Waiting on the Word.

Lorraine Cavanagh explores the nature and meaning of the Sermon...

Webster’s dictionary defines preaching as ‘to give moral or religious advice, especially in a tiresome manner’. The sermon has a bad track record. Many people associate preaching with Victorian piety, or with a particular theology or churchmanship, or with charismatic individuals whose showmanship they distrust. In all of these real or imagined settings the sermon is perceived as alienating. People feel that they have been manipulated or brainwashed, if not plainly bored.

Whether they come to church in an enquiring frame of mind, or just feel the need for God, churchgoers do not always look forward to the sermon. It is something which they will have to endure, or which may simply afford some time for doing a little mental darning, going over the past week, picking up stray threads and weaving them back into the garment of their life and relationships, filling the gaps so as to make better sense of things. The sermon does not help them make sense of their lives. At best, it is a series of answers to irrelevant questions. But the listener is hopeful. He waits to hear something that will resonate with his intuition, that will strike a note of truth, even if he knows that this is unlikely to happen. Others will have known in the first minute or two that the sermon was not going to have anything to say to them. It was something that the preacher had written out and then ‘delivered’ either as a formulaic working through of a given text or as a personal and predictable response to specific events. Somewhere during the course of its preparation the sermon had become an object, a stone which sinks to the bottom of the lake when it should have spun and hopped a few times first. It had been reduced to a matter of ‘throwing answers like stones at the heads of those who have not yet asked the questions’.1 The stones had disappeared from sight before they, or any questions they might have prompted, had the slightest chance of sinking into the inner consciousness of those listening.

Jesus did not preach sermons. He talked to people, so they went away more aware of who they were, of how they belonged in the deepest sense to God. They went away fed, sometimes bodily as well as intellectually and emotionally. At times, he shocked or angered them, although he did not always intend to do so or, if he did, it was only to give them a glimpse of what they were missing. He wanted them to know what it feels like to be fully alive, what we experience when we are fully engaged with another person or with an idea.

His first recorded sermon took place in his local place of worship on an ordinary Sabbath morning. He was handed the scroll with the text for the day which was a compilation of verses from the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1-2; 58:6) with added references to Leviticus. He did not address the congregation from an elevated podium or pulpit. He sat down, as was the custom for preachers.

Pulpits have their advantages; it is easier for the preacher to be seen, and perhaps heard, but pulpits also create a physical separation between the one speaking and those who are listening. This reinforces a further separation created by a top-down hierarchical system of governance in the institutional Church. People are feeling increasingly out of touch with the higher ranking clergy, and patronised by them, especially where the roles of administration and management are conflated with those of pastoral and spiritual care. The existing preaching environment in most churches mirrors this separation and can alienate those who are in the pews. They see the person who is preaching as a member of the cognoscenti standing over them, delivering a sermon from on high.

Speaking from ‘on high’ also gives the impression that a further separation exists between life as it is lived in the everyday, and life as it is intended to be lived in God. The people represent ‘the everyday’, and the preacher, talking down to them from the pulpit, seems to belong to another more rarefied sphere, so creating the impression that he or she has a ‘hot line’ to God and speaks on God’s behalf. The Holy Spirit, whose living presence should fill the speaker and her listeners in equal measure, bears no relation to a ‘hot line’ to God. The alienation created by this more implicit separation is one of the aspects of preaching which puts many people off sermons, and puts them off coming to church.

How much better it would be if the preacher was to be seated, perhaps on a slightly raised surface, if visibility is a problem, with the people around her.2 Being on the same level, and in much closer proximity to our listeners, makes it easier for us to sense whether what we are saying engages them, whether it is the truth they need to hear. A warm and reasonably comfortable environment is also helpful, as I have often found on visiting churches in the US. Warm churches make for greater attentiveness and for prayerful listening. They warm the mind. A congenial environment relaxes people and disposes the listener, as well as the person preaching, to expect the best from the sermon and to listen deeply for the truth they all need to hear. Only when people sense this shared truth will the sermon convey meaning.

Meaning

Meaning, or truth, comes in the epiphany moments which we all experience from time to time as moments of truth. But it also comes with deep listening and from living in such a way as to be available to God who is truth itself, in all our waking moments, as well as in our sleeping ones. Simone Weil describes this availability to God as disponibilité, a permanent openness to God and to the unexpected.3 It is also what Paul meant when he urged his readers to pray at all times. The one who is preaching needs to be open to being surprised by God at all times. If he is to convince others of the truth of what he is saying he must live from within that truth. If he is living within it he will have recognised that the faith which he professes through his sermon does not entirely depend on the literal or historical accuracy of facts and events. It depends on the truthfulness of his own dialogue with God. He is not putting forward an argument to prove or disprove facts. He is ‘exposing’ (from which we get the words ‘expository preaching’) the deeper meaning of Scripture for the present set of circumstances. He is taking his listeners beyond the rational, while using the rational as a springboard from which to expose a deeper truth. In order to arrive at the kind of truth which reaches beyond the rational, he will have thought honestly about it, respectful of the different ways in which a text can be read and of the intellectual and spiritual challenges which they present to him personally. He will have done his theology.

The sermon is an exhortation to the listener to take theology seriously. Theology is heart thinking. To think about God, or to do theology, is to be willing to be disponible, open to the risks entailed in working at a loving relationship so that it can mature and remain charged with meaning. The sermon should be an invitation to the listener to step outside the boundaries of the philosophy of religion, to be willing to change. It should invite her to explore beyond the purely rational, beyond the mind which questions the ‘existence’ of God, a question which is often defeated by the very notion of existence as it might pertain to God. Among other things, the sermon should embody the possibility of open but honest trust with regard to the kind of God revealed through Scripture, and whether God is ‘good’ in the way we understand that word.

All of these questions provide a framework in which the truth about God in relation to human beings is worked out through Christian doctrine. But doctrine itself must be kept alive and constantly renewed by the collective mind of the Church as the whole people of God. It must come alive in the new truths which will emerge from the preacher’s sermon on any Sunday morning in the context of their immediate needs. The congregation is not to be thought of as a non-specific collective. The congregation is not an ‘it’. The congregation is a ‘they’. They are God’s people, unique persons who are gathered together to hear what God’s Spirit has to say to them as a community and as persons honoured and loved by God.

When the preacher makes it possible for people to know themselves as loved by God, both together and individually, they become a worshipping community in the fullest sense. Luke describes Jesus offering this subtle transformation to the people in his local synagogue, an offer which they ultimately rejected. (Luke 4:16-22) The substance of his address would have unsettled some of them because it spoke directly into their collective situation; they were living under foreign occupation and they were not theologically free. They were controlled both by a foreign government and by the religious establishment. They were accustomed to hearing sermons which controlled how they thought and which would have made them feel intellectually safe. But sermons preached in a controlling mind-set, whether by leaders of sects within the Church, or by the religious establishment as a whole, do not convey love, so they do not convey meaning. Jesus spoke to the people, and to each person, in the heart’s secret place, that place known only to God, where a person’s fears and longings, as well as loves and hatreds, are lodged. He spoke freedom into the secret fears of many of his listeners. Those of us who preach are called to do the same.

In his first documented preaching engagement, the text appointed for the day suited his purpose admirably. It was about the Jubilee year which occurred once every fifty years, to coincide with the Day of Atonement (Lev. 25:8-13). The Jubilee was ordained as a time of returning. The Jews were to return to their place of birth and re-gather as tribes and families. It was also to be a time of rest for the land and of freedom for those in bonded labour. In the final words of his address Jesus reveals to the people that he embodies the truth of this prophecy ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’. He reveals a truth which they recognise as an epiphany, something which they have perhaps known for a long time but have not wished to come to terms with. Some marvel at his wisdom. Others are outraged because he has overstepped the lines of convention when it comes to who has the right to speak the truth in the context of gatherings that support the edifice of institutionalised religion.

As preachers, we are called to speak the truth as Jesus spoke it to that congregation, whatever the text of the day, and however formal the setting. We are called to embody

the liberating truth given to us in the abiding Spirit of Christ and to manifest that truth in our own life in God. When the sermon speaks truth from within the preacher’s life in God, as it did when Jesus addressed the people of Nazareth, the preacher will immediately connect with people wherever they are in their own unique relationship with him. She will connect at the level of intuitive knowing, or what the Anglican solitary, Maggie Ross, calls ‘deep mind’.4

Our inner, or deeper life in God, has its own dynamic. It is always about ‘returning’. Our life in God is our place of Jubilee. The prophet Isaiah speaks into the confusion and doubt of people who are being urged to return from a place of exile (540BC). They have settled into leading quite comfortable if somewhat colourless lives, but he urges them not to be afraid to return, but to believe in this deep inner place, which is their collective deep mind and where their real identity as a people lies. ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved’ (Isaiah 30:15) the prophet writes.5 He is calling them into truth, as a people who are forgiven and reconciled to God. He urges them to trust that God will provide for them as his people, and to trust in the deeper truth which they share. If they grasp this offer, the peace it gives will transform them into people who are fully alive, the kind of people they were chosen to be when he first called their father Abraham out of the land of Ur.

The truth about the Christian idea of salvation consists in a similar new beginning, in returning to God who makes a new creation of our lives, past and present. It is a return to a truth already known, the reality of God’s love for the human race. The sermon will always return to this central aspect of Christian doctrine, not necessarily by stating it in so many words, but by inference. The preacher will infer its truth by being a certain kind of person, a bearer of the sacramental and transformative word of God.6 So the preacher must have great love for God if he is to be an agent of transformation and if his sermon is to be sacramental in the fullest sense. A sacramental sermon is one which feeds its listeners. It is the prelude to the Eucharistic meal, the ‘starter’. Archbishop Donald Coggan compares the sermon to the act of consecration itself, so that in preaching ‘The “elements” are words, ordinary words, the words that we constantly use in the commerce of everyday life …Who can doubt’, he asks ‘that, when such preaching takes place, there is the Real Presence of Christ?’7

Being a transformative agent is not a matter of having a forceful personality. Preachers who rely on their personality to win over their congregation risk obscuring the delicate truth which is at the heart of the message. They obscure the word with their personality and in doing so they are treating their congregation as an ‘it’ and not as a ‘they’. The truth which they obscure also needs to be liberated from the kind of constraints imposed by a priori suppositions about text and theology. In extreme cases, these a priori judgments can cause serious psychological harm to God’s people, especially to women and to those who are marginalised or excluded from churches on the basis of their sexual orientation.

The truth, as it always returns both the preacher and the listener to the love of God, is the meaning and purpose of any sermon, but it will be given and received in a myriad of ways, depending on a person’s particular circumstances and on the way their thinking about meaning and the world has already been shaped by their own life experience. This applies in equal measure to both preacher and listener. Relying on personality alone will obscure the message sooner or later, when the charisma starts to wear thin and reveals little intellectual or spiritual substance beneath it. To cultivate a personality in order to win over those we are speaking to, in order to make them like us, is to deal in untruthfulness. A truthful person is always transparent in the way she relates to others and in her relationship with God. She is not constrained by the Church she serves and she does not hide behind its ramparts. She does not allow it to obscure her humanity. She is someone people would warm to in any other context. This is the kind of person Jesus was.

Jesus was fully human, earthed in the fullest sense, as holy people invariably are. Holiness is not a matter of introspective detachment from life, or from other people. It is about being fully in the world, with all its confusion and its physical and emotional needs, but not of the world. The preacher who connects with her listeners is someone who they recognise, as if they had always known her, because she speaks from a place they know. She is in the world. She is not trying to conform to the expectations of the world, or to the worldly expectations of the institutional Church, although she is the Church’s public face. Here she has a choice; she can be one of two different faces, depending on the depth and veracity of her life in Christ. She can be the figura of the institutional Church, or the face of Christ to his people. If she is to be the face of Christ to them, people will need to feel that they matter to her and that her love for them is not compromised by concerns over protecting her territory or by ‘profile’ grabbing. Her true self, or ‘self-consciousness’, and the things that matter to her, will be shaped by her inner life in Christ.8 This is the basis of holiness, both for the Church and for the person who serves it, or who speaks on its behalf.

Holiness has nothing to do with achievement or success, especially in regard to ministry. Once understood, this takes considerable pressure off clergy, since letting go of the drive to achieve and succeed immediately places us outside the system. The same applies to the way we preach. A good sermon does not simply impress. Impressive sermons are often quickly forgotten, either because they leave people feeling intellectually inadequate, or because they are devoid of the kind of substance which nourishes the heart as well as the mind. They are no longer subject to the Holy Spirit; the impressive sermon has become ‘my sermon’, which I will store on my computer and use again. This is to systematize and objectify the word of God. Where it should have been inherently fluid and supple, able to shape itself to the moment and to the hearts of the listeners, the sermon now belongs to the preacher. It has become something which the preacher owns and arbitrarily ‘drops’ on the heads of the people. It has become a commodity, wholly unrelated to their deeper fears and longings and which they will probably have heard before, in any case.

Objectified sermons are the shadow-side of a Church which is becoming systematized. They are its figura. Systems survive by telling those who serve them that they must meet certain  expectations and that they should achieve numerical growth, generally described as ‘mission’. For the Church, part of the achievement process consists in justifying its existence on the secular high street by offering the right commodities, commodities which replicate perceived social trends but which often lack depth and meaning. Systems, and the commodities which serve them, disconnect us from God, from people and from our own humanity. 9

When Jesus tells his disciples not to be afraid because his kingdom is ‘not of the world’, he meant that neither he nor his kingdom are of the system. He is telling us the same thing today. We are not to fear the system, because we have already been freed from it. Wherever the Church has allowed itself to become over systematized, the abiding Spirit of Jesus remains a threat, because his Spirit is about freedom, a freedom which he continues to offer to those who preach in his name.

When Jesus tells his disciples to go out and make disciples, he is telling them to be liberators, to set the captives free. The first few seconds of any sermon are decisive in this respect. Is the sermon going to bring hope to the captive? Does it invite her to return to a God in whom she will find peace?

If the preacher has connected with them at any point in the sermon, individuals will approach him after the service and remark on the fact that his words touched them, or that he sparked off a new way of thinking about a text. Both of these areas of transformation will generate a ‘ripple’, or ‘trickle down’ effect. Both will be transformative. The way the words connect or kindle something in the heart of the listener will perhaps manifest itself in some kinder attitude or action to another person later in the week, someone who may never come near a church. This is mission at its best. It proceeds from a silence in which we, as preachers, are called to abide and wait if we are to kindle any semblance of faith in the hearts of those who listen to us.

How we think about a given text is a germinating process which happens in our inner silence, but its truth is rarely given before the moment of speaking. It will be conveyed not only through words but through the whole of the person who is doing the speaking, effecting deep transformative changes on that person, and on those listening. A sermon must have its own particular truth. Its truth will free both listener and preacher from habits of mind which may have become a constraint to them spiritually and so impeded their growth into theological maturity. The newness of the thought, and the liberation which that brings, comes in the moment. The thought has not been ‘kept in reserve’, or recycled from a previous sermon. It pertains to the moment and to the on-going life of the Holy Spirit. The more such ideas are allowed to surface from the preacher’s inner silence, the greater the liberating potential of the sermon.

The sermon, if it is truly liberating, frees both speaker and listener in a downward direction, from the mind to the heart. It takes us into the realm of intuition. Here, the mind and the unconscious function together, so that we learn from what is said through us as we preach. We think and sense at the same time. In neurological terms, this might correspond to the intuitive process described by clinical psychologist, Daniel Siegel, an ‘input from the body [which] forms a vital source of intuition and powerfully influences our reasoning and the way we create meaning in our lives.’10 We input with our rational minds and subject the rational process to our love for God. The sermon’s liberating power consists in freeing all of us for the faith journey which lies ahead, the journey towards God which preacher and people take together. Thus, the sermon will be the preacher’s locus of encounter with God, and God’s locus of encounter with his people.

Journeying

Journeying has shaped the Judeo-Christian tradition from Abraham to Moses and the later exilic prophets, to the peripatetic teaching ministry of Jesus. The idea of journey, or pilgrimage, continues to shape the life of the Church today. It is a context in which we meet God. People grow in their relationship with God, and they grow as a worshipping community, in the context of movement, migration and change, and through waiting. The journeying is in the waiting. In Old Testament times, God’s people waited to encounter him in the ‘tent of meeting’ at Sinai. They wept and waited by the waters of Babylon. Later, they waited for Jesus to heal a child or a loved servant, or to raise a brother from the tomb. Today, the Church waits for the renewal of its life in God. The waiting is part of the journey.

Biblical journeys often took decades. They symbolise the faith journey which we are all called to undertake from the first moment of consciousness, the moment when we discern a face and know that a vital bond exists between us and that person, until our last breath. A person’s faith journey passes through various stages. In his study on faith development, James Fowler compares these stages to the life transitions which occur from early infancy to adult maturity.11 While his theory is helpful in providing a framework within which to explain the way we mature in our thinking about God and the development of moral awareness, it remains within the bounds of the explainable.

The preacher must be prepared to take us outside the explainable, outside defining frameworks. She must journey with people who are looking for a way out of the confines of institutionalised religion, and through the spiritual wilderness of materialist individualism, into fellowship with God and into a renewed understanding of what it means to be God’s people. She must journey with them, but at the same time wait with them, so that she can meet them in this undefined wilderness place. In order to do this, and prior to speaking to them, she will have already engaged in a kind of silent exploration of the wilderness as her listeners might be experiencing it, visualising their faces, if she knows them, or their presence with her if she does not. She will have waited on the word which God wishes to speak to them. Identifying with them in this way in the preceding days will give meaning to the words she speaks on the Sunday. As she begins to speak to them she will sense that she knows them, even if she has never met them, that she has travelled alongside them in a kind of dynamic stillness, always travelling and at the same time always arriving at a place already known.

Perhaps Lewis Carroll was thinking of this when he imagined The Red Queen running with Alice.12 They were running so fast that things seemed to be running with them, but at the same time nothing ever changed, everything remained still. This particular incident in Carroll’s story is a metaphorical rendering of the dynamic of stillness. The preacher must allow her thoughts to come from within the still dynamic of her own deep mind which is the only place from which she will connect with the intuitions and feelings of the people and with the deep mind of the individual. She must run with them, so that they can be still in God, so that they can ‘return’ to him. She must journey with them in a spirit of forgiveness, speaking to a people who have been forgiven in Christ. For this to be possible, she must journey from within her own life narrative, but without distracting their attention from Christ by drawing attention to herself.13

The preacher undertakes the journey with the people, as the prophets did, but he is also called to teach and guide along the way. His words must be food for the journey. So the one who is tasked with preaching sermons should expect to do so from his own wilderness place. Only then will he connect with the deep longings and the anguish secretly held in the hearts of others. His own anguish will be the on-going inner conflict which is part of every journey undertaken in a primal desire to be at one with the purposes of God, even if that desire is unrecognised or consciously resisted.

As we meander through the wilderness of life, a wilderness which we sometimes either choose or create for ourselves, we sooner or later realise that the purposes of God are for our true well-being, found only in him. This does not mean that the sermon should meander, as sermons do when they try to be simply ‘relevant’. The sermon should lead preacher and people together along the straight path chosen by Christ, embracing them while pressing forward, attuned to the same Spirit which journeyed in the wilderness of the biblical exile, behind and ahead of his people until they reached the promised land.

It follows that a good sermon will re-awaken a person’s longing for God by bringing them to a new place, a place of meeting. A good sermon will open up a new theological landscape. It will ‘transfigure’ the way they see things. It will allow for metaphor.14 Every event in Scripture, irrespective of historical detail, is also a metaphor, so everything we say as preachers has a deeper metaphorical dimension which will touch people in the way a straightforward account will not.

Like the story of the Transfiguration of Christ on the holy mountain, miracles and many of the events we speak about can also be read as ‘a narrative about changed perspective’.15 Changed perspective changes, or deepens, our understanding of the world as it is, and of how the world’s suffering connects with the anguish and longings of those to whom we preach sermons. It relates their longing for God to their longing for truth and righteousness, and it assures them of its value to God. It prepares the way for empathy, for transfigured understanding leading to change.

Empathy is the basis for real missional action. The Church of the future will have been rooted in empathy, in a capacity for understanding and in the healing which comes with it.

Waiting on the Word: Preaching sermons that connect people with God by Lorraine Cavanagh is out now in paperback, priced £12.99.

1. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).

2. This works both in a formal liturgical setting and in smaller informal contexts, such as house communions or agapes. The St Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco not only has the preacher seated but invites the whole congregation to follow her from the preaching space to the altar when the creed has been said. This transitional movement, from word to sacrament, creates a people-based connection to the Eucharist and ties the sermon more closely to the rest of the service.

3. Simone Weil, Cahiers.

4. Maggie Ross, Silence: A User’s Guide (London: DLT, 2014), pp.41ff, p.76.

5. Their national, as well as their spiritual identity is brought together in this verse which scholars have argued is the pivotal point of the whole book of Isaiah.

6. Kay L. Northcutt, Kindling Desire for God: Preaching as Spiritual Direction, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), p.29.

7. Donald Coggan, Preaching: The Sacrament of the Word (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988), p.76.

8. Maggie Ross describes this as the ‘en-Christening process’, Writing the Icon of the Heart, p.46.

9. My thinking owes much to Maggie Ross’s depiction of the Church as organisation. See Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), Chapter 6.

10. In James D. Whitehead and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, Nourishing the Spirit: The Healing Emotions of Wonder, Joy, Compassion, and Hope, ‘How we know – Intuition and the Wisdom of the Body’ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), p.150.

11. James Fowler, ‘Stages of Faith Development’ in Philip Richter and Leslie J. Francis, Gone But Not Forgotten: Church Leaving and Returning (London: DLT, 1998), Chapter 5.

12. Lewis Carrol, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 2.

13. Brian Castle, Reconciliation: The Journey of a Lifetime (London: SPCK, 2014), p.74.

14. Maggie Ross differentiates between the idea of something which is transfigured, and that of transformation, the latter being a word which is often misunderstood and therefore misused.

15. Maggie Ross, Silence: A User’s Guide (London: DLT, 2014), p. 31ff.