Dr. John J. Timmerman, son of the late Rev. John Timmerman and for many years a professor of English at Calvin College, writes: “I have an abiding and high respect for the traditional sermon. I do not believe it to be an archaic relic to be entrusted to a museum with other valuable objects that have outlived their usefulness.” Not only his superior style but especially the message his lines convey, make Dr. Timmerman‘s article one no reader can afford to miss.
Communication has changed enormously in the last fifty years. Anyone who grew up as I did under the formative influences of Victorian poetry, fiction, and criticism realizes how the forms of fiction and poetry have been ruptured and then reconstructed into novel and even bizarre patterns. The permissible content has been so extravagantly enlarged that chagrin, repulsion, and even boredom have often characterized the humane, non–religious reader. The irrational and the absurd have sometimes replaced the sane and the normal. Literary criticism has introduced many new standards for excellence.
Radio has enlarged the boundaries of communication. Then came television, a medium, spectacularly influential and possessing extraordinarily sophisticated instruments, largely devoted to junk. God must be angry at what man has done with this marvelous medium. Instead of great plays, we have “Kojak” and “The Edge of Night”; instead of great music, we have “Tony Orlando and Dawn.” There are some fascinating interviews, but most of them are exercises in animated backslapping. Some religious programs embody the means of television to provide spectacular settings and florid showmanship. One clergyman accompanies a disjointed series of comments with meandering piano playing. Shouldn‘t that Victorian relic, the traditional sermon be pepped up? Doesn‘t it need some aid?
The Editorial Board of THE OUTLOOK has asked me to comment on this question, not, I am sure, because J am any kind of expert on the sermon, but probably because they know that I have an abiding and high respect for the traditional sermon. I do not believe it to be an archaic relic to be entrusted to a museum with other valuable objects that have outlived their usefulness.
All the sermon really needs today is a competent clergyman and the English language. A thousand years of rich human experience, intelligence, and the work of many geniuses have made that language an incomparable instrument for expressing human thought and feeling. To supplement it in a sermon with flannelgraphs, cartoons, drawings of flora and fauna, illustrative objects like toothpaste, sound effects, audience participation and hysteria demonstrates the intellectual poverty of all involved.
No one would deny the religious value of art, but I don‘t enjoy mixing the arts, accompanying the sermon or prayer with good music. A good sermon is an oratorical unit and should not be invaded. It is primarily a matter of words and gestures to which personality and sincerity are the only important aids. I believe this is all the sermon needs; but it is not all the contemporary audience needs, as I shall point out later.
Communication through a sermon is not easy. No worthwhile speaking or writing is, and there are no effortless solutions. Words are slippery; they are often many-layered in meaning; they alter in meaning through generations. The strong words of one age become weak or unusable in another. When someone was called silly in Chaucer’s time, he was denominated saintly; today he is ridiculed as a fool. One of the rich words years ago was gay, a word now so debased one scarcely dares use it. Doctrinal terms, since they are not part of daily life, have to be incessantly taught because substitutions are hard to invent. To fix the right meaning in the right words is an everlasting task for the minister. If he accomplishes it well, he should not need aids, at least not in our churches.
Dissatisfaction with the traditional sermon is, in my judgment, not so much caused by the inadequacy of the sermon itself as it is caused by a cultural context increasingly hostile to it.
Let me illustrate. The Reverend Mr. R. B. Kuiper, whom many of us remember with affection and gratitude was an outstandingly able preacher in matter, manner, and expression. In my youth he attracted overflowing audiences. Probably many of us walked a long way to hear him. I doubt whether it would happen today if he were among us. Various influences have shouldered the sermon out of its former centrality in the life of our members.
In some of our churches, possibly many, the worshippers at evening service are becoming an endangered species. The evening sermon competes with the beach, Kojak, visiting, indifference, and inertia. The authority of and the taste for the sermon have diminished. I do not think the fault lies in the sermon. I hear many fine sermons today. The basic fault lies in a new sensibility on the part of the church members. How to modify that is the real problem. I do not believe it will be modified by refashioning the sermon in drastic ways. In the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
Ministers and writers in aUf circles who wish to stimulate wide response face hard times not because they cannot communicate but partly because a portion of the potential audience resents intellectual effort, and partly because another portion has been attracted to and alienated by influences in our culture which have decentralized the Word and the word. Ministers and writers are urged to be brief, transparent, obvious, and captivating—one page articles immediately digestible and fifteen–minute sermons.
If this pattern prevails it is the prelude to disaster as far as the Reformed tradition is concerned, an intellectually tough tradition that can never be kept alive by hasty reading of bits of devotional and theological prose. The magazines that try to keep this tradition alive have a disappointingly meager subscription list. Solid reading is rare. The Banner has its problems especially with the age group in the twenties and thirties, a group that should be the foundation for future development. In all these cases, I do not believe the real problem lies in inept communication; it lies largely in indifference to what is communicated.
How to change this attitude in an age that disparages authority, exalts individualism, and is geared to the idea of instant wisdom baffles me. Anyone who has taught college students during the sixties knows how overwhelmingly powerful the spirit of the age can be. Professor Jowett, the famous Oxford don once told a student who professed to be an atheist, “You believe in God by 10 a.m. tomorrow or you will be expelled.” He wouldn‘t have done it in 1968.
The past was not perfect; many sermons were not masterpieces, and the services were not ideal at all times. Keeping awake on a sunny August afternoon was sometimes beyond the power of some of the elders up front. I remember a man snoring. Babies were yammering until they received natural nourishment. The minister faced a tempest of waving fans, and the elders at times had to police naughty boys in the back row. But the congregation was there, and the majority came to listen and to learn. I was there—three times a Sunday.
The minister was expected to exegete the Word, and he did not have to be a spellbinder. The minister was like Philip who said to the eunuch, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” In answer to the eunuch’s reply, Philip opened his mouth and explained the Scriptures. When the multitude was assembled at the mountain side, our Lord opened His mouth and taught them.
The only way I know to master a passage in literature is to read it word after word, and, if I am baffled, further explanatory comments. This strikes me as neither old-fashioned in a derogatory sense or sterile. Formerly the audience was willing to do its part. If the sermon fails today, I would fault the audience more than the minister. Mr. Blythe makes a comment applied to another matter, but it has relevance here: “The old people have gone and have taken a lot of the truth out of the world with them.” In this case a lot of the truth about preaching.