Dr. John Timmerman, Professor of English at Calvin College, delivered this address at the annual meeting of the Reformed Fellowship, Inc. held at the Grandville Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan on October 6, 1972.
When I was a boy in rural Iowa, the church and the sermon in the church were close to the center of experience. Here for a few hours each week, the harsh toil and long loneliness of farm life were forgotten. In the fellowship of believers, the singing of long familiar psalms, and above all in the sermon the members of the church found security, spiritual nurture and new strength. Though it was a long, long day for a little boy as the sermons seemed to stretch endlessly on under the hot summer sun, yet even then the church and the sermon provided a kind of stability and fixed point to life which endured with me.
Can the sermon survive – Willa Cather prefaces one of her finest no novels with the Latin words, “Optima dies . . . prima fugit,” (the finest days fly first). Whether the early decades of our century were the best years of our church may be debatable, that they were good years and that they are gone is not. The pastoral context is largely gone, the minister’s preferred position and authority has lessened. The roar and sweep of our industrialized and standardized culture has muted our distinctiveness.
American thought and especially American psychology have changed the ways we think. Our obsessive “presentism” has hit the young hardest, and they often abandon the past not with a sigh but a shudder. There is a feeling abroad that regard for tradition is an absurd loyalty. Everywhere there is a revolt against authority: decency in literature and the arts, standards in language, doctrine in religion, instruction in education, and reason in experience.
The question we face is whether the sermon, as the central element in the church service, can survive in a world in which whirl seems to be king, the termites are always at the pillars of the temple, and good things die everyday. I hope to show that it should.
Sermon as oratory and rhetoric – The sermon is a major example of the arts of oratory and rhetoric. The type of sermon we are accustomed to hear has risen out of a long literary tradition. Our church has never encouraged extemporaneous preaching and has very rarely ordained a minister without long education, which has always included homiletics.
This literary tradition goes back to the middle ages in which there were elaborate theories on effective preaching and critical sheep in the audience to test them. In the seventeenth century sermons were the greatest form of prose literature. In Puritan New England books of sermons were best sellers, and Samuel Sewall gave them to the woman he was courting. This concern with the artistic dimension of the sermon continues to this day.
Furthermore, the sermon has been a very flexible form, amenable to freshness and variety without loss in dignity or identity. It has ranged from the homespun clarity of John Bunyan to the silks and satins of John Donne, from the “close, naked, natural way” of the Puritans to the urbane and sophisticated prose of Cardinal Newman, from the austere dignity of the “Pardoner’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the colloquial style of Moody. It has room for the preacher’s personality, the nature of the messages, and the temper of the time. It can serve a devout, spiritual purpose with all the resources of art. It is, in fact, often the most organized and sustained speech its audience hears all week.
Sermon as a medium – The sermon is still an highly effective medium. I know that effectiveness is hard to measure. I remember working hard to teach a class the definition of an heroic couplet. two rhyming lines of regular verse. When the tests came, one of the students defined it as follows, “A heroic couplet is when two young people marry and have a lough time of it but slick together.” Perfect communication is seldom possible. The speaker may be somewhat cloudy, the hearer not alert. Words too are hard to handle. Eliot has said that words:
Crack and sometimes break, tinder the burden,
Under tile tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
But to say that sermons have been bouncing off the heads of audiences for generations as if they were masses of imperceptive clods is the other extreme. There are those who neither listen not learn; dull in faculty or enveloped in a miasmic mist of egoism. But there are many who know what was said and can discuss it.
The responses I received to my little piece on the sermon help prove this. There were, to me surprisingly many—verbal and written. They came from unlettered laymen, from physicians and lawyers, from many of my colleagues at the college, and from a good many ministers ranging in age from 27 to 82. Among these ministers were a good many whom most of us would consider the ablest in our church. The sermon still works and to a good sermon can still be applied the words of Emily Dickinson:
Some say a word is dead
When it is said,
I say it just begins to live
That day.
Sermon in the apostolic church – Many critics of the traditional sermon, ignoring other passages in the Pauline letters, ground their convictions on the alleged general practices of the apostolic church in which one taught, another sang a psalm, a third spoke in a tongue and a fourth interpreted this. The specific Scriptural passage referred to in Called to Serve is I Corinthians 14:26-33. But in a minor masterpiece of suppressing the evidence, they fail to continue with verses 34-35, where Paul says “It is a shocking thing that a woman should address the congregation.” Now, one can’t have it both ways. Either verses 26–35 are all normative today or the verses describe an expression temporary in character.
I believe this was a legitimate form of worship at the time, but superseded by the long tradition of the sermon as we know it. One of our ministers who had just taken graduate work in the life and literature of the first and second century apostolic church wrote me that this studies made it abundantly clear that such dialog services were held only until competent preachers arose and that when they did the sermon became central in the worship services.
Authoritative voice versus democratic colloquium – I believe, furthermore, that the minister fills a God-ordained office in preaching, that he literally represents, in spite of human frailty, the voice of God to His people. There are excellent commentaries on the Bible, and many helpful spiritual books, but only in preaching does a living, human voice confront us directly as God’s messenger to us. The minister cannot share this office. In a dialog service this is lost; instead of an authoritative voice we have a democratic colloquium. The minister has been lengthily and expensively trained to perform this office, and it is not the business of unprepared people to offer instant wisdom on knotty Scriptural passages. The minister has the special training, the gifts, experience and time to explain Scripture in a way that most of us are too preoccupied with our daily tasks to do.
The sermon seems to me irreplaceable in worship. No other way of conducting services embodies the values I have emphasized. I do not think any intelligent critic would deny the esthetic dimension of the sermon. If one is dubious, let him read sermons by Donne, Newman, and R. B. Kuiper; then, if he is still dubious, one can safely dismiss him as a blockhead. The opinion of the sermon as invariably dull and soporific strikes me as adolescent in origin and weightless in argument. Not all sermons are brilliant, but I have never heard a carefully prepared sermon by an intelligent man that did not have something worth listening to. In no other service does the minister speak with the authority inhering in the sermon.
If these convictions are sound, interwoven dialog is both erroneous and ineffective, “passive listeners” will be limited to the daydreamers, self-appointed geniuses, sleepers and hostile witnesses, eloquence will not be confused with contrivance, and libellous language which describes our traditional preaching as replete with “ponderous phrase and esoteric language, intellectual conceits and theological smokescreen” will not be madly spoken. Good sermons will continue to nurture our faith, stimulate love for God and neighbor, inspire compassion, work repentance and faith, give light for darkness and hope for the morrow.
When I was a boy in rural Iowa, the church and the sermon in the church were close to the center of experience. Here for a few hours each week, the harsh toil and long loneliness of farm life were forgotten. In the fellowship of believers, the singing of long familiar psalms, and above all in the sermon the members of the church found security, spiritual nurture and new strength. Though it was a long, long day for a little boy as the sermons seemed to stretch endlessly on under the hot summer sun, yet even then the church and the sermon provided a kind of stability and fixed point to life which endured with me.
Can the sermon survive – Willa Cather prefaces one of her finest no novels with the Latin words, “Optima dies . . . prima fugit,” (the finest days fly first). Whether the early decades of our century were the best years of our church may be debatable, that they were good years and that they are gone is not. The pastoral context is largely gone, the minister’s preferred position and authority has lessened. The roar and sweep of our industrialized and standardized culture has muted our distinctiveness.
American thought and especially American psychology have changed the ways we think. Our obsessive “presentism” has hit the young hardest, and they often abandon the past not with a sigh but a shudder. There is a feeling abroad that regard for tradition is an absurd loyalty. Everywhere there is a revolt against authority: decency in literature and the arts, standards in language, doctrine in religion, instruction in education, and reason in experience.
The question we face is whether the sermon, as the central element in the church service, can survive in a world in which whirl seems to be king, the termites are always at the pillars of the temple, and good things die everyday. I hope to show that it should.
Sermon as oratory and rhetoric – The sermon is a major example of the arts of oratory and rhetoric. The type of sermon we are accustomed to hear has risen out of a long literary tradition. Our church has never encouraged extemporaneous preaching and has very rarely ordained a minister without long education, which has always included homiletics.
This literary tradition goes back to the middle ages in which there were elaborate theories on effective preaching and critical sheep in the audience to test them. In the seventeenth century sermons were the greatest form of prose literature. In Puritan New England books of sermons were best sellers, and Samuel Sewall gave them to the woman he was courting. This concern with the artistic dimension of the sermon continues to this day.
Furthermore, the sermon has been a very flexible form, amenable to freshness and variety without loss in dignity or identity. It has ranged from the homespun clarity of John Bunyan to the silks and satins of John Donne, from the “close, naked, natural way” of the Puritans to the urbane and sophisticated prose of Cardinal Newman, from the austere dignity of the “Pardoner’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the colloquial style of Moody. It has room for the preacher’s personality, the nature of the messages, and the temper of the time. It can serve a devout, spiritual purpose with all the resources of art. It is, in fact, often the most organized and sustained speech its audience hears all week.
Sermon as a medium – The sermon is still an highly effective medium. I know that effectiveness is hard to measure. I remember working hard to teach a class the definition of an heroic couplet. two rhyming lines of regular verse. When the tests came, one of the students defined it as follows, “A heroic couplet is when two young people marry and have a lough time of it but slick together.” Perfect communication is seldom possible. The speaker may be somewhat cloudy, the hearer not alert. Words too are hard to handle. Eliot has said that words:
Crack and sometimes break, tinder the burden,
Under tile tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
But to say that sermons have been bouncing off the heads of audiences for generations as if they were masses of imperceptive clods is the other extreme. There are those who neither listen not learn; dull in faculty or enveloped in a miasmic mist of egoism. But there are many who know what was said and can discuss it.
The responses I received to my little piece on the sermon help prove this. There were, to me surprisingly many—verbal and written. They came from unlettered laymen, from physicians and lawyers, from many of my colleagues at the college, and from a good many ministers ranging in age from 27 to 82. Among these ministers were a good many whom most of us would consider the ablest in our church. The sermon still works and to a good sermon can still be applied the words of Emily Dickinson:
Some say a word is dead
When it is said,
I say it just begins to live
That day.
Sermon in the apostolic church – Many critics of the traditional sermon, ignoring other passages in the Pauline letters, ground their convictions on the alleged general practices of the apostolic church in which one taught, another sang a psalm, a third spoke in a tongue and a fourth interpreted this. The specific Scriptural passage referred to in Called to Serve is I Corinthians 14:26-33. But in a minor masterpiece of suppressing the evidence, they fail to continue with verses 34-35, where Paul says “It is a shocking thing that a woman should address the congregation.” Now, one can’t have it both ways. Either verses 26–35 are all normative today or the verses describe an expression temporary in character.
I believe this was a legitimate form of worship at the time, but superseded by the long tradition of the sermon as we know it. One of our ministers who had just taken graduate work in the life and literature of the first and second century apostolic church wrote me that this studies made it abundantly clear that such dialog services were held only until competent preachers arose and that when they did the sermon became central in the worship services.
Authoritative voice versus democratic colloquium – I believe, furthermore, that the minister fills a God-ordained office in preaching, that he literally represents, in spite of human frailty, the voice of God to His people. There are excellent commentaries on the Bible, and many helpful spiritual books, but only in preaching does a living, human voice confront us directly as God’s messenger to us. The minister cannot share this office. In a dialog service this is lost; instead of an authoritative voice we have a democratic colloquium. The minister has been lengthily and expensively trained to perform this office, and it is not the business of unprepared people to offer instant wisdom on knotty Scriptural passages. The minister has the special training, the gifts, experience and time to explain Scripture in a way that most of us are too preoccupied with our daily tasks to do.
The sermon seems to me irreplaceable in worship. No other way of conducting services embodies the values I have emphasized. I do not think any intelligent critic would deny the esthetic dimension of the sermon. If one is dubious, let him read sermons by Donne, Newman, and R. B. Kuiper; then, if he is still dubious, one can safely dismiss him as a blockhead. The opinion of the sermon as invariably dull and soporific strikes me as adolescent in origin and weightless in argument. Not all sermons are brilliant, but I have never heard a carefully prepared sermon by an intelligent man that did not have something worth listening to. In no other service does the minister speak with the authority inhering in the sermon.
If these convictions are sound, interwoven dialog is both erroneous and ineffective, “passive listeners” will be limited to the daydreamers, self-appointed geniuses, sleepers and hostile witnesses, eloquence will not be confused with contrivance, and libellous language which describes our traditional preaching as replete with “ponderous phrase and esoteric language, intellectual conceits and theological smokescreen” will not be madly spoken. Good sermons will continue to nurture our faith, stimulate love for God and neighbor, inspire compassion, work repentance and faith, give light for darkness and hope for the morrow.