WHAT IS A SERMON?
Growing up in the United Methodist Church, I would hear a common refrain whenever I told a fellow Methodist where I went to church: “Oh sure, I know that place. Who’s the preacher there now?” The question was understandable. Like most Methodist congregations, ours would get a new pastor every few years. These frequent changes in local leadership weren’t because we were a particularly bruising or cantankerous bunch. That’s simply the way it was—and is—in United Methodism, a tradition in which pastors are appointed annually by their bishop to serve in a particular place. Most of them are appointed to serve in a place for only a few years, and long tenures are rare, so the question was frequent: Who’s the preacher there now?
By “preacher,” the questioner generally meant something like “senior minister” or “pastor-in-charge.” In other words, the person employed to lead the place, to put on a robe, hang a stole around their neck, and stand up in the pulpit on Sunday morning. Today, as an Episcopalian, I rarely hear the term used in that way. In my current context, the word most often describes a specific liturgical role, as in, “I’ve got to get home to finish Sunday’s sermon. The rector will be the celebrant, but I’m the preacher.” Still, I remember fondly the meaning the term had in my youth. My fondness is in part due to my own preaching vocation, but it’s also because identifying a person in a professional ministerial role as a “preacher” reveals an important perception of that person’s vocation.
The liturgical role of giving a sermon has for many Christians come to symbolize the vocation and ministry of the ordained person. What does the preacher do? They preach, of course. By identifying “professional” Christians as preachers, we are by extension saying that preaching is an extremely important part of Christianity. Indeed, it is. Not just because preachers are important—after all, one doesn’t have to be ordained to preach—but because sermons are important.
Sermons are important, but not easily defined. Any single-sentence definition of a sermon is certainly going to have a few commas, clauses, and conjunctions. Take, for example, O. C. Edwards’s definition from his 1982 book, Elements of Homiletic:
A sermon is a speech delivered in a Christian assembly for worship by an authorized person that applies some point of doctrine, usually drawn from a biblical passage, to the lives of the members of the congregation with the purpose of moving them by the use of narrative analogy and other rhetorical devices to accept that application and to act on the basis of it.
It’s a mouthful, to be sure. But while Edwards’s definition may be quite a bit to chew on, he is on the right track, giving us the core truth about a sermon that we might update and expand in some key respects.
First, a sermon is a liturgical event. This is to say that it happens in the context of worship. In many Christian contexts, especially Protestant ones, the sermon is the focal point of the worship experience. Sure, other things happen in worship, but the sermon is a main event. It’s the thing that Christians the world over sit through—sometimes endure—for anywhere from ten to forty-five minutes (or more). It’s the thing during which crying babies are hurried out of earshot, the thing folks feel compelled to comment on afterward when shaking the preacher’s hand, the thing church nerds critique with friends over lunch. For those of us in liturgical contexts (such as Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Lutheranism) in which weekly Eucharist is more common, the sermon may not take up quite as much time; nevertheless, it plays a crucial role in public worship.
The word “public” is particularly important here. A sermon is preached on occasions when the assembly of the faithful gathers to glorify God. To describe such a gathering, the New Testament uses the word ekklesia, which we often translate as “church.” At its core, this word refers to a public assembly, which tells us that even from its earliest days Christianity isn’t something practiced in private. Christianity is a communal phenomenon, and so we gather to worship in community. That’s why we Episcopalians call it common prayer—as in, The Book of Common Prayer—because we share it with each other. Our worship is part of our collective identity as a community of baptized members of the Body of Christ. It’s not that we cannot pray as individuals. We can and we should. But the fullest expression of our common life is borne out in our public worship of God, so that is where sermons are preached—in the midst of an assembly of faithful followers of Jesus.
The Episcopal Church’s 1979 Book of Common Prayer brought a renewed emphasis on the Holy Eucharist as the principal form of the Christian community’s public worship, but such a focus on the Eucharist in no way diminishes the sermon’s role in the liturgy. In fact, its contextualization within the eucharistic rite can give the sermon even fuller meaning. In the prayer book, the Eucharist contains two parts: the Word of God and Holy Communion. The sermon is situated in the former, after the scripture readings and before the recitation of the creed, the prayers of the people, the confession of sin, and the exchange of peace. While the specific number of readings, psalms, or hymns that precede the sermon, as well as those things that follow it, may vary according to the occasion, the sermon’s place in the liturgy points to its importance as a fulcrum that connects the proclamation of God’s Good News with the community’s active response to that Good News.
If the sermon is a liturgical fulcrum, then it is an extension of the gospel, and therefore in its very nature is the proclamation of Good News. After all, the word “gospel” means “good news” precisely because that’s what it records—the story of our faith, which is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is through this story that Christian experience finds its fullest meaning and expression, and so it is this story that sermons tell. Liturgically, the proclamation of the gospel which precedes the sermon comes in the form of the scriptural texts, including the Gospel, which are opened for the community’s hearing before they are interpreted in some way by the preacher in the sermon.
It is important to note that a preacher need not preach on the day’s Gospel text to proclaim the gospel. Readings from the Old Testament and the other New Testament writings can be just as generative of the Good News. Regardless of which text acts as the message’s springboard (and in some cases, it may be more than one), the sermon reveals a message of resurrection life to the Christian assembly. Jesus’ resurrection is the primary source of our Good News. Christians interpret all of God’s saving acts, whether from the Old Testament or the New, in light of the resurrection, which for us is the crowning event of salvation history. This is not because the resurrection supersedes the catalog of God’s previous saving deeds. This is because it is Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that chiefly defines and shapes Christian relationship with God. In other words, because Jesus was raised to eternal life, the Risen Christ is with us still. So, whatever scriptural word acts as the springboard for the preacher’s message, the Good News is principally proclaimed as the sermon unveils the living Word in the community’s midst.
As a liturgical proclamation of Good News, the sermon is far more than the text on the paper or the iPad in front of the preacher. As homiletics teachers such as H. Grady Davis and Eugene Lowry have shown us, a sermon cannot be limited to an object in space—an outline, transcription, or blog post. Rather, the sermon is more fully realized as an event in time. It is what the preacher says. Or, perhaps more to the point, what the listener hears. It is an experience that names the presence of the living God, the Risen Christ, in the assembly. But the role of the sermon is not solely to call the listeners’ attention to the presence of the living Word of God; it is also an invitation to participate actively in the claim that the Word makes on their lives. To do this, it must bring the Good News to bear directly on the lives of the faithful. If all the sermon did was teach, it would be no different than Christian formation outside of worship. More than mere interpretation of scriptural texts, moral instruction in godly living, or explication of Christian doctrine, the sermon calls all members of Christ’s body to a faithful response to the Good News that it proclaims. So, in addition to instructing the listeners, the sermon invites them to respond through active participation in the living Word of God. To be sure, that participation begins when the listener engages aurally with the content of the message during worship, but it also continues afterward, through the liturgy, and indeed long after its end.
Liturgically speaking, the response to the proclamation of the Good News comes in the recitation of the creeds, the prayers, confession of sin, exchange of the peace, and the celebration of Holy Communion. Each of these is an embodied, participatory act in response to the Word of God proclaimed. We speak the creed as a community, we are led in communal prayer by a member of the assembly, we confess our sins (both communal and individual), we greet one another in the name of Christ, and then we come together around the altar to celebrate the memorial of our redemption. Although the priest may lead us in that celebration, it is an act that requires the fullest sense of our embodied participation in the living Word. Not only is our liturgical participation throughout the Sunday liturgy borne out in our oral and aural function, but, as a friend of mine recently noted, it’s aerobic—we stand up, sit down, kneel, make the sign of the cross, and extend our hands in greeting to one another.
Our participation in the living Word extends beyond the liturgy, as well. As one of the prayer book’s post-communion prayers puts it, the grace imparted to us in the sacrament of Holy Communion instills in us the power to “do the work [God has] given us to do.” So it is with the sermon. Because it brings us into participation in the living Word, it is a conduit for God’s grace, making present the living Christ in whom we live and move and have our being. As Christians, our work in the world is as wide-ranging as the preaching styles that inspire it, but what binds together that work—and that preaching—is the grace that makes it possible.
If we put into a single sentence what we have discussed above, it might go something like this: The sermon is a liturgical event in which the preacher proclaims the Good News of Jesus Christ, inviting the listener to active participation in the living Word of God. It is a bit simpler than Edwards’ definition, and therefore lacks some of his specificity, but it is nonetheless a container for the core components of a sermon and its role in Christian community: to invite all in the assembly, through a hearing of Good News, into a life of deeper participation with the Risen Christ. It is true that many associate the role of the “preacher” with broader leadership in the Christian community. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But what is even more important is an understanding that the true task of preaching—of faithful participation and active response—could never rest with just one person. No, that task has been given to all who are united in the Body of Christ.
