THE SUNDAY SOAPBOX GUEST PREACHER
What’s the Worst Opening Line to a Sermon You Can Imagine?
How To Make a Congregation Switch off in the First Ten Seconds
Some suggestions:
I appear to have picked up the wrong set of notes, so for those of you who missed my last sermon, here’s another chance to hear it.
Or
Before I begin, I need to spend the first hour laying out the fundamentals of New Testament Greek so you can fully understand the following hour’s arguments.
Or
I haven’t had time to prepare this passage, so let’s muddle through it together.
Or
Turn to the person next to you and tell them the worst thing you have ever done — your deepest, darkest sin.
I have actually used the last one, but I wanted to get everyone’s attention, and I followed it up a second later with, ‘don’t actually do that, but how did it make you feel to think about other people finding out your deepest, darkest sin?’.
Preaching
I have heard people say, ‘don’t preach at me.’
It sounds negative. None of us really like being told what to do. But it’s a vicar’s job to do this. Although many sermons now seem to lean towards ‘advising’ and ‘persuading’ rather than ‘telling’. I have been asked to give ‘the address’ or ‘the talk’ in churches I have visited, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of the word ‘preach’.
When did the church lose confidence in proclaiming its message to the world?
I was given many responsibilities when the Church of England ordained me as a priest. One was:
To unfold the Scriptures, to preach the word in season and out of season.
So vicars shouldn’t be shy of preaching. But what are we charged with doing?
To Unfold the Scriptures
This goes beyond just reading them out. It certainly includes study. The starting point is ‘context’.
The Bible was written a long time ago, over a period of 1500 years, to different cultures in ancient languages.
When and why, and to whom was the passage written? How do we translate the words used? What did this passage mean to the people who originally heard it? If we’re looking at the Old Testament, how do we interpret this in the light of Jesus? How does it fit into the big picture of how God has dealt with the world?
But we need to go beyond study. ‘Unfolding the Scriptures’ is followed up with another related responsibility:
To Preach the Word in Season and Out Of Season
I assume this was inspired by the Apostle Paul’s instructions to one of his protégés, Timothy, who was working with the church in Ephesus:
Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage — with great patience and careful instruction.
2 Timothy 4: 2 (NIVUK)
The passage goes on to warn that people are no longer listening to ‘sound doctrine’ but are turning away to listen only to what they want to hear. This sounds very relevant to today’s society to me. So, instruction is important, but this Bible verse suggests that ‘preaching the word’ is more than just ‘teaching’. It is intended to change lives, showing people how God intended them to live, setting people straight where necessary, and building them up.
It means asking the question, ‘so what?’ By this, I mean asking as part of a sermon:
- ‘How is this relevant to everyday life’ or
- ‘Now we’ve heard this, how will our lives be different?
And all this applies when people are willing and ready to hear and when they are not. (And when I feel like doing it and when I don’t!)
Where’s the Good News?
These words still ring in my ears. At college, one of the tutors who taught us how to write sermons challenged us to ‘find the Good News’ whenever we preached. When I say ‘challenged’, he was more forthright than that. ‘People are miserable enough without you making them more miserable,’ he would say. ‘God’s message is Good News. The Bible tells us of this Good News. Your sermons should be full of this Good News.’
God’s message to us isn’t ‘Good Advice.’ It’s ‘Good News.’
This Good News is both simple and beyond comprehension. God loves us, despite all we have done which has hurt Him and hurt others. This has broken our relationship with Him. But the Good News is God did something about this. He sent His son Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life, was put to death, and rose again, which is how we can be forgiven and reconciled to God. This gives us new life to live as God originally envisaged, a new life that starts now and continues into eternity.
(That’s my definition of the ‘Good News’ anyway. And note I don’t say anything about our problems all disappearing, although I could talk about us no longer facing these problems alone.)
A Different Question:
My title for this article was:
What’s the Worst Opening Line to a Sermon You Can Imagine?
Given a sermon should be ‘Good News,’ then a better title is:
What’s the Best Opening Line to a Sermon You Can Imagine?
One answer could be:
God is in the business of reconciling people back to Him and each other. He’s told us how He has done this and what it means for our lives now, so listen carefully…
P.S. And try to do all the above in no more than 15 minutes each Sunday!
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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