My wife and I once began to watch through the entire Steven Spielberg directorial catalog beginning with one of his first made-for-TV movies, the tense and mysterious Duel. We moved on to Jaws and to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We were looking forward to Raiders of the Lost Ark. But between that and Close Encounters, there came 1941, a movie so spectacularly bad that we couldn’t finish it.
As a preacher, I’m encouraged by this. Not every sermon is going to be Saving Private Ryan. And that’s okay.
I tell ministry students that I have a ±3200 word essay due every Sunday morning and late submissions are not allowed by the syllabus. Some weeks the schedule is tight and exegesis is curtailed or the writing is rushed. It’s remarkable that I get anything out at all.
When I’m happy with the result, I’m in awe at the grace of God who enables me to piece together something true and helpful. But when the sermon is too long, too impractical, inadequately illustrated, or simply tedious, I want to hide my face and hustle off to some private place to be alone to bewail my inadequacy.
Of course, if we’ve spoken something untrue that needs to be corrected, or if to allow more thoughtful preparation we need to re-prioritize our schedules, then by all means we should do those things. But when we still churn out that sermon that makes us want to quit altogether, I suggest we resist that impulse.
The bad sermon is often not as bad as it feels. And even if it was, God can draw straight lines with crooked sticks, as my mom would often remind me. There have been so many times when people have told me how much my (self-judged terrible) sermon helped them that I’ve been known to get angry at God for letting that happen. He refuses to join my pity party, and that frustrates me.
Besides, the sermon is not the only vehicle by which God uses us to communicate his grace to our people. It’s your presence, your care, and your delight in God that they see and care about. Contrary to what you may imagine, your polished oratory may be secondary at best.
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote about what he called the romance of preaching.1 Our words land in ways we can never imagine or predict. And, I would add, they may take a while to germinate. I once saw singer/songwriter David Wilcox at a small venue in St. Augustine, Florida. He told a lot of stories and sang a lot of songs in the ninety minutes he was on stage, none of it immediately impactful.
But in the days and weeks that followed, though, I began to remember lines about “starting with the ending” and images about making beauty within defined frames. What he had planted in my mind had to sit for a while. When I needed them, they emerged. Even our less than Oscar-worthy sermons can be like that. We plant that which in God’s time and under his care breaks through the surface and blossoms. Your words, pastor, even the weak ones, are not in vain.
You will preach bad sermons. Accept that and realize that you are in great company. Charles Wesley wrote thousands of hymns, most of them now forgotten. Some were so-so or bad. It happens.
Around 1930 a book titled The Stuffed Owl2 was published. This was a snarky collection of bad poetry written by poets such as Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, and others, some of the most esteemed English poets in history. You may not be the “Keats of the pulpit,” but it’s good to see that even those greatest at their craft have occasionally lost their way, as do we.
It’s okay if we now and then squeak out a bad sermon. That’s called being human.3 If Steven Spielberg can have 1941 in his body of work, then I think we all can be permitted the occasional sermonic dud.
And before we send out invites to our pity parties, we might need to do a better job of listening to the gospel we preach. Recently I was wrapping up a sermon on how God accepts us not because of our works or performance, but solely in Christ. As I did, though, I was convinced this sermon belonged in the 1941 file. On the outside I was saying that in Christ we’re good enough apart from our production. Inside I was condemning myself for producing such tripe. What others heard me say was that we are God’s beloved apart from the quality or quantity of our acts. To myself I was saying, “This is an awful sermon. Everyone is thinking so. You should be embarrassed.”
Instead of supporting my pity party, God showed me how silly I was being.
I laughed.
Here’s hoping you can laugh at your awful sermons, as only the beloved of God can.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (United States: Zondervan, 1972).
D. B. Wyndham Lewis, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (United States: New York Review of Books, 2003).
Which for some of us is something that needs repeating. Two helpful recent books making this point are Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (United States: Random House, 2021) and Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (United States: Brazos Press, 2022).