The Haunted Pulpit - The Over-Ghosted Sermon

(Sixth in a series.)

The third member of Sayers’ literary trinity is the spirit or, in her more King Jamesian lingo, “ghost.” If the father-element is the governing Idea and the son-element is the Energy, the order and structure which incarnates that idea into words, the ghost-element is for Sayers the Power. Sayers shows us the proper function of the ghost when she magnifies it into a piece of literary kudzu that engulfs the landscape of the text: “Many a column of sob-stuff betrays the uncontrolled sensibility of three impressionable ghosts.” The ghost-element of the sermon, then, is its affective aspect, the channel by which the Idea enters the hearts of the hearers within the structure of the Energy. Sermons can go spirit-scalene in one of two ways, either by being over-ghosted, which results in a haunted sermon, or under-ghosted, which produces a flat-tire sermon. We will consider each in turn.

Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. The difference between a spirit-scalene sermon and a trinitarian one is the difference between lightning and a light bulb. I remember one summer when a jagged bolt of electricity blasted a beautiful ash tree two doors down from our home. The next day I stared at the wreckage. The jolt slashed the trunk in half. The tree’s leafy topknot sprawled on the grass. A livid weal twisted through the burnt bark of the stump like Captain Ahab’s scar. As my neighbor pointed to crunchy gems of glittering glass and recounted how chunks of lumber had smashed through his bedroom window, I mulled the fact that the same sort of pulsing power hummed through my own home at every moment. A complex structure of colored wires - an electrical son-element, in fact - made all the difference between my warm, bright home and this toppled tree.

Lightning strikes with undeniable power and brightness, but the strikes are random both in time and place and usually destructive in their effects. The light bulb harnesses the same electricity into a receivable form (son-element) put under the direction of a chosen purpose (father-element). During Paul Wellstone’s campaign to become senator from Minnesotta his campaign manager Patrick Forciea told New York Times reporter David Carr that despite the candidate’s double-digit deficit in the polls with only weeks to go, he was sanguine. He figured some sort of scandal would break at some point and explained that based on that hope “we are going to get as close as we can, wait for a lightning storm and then head out to the golf course and wave a 9-iron around.” In the end rival Rudy Boschwitz publicly questioned whether Wellstone was Jewish enough and Wellstone won it at the wire.

Such a strategy might produce results but has severe drawbacks: the storm might not come; it might come but skip your Titleist lightning rod; it might strike your proffered target only to prove a danger to you and those around you. The over-ghosted sermon prays for a lightning storm and devises various methods for becoming the target of its energy. You can always spot a spirit-heavy preacher - he may not be holding a golf club but from the way he hikes his hands aloft and brandishes them about, he might indeed be a human lightning rod on the tenth tee in a rainstorm.

At the risk of generalizing, we can say that the over-ghosted sermon is usually haunted by the ghost of good sermons murdered by the blunt instrument of the preacher’s neglect. Failure to honor the text with the time needed to discover a ruling idea turns any son-structure into a corpse. The dilatory preacher, faced with Sunday’s congregation and Sunday’s expectation, now attempts to jolt this corpse to life with the raw electricity of emotion or eloquence. To be completely accurate, this problem produces not so much a ghost as a Frankenstein’s monster - a patchwork of body parts cobbled together and juiced into motion by illegitimate means. Failure to honor the text with the painstaking work of creating a structure turns a father-idea into a sonless phantom. The sermonic slacker slouches to his Sunday appointment with only an idea that could be expressed in a sentence (if he had taken time to compose even that sentence) but an obligation to occupy thirty minutes. Now we get the ghost proper as the preacher attempts to expand pure ectoplasm into an apparition sufficient to hold its transparent shape for the time required.

We can spot the haunted sermon by three marks: it is kinetic, pathetic, and frenetic.

The haunted sermon is kinetic, a single explosion of uninhibited energy. Spurgeon, speaking under the heading of “Earnestness” of something very like what I mean by “ghost,” warns us not “to stamp the foot, to smite the desk, to perspire, to shout, to bawl,” in an attempt to cover up the fact that all of this sound and fury signifies nothing except the preacher’s lack of preparation.

The haunted preacher of the ghostly sermon pinwheels in the pulpit like a charismatic on crack. She preaches in the place where religion meets Red Bull. His arms flail as if he were attempting to become the descending dove who brings the unction on whose presence he has pinned all his hopes for Sunday success - or even survival. He exhausts himself in the effort, by sheer heat, whether of soul or body, to create steam long after his small stock of stagnant sermonic water has boiled away. She labors to produce solid sermonic bricks in the absence of even a single textual straw, to slather together a solid structure using only the perpetually plastic ooze of emotional mud.

This bobbing and weaving rarely fools the congregation, who might look askance at all this activity and pass the same judgment Joe Louis did on Billy Cohn. On June 18, 1941 Cohn sacrificed his light heavyweight title belt to face the Brown Bomber for the heavyweight crown. When questioned about his strategy against this huge, hard-hitting opponent, Cohn said that he intended to use his speed, to “hit and run.” Sportswriters’ queries of Louis produced one of the most famous epigrams in history: “He can run, but he can’t hide.” He could, and did run - for a dozen rounds, at the end of which Cohn led on points. He couldn’t, and didn’t hide - Louis knocked Cohn cold in the thirteenth. No matter how big the pulpit or how spacious the platform, haunted preachers quickly find that their gyrations can’t carry them the full sermonic distance.

The haunted sermon is pathetic - it seeks to bypass the brain and go straight for the glands. Again, Spurgeon sneers at the effort “to quote pathetic portions of other people’s sermons, or to pour out voluntary tears from a watery eye.” At my seminary, we referred to this as the “puppy dog sermon.” At the end of a homiletic effort that could hope for no slashing of the two-edged sword of the Word because the text had hardly been drawn from its bonded leather scabbard, the preacher would tell an affecting tale about a little girl whose dog - usually a birthday gift, preferably from a father dying of some rare disease - ran into the road and got the business-end of a pickup truck. As she stands in the street, cradling and cuddling the defunct doggy, the preacher, voluntary tears puddling in his watery eye, makes some vague connection between the child’s emotions and Jesus’ love for sinners, then launches into a few dozen choruses of “Just As I Am.”

The false pathos of the haunted sermon is worse than venial. Like anabolic steroids which eventually stunt the very muscle growth they originally stimulate, emotionally juiced messages eventually cause genuine sensitivity to atrophy. It was the weepy sermons of his Anglo-Irish grandfather that went far to sour the young C. S. Lewis against Christianity. Indeed, it was largely through the emotionally repressed and rigidly disciplined logic of an atheistic Scots schoolmaster that he managed to find his way back to faith. Preachers who continually strip-mine reactions from an increasingly desensitized congregation find that they eventually destroy the emotional ecosystem. Sweat-shop sorrows squeezed from the surface of exhausted sensibilities leave behind a jaded crust of indifference.

Finally, the haunted sermon is frenetic. This old word for crazy comes from a Greek root and suffix which mean something almost exactly like “reason-itis,” the condition of being rationally feverish. The over-ghosted sermon amps itself ever upward to increasingly uncontrollable levels of rhetoric and volume. Sayers compares the unghosted author to a person who has no mechanical insight. Such a person threatens those around him because he “irresponsibly sets (a piece of machinery) going and turns it loose, without controlling it or noticing what has become of it.” I would argue that Sayers here describes, not so much the unghosted as the over-ghosted, at least where preaching is concerned. The haunted preacher kick-starts her Harley hog of a sermon without the least notion of how to ride, and rolls the throttle to ever-higher levels of RPM with no plan of where to head and no skill to steer if she had one. The over-ghosted preacher seldom notices “what has become of” his sermon: some of the most high-torque metaphors of the faith, some of the most piercing passages of the prophets and pile-driving doctrines of Paul’s epistles he lets loose in a field of unsuspecting saints. This person often brags that she “doesn’t care” what havoc her truth wreaks; she is preaching the word and can’t be afraid of the effects it might produce. But if the Scripture is active and living and sharper than a two-edged sword, that is all the more reason not to wave it around like a giant foam finger at a football game, its arc of influence growing wider as the emotion runs higher. In my home state of Texas we have a concealed-carry law which permits one to pack a pistol, but only when one has taken the proper training and passed a test on marksmanship. I sometimes wonder if a similar standard should not apply to the far more powerful preaching of the Scripture.

So why the high incidence of haunted sermons? The most obvious reason is a left-handed compliment according to which the more important, the more “spiritual” (in the theological, not homiletical sense) preaching is, the less discipline it demands of the practitioner. As a seminary professor I am continually amazed - and appalled - at my students’ readiness to spiritualize their pardonable ignorance into a less-pardonable epistemology. Students resist learning on the pseudo-spiritual grounds that God has given them a direct download. Two thousand years of Christian history they dismiss as carnal dabbling in unholy intellect, unable to see that it is rather incarnational wrestling by intellects made holy through offering them on God’s altar. Of course, we should also acknowledge that for many this apologia for the haunted sermon amounts to no more than so much rationalization of basic laziness.

At some level the haunted sermon arises from an impatience with boundaries. After all, a ghost is a disembodied spirit whose see-through status enables it to pass through solid objects. The ghost-driven sermon scorns the limitations of points or headings and the cumbersome baggage of doctrines and dogmas. This approach, however liberating it may seem, in the end takes on the dimensions of the old medieval cunundrum about the number of immaterial angels who can dance on the head of a pin. The haunted sermon becomes the stomping ground of so many ideas, so many texts, so many illustrations and applications that the result is insanity.

Legion the demoniac might serve as teh scriptural type of the haunted sermon. That the spirits who stuffed themselves into his psyche were wicked ones is not now the point. Much of his madness may have stemmed simply from spiritual overcrowding! Because the over-ghosted sermon owes no allegiance to a governing idea, it has no basis on which to reject any stray thought. Because it submits to no sermonic structure, it has no “thou” and “not-thou” to keep its outlines clear. This seeming openness transmogrifies the sermon into a baggy hold-all full of random bits of truth, none of which can be heard long enough to do any good. When Milton sought a name for the headquarters of Hell he coined the term Pandemonium, the place of all demons, thus implying that Hell is not only wicked but also maddening through the sheer cacophany of voices heard there. Sermonic pandemonium - or perhaps panangelicum, which is only marginally better - results when the cherubim soaring about the heavenly throne cannot agree on the single-line chorus of “Holy, holy, holy” and insist instead on chanting each its own favorite ditty.

This is where Idea and Energy unite to funnel Power into useful channels. Speaking of his waning days as an atheist, G. K. Chesterton recalls that “the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.” Good things running wild within sufficiently broad boundaries might be a good definition of the properly ghosted sermon.

One final thought and I finish. One of the earliest debates of the Christian church was the fililioque controversy. This famous debate centered on the question of whether the third member of the Trinity is generated by the Father separately, as is the Son, or is mutually generated by the relationship between the other two. Whatever the theological merits and consequences of either argument, I think that no good preacher would doubt that, for the trinitarian homiletic, the western position must be the orthodox one. I cannot imagine a bare Idea directly creating sermonic excitement. It is the movement from Idea to Structure, from father to son, that creates the shuddering, jittering, electric, ecstatic, emphatic, pulsating, stimulating Power that allows the sermon to slip past the watchful dragons of the listener’s preconceptions and find a place in her heart.

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