A sermon is never just information about Jesus or about God but is crafted so that something happens to the listener. The listener is moved by the sermon—in other words, the Spirit works on the listener. But the preacher should never tax the Spirit too much. The Spirit is busy in this world, and so our job as preachers is to trust her accompaniment, but also to do our own work so listeners respond with passion to hearing the good news.
Moved by the Word
Preachers tend to bristle when they hear that a sermon should secure some sort of moving effect. To elicit an emotional response seems manipulative or too much like preaching as performance. And yet the preaching event is a performance in the truest sense of the word. To perform is to carry out, accomplish, or fulfill (an action, task, or function). A sermon is not a sermon until it is performed—that is, brought to its completion. A sermon is not a sermon until it is uttered out loud in a community of believers.
A helpful analogy might be the performance of a musical piece. The intended goal of a musical composition is to be heard. Once the musician has learned and interpreted the score, their work is not complete until the score is played. The score is never what it was meant to be if it is not performed for an audience. The musician, the composition, and the audience—like the preacher, the text, and the congregation—all come together in a moment in time, never to be repeated again. Perhaps you have attended a musical performance that you will never forget. The musician or group played one of your favorite pieces or songs, and you listened with special people surrounding you. Like a musical composition, a sermon does not come to life until it is performed.
By focusing on this fundamental meaning of performance, we begin to realize just how important moving speech is for crafting a faithful sermon. If we think back to the rhetorical triangle, this aspect of preaching is the pathos—the audience or the congregation. In Greek, pathos means “emotion,” “feeling,” or “passion.” If the congregation is not affected by the preacher’s words, then somewhere along the line the preacher has forgotten that the Word became and becomes flesh.
Being moved by the Word is inherent to the biblical writings. In chapter 1, we looked at John 20:30–31: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The purpose of composing this Gospel, says the Fourth Evangelist, is not to provide information about Jesus, an historical account of Jesus’s life, or even another testimony to Jesus’s ministry. Rather, the Fourth Gospel is written so that something happens to the reader. It is read out loud so that something happens to the hearer.
The Fourth Evangelist is quite clear about this “something.” The signs and ministry of Jesus are recorded so that you might believe. In the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John, “so that you might believe” has two possible meanings depending on the Greek verb tense. The first meaning is that this Gospel was written so that while you did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, after hearing the witness of the Fourth Evangelist, you will come to believe in Jesus. The second meaning intimates that this Gospel was written to you, a believer, so that you might be sustained in your belief, encouraged in your relationship with Jesus. The issue is not for us to determine which interpretation is correct, because both are possible on the basis of the entirety of the narrative of the Fourth Gospel. Rather, the issue is to recognize that John expects the reader to respond to the witness presented in this story of Jesus.
At the same time faithful preachers determine a focus for the sermon, the main point or core affirmation for the sermon, faithful preachers also craft the function of the sermon. What do you want your sermon to do? Or what effect do you want it to have? Sermons do not just say things; they do things.
Fashioning a function for your sermon starts with thinking about what the text on which you are preaching has done to you. How have you been moved or touched? What was the effect of the text on you when you first read it or heard it? Document these feelings, because these are your first impressions of the passage. The effect that the biblical text had on you can very well point to the function for your sermon. How can you re-create that experience in your sermon?
Function statements should begin with an infinitive verb—“to encourage” or “to give hope,” for example. Function statements are not restatements of your focus, the point or core affirmation of your sermon, but seek to name what you want your sermon to do. Returning to John 4 and the woman at the well, a function statement might be, “To encourage the listeners to leave behind what is holding them back and invite others to an encounter with Christ,” a statement based on the woman at the well leaving behind her water jug. In addition to determining a function for your sermon, what you want your sermon to do to the listener, crafting a sermon that is attentive to pathos strives to create speech that moves. There are two primary skills to learn so as to give shape and voice to words that touch hearts: writing for the ear and delivery.
Writing for the Ear
We are a literate culture, with almost all people able to read and most people reading silently to themselves. However, the biblical writings originated in the oral era of communication, when the primary means of communication were speaking and listening. Biblical texts were read out loud in communal gatherings, and, as such, the biblical writings were written to be heard. In this oral and aural stage of media usage, knowledge had to be communicated in memorable forms. Translations conveyed the oral nature of Scripture, capturing the fact that the writings collected in what we now call the Bible were written for the ear and not for the eye. The King James Bible, while written in language challenging for the contemporary ear, maintains the inherent oral character of Scripture as a translation set prior to the media age of literacy (1611).
For example, note how 1 Corinthians 13:11 sounds in the King James Version: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Compare this with a translation from the media age of literacy: “When I was a child, my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish. When I grew up, I had finished with childish things” (NEB). Or Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (KJV) compared to: “In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ” (NEB).
With a plethora of Bibles available—numerous versions, translations, study Bibles, devotional Bibles, inspirational Bibles, Bibles in which you can color in the margins—we forget just how recently we have had this easy access to Scripture and how much the Bible has changed over the years. It was not until the invention of moveable type and the printing press that Bibles achieved the ubiquity they have now. Concurrently, the Bible began to be translated into the vernacular, the language of the people, from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. With the invention of the printing press and the possibility of people being able to read the Bible rather than hear it, translations of Scripture began to adapt to the eye, to reading. Up to this point in the history of media, “books”—that is, papyrus and vellum, including the Bible—could be read only by the educated few who knew how to read and knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Literary critic Walter Ong describes Scripture as “residually oral” or “textualized orality.” In other words, the Bible has an inherently oral nature and, as such, is our best teacher for how to write for the ear. The biblical writers use various rhetorical devices and techniques that are meant to create a moving experience. We are naturally attuned to this kind of communication, and we know it when we hear it. To illustrate this point, for a week, keep a rhetoric log, writing down phrases and sentences that catch your ear, and then reflect on why they caught your attention. By the end of the week, you will realize just how prevalent memorable rhetoric is and how drawn we are to this kind of communication experience. All too often, we assume that we cannot possibly write like the grand rhetoricians we admire. We can, however, with observation and practice, actively listen for good rhetoric, engage in imitation, and practice a few simple yet effective methods for developing meaningful and moving speech. When we pay attention to what we hear, we notice the inherent patterns of moving speech: rhythm, rhyme, and patterns of repetition; melodies, echoes, resonances, and reverberations that ring long after the words are uttered. In other words, the how of the text communicates meaning as much as the what. The narrative mode of the text makes a theological claim.
Techniques of Speech
When it comes to writing for the ear, three essential techniques can help craft moving speech: constructing memorable sentences, using repetition, and building images that last in the memory and minds of the hearers.
Memorable Sentences
We know a memorable sentence when we hear it. Consider “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” (from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, January 20, 1961). Or “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1933). These two sentences use antimetabole, which is the repetition of words in successive clauses but in transposed grammatical order. Rhythm and rhyme also capture the ear, as we hear in this poignant sentence from Barack Obama’s speech at the memorial for victims of a shooting in Tucson, Arizona, on January 12, 2011: “I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.” This is not to suggest that the preacher become a rhetorical genius. Preachers often shy away from using rhetorical devices, once again assuming that such speech is manipulative. Indeed, an accomplished public speaker knows the power of rhetoric to persuade the audience of a given argument. But a preacher’s task is also persuasive in nature, convincing the congregation that the Gospel really is good news.
A memorable sentence is often periodic, starting with a subjunctive or dependent clause and ending with the concept you want to emphasize or the word you want your listeners to remember. That is, the main point of the sentence is at the end of the sentence, at the period. For example, “If we say we have no sin, we lie” emphasizes the word “lie.” One of the most memorable sentences in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is an example of a periodic sentence: “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.” The big word, the big idea, in the sentence is “rights,” and that is the focus of the sentence.
This happens consistently throughout the New Testament. While English sentences depend on word order for comprehension, declensional languages, such as Greek, Latin, and German, in which the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective changes to indicate the function in a sentence, can use word order to emphasize certain ideas or words by placing these selected words at the beginning or at the end of sentences. One principle of memory and impact is that we are more likely to remember what is at the beginning and the end of sentences or paragraphs or speech events. A skilled rhetorician knows to place what they want you to remember in those strategic locations, and Scripture is filled with examples of this rhetorical technique. For example, John 18:11b reads, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” in the New Revised Standard Version and in the New International Version. However, in the King James Version and in the New American Standard Bible, the translation is as follows: “The cup which the Father has given me, shall I not drink it?” In the NRSV and NIV, the structural emphasis is on “I” and “me,” but in the KJV and NAS, the important image or idea is “the cup,” thereby changing the theological meaning of Jesus’s words.
Most of our sentences, however, are constructed for print copy, for reading, for the eye. The dominant sentence structure in English is the trailing sentence—subject, verb, object—and more often than not, our sentences end with prepositional phrases. Those who write for the ear know that the strength of oratory is in verbs and nouns, not adjectives or adverbs or prepositional phrases. Consider the difference between the sentence stated above, constructed for the ear—“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights”—and what this sentence might sound like were it formed for the eye: “Until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights, there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America.” Not only does the sentence sound less attractive to the ear, it also has a different meaning.
Additional schemes of rhetoric used in effective preaching are alliteration, the repetition of initial or medial consonants in two or more adjacent words, and assonance, the repetition of similar vowel sounds in two or more adjacent words. An example of alliteration is another memorable sentence from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” “Color”/“skin” and “content”/“character” are alliterative schemas. Note also that the main idea, the big word, is “character.” The sentence would mean differently were it written, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.” Another example of alliteration comes again from Obama’s speech at the Tucson memorial service: “If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.”
Anaphora, the repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginnings of successive clauses, is another powerful rhetorical technique. In the “I Have a Dream” speech, there are at least a dozen uses of anaphora, with the two most memorable being “I have a dream” and, at the end of the speech, “Let freedom ring.” Or, Winston Churchill, House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on June 4, 1940:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender, and ...
