Preaching Master Class

Lessons from Will Willimon’s Five-Minute Preaching Workshop

Will Willimon, Noel Snyder, Snyder

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781606089156, 9781498212168
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893189
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Preachers around the globe have come to rely on Will Willimon for insight and advice on the craft of preaching. For over a decade, Willimon has published his reflections in the "Five-Minute Preaching Workshop," a quarterly column he writes as editor of Pulpit Resource. Here the best selections from that column have been brought together into a single volume for the first time. Drawing on years of experience, study, and careful observation of the current state of preaching, Willimon offers candid thoughts on a wide range of homiletical issues-from theological to pastoral, cultural, and stylistic. Readers will find challenge and inspiration from a few hours spent in the studio of this master preacher.

Section 1

The Practice of Preaching

Wonder at Words

A number of years ago, I did a book on clergy who call it quits. Burnout. In interviewing pastors who had given up on ministry, I discovered that many of them cited preaching as the most debilitating of pastoral activities. Should I have been surprised?

It can be a tough way to earn a living, giving oneself, week-in-week-out, to the task of bringing God’s truth to speech. Preaching is a fragile art. Between eleven and noon on Sundays I cast my words out toward the congregation, they bounce between limestone walls, ricochet off the ceiling, are quickly absorbed, die, and then, silence, all-threatening silence.

Like Israel’s loquacious God, I hate silence. I chisel my message out of the hard granite of the biblical text, a text that often refuses to speak without being wrestled to the ground, twisted, wrenched into sound. In the back of my mind I have this haunting fear that one Sunday the text may refuse to speak and I’ll be stuck with numbed, dumb silence. It hasn’t happened yet, but still, it’s enough to keep me nervous.

I mount the pulpit, I throw some words at them. My Sunday listeners sit impassively before me, staring back at me, not as eager to hear as they ought to be. I cast out my voice into the silence; the sermon begins. My voice has the resonance of an old gate swinging by its hinges in the wind. Why do they keep returning every Sunday? What, in God’s name, do they hear? It’s only words.

I digress.

Augustine referred to himself as a word merchant. After three decades of peddling my wares, I know less about the job than when I began. Why do they listen and not hear? Why do I speak but it’s only a lecture and not yet a sermon? Why am I so disquieted when they do hear? Who killed last Sunday’s sermon—me, them, or the Holy Spirit? But I digress again.

You and I, as preachers, are dealers in words. Words are all that we have to do any important work. Like some of the psalms of lament, I want both to thank God for speech and to blame God for speech being so difficult. And I want to fall in love with language, over and over again. That’s one reason why I read poetry, and go to plays and movies, and read all I can, because, as a preacher, it’s all just words. I want to love words and, in what I write and edit, to have fellow preachers and listeners love them with me. A preacher is, among other things, someone who has learned to love words.

A student bores me to death with an extended, detailed account of the young woman with whom he is now in love. He loves her for her wit, her sarcasm, her body, her faith, the way she loves him, but above all she is loved for her sheer, mysterious otherness. I love the Word and words in a similar way. I’m exuberant about speech.

Even as I write these words on a page, I’m already nervous that you will not like these words, that they will not do to you what I intend, that you won’t understand, worse, that you will understand what I am saying better than I. I will not have concealed that meaning of myself that I thought it unsafe to reveal. Worse, my words will have gotten away from me, broken free in the life of someone I don’t even know, made mischief in someone I know only as my reader, or taken on a significance I did not intend. When a preacher’s words become the Word, it’s scary. Such are the perils of the profession of merchant of words, Servant of the Word.

I never quite got over my puerile fascination with the sheer wonder of words, thank God. As a child, my mother bored herself to death with laborious re-readings of Winnie the Pooh, and The Tales of Grimm, and Hurlburt’s Bible Stories. When she complained about my infantile obsession with stories, a teacher friend of hers advised, “No child likes that much Winnie the Pooh who is not a born lover of words.”

I therefore, despite the rigors of this job, have always considered my vocation into the preaching ministry to be a peculiar act of grace. Not only do I get to love language, but I get to do it for a living. Some Christians had to serve God by being eaten by lions. Others had to be celibate. All I have to do is talk.

I’m writing these thoughts on Pentecost, the day that the speech of the church began. You will recall the story as Luke tells it in Acts 2. Having been told by the risen Christ, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), we don’t have to wait long for the Word-generated witnessing to begin. A crowd forms out in the street upset about the inebriation upstairs. “They’re doing what they did when Jesus was with them,” they scoffed. “They’re drunk!”

Peter comes out and speaks. Peter. Do you recall where we left Peter only a short while before? He was in the courtyard with the maid. While Jesus was being whipped and stripped before Pilate, Peter, The Rock, the one who had so loudly declared his allegiance to Jesus in the upper room, was stupefied and tongue-tied when confronted by the maid in the courtyard.

The power of that woman! In just a few short verses, she had Peter cursing Jesus, “I don’t know the man!”

Now, before a large, mocking mob, Peter comes out and speaks, makes one of the shortest and most effective homilies in all of Scripture, assuring the crowd that “this promise is for you and for your children . . . for everyone whom the Lord Jesus calls.”

The Holy Spirit induces, produces speech, specifically, gospel, news that is good. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit produces speakers, those who are genuinely surprised by their guts in standing up and saying a good word for God. By the grace of God, we not only have something to say, but the means to say it, which Christians have always regarded as miraculous gift.

The Most Dangerous, Most Wonderful Step in Sermon Preparation

Over the years, I have come to believe that the most important time, in the movement from the biblical text to the preached sermon, occurs very early in the process of preparation. I have come to believe that the first encounters with the biblical text are the most crucial. This is counter to what I was taught, that our first impressions of a biblical text are usually wrong. Of course, the people saying this were biblical scholars who spent their lives pondering biblical texts, dissecting them, laboriously and minutely examining the text. Therefore, they were convinced that there was no way to be grasped by a biblical text other than the way that they had mastered it. Note that many of them spoke of “mastering” the biblical text. The text was treated as a passive object that we examine and dissect in order to get down to the kernel of the real truth of the text.

Fortunately, we are learning a much more dynamic view of the biblical text. Biblical texts are not only speaking certain ideas, but rather they are engaging us in various experiences. To meet a biblical text is somewhat analogous to meeting another person. While it is true that first impressions are often deceptive, first impressions are also very important. When first meeting another person, the person comes across to us “cold.” We have no preconceptions, or past experience with the person, so there is a kind of immediacy in our encounter with that person. Sometimes our first impressions can be very truthful.

I recall a friend who reported to me that upon meeting someone, he felt this person to be smug, arrogant, and full of pride. He got to know this person and the complexity of his personality. He became appreciative of the great erudition of this man. However, he could still say later, “My first impression of him was quite accurate. He is a person full of pride and smugness, despite his other virtues.”

A biblical text is a work of art, a piece of literature. Any piece of literature has an immediate impact. Sometimes that immediate impact can be lessened, or defused through detailed work on the piece. Therefore, we ought to retain as much of our first impression as possible.

Furthermore, let us be reminded that our congregations, the people who will actually hear our sermons, have nothing but first impressions to go on in their understanding of the text. I think I have ruined a lot of sermons by trying to unload all of my biblical study of the text on the congregation. The poor congregation had no prior preparation for this. I have spent hours studying this text. The congregation has had the benefit (or the curse) of none of this. Therefore, as a preacher, I ought to strive to maintain my first impression of the text, the freshness with which I encountered it, which will be close to how our congregation will be appropriating the text.

I remember a friend of mine emerging from a class after he had given a lecture, saying, “I failed in that lecture. I knew too much about the subject and completely ruined everything.” I think I know what he was talking about. It is possible, through hours of study, to know so much about a text that we cannot talk about that text in the twenty minutes of our sermon. Therefore, first impressions are important.

I advise beginning sermon preparation as early as possible. With the need to preach a sermon on Sunday looming before you like a hangman’s noose, we panic. We jump to conclusions too soon. Our preparation begins, not with imaginative exploration, but with a grim prodding toward the end of the sermon.

Eugene Lowry advises,

Wallow in the text. Read it aloud. Hear it and see it. The mind works differently through the ear and through the eye . . . Do your best to forget that Sunday is coming. Read the text out loud over and over—and in numerous translations and paraphrases. Then say it in your own words. Dive in the deep end of the biblical pools. Get inundated with the biblical word.1

It is very important to try to keep as loose as possible during this stage of the process. I find it helpful to keep a sheet of paper in front of me and simply jot down first impressions. I will not want these first impressions to be lost in a mass of later study. Listen for what is strange in the text, out of place, or odd. This weirdness can be helpful as the sermon is later taking form. What is weird to you at first hearing may cease to be weird after you have read and reread the text. So jot down first impressions. Try to stay confused about the text. Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.

Thus, Eugene Lowry has long urged us preachers, when we look at a biblical text, “look for trouble.” Try to be open to those matters in the text that you have not noticed before. Intentionally develop the attitude of the little child who drives adults crazy by asking of phenomena, “Why? Why? Why?”

Cultivate a willingness to be shocked, surprised by the text. Of course, it is very difficult to plan to be spontaneous. However, I believe that we can discipline ourselves when we go to a biblical text, to expect to be disarmed and dislodged by the text. You have heard me quote James Sanders, the great biblical interpreter, who said words to the effect, “If you read a biblical text and say to yourself, ‘that is what I’ve always thought,’ read the text again. You probably have got the text wrong.”

Because God is God and we are not, because God’s ways are not our ways, it is reasonable to expect to be surprised by a text.

Eugene Lowry advises us to read a biblical text and underline all of the important portions of the text. Then, after the underlining is complete, go back and look at what is not underlined. Are there sections that I have simply taken for granted? Are there details that I have overlooked in my desire to get the “big” point of the text?

Try taking different positions within the text. When reading the story of the Lord’s call to young Samuel when he was living with the priest Eli, try to read the story again from Eli’s perspective. How does this text read differently if you are reading it from the perspective of an old priest at the temple as opposed to a young boy? Biblical writers often give us a glimpse of biblical events through the eyes and the words of spectators.

Sometimes, when reading about Jesus, there is that tendency for us to identify with Jesus, to take our place standing beside Jesus. Rather, we ought to take our places within the crowd listening to Jesus, watching his strange behavior, and trying to figure out what is going on. Do free association with a biblical text. Keep stoking the mind with images that are evoked by this particular text.

Eugene Lowry asks, “Why is it that we wake up in the middle of the night with our best insights?”2 Lowry surmises that perhaps it is because our mind needs room for ...

Table of contents

• Preaching Master Class
• Preface
• Section 1—The Practice of Preaching
• Section 2—Special Issues in Preaching
• Section 3—Preaching and the Text
• Section 4—Preaching, the Church, and the World
• Bibliography