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A post or two crossed my Instagram feed last week promoting an online preaching seminar taught by a man unknown to me, but allegedly well known to his 25,000 followers. He promised that if I were to take his class and implement his strategies people would better remember on Monday what I preached on Sunday.
That’s cool, I thought, since if you were to ask me on Monday what I preached the day before, I’d have to think very hard to tell you. My deficiencies aside, his point is a good one. We invest a lot of time preparing our sermons. It would be nice to know they are heard.
And yet, like so much in the Christian economic world, I fear he oversells his product. A recent book for parents speaks of the author’s “proven plan for success” that will result in “off the charts revival.” Buried, or assumed, in advertisements such as these is the caveat, “results may vary.” In human affairs, results always vary. Aggregate statistics may show a positive response, but pastors don’t deal with aggregates. We deal with John and Sue and Saul and Pete, individuals with whom there are never guarantees.
The illusion that we can have guarantees comes from our technological assumptions and not a genuine biblical anthropology. Science can make things work. It can’t make people work. Historian Barbara Tuchman once remarked,
“If history were a science, we should be able to get a grip on her, learn her ways, establish her patterns, know what will happen tomorrow. Why is it that we cannot? The answer lies in what I call the Unknowable Variable — namely, man.
“Human beings are always and finally the subject of history. History is the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all, but illogical and so crammed with an unlimited number of variables that it is not susceptible of the scientific method nor of systematizing.”
That is, when people are involved, there are no guarantees.
I used to drive by a massive bread factory and notice the large silos of flour along its side. Here was a place where guarantees prevailed. It was guaranteed that the flour going into that building would come out as loaves of bread. All variables had been removed. It worked. We love things that work. And when they don’t, we feel frustration that can, unchecked, turn ugly. If the fine-tuned bread factory began instead to turn out popsicles, heads would roll.
When preachers aim for bread and end up knee-deep in popsicles, they can be tempted to raise the temperature and intensity of their preaching. Disappointment and frustration can lead to forcefulness and manipulation. Instead of entering the pulpit motivated with the desire that the Lord would direct their listeners’ hearts to the love of God,
our sermons lose sight of grace and take on the tone of, “What do I have to do to get you off your lazy buns?”The truth is that a long line of very fine preachers aiming for bread got popsicles, or worse, due to Tuchman’s Unknowable Variable. Often, for example, Elijah had an audience with Ahab and his lovely wife. They were moved by his preaching only to desire his death. God urged the reluctant Jeremiah to preach, and his eloquence landed him deep in a mucky cistern. Jesus announced the possibility of new life and was laughed at. Herod loved to hear Paul talk, but remained unmoved.
There were and are no guarantees. And when we think otherwise our impatience moves our focus away from grace to law, from the indicative to the imperative. Our desire to see change, when frustrated, tempts us to lay aside the only message we have that has the power to change.
Episcopal priest and author Fleming Rutledge eloquently reminds us that the only guarantee in preaching lies in the content, not the method. She says,
“As I have tried to pass along to young preachers, every biblical sermon should give a reason for hope, and every biblical sermon should contain a promise. . . . Every person in the congregation should feel that a promise has been made to him or her by the God who, unlike human beings, keeps his promises."
Frustration in the pulpit will lead preachers to push their hearers to do, and such preaching, Rutledge observes, leads hearers to “. . . feel defeated and powerless—except, of course, for the few who are already doing whatever it is, who then can feel superior.”
I cheer anything that will help us better communicate from the pulpit. But beware the guarantee. There is no guarantee that people, some of whom would rather chew their own tongues off than respond to a call to repentance,
will respond in the way we hope. Methodology can never overcome the universal variable that is sinful humanity.If our preaching exalts the love of God for sinful people, if our preaching elevates the cross, if our preaching ends on grace, we have fulfilled our task. People will often get our moral teaching hopelessly twisted around. And they may even forget on Monday what we told them to do on Sunday. But if we have ended on grace, if we have driven them to see the guaranteed promises of God, we have done our job.
I guarantee it.
Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History: Selected Essays (United States: Ballantine Books, 1982), p. 247, 248
“May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” (2 Thessalonians 3:5)
Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (United States: Eerdmans Publishing, 2018). Kindle Location 713.
“The fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was plunged into darkness. People gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores. They did not repent of their deeds.” (Revelation 16.10, 11)