The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition

The Sermon as Narrative Art Form

Eugene L. Lowry

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780664222642
• eBook ISBN: 9781611642117
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Now in reissue with a new foreword by Fred B. Craddock and afterword by the author, Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition follows in the same solid tradition of its predecessor. Upon its release, The Homiletical Plot quickly became a pivotal work on the art of preaching. Instead of comments on a biblical passage, Lowry suggested that the sermon follow a narrative form that moves from beginning to end, as with the plot of a story. This expanded edition continues to be an excellent teaching resource and learning tool for all preachers from introductory students to seasoned clergy.

Section Two

The Stages of the
Homiletical Plot

OOPS!

Upsetting the Equilibrium

The first step in the sermon as preached is to upset the equilibrium of the listeners in such a way as to engage them in the sermon theme. Here we do well to note the approach of playwrights, television writers and novelists. They make the assumption that the readers and observers are in neutral mentally as the experience begins. The truth is, different people will be in different forms of readiness. Some are eager to be engaged, others reluctant. Some enter the theater after a bad day, others sit down in front of the television set out of boredom. Some are happy, others sad, etc. All these matters are taken as moot by the artists who wisely take full responsibility for eliciting attention/interest/engagement. They draw us into a world of their own making.

So likewise the congregation gathers on Sunday morning in many different moods, readiness sets, etc. Too often we who have been engaged with the theme for several hours, days, or weeks assume a similar investment on the part of the hearers. Likely, most listeners know only that a sermon is coming within the context of worship. Perhaps they have glanced at the title in the bulletin or on the outside sign. The hopes of some may be limited to the desire that our sermon won’t be too long. It is quite possible that those we want most to reach with the gospel are those with the least desire to hear.

We therefore need to take major responsibility for their engagement with the theme. What has been our sermonic itch must become theirs—and within a matter of two or three minutes—else their attention will move to other matters. Of course there will be those who will give us rapt attention regardless of what we say or how, but to key on them is to miss our first responsibility.

In the sermon as experienced, upsetting the equilibrium is based not alone on its being a tested literary device; it is born of the nature of being human. Fromm, the psychologist, calls us the “freak of the universe”¹—the homeless animal. Reinhold Niebuhr speaks of the anxiety consequent of our being both finite and self-transcendent.² Ambiguity is thereby felt as foe to be vanquished. The need to resolve ambiguity is theological in nature—that’s why it can be used as a literary device. In mild doses it is a motivator both to attention and to action. One cannot breathe easily until some solution occurs. And when resolution comes, the result is both a knowing and a feeling.

So potent is our need to resolve ambiguity—to be at peace—that ambiguity has power even when experienced in pseudo-form. This is one of the reasons children love to hear a nursery rhyme over and over again. Although they know how it will conclude, it is pleasurable to relive the painful suspense of it so that once again the suspense can be removed.

Often in homiletical writings we have been told to “stimulate interest,” but are seldom told what interest really is. The consequence is that only after a sermon has happened do we have a vague notion of whether we did it or not. In my view, interest is the first psychological state of ambiguity. (Advanced states of ambiguity may be fear, dread, and repression.) The reason why it is good advice to “talk about people” in sermons is that the introduction of people produces ambiguity—as any storyteller knows. More broadly put, ambiguity exists in any phenomenon which is both vital and at risk. The opening sermonic statement: “Today I want to talk about love” is dull indeed until risk is introduced: “Our problem is that so many times we extend our hand in love only to bring it back bruised and broken. To love is to risk rejection.”

John Dewey noted many years ago that thinking begins at the point of a felt problem.³ Problems are felt as ambiguity and hence the introduction of ambiguity is the first step in a sermon as preached. Kurt Lewin, a theorist in change strategy, explains that the process that concludes with change is begun by altering the balance of tension (force field) within an individual or group.⁴ Such new imbalance as Lewin suggests (and which we will explore later in greater detail) is in fact what we are calling ambiguity, making it correct to conclude that the primary purpose of sermon introductions is to produce imbalance for the sake of engagement. This comes as no surprise to us if we have observed what happens in the opening scene of a play, the first couple of pages of a novel, or the first two or three minutes in a television program. “Conflict,” explains Roth, “is the very stuff of which stories are made. So also with life and the world. We are carried on by the suspense. We long to know the outcome.”⁵

It should be noted in passing that this is an important purpose to an announced or printed sermon title—to help upset the equilibrium. Most titles tend to do the reverse. They appear to be drawn from the sermon’s conclusion (the scratch rather than the itch). As a result, the preacher has to move backward from the announced title in order to arrive at the beginning of the sermon itself. A title known in advance of a sermon should itself be ambiguous—making listeners wonder what the sermon will be about. Once the sermon is presented the title becomes a one-phrase summary of the essential point.

Again, the ambiguity must be felt by the listeners, not just the preacher. It is possible that there may be a small peculiar corner of our esoteric interest in the Church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries which includes ambiguity, but this is not “preach-able” until and unless it is translatable to an ambiguity that can be experienced by members of the congregation.

The first step in the presented sermon, then, is to upset the equilibrium of the listeners, and is analogous to the opening scene of a play or movie in which some kind of conflict or tension is introduced. This opening ambiguity may or may not be related directly to the major theme of the sermon. The homiletical view expressed in this writing assumes that ambiguity and its resolution is the basic form-ingredient to any sermon, whether life-situational, expository, doctrinal, etc. in content. There is always one major discrepancy, bind, or problem which is the issue. The central task of any sermon, therefore, is the resolution of that particular central ambiguity. This is not to say that the sermon closes down all of life’s ambiguities any more than the closing of a good play presumes to finish the lives of the central characters. Rather it is that now the anticipated future is made new by the resolution of one central issue or problem.

The resolution of a central ambiguity also does not mean that there are no other ambiguities which get resolved in the course of the presented sermon. Every dramatic or literary plot has numerous smaller subplots that come and go. For example, I recall a movie in which the opening scene was ambiguous in the fact that the viewers could not determine what they were viewing. I recall that I could see a shimmering, wet-like, bumpy surface of some kind—unidentifiable because the camera was purposely out of focus. As the picture sharpened in focus I could then discern that it was a rain-soaked cobblestone street I was viewing. By the time I was able to determine that fact, two feet passed by on the screen—but whose? As the person walked away from the camera I could detect the sex and approximate age of the person. The camera followed the person into a building and its elevator. It was not until the person turned around in the elevator that I was able to see the face. By that time I certainly wanted to know who the person was and what destination was in store for both of us once the elevator opened again. In short, the set of small ambiguities caught me into the larger and still undefined ambiguity of the main plot—which soon was to emerge. Likewise a sermon introduction may upset the equilibrium of members of a congregation by means of an inconsequential ambiguity which serves simply to stimulate interest in the sermonic process. As such it may be as unrelated to the central discrepancy or thematic problem as was the issue of the unidentifiable rain-soaked street in the movie. Helmut Thielicke often utilizes this kind of introductory/minor ambiguity in beginning his sermons on the parables. He begins his version of the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” with these words:

Several years ago I once set my little son down in front of a large mirror. At first he did not recognize himself because he was still too young. He quite obviously enjoyed seeing the small image that smiled at him from this glass wall. But all of a sudden . . .⁶

Note that the illustration of his son has nothing to do with the Prodigal Son narrative. It serves only to whet the appetite of the listeners who, after hearing the story, will wonder what it has to do with the biblical story.

One must be careful, however, to determine that what is intended as an opening minor ambiguity for interest’s sake does not occupy the listeners’ attention at the expense of the central plot. For example, I used to begin a sermon on Jonah with the observation in the opening lines of the sermon that certainly it was difficult for many of us twentieth-century scientifically oriented people really to hear a story which involved a fish big enough to house a man whole and carry him around for three days before spewing him out on the ground safe and sound. With that opening minor ambiguity for interest’s sake I moved on to engage the congregation in the central issue of Jonah’s narrowmindedness and the largess of God’s love. Unfortunately, while I moved on, many in the congregation did not. They had not found closure for the minor ambiguity and stayed with it throughout the sermon. They missed Jonah altogether! One must be reasonably certain that an opening minor ambiguity is in fact closed. I revised my Jonah sermon by deleting the entirety of the opening remarks about the story, and started directly with the narrative itself—which has plenty of ambiguity already!

(This same problem of minor ambiguities becoming major obstacles to central plot involvement often emerges again with the use of sermon illustrations. A sermon illustration, for instance, may be included to concretize a point but have an ambiguity of its own upon which the congregation’s attention becomes fastened—to the preacher’s dismay! I recall a student’s sermon which was illustrated by his own experience of conducting a marriage service. “The father of the bride arrived drunk,” he mentioned in passing. He then drew his sermonic point from a portion of the wedding service he had conducted, and moved on to his next point. But what happened to the father? Did he make it through the service? While the preacher made his next point we were still at the wedding—fantasizing what might have happened. I now do not recall what was the next sermonic point. Such is the power of ambiguity and the necessity for closure.)

While the sermon introduction may involve a minor ambiguity not actually related to the central plot, in many cases the initial sentences of a sermon open directly into the central bind or discrepancy. Such was the case in the sermon “A Great Time to Be Alive” by Harry Emerson Fosdick, which began: “This certainly is a ghastly time to be alive. . . .”⁷

As a general rule, when the context of a sermon is the contemporary human situation, whether at the personal or social level, it is likely that the opening ambiguity will be the central or fundamental discrepancy. In the case of expository or doctrinal preaching, it is more likely that the opening ambiguity will serve to engage the congregation in a preliminary bind which in turn opens into the central problem.

In any case, the purpose of the opening stage of the presented sermon is to trigger ambiguity in the listeners’ minds. Such an ambiguity is not known simply as an intellectual matter; it is a mental ambiguity which is existentially felt. It becomes a part of their existence at that moment in time, and hence when it is resolved and the gospel proclaimed, the good news is not just something one now knows propositionally, but something one now experiences. More about the experiencing of the gospel later. Now it is enough to understand that ambiguity sets the stage for the sermon to become an event.

Such advice ought to be unnecessary inasmuch as we understand the principle well in the theater, with a novel or in a joke. Suspense in these artistic forms is expected. Likewise suspense is an important underlying fact behind the questionable pleasure we had as children in elementary school when we tripped other children as they walked down the classroom aisles. We knew they could either fall on their faces, or recover their equilibrium. (The one thing they could not do is go back to the last balanced step!) Whatever resolution occurred was a resolution to a felt ambiguity.

Unfortunately, we have been taught to begin our sermons by giving away the plot—even to include in the introduction a one-sentence abstract of sorts. As a result we become homiletical equivalents to a foolish playwright going to center stage prior to the drama to announce the central points to be communicated by the drama. If such were to occur in the theater, the audience, having no further reason to stay, would have sufficient cause to get up and leave the theater. The principle is the same for preaching. The purpose of the beginning process of the sermon is to upset the equilibrium.

The preaching of pastors quite diverse in theological temperament illustrates this purpose of sermonic beginning. For example, J. Wallace Hamilton, in his sermon “Does Christianity Have a Chance?” asks in his opening sentence: “Can Christianity survive in a world where the powerful forces run counter to it?”⁸ In “Scandals of Faith,” Paul Scherer opens with: “These Gospel lessons, as a rule, seem so neat and simple. And they aren’t at all.”⁹ In the sermon “As a Little Child,” Ernest Fremont Tittle begins with these words: “In this saying of Jesus there is something strangely appealing—and strangely disturbing.”¹⁰ In preaching on the theme entitled “Did Jesus Distinguish Between Sacred and Secular?” Leslie Weatherhead said: “Wherever I go, I am very concerned to find that the commonest criticism of modern religion is that it seems irrelevant to life.”¹¹ Said Phillips Brooks in the opening line of “The Great Expectation”: “It is not easy to decide just what the apostles expected with reference to the second coming of the Lord.”¹² And David H. C. Read started his sermon “What Response to Our Prayers?” by asking: “When you pray is there anyone there listening?”¹³

In each of the above illustrations something is left “hanging”—something that needs closure. The fact of incompletion, whatever its nature, is the cause of the listeners’ attention. Such disequilibrium on the listeners’ part is the key to beginning a sermon. But establishing disequilibrium is only the first step. The second is even more important—to keep it. Often a pastor will open a sermon with the binding discrepancy only then to allow it to slip away in the next sentence or two. For example, the more recent of Gerald Kennedy’s preaching typically will raise an important issue only to announce in advance how it will be resolved. In his sermon “God’s Good News,” Bishop Kennedy begins with an interesting story of how Bishop Taylor used to stand on top of a barrel on a San Francisco street and announce to any who would hear that he had “good news for you this morning.”¹⁴ But in a few sentences Kennedy says:

Tonight I want for a little while therefore to talk to you about the Gospel as the “good news,” and I want to say three or four things. First this: The Gospel is the good news of personality. It is the good news that at the heart and center of the universe there is a person—that God is a person.¹⁵

You can feel the tension slip away. Suppose he had continued in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section One: The Sermon as Narrative
• Section Two: The Stages of the Homiletical Plot
• Section Three: Other Considerations
• Afterword
• Notes
• References