Under-Inflated: The Disspirited Sermon

The spirit-element is the Power of the sermon, its ability to spark across the gap between speaker and hearer in order to ignite what otherwise remains inert theological fuel. Remember, we are not speaking now of the Spirit’s presence or of the spiritual life of the preacher. When it comes to sermons (and a good many other things in the Christian life) the Third Member of the Trinity has often proven, in Shakespeare’s words, that

rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a
poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster.

The reference here is to the sermon itself. The disspirited sermon may have sound theology (the father or Idea element) and a clear and even clever structure (the son or Energy element) but lacks intensity and interest, lacks, in short, the Power to move the hearers. Just as the Holy Spirit is the trickiest member of the Trinity to conceive and understand, so the sermon-spirit moves in a mysterious way. We cannot always say how to achieve it or explain why a given sermon has it. We can always, however, spot one that does not.

The disspirited sermon hits the hearer’s heart like the feel of dribbling an under-inflated basketball. Survivors of church youth camps from the ’70’s will recognize the experience. A summer intern cranks a rusty key in a reluctant lock and finally pries open the door of an ancient equipment room like an archaeologist busting into a pharoah’s tomb. Inside, instead of the dull gleam of gold sarcophagi and the rainbow wink of glittering gems he uncovers a moldy collection of sports equipment. (The analogy to the pyramids does not completely break down: some of this gear probably dates back to the Middle Kingdom and has lain undisturbed for just as long.) From among the detritus he plucks a basketball. You and your pals scramble to the cracked concrete of the outdoor court, anxious to aim jump shots at the hoop, cockeyed and denuded of its net miniskirt, that tilts drunkenly from a rusted backboard. The first player grips the ball and moves up the lane, putting leather to cement as he begins to build the momentum for his lay-up. But instead of slapping smartly on the floor with a heartening smack, the ball sort of grunts like a fat guy kicked in the stomach then lies there inert.

The ball illustrates a spirit-defective scalene trinity. There is a clear Idea: a perfect sphere passed through space with skill and strength to pierce the exact center of a perfect circle. The idea has become incarnate in an Energized form: leather, rubber, and air have enfleshed the concept into something that hands can handle. But there is no spirit, (literally, no air), no Power created by pressure, no Energy stored within the confines of the Idea.

Nor is the spirit-element optional. The disspirited sermon is a homiletic heresy just as a denial of the Holy Spirit is a theological one. Because unheard sermons do no work. Dylan Thomas reminds us that

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night

and neither may the preacher, who at his end knows that the unconquerable and incomprehensible light shines in the darkness, slope off gently into the nightmare of sermonsn without spark. Spurgeon speaks of the “mental mosquitoes” that “sting the man while you are preaching to him,” leaving him “thinking more of trifling distractions than of your discourse.” The Prince of Preachers views this phenomenon, not at the condemnation of the hearer but the legitimate challenge of the preacher:

You must drive the mosquitoes away, and secure your people’s undistracted thoughts, turning them out of the channel in which they have been running six days into one suitable for the Sabbath. You must have sufficient leverage in your discourse and its subject to lift them right up from the earth to which they cleave, and to elevate them a little nearer heaven.

Notice Spurgeon’s isosceles homiletics: the “subject” (father-element) of the “discourse” (son-element) must have the “leverage” (spirit-element) to “lift” and “elevate,” verbs owned and acted by the third member of the homiletic trinity.

But plumping up a powerless sermon is a more mysterious matter than pressurizing a soggy basketball. Calvin Miller speaks of the Spirit in preaching under the heading of “The Imperative Mystery of Preaching” and uses terms like “The Intrigue of Otherworldliness.” He theorizes that “perhaps ‘liminal’ is the real word here,” likening the spirit-strong preacher to a shaman “through whose life strange forces are at play.” Spirited sermons are, in Miller’s language, “the documents of all that cannot be documented.”

Spurgeon, in his typically more earthy, John Plougman personna, provides at least some practical steps for securing spirit in the sermon. He lists these steps under the heading of “Attention” and how it is to be gained and held. “Attention” comes very near, not a definition of the spirit-element of the sermon, but a description of its aim and effect. While we cannot, perhaps, start with spirit and tell how to get it into a sermon, we can work backwards from its most obvious goal. Among Spurgeon’s suggestions for gaining attention the following seem especially relevant.

“If you need another direction for winning attention, I should say, be interested yourself.” Bored preachers make for boring preaching. Disspirited sermons may not always indicate disspirited preachers, but they often do. Disspirited preaching may arise from a mistaken sense of selflessness, a basic personality trait, fatigue or spiritual pilgrimage.

Some preachers deflate their sermons through the mistaken idea that the sermon should have nothing in it for themselves. Certainly the pulpit is no place to indulge selfish tastes or riff on favorite themes. At the same time, the preacher must hear her own sermons - more than once if her church has multiple services - and has as much right as any other hearer to something interesting or delightful. I have frequently preached sermons in which I look forward to the chance to deilver a specific sentence or share an inspiring story. I cannot help but think that my own enthusiasm communicates spirit to the sermon as a whole.

Sermons may lack spirit because the preacher’s personality favors thought over feeling. Phillips Brooks defined preaching as “truth through personality.” Some of us are short on personality and so, inevitably, will be our preaching. To some extent this is simply the ready-made reality of the situation and we must play as well as we can the hand we have been dealt. That hand, however, can be played to greater or less advantage. As Don Schlitz reminds us in his country-western ballad “The Gambler,”

Every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser.

A preacher with a less-marked or more withdrawn personality must take special care to let the interest and excitement he does feel come out in his sermons.

But disinterested preaching may be more than a matter of personality. I can think of at least two other elements that can contribute to a scalene sermon in this regard. The sermon may flatten out from the preacher’s fatigue. The preacher may be too tired to be interested, and thus too tired to be interesting. This weariness can be physical or emotional (the two are never so seperate as we often make them) and can, in either case, be cured only by rest. Churches will unwittingly drive their preachers like galley slaves chained to the oar until, having worn out the incumbent, they toss the corpse overboard to the sharks and go in search of a new victim. Preachers must insist on sufficient rest, both on a regular basis and in the form of vacations and sabbaticals.

A final reason for disinterested preaching may be that doctrine itself has grown dull to the pastor’s heart. Of course, this may be a sign of spiritual sickness on the preacher’s part and the first response should be a triage of one’s inner life. If we harbor known sin or neglect our inner life, dullness in preaching will be the canary in the coal mine that first signals deadly danger. At the same time, such a dullness may be an important sign of growth, indicating, not that the old truths have ceased to be true but that have not yet become true enough for us. Ministerial ennui is not necessarily a sign that one has drifted away from her theology; it may indicate that she is in the act of digging beneath it to a deeper - and more exciting - level. But the digging itself is hard, and even boring work. When preaching becomes disspirited for this reason the preacher should not despair but rely on The Spirit to breathe life into the best the preacher has to offer.

“We must make the people feel that they have an interest in what we are saying.” Building on this idea, Spurgeon offers the analogy that “I have heard of some very strange things, but never did I hear of a person going to sleep while a will was being read in which he expected a legacy, neither have I heard of a prisoner going to sleep while the judge was summing up, and his life was hanging in jeopardy.” Spirited preaching often works reciprocaly. A preacher who is confident of interesting his hearers goes about his task with more spirit. A listener who takes an interest feeds her own energy back into the loop, and so the cycle continues. Every preacher knows the feeling of having discovered a particularly apt and pithy quote or illustration, or having a funny anecdote he cannot wait to share. The eagerness and confidence generated by having such a bullet in the chamber can lend spirit to the entire preaching event.

This process, however, differs from the “seeker sensitive” sermon. The spirited preacher discovers human need from the text so that the hearer may discover it from the sermon. The seeker-sensitive sermon may be “inflated,” but is seldom “inspired”.

Finally, Spurgeon bluntly advises us to “avoid being too long.” Length and spirit in a sermon are not necessarily mutually exclusive but “brevity,” as Shakespeare’s Polonius reminds us in the midst of a speech that is anything but brief, “is the soul of wit.” There is plenty of air on the outside of a basketball - more, in fact, than there is on the inside - but the ball won’t bounce for all of that. The ball rebounds from hard surfaces with its satisfying slap because the relatively small amount of air on the inside is too big for its container. A lot of spirit pressed into a little less son creates power. A smaller, tighter, more compact sermon incarnation will maximize the pressurized power of the Energy it contains. Thus the sermon is measured not so much in terms of time (acceptable length may vary depending on denomination, ethnicity, nationality and other factors) but in terms of psi: how much spirit per square idea does it take - and can the preacher provide - to fill the message to capacity.

This entry was posted on July 2, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.