Sunday Comes Every Week

Daily Habits for the Busy Preacher

Frank G. Honeycutt

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780802876454
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467456708
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Seasoned advice for pastors facing the weekly challenge of preparing sermons

For pastors, a new sermon comes every week. Conventional wisdom says that pastors need to sequester themselves to prepare their weekly sermon without distraction. But veteran preacher Frank Honeycutt suggests just the opposite: prepare your sermons as part of a daily, lived experience in the community.

Using the days of the week as a framework, Honeycutt describes practical and essential tasks leading up to the writing and delivery of the Sunday sermon—habits that will provide lasting spiritual nourishment for pastors who plan for a long career in parish ministry. With humor and candid acknowledgment of his own mistakes and doubts, Honeycutt reflects on the joys and hazards of ministry and explains how a faithful process of preaching shapes pastors for a lifetime of healthy ministry.

1. Monday: Listening
2. Tuesday: Hearing
3. Wednesday: Exegeting
4. Thursday: Naming
5. Reflecting: A Pastor Looks Back
6. Friday: Writing
7. Saturday: Rehearsing
8. Sunday: Offering

1

MONDAY

Listening

Start Early

I think it was the great preacher Ernest T. Campbell¹ (1924–2010) who once observed that Sundays for a pastor come along as quickly as telephone poles outside the window of a moving train.

Even if Monday is your day off after an exhausting yesterday, spend half an hour with the coming Sunday’s assigned lectionary texts. I realize that some traditions don’t follow a lectionary, but will briefly say here that the lectionary is a tremendous gift to new pastors, forcing the novice preacher to reflect upon a large chunk of the Bible in the first three years out of seminary.² I invite you to strongly consider using the lectionary in your first years of preaching even if your tradition doesn’t follow such a practice as a general rule.

A lectionary also offers the additional gift of avoiding the common accusation of “pushing your own biblical agenda” upon the congregation with a steady diet of your favorite texts. And we all have them. The lectionary will regularly expose you to fruitful preaching opportunities on texts you would probably never select on your own.

I’m thinking here of Jesus’s odd teaching about repentance in Luke 13:1–9 (usually assigned in Lent, Cycle C), where he uses two strange local news stories—the slit throats of hapless Galileans and the unfortunate demise of those standing near the collapsing tower of Siloam—to warn his disciples about the dangers of delayed repentance. Jesus quickly covers the waterfront of most events regularly reported on the evening news: evil hatched by a despot, and tragedy involving innocents who happen to get in the way. It’s a rather complicated and brief exchange between the master teacher and his students, even though its challenge is coupled with the gift of time requested by a persistent gardener in the accompanying parable.

This sort of pericope sends shivers, I suspect, down the spines of most new preachers. (At least that was true for me.) However, these are the very texts that parishioners wonder about while prowling around in the Bible’s pages—much more than the rather straightforward truths of Psalm 23, for example. A lectionary often allows you to pull the elephant out of the closet and present the wily pachyderm in full view, even if you never apprehend (or comprehend) the large beast entirely.

At the very least, the lectionary affords an opportunity for preacher and congregation to engage together in an act of mutual consternation and head-scratching, immersed for the long haul in the Bible’s full and wondrous corpus. I have always appreciated this description of our common journey from Rabbi Burton Visotsky:

For the Rabbis and Church Fathers, reading the Book was an adventure, a journey to a grand palace with many great and awesome halls, banquet rooms, and chambers, as well as many passages and locked doors. The adventure lay in learning the secrets of the palace, unlocking all the doors and perhaps catching a glimpse of the King in all his splendor.³

Over liturgical time, the lectionary will help you fall in love with even the Bible’s unusual twists and strange turns that seek to intentionally shock our often-safe sensibilities.

Even though the lectionary offers a menu of four weekly texts, your Monday task (even if you have only thirty minutes) is to try to choose only one for your principal preaching text. A seasoned preacher may be able to balance more than one text in the scope of her sermon, but a single-text focus will teach a new preacher the knack of theme development.

Most sermons will benefit from the preacher’s ability to write (cogently and privately) a single sentence describing the sermon’s aim. If you find that on a regular basis you cannot do this with your sermons, it is likely that you’re juggling too many themes.

A single preaching text increases the likelihood that you will remain focused in your sermon preparation and that your parishioners will remain focused as they listen. Jesus was very fond of the phrase “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” Sometimes preachers divert faithful listening by stuffing far too many items inside the ears of those who cannot possibly process them all. Barbara Brown Taylor learned about the wisdom of sermonic focus in a letter exchange with a friend:

Last year I complained in writing to a friend that I was not sure people even listened to sermons anymore. She wrote back, “I do think people are trying to listen and that preaching does matter. In fact, I think the vast majority of people are sitting in the pews with parched lips. They are so thirsty that they have lost their ability to listen, to speak, or to think. But one big gulp of Gatorade is not the answer. They will drown. Their thirst is so great that it requires a series of sips much like parched fields require a series of gentle rains.”⁴

There will be other Sundays to use a provocative story or illustration that doesn’t quite make the cut of your one-sentence theme statement. Try to see your ongoing preaching ministry as a “series of sips.”

Choosing a single text may seem to contradict what I’ve just said about the merits of the lectionary’s biblical breadth. The truth is that one text preached faithfully will increase the likelihood of a parishioner’s private (or communal) investigation of the other supporting passages assigned for that Sunday.

Before moving on to other Monday tasks (or Tuesday, if you are taking Monday off), I offer a final word about the importance of early selection of a preaching text. It is my experience that the Holy Spirit rarely speaks instantly and when summoned. Good preaching relies on two words that find their origin in most kitchens: percolation and marination (heating and soaking). Fire and liquid are, incidentally, components of the Holy Spirit’s functional sacramental DNA.

All pastors can share stories about a particularly trying week that unavoidably pushed sermon preparation until Saturday night. But this reality should be rare in practice because the Holy Spirit, by biblical definition, is rarely summoned on command. There is an unexpected and unruly nature to the Holy Spirit’s specific manifestation in our lives.

Any prediction that Peter would find his tongue in the streets of a Jerusalem Pentecost fifty days after feeling tongue-tied (in the same streets!) would have been met with hoots of laughter and exchange of coin by anyone prone to first-century gambling. The Spirit is unpredictable and difficult to corral for urgent purposes. It therefore makes all the sense in God’s world to start the sermon process early in the week with ears, eyes, and heart attuned to the Spirit’s utterances all through the coming days in venues ranging from a moving car, to a hospital emergency room, to the back porch of an aging congregational matriarch, to your daughter’s Thursday afternoon soccer game. The Spirit can certainly speak on Saturday night, but why waste the chances for holy intersections with the details of your week that might well begin on Monday?

Some practical advice: keep a writing pad and a pen close by, wherever you go, including both on a bedside table for “aha moments” that may awaken you during the night. The preaching process is often like gathering stray bits of bread along a path. You’ll rarely find all the bread at once. And you won’t use everything in a sermon that you write down in a given week. But once you’ve selected a text, your senses become attuned to the Spirit’s nudges about it, which might occur . . . anywhere. You are the “recorder” for these irregular bits of inspiration. Be ready. What Anne Lamott observes about writing a novel can also be applied to writing a sermon:

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You do not have to see where you’re going, you do not have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.⁵

Early text selection, an important Monday task, will not increase the Spirit’s consistent penchant for holy communication. It will, however, increase a preacher’s likelihood to faithfully record the communication.

The modern preacher’s unfortunate temptation to reach for canned online sermons clearly preys upon a pastor’s habits of delayed preparation, the Saturday-night panic button. “Only preachers who deliver their own sermons,” writes Tom Long, “stand with one foot in the life of the people and one foot in the biblical text. No Internet preacher stands in this same place.”⁶ Parishioners will sense (over time) that you are indeed taking time to wrestle with God’s word. Conversely, they’ll also be able to detect when you are not.

If Monday isn’t your day off, here are a few additional considerations in choosing a sermon text. (Otherwise, I invite you to conflate these considerations with your Tuesday tasks.)

Trust the Biblical Breadth of the Church Year

My phone call with Susan that afternoon revealed a number of challenging congregational issues. Any one of them was daunting; cumulatively, they seemed overwhelming (and would be for any pastor, regardless of age or experience).

Life in the mainline church has indeed changed since I graduated from seminary in 1985, over thirty years ago. Synodical seminary-tuition support for seminarians has largely dried up, leaving recent graduates with debt tension unheard of in previous generations of pastors. Local church offerings in general are down, creating anxiety for meeting staff payroll and worry, in some instances, about possible closure. Sunday worship attendance continues to shrink at alarming rates in most major Christian denominations. Congregational lay leaders often attach expectations to a new pastor that are unrealistic and wearing. The rise of the “Nones” (the Pew Research Center’s term for the completely unaffiliated), especially in the twenty to forty range, often leaves young pastors with many congregants twice their age.⁷

The balance of this book will return to these issues often, especially as they impact the preaching ministry of recent seminary graduates. For now, consider how these issues may affect the Monday selection of a preaching text.

Topical sermons are rarely a good idea. As important as any of the issues named above happen to be, the topical sermon focused upon a “problem” or an “issue” usually deteriorates into a gripe session centering more upon the topic itself than God. The same danger is present in most “sermon series” meant to highlight a fetching or pressing subject near and dear to the human heart. (Deliver me from the sermon series devoted to “the love of grandparents.”)

More advice: allow the biblical text to directly (or indirectly) raise the issue in question in a natural way. Again, the three-year lectionary offers the underrated gifts of time and pacing. Although our current church challenges are different from a generation ago, any “issue” you might name—lack of commitment, congregational depression, biblical infidelity, shifting allegiance, greed, injustice, abuse of power—will roll around in the lectionary over the course of three years. (And then we begin again.)

I have been asked, “Isn’t there ever a time when a pastor might depart from the assigned lectionary text to address a pressing congregational issue?” My answer: “Perhaps.” But I am also quick to say how many times (in a thirty-year ministry) I have gone foraging around both testaments for some applicable passage only to have the assigned texts offered within a specific church year season (more on that below) yield unexpected light on the very worries that sent me searching.

Sometimes the light surfaces obliquely. Sometimes the Spirit, somewhere between pulpit and listener, transforms my words in a healing direction I did not even intend.⁸ Sometimes the text provides a cover and a shield from an incoming fusillade of responses. (“Hey, I didn’t make this parable up,” says the quick-footed pastor.) Trust the lectionary—in use in some form since the early centuries of the church and inherited from Judaism even earlier—even with your worry over “the big issues.”

Regularly Check the Time

In one of her books,⁹ Gertrude Mueller Nelson describes the fascinating origin of the Advent wreath in Scandinavia during the early Middle Ages. As the dwindling light of December prompted farmers to give thanks for the preceding harvest and bring tools and equipment inside a barn for cleaning and maintenance, families would also bring inside the house a single cartwheel and festoon the circle with lights and greenery, awaiting the Son who brings eternal light and life.

Nelson’s book, as much about the power of measured and celebrated time as the history of a particular church season, offers an interesting insight about the wreath’s practical (and visual) contribution to the season of slowing down: a family couldn’t go anywhere on three wheels.

One Advent I led a children’s sermon using a miniature car with rubber wheels. Removing one, wordlessly, I decorated the wheel with small sprigs of greenery and secured four birthday candles to the top of the wheel with a bit of Plasti-Tak, my go-to home adhesive—and, presto, a miniature Advent wreath. The sermon received a big laugh when I playfully encouraged the children to honor the spirit of the season by removing (with adult help) a Michelin from Mom’s Mitsubishi, then hanging the tire from the rafters with lights and braided mistletoe. Maybe that would finally slow down mom, dad, and the whole family in memorable preparation for Christ’s Advent.

A pastor’s preaching text is always selected within a context that is wondrously cyclical and biblically imagined. There is really no need to scamper around the pages of the Bible in search of just the right text that might address some specific, pressing, nagging issue that occasionally awakens you in the night. We already have a story of salvation and truth—wonderfully arranged through centuries of calendar use—that addresses any situation that “the father of lies” (John 8:44) might deceptively cast our way.

The church year systematically arranges the story for handy homiletical planning. In the time you’ve allotted for Monday text selection, also take a few moments to ask the old question posed by God to the Garden’s first inhabitants: “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). This is obviously much more than a geographical question. God knew their location. The question centers upon personal (and corporate) awareness. Where are you? What time is it? What’s occurring in your life that seems more important than God?

The church year thrusts the ontological clock in our faces with rapt repetition. “You have died,” claims Colossians 3:3. “You’ve been baptized into his death,” suggests a rather stark declaration in Romans 6:3. “I...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Thomas G. Long
• Introduction
• 1. Monday: Listening
• 2. Tuesday: Hearing
• 3. Wednesday: Exegeting
• 4. Thursday: Naming
• 5. Reflecting: A Pastor Looks Back
• 6. Friday: Writing
• 7. Saturday: Rehearsing
• 8. Sunday: Offering
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography