image by using the phrase of the opening sentence as the title of
the sermon, "Under Sealed Orders." The sermon concluded by
returning to this opening image and fixing it in our minds:

We are living in a hazardous epoch of history ... You are leaving
port under sealed orders and in a troubled period. You cannot
know whither you are going or what you are to do. But why not
take a Pilot on board who knows the nature of your sealed orders
from the outset, and who will shape your entire voyage
accordingly? He knows the shoals and the sandbanks, the rocks and
the reefs. He will steer you safely into that celestial harbor
where your anchor will be cast for eternity. Let his mighty nail-
pierced hands hold the wheel, and you will be safe.

Now is a splendid time to entrust your life to him, now, as you
begin. Give him your life. He will treasure it, even as [he
treasures] you.

Then, though you may not know what will be your harbor, you will
know your Pilot ... And all will be well.45

If somebody who heard that sermon was asked later that day,
"What was the sermon about?" he would not likely say, "I really
don't know what he was getting at!" He might not immediately
remember the text. His first memory might not be Abraham, the
actual theme of the text, nor the meaning of Abraham for our
time, that we too venture forth in faith.
The first image which would come to mind for the listener
would be the gray destroyer gliding into the icy mists of the
North Sea. From there the listener would recall the rest of the
sermon in his mind -- Abraham, the text and the application of
the text to us. The introduction fixed an image which became the
controlling image of the whole sermon.

Carrying the introduction throughout the sermon and the
conclusion doesn't always work. Nor would you want every sermon
to fall into that same pattern. But when it works, it gives the
sermon a unity of structure which cannot help but convey the
message to the audience.

Titles
Titles can reinforce the message of the sermon. It is the
first thing about the sermon the listeners actually see -- in the
bulletin, the sign board outside, or in the newspapers. An
effective title can:
*provoke curiosity about the sermon;
*pose a question to stimulate thinking; or
*lead into the theme of the sermon.
Preaching on Matthew 17:19, "Why could not we cast him out?"
Martin Luther King, Jr. titled the sermon "The Answer to a
Perplexing Question." If the people paid attention to the gospel
being read, they would have heard the question posed in the text
and known the sermon would deal with it. Rev. King began the
sermon by restating the question of the text:

But the problem that has always hampered man has been his
inability to conquer evil by his own power. In pathetic
amazement, he asks, "Why can I not cast it out? Why can I not
remove this evil from my life?"46

He went on to give two false ways to eliminate evil: either by
our attempt to remove evil through our own power, or by waiting
passively for God to solve the problem. Then he restarted the
question of the text on our level:

What, then, is the answer to life's perplexing question, "How can
evil be cast out of our individual and collective lives?" If the
world is not to be purified by God alone nor by man alone, who
will do it?47

He moved to the answer, responding to the two false answers given
earlier:

The answer is found in an idea which is distinctly different from
the two we have discussed, for neither God nor man will
individually bring the world's salvation. Rather, both man and
God, made in a marvelous unity of purpose through an overflowing
love as the free gift of himself ...48

The theme of the title has become the theme of the sermon, and it
is concluded in the final paragraph:

Herein we find the answer to a perplexing question. Evil can be
cast out, not by man alone nor by a dictatorial God who invades
our lives, but when we open the door and invite God through
Christ to enter ...49

It all fit together. The structure of the sermon was made very
clear from the start, and words "perplexing question" became the
unifying idea, from the title through the concluding paragraph.
The audience's attention was maintained as we were kept waiting
for the answer posed by the text. The title was clear from the
start and was used throughout the sermon.
One can also use a title to heighten expectation and tension.
People will listen carefully, because they wonder, "What does the
title have to do with all this?"
Fred Craddock preached a sermon on Galatians 1:11-24, the
transformation from Saul the persecutor to Paul, the apostle to
the Gentiles. He noted how difficult it must have been for the
early Jewish Christians to accept Gentiles as Christians, and
pointed out how our own prejudices can become barriers to our
discipleship.50
An obvious title would have been "Overcoming Prejudices," an
accurate but banal description of the sermon's theme. Such a
title wouldn't spark anybody's interest.
Instead, Craddock's imaginative title "Praying Through
Clenched Teeth" piques our curiosity, helps us to imagine

how Paul must have felt when God first called him to preach to
the Gentiles, and leads us to wonder how often we ourselves pray
unwillingly. The title grabs our attention and embodies the
content of the sermon.
In crafting a sermon, knowing how people's minds wander, take
steps to seize and hold their interest!