June 24, 2008 by djackson.

(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.

Posted in General | No Comments »

June 16, 2008 by djackson.

(Note: This blog continues a series that begins with “Heresy Roulette” on May 19. The series analyzes preaching strengths and weaknesses based on a sort of “literary trinity” set out by Dorothy Sayers in her essay “Scalene Trinities.” Blogs so far have examined the over-fathered, under-fathered, and over-sonned sermon.)

Arguably the most famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a strongly fathered writer with his own scalene son-element, was “Kubla Kahn.” Ironically for our purposes, the poet himself called the work a fragment and claimed that a chance interruption by a casual caller derailed his creative process: In other words, the guest’s intrusion broke the writer’s tentative contact with the son - the structure, plotting, and actual expression of what he claimed was originally an opium-fathered vision - and his piece never recovered.

At any rate, Coleridge begins with those stirring lines about the “stately pleasure-dome”

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Now I’m shamelessly imposing my metaphor on Coleridge’s lines but it strikes me that many sermons set out, like the “sacred river” seen by the prophet Ezekiel, intending to grow from elegant streams to mighty rivers of divine revelation teaming with eternal life, only, at some point, to dive underground into Carlsbad-black obscurity, puddling into dank pools of exegetical swampland. To use the terminology of scalene homiletics, they run “through caverns measureless to man/Down to a son-less sea.”

Remember that the son-element of the triune sermon is its form, its flow, the incarnation of sound theology and mystical excitement into actual words that the hearer can understand. The under-sonned sermons suffers not from lack of inspiration but lack of incarnation, not from lack of content but from lack of a discernable container, not from a lack of material but from immaterialtiy. The under-sonned sermon is a woefully Gnostic production of such pure conception that it cannot bear the interruption of logical shape.

As Dorothy Sayers maps out her scalene literary criticism, she notes a paucity of examples of the under-sonned author because “a really disastrous failure in this person of the trinity produces not a good writer with a weakness, but simply a bad writer. . . .the judgment upon bad writing is oblivion, so that the dreadful example, when found, is not likely to be familiar.” In other words, writers with son-anemia either do not write or have no one to read what they write, so that the reading public runs very little risk of encountering them. Son-starved writers pose, Sayers believes, a different and equally serious danger, which we will look at in a moment, but right now I want to emphasize the unfortunate advantage of the under-sonned preacher: he gets a hearing much more readily than his literary counterpart. Sunday after Sunday congregations find themselves caught up like Elijah in a whirlwind of divine doctrine. These preachers aim for the same result, too: that their hearers be snatched from earth into the very presence of God. Unfortunately, their tornado of rhetoric never takes on any shape so definite as a chariot and horses. The more usual result is that the listener finds herself battered by stray bits of verbiage and random bludgeons of doctrine until the storm subsides and she sinks again to the earth bruised in mind, lacerated in heart, and perhaps a trifle car sick.

Though Spurgeon made clear his preference for solid content over a fancy container, he still valued the sonned structure of the sermon when he insisted that

our matter should be well arranged according to the true rules of mental architecture. Not practical inferences at the basis and doctrines as the topstones; note metaphors in the foundations, and propositions at the summit; not the more important truths first and the minor teachings last, after the manner of an anticlimax; but the thought must climb and ascend; one stair of teaching leading to another; one door of reason conducting to another, and the whole elevating the hearer to a chamber from whose windows truth is seen gleaming in the light of God. In preaching have a place for everything, and everything in its place. Never suffer truths to fall from you pell-mell. Do not let your thoughts rush as a mob, but make them march as a troop of soldiery. Order, which is heaven’s first law, must not be neglected by heaven’s ambassdors.

The Prince of Preachers often related his son-strong approach through a charmingly humble childhood anecdote. It seems his grandmother sent him to the village grocery to purchase set quantities of tea, mustard, and rice. As he returned he spied a fox hunt, a spectacle that always fired his boyish imagination. Without a second thought the young errand boy abandoned his mission and tore out after the hounds for as long as he could keep up the pace. He discovered “when I reached home, that all my goods were amalgamated - tea, mustard, rice, into one awful mess.” As a result, he explains,

I have understood the necessity of packing up my subjects in good stout parcels, bound round with the thread of my discourse; and this makes me keep to firstly, secondly, and thirdly, however unfashionable that method may now be. People will not drink your mustard tea, nor will they enjoy muddled-up sermons, in which they cannot tell head from tail, because they have neither, but are like Mr. Bright’s Skye terrier, whose head and tail were both alike.

That line about “firstly, secondly, and thirdly” bears a little development in its own right. Spurgeon creates here a false dichotomy between one form of son and no son at all. It is the tyrrany of the three-point alliterating outline that has led to so much son-burned preaching, as I mentioned in the last blog. It also leads to the sense of condemnation expressed by one reader who responded to that particular blog by commenting that,

My sermon structure is rarely tightly knit. It is usually organized around the text. If it isn’t organized around the text, it is organized around problems I have in understanding the text, questions I ask of the text, or questions other people have asked me of the text. For my sermon on enemy-love in the Sermon on the Mount for instance, I took us through a bunch of texts about what the gospel is and what God intends to do with us who believe the gospel, but normally when I preach from the synoptics I never leave that book. I really have no idea how to construct meaningful flesh in which to fit sermonic ideas. So my sermons are under-sonned. I should probably start reading more sermons, lectures, and fiction.

Notice that this young preacher, who claims to have “no idea how to construct” a sermon, names five excellent ways of doing so: text, problems the text presents, questions the text raises for the preacher, questions the text raises for the congregation, and companion texts that speak to the main passage. Notice also that the writer equates “tightly knit” structure with “meaningful flesh in which to fit sermonic ideas.” In fact, a rambling structure may best fit some passages or some sermons - specifically those in which the Scripture takes the reader on a leisurely stroll to green pastures by still waters.

Sayers remarks on writers who style themselves heretics, claiming that they never plan a book beforehand. She declares herself agnostic toward their heresy. “When their creation is successful as a work of art, the end-product will always disclose a unity of tone and theme which quite certainly did not come there by accident.” Such works betray “a bland uniformity of style and a methodical lack of method that bear witness to the cunning co-operation of father and son in its creation.”

In this case I have the advantage of having heard the young preacher quoted above and can bear witness that his sermons hold together admirably and produce, for the hearer, the sense of a single, coherent experience that leaves the hearer intellectually satisfied so that he is free to be spiritually challenged. Preachers do well to remember that the Son, in giving shape to the Father’s “let there be,” shows a delight in variety. A dog and a centipede both have a clearly perceptible form but, if in only so obvious a feature as the number of legs, display a wide variation in that form. A sermon may indeed trot forward in a straight line on four legs or wriggle widely but purposefully on a thousand. As long as it has a ruling core and remains true to it, the sermon is not under-sonned.

Calvin Miller incarnates a narrative alternative to the point-by-point propositional sermon with his concept of the “stacked sandwich.” Between the foundational “slice” of the text and the copestone “slice” of the altar (the call for response), Miller offers the preacher the choice of an endless variety of meat, cheese, and vegetables: narrative, proposition, statistics, supporting texts, proverbs, poems, and application. The preacher may arrange these “fillers” in a constantly shifting pattern that avoids monotony or predictability, but always works “between the bread” to discipline the sermon to purposeful movement. Eugene Lowry in The Homiletical Plot offers a loop-the-loop pattern that moves from “oops” to “yeah” by way of “ugh,” “aha,” and “whee”! In Patterns of Preaching Ronald Allen offers thirty-four sermon structures and includes an example of each.

Bottom line: there’s more than one way to keep sermonic mustard out of one’s homiletical tea!

Two specific forms of the under-sonned heresy that Sayers analyzes with reference to literature also have important lessons for preaching. She asserts that “bodiless Gnosticism is the besetting heresy of the ‘literary’ dramatist,” whose plays contain “‘literary’ dialogue, which reads elegantly, but which no living actor can get his tongue round.” The pulpit companion is the literary sermon, a wonder to behold (and to read) in manuscript but containing passages the preacher cannot deliver at the pace and volume the pulpit requires, and that the hearer cannot digest because their very genius requires re-reading (not possible when he hasn’t the printed product before him) and reflection (not possible because the sermon keeps moving). Such sermons contain passages that stain the preacher’s tongue more purple than the Lord’s Supper itself but no one else partakes of their grace because it is a self-administered sacrament. As one often guilty of this particular fault I hesitate to condemn it too roundly. So much preaching treats language as no more than a mule to haul in cargo - without value in itself and certainly not considered for its beauty. It seems a pity to discourage what few efforts preachers make at art. Still, the literary sermon generally leaves the congregation exchanging remarks like those supposedly passed between two elderly ladies who had gone to hear Paul Tillich:

“Wasn’t he confusing?”

“Yes, but wasn’t he confusing on a high level?”

A second, and more dangerous mutation spawned by son-weakness is what Sayers calls “the uncreative artist.” Such individuals have, certainly, “a fire shut up within their bones” but have no sermonic skeleton to which they can transfer the blaze. The resulting homiletic heartburn tends to sour their disposition! These people, Sayers thinks,

believe the failure to be outside them, and despair of other men; they resent the world’s refusal to recognize that vocation which to them is an inward certainty. They know, and continually assert, that they “have something there” which they desire to make manifest, but the manifestation is beyond their capacity. They are their own prisoners, languishing incommunicado.

This is the case with the occasional student who takes a preaching class because the degree plan requires it, but who enters convinced that he needs none of this tedious business of exegesis and outlines, of illustrations and applications. Yet when such an individual storms into a pulpit like the bull at a corrida, he finds to his great frustration that his message seems to remain in his own mind (or perhaps a bit south, in the intestines) and fail to transfer itself to anyone else. The churches themselves tend to weed out such individuals, as no one will consistently sit to hear them preach. This, however, does not neutralize them as a danger to the fellowship of the saints. Sayers goes on to insist that

such men are dangerous; since Energy, if it cannot issue in creation, may contrive to burst its prison somehow and issue in its own opposite. The uncreative artist is the destroyer of all things, the active negation. When the Energy is not Christ, it is Antichrist, assuming leadership of the universe in the mad rush back to Chaos.

Few pastors last long in the ministry without encountering in their congregations such an “uncreative preacher,” the frustrated former or would-be pastor whose son-shrunken trinity has barred him from the pulpit. This person’s creative Energy does indeed issue in its opposite as he becomes Shiva the Destroyer, the many-armed mutilator of every sermon he hears and every program he discovers. Sayers believes that the destructive artist can be cured by a competent psychiatrist. The destructive preacher probably could be cured if he would submit himself to spiritual direction or at least a basic course in preaching but he almost certainly will not do so. He will instead rocket like a turbo-charged pinball from congregation to congregation, caroming off of each pastor like a rubber-buttressed bumper. Of course, the analogy breaks down at that point of collision: the crash does not produce points in any positive sense, and the preacher usually lacks protection from the impacts.

Posted in General | No Comments »

June 11, 2008 by djackson.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1.3

“Everything in the visible structure of the work belongs to the son.” - Dorothy Sayers, “Scalene Trinities”

To recap: We were discussing (before I interrupted in order to vent some steam lest the emotion boiling in my soul after watching the movie version of “Prince Caspian” blew my psychic radiator cap and did some serious damage) about a trinitarian homiletic. I have appropriated this idea from Dorothy Sayers who maps out such a scheme for judging literature. As we work out this idea, the following should be kept in mind:

1. The “trinity” under discussion is not The Trinity. The idea is analogous, not doctrinal and a preacher can be entirely orthodox and still have a homiletic trinity which denies or underemphasizes one of three key components.

2. The members of the homiletic trinity work out as follows: the “father” is the Idea, the governing doctrinal truth behind the sermon; the “son” is the creative Energy or structure of the sermon; the “spirit” is the Power, the emotion and pathos created by the sermon in the hearer.

Having laid out this framework Sayers comments that “we may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers (or, for my purposes, preachers) who are respectively “father-ridden,” “son-ridden,” and “ghost-ridden.” Working from there, I have taken on the task of analyzing the various out-of-scale sermons that can result from a lopsided homiletic trinity. So far we have looked at the over-fathered and under-fathered sermon. Next, we will examine the over-sonned sermon.

“Form,” says Sayers, “is the domain of the son.” Or, as John the Evangelist says of the Other Trinity, “without him was not anything made that was made.” It is because of the Son’s presence on opening day at Eden that the divine fiat produces discernable creatures - giraffes and mangos and wombats and truffles - and not simply a pulsing mishmash of God-flung “is-ness.” From day one, God goes about making divisions and distinctions: light from darkness, a firmament dividing the waters above from the waters below and boundaries keeping the waters below from indundating the dry land. Now vegetation sprouts, but each after its kind and with self-contained seed. The light, divided from the darkness, next divides day from night. Next the creatures come but they come in their place and after their kind - sky, surf and turf, flying, swimming, swarming and walking. Adam can name the animals because they remain reliably themselves, not shape-shifting in some carbon-based nightmare meltdown. Wisdom Personified in Proverbs 8, a figure in whom some theologians see God the Son, describes creation almost completely in terms of divisions and boundaries:

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth. - v.27-29

Clearly, structure is a good thing. Yet sermons suffer when the son runs riot over other elements, when a lack of father - a governing Idea - leaves the son nothing to work with, or when the spirit - the indwelling application of the message - finds itself ensnared in the fine meshes of a gill-net of asthetic needlepoint. Spurgeon surgically skewers this sort of sermon when he complains that “to divide a sermon well may be a very useful art, but how if there is nothing to divide? A mere division maker is like an excellent carver with an empty dish before him.” The Prince of Preachers continues:

To be able to deliver an exordium which shall be appropriate and attractive, to be at ease in speaking with propriety during the time allotted for the discourse, and to wind up with a respectable peroration, may appear to mere religious performers to be all that is requisite; but the true minister of Christ knows that the true value of a sermon must lie, not in its fashion and manner, but in the truth which it contains.

Spurgeon sums up, “However beautiful the sower’s basket it is a miserable mockery if it be without seed.” A little later he goes so far as to express his opinion that it is:

better far to give the people masses of unprepared truth in the rough, like pieces of meat from a butcher’s block, chopped off anyhow, bone and all, and even dropped down in teh sawdust, than ostentatiously and delicately hand them out upon a china dish a delicious slice of nothing at all, decorated with parsley and poetry,a nd flavoured with the sauce of affectation.

In a similar vein Calvin Miller likens the son-surfeited sermon to the work of Herman Melville’s fictional Dr. Cuticle, a naval sawbones who performs an appendectomy on a foremastman. Playing to the gallery, a fascinated mob of the sick man’s shipmates, the surgeon goes on at great length “picking through the viscera of his poor patient” in order to anatomize the body’s architecture. “The operation is impressive,” Miller concludes,

but by the time Cuticle has sewn up the patient, he has been dead for quite a long while. Dr. Cuticle was so enthusiastic in his exegesis, he hadn’t noticed his patient had died. If our pulpit exegesis gets clever with alliterative outlines and spunky word studies that fascinate while our patients die, our preaching fails.

In the same book, Miller tells of a preacher who led his congregation on a forty-three week forced-march through Paul’s letter to the Philippians. It was one of those churches where the truly devout take copious notes on each message and Miller quips that “one of his less enchanted members, whose notebooks looked thin and atheistic, said, ‘The series is done, and while I still love my pastor, I hate the Book of Philippians.’”

Miller describes the over-sonned sermon in narrative form in the ministry of Pastor Sam, protagonist of the delightful book The Sermon Maker. In the midst of his thirty-two sermon series “First-Israel, Second-Israel, and the Nature of the Holy Covenants in Transition,” Sam receives a visit from an avenging angel understandably bent on busting up this Gordian knot of intricate structure. The heavenly messenger discovers sermons entitled “Designing Doctrine to Deal with the Devil,” “Destiny, Debt, and the Divine Deliverer,” and “Debauchery, Dissension, and Demonic Delusion.” Moreover, the accompanying slides color all the “d’s” red with flames that flicker at their bases, an effect that looks “terrifyingly premillenial in PowerPoint.” When the angel seems inclined to give the sermons a “D-minus,” Pastor Sam blusters that “alliteration is my gift of the Spirit.”

Doubtless the classic three-points-and-a-poem is the indelible triple-six on the forehead of an over-sonned sermon, especially when the three points all begin with the same letter. The son-burned sermon, however, can take other forms. Seeker-sensitive ideas about sermons have led to messages that, by definition, begin with a liliputian father-element. When the preacher exegetes the felt-needs of his hearers (or perhaps of his theoretical hearers, the “seekers” who may or may not come seeking on the Sunday in question) and then works his way backwards into the Bible, Scripture becomes so alarmingly flexible that the son-element, instead of giving incarnate shape to the divine “let-there-be” must instead do both jobs at once. The sermonic son must not only shape content but provide it. Jesus gazed constantly on his Father and then performed actions that gave shape to that beatific vision (John 5.19). The over-sonned sermon instead gazes outward at the congregation and then seeks in the sermon to provide the kinds of signs sought by an evil and adulterous generation.

The seeker-sensitive form of the over-sonned sermon tends not to alliteration but to the acrostic. “SMILE” becomes the mnemonic for “the five biblical principles for success in your job,” S-tick to your own job, M-ake yourself indispensible, I-gnore office gossip, L-augh at yourself, and E-at right. I churned those out off the top of my head but I am sure that in just as little time I could match each with a Bible verse. Such a structure is memorable, and that is just the problem. Hearers go away with this “doctrine” tatooed on their souls without ever being invited to wrestle with some serious father-questions: like whether success on one’s job is necessarily a mark of those who work for a different Boss, or is a worthy goal for those called to see all work as ministry and evangelism.

Donald Miller, in his own inimitable style, analyzes what he calls the “formula” approach to Christian writing, an approach that lives in symbiosis with the pulpit. “It seems that when God had the Bible put together, He hid a lot of the ancient wisdom so, basically, you have to read into things and even kind of make things up to get a formula out of it.” Ultimately however, Miller confesses himself dissatisfied with this synthetic exegesis. The effort to assemble recipes from the Bible “really got me thinking that, perhaps, formula books [and we could add “sermons,”] by that I mean books [or sermons] that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible.” In the end he concludes that “if there was a formula fix to life, Jesus would have told us what it was.”

In his novel Brother Odd, Dean Koontz creates the character of Brother John, a mad monk whose scientific genious outruns his monastic devotion and leads him to the Frankenstenian excess of creating his own life-form. Significantly, this monstrosity takes on the form of an intricate and ever-flexible congeries of bare bones. As his narrator, Odd Thomas, gazes on the creation he notes that

the joints that linked these ranked rows of bones . . . evidently permitted 360-degree rotation along more than one plane of movement. With the dice-on-felt sound, the kaleidoscope shifted, producing another intricate pattern as eerily beautiful as the one before it, though a degree more menacing. I got the distinct feeling that the bones allowed universal rotation on numerous if not infinite planes . . . .

Koontz’ science fiction is theologically intriguing and certainly homiletically valid: the monk, though a genius, is only a human being. As a result he cannot create a life-form subject to the kind of control imposed by a perfect trinity. The being lacks a Father and its originator compensates by making its Son-element, its actual incarnation, infinitely complex. In the same way, an over-sonned sermon becomes ultimately maleable because there is insufficient father, insufficient controlling Idea, to lock the Energy into a stable form.

The more sinister implications of the son-soaked sermon can be seen in Joseph Conrad’s character, Mr. Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness. Kurtz comes to the reader as a man strong on Energy, determined to grab hold of the world and wrest it to his control. Kurtz is talented, an eloquent speaker and writer, as well as a natural leader and a man of great determination. What he lacks is a “father,” any governing principle, any Idea to direct his Energy. Conrad conveys this truth in different ways. We read that Kurtz lacks any specific nationality: “His mother was Half-English, his father was half-French. All Europse contributed to the making of Kurtz.” He has no vocation: “To this day,” admits the narrator Marlow, “I am unable to say what was Kurtz’s profession, whether he ever had any - which was the greatest of his talents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else a journalist who could paint. . . .He was a universal genius. . . .” When the natives threaten to kill Marlow’s entire party unless Kurtz orders them spared, Marlow says to a young man who views Kurtz as a hero, “Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time.” Asked if he does not agree that Kurtz’ method for harvesting ivory is unsound, Marlow responds that it is “no method at all.”

The result of all this Energy with no Idea to govern it appears in the shrunken heads that decorate posts around Kurtz’ headquarters. It also appears in the single sermon manuscript that Conrad gives as evidence of the homiletic of this tragic preacher of progress. After a brief opening, Marlow says,

he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence - of words -burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases . . . .

This is the son-heavy, under-fathered eloquence that becomes dangerous by its ability to go anywhere and, in Marlow’s phrase, take the hearer along. One admirer of Kurtz argues that he should have become a politician “he could get himself to believe anything.” When Marlow asks which party Kurtz would have chosen the speaker replies, “Any party.” Conrad underscores the danger of this much Energy without an Idea when he quotes the hand-written postscriptum to Kurtz’s sermon: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

Preaching that is all art and no message inevitably comes to regard the congregation as an audience, dispensible when it fails to respond as desired. This metamessage, like Kurtz’s postscript, often goes unexpressed but it informs every word of the sermon. It reminds me of the fact that many martial arts weapons, such as the staff, nunchucks, and sai, were originally tools before someone discovered how to put their domestic designs to warlike uses. The seeker-sensitive preacher with megachurch ambitions often discovers that his preaching was never more than a tool to achieve high attendance. When the tool fails to work, it can quickly become a weapon to punish a recalcitrant congregation, and a deadly one at that.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

June 4, 2008 by djackson.

We interrupt this series on homiletics for a brief rant regarding the movie, “Prince Caspian.” I went to see it and my general impression was that a blind man on a bushhog had run backwards over a copy of the novel which was then pasted together by a drunken chimpanzee wearing two catcher’s mitts. You knew you were in trouble when the opening credits announced that it was “Based on” the novel by C. S. Lewis. Debased on it would have been more like it.

When I expressed these gentle sentiments to family and coworkers they all responded with those patronizing grins which say so clearly, “Purists are such a drag!” And I don’t say they’re wrong. The fact is that my angst was almost entirely inarticulate. I mean, I could cite chapter and verse as to where the film had taken liberties with the book but was less successful in explaining why this bothered me so much. About the best I could do was to realize that, as one trained to have deep respect for the written text of Scripture, I tend to extend that reverence to just about anything expressed in writing. (I’ve gone on similar jags regarding the liberties Hollywood has taken with various biblical stories: they mangle the theology and don’t improve the drama. It’s like simultaneously increasing the calorie count of a cake while making it taste like sodden toilet paper. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do know what sodden toilet paper tastes like but it was a college prank and I don’t want to talk about it.)

ANYWAY . . . I decided it wasn’t just over-anal-ysis on my part, though a sort of literary fundamentalism might have come into play. For one thing, the screenplay has glaring flaws. (Warning: there’s a plot spoiler coming up, but the only plot it really spoils is the one in the movie, which is kinda like saying I’m going to spoil an egg that’s been sitting on concrete in the South Texas sun for six hours.) For instance, in the scene where Caspian flees his uncle’s assasins, he falls to the ground and blows his magic horn even as Trumpkin the dwarf rushes to defend him and is captured. Now, at this point, none of the Old Narnians knows who Caspian is or has any idea why he’s pretending to be Louie Armstrong when his life is in danger. Yet later on, when Trumpkin meets the Pevensie children, he expresses his disappointment that the magic hadn’t worked better, saying something like, “We expected a bit more.” Who, one wonders, is “we,” since he hasn’t a clue as to the Prince’s identity, and what reason did he have to expect anything? Then he decides to guide the Pevensie children to Aslan’s Howe, even though nobody was there when he left, there was no revolution underway and no battle taken place. And next (third time’s the charm), when Peter first meets the Prince, he calls him by name! Even though Trumpkin, the only Narnian he’s talked to on this particular trip, never knew the identity of the injured stranger whom, for some reason, he’d risked his life to defend. One clearly senses the mitt-muffled hand of the glue-sniffing chimp here.

But that was hardly enough. I mean, such evident gaucheries, irritating as they were, did not account for the level of anger I experienced.

I was wrestling with all of this when, in preparation for some lectures I’m supposed to deliver next week, I re-read Lewis’ essay “On Stories.” To my great delight I found Jack himself going on a tear about a movie made from one of his favorite books, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Unlike me, Lewis eloquently anatomizes his angst:

Of its many sins - not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went - only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake.

Lewis goes on to explain that this double-barreled danger might increase the level of raw excitement but complains that “there must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard’s actual scene. What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death) - the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptered dead.”

What Lewis is getting at here is the idea of atmosphere, or what Lewis Scholar Michael Ward, in his new book on the Narnia series, Planet Narnia, calls donegality. This quality is, Ward explains, “the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. . . . its peculiar atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavour; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text . . . .”

So, for Lewis, the stories of Fenimore Cooper only work because of the “Redskinnery” of their danger, not the danger itself (For me, the stories of Fenimore Cooper don’t work at all, but that’s another topic.), stories about giants work not because the hero is in danger but because he is in danger from giants, and pirate stories work because they have pirates, not because they have storms and sea-fights and shivered timbers and the like.

So what is the “donegality” of Prince Caspian? I suggest that it is chivalry: codes of honor and elaborate courtesy and carefully defined social roles. When Miraz stumbles on a tree root during his mano-a-mano for the Narnian throne, Peter steps back to let his foe rise. “‘O bother, bother, bother,’ said Edmund to himself. ‘Need he be as gentlemanly as that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King.” It is the same with the baroque language in the challenge Peter sends to Miraz in the first place. Peter describes Miraz’ regicide as “abhominable,” then insists that his amanuensis “spell it with an H.” That spelling is based on an incorrect etymology which believed the word derived from ab-, “apart from,” and homo, “human,” and thus meant “outside the boundaries of humanity.” The fact that this is a medieval spelling is significant in itself; Peter insists on harking back to the age of Chivalry. More important, perhaps, is his very medieval idea that murdering one’s king and brother is more than “illegal.” It is, instead, an act which casts one out of the fellowship of humanity.

Now, you can like or dislike chivalry. Most feminists, I understand, hate it. I was raised to love it. My grandmother taught me to say “sir” and “ma’am” and my mother insisted that I stand aside as she or any other woman entered a doorway. I’ve always liked the story about how G. K. Chesterton, a man of brobdingnagian girth, once spoke of the chivalric privilege of offering his seat to two ladies on a bus. But the point isn’t whether one likes chivalrly or not; the point is that Lewis made it the “spiritual essence or quiddity” of his book and that changing it is akin, not to changing the color of a baloon, but to deflating the helium and replacing it with oxygen.

It is hard to imagine anything less chivalrous than the movie “Prince Caspian.” A few examples will have to suffice, though skipping any of them makes me feel like a ravenous hyena leaving slabs of juicy flesh on the carcass of a freshly downed wildebeest. Off the top of my head, then:

In the opening scene of the movie, we find Edward, oldest of the Pevensie children and High King back in their Narnian days, brawling in a punch-up down the tube station because someone has pricked his swollen pride and he can’t stand being treated as just another kid when he is, in fact, royalty. But the whole idea of Narnia is that those who visit become better people, and this happens precisely because they imbibe an “atmosphere” (the children have hardly been a day back in Narnia when we read that Edmund can hold his own in a fencing match because “the air of Narnia had been working upon him ever since they arrived on the island, and all his old battles came back to him, and his arms and fingers remembered their old skill.” Before his fight with Mirza, Peter, we read, would be unrecognizable to his schoolmates because “Aslan had breathed on him at their meeting and a kind of greatness hung about him.”). This atmosphere of Chivalry, or Medievality or whatever one wants to call it, is the donegality of Prince Caspian. To attribute pugnacity to a character precisely because he has been to Narnia violates it.

To take another example, the movie depicts a sense of rivalry between Peter, the High King of old, and Caspian, the prince who would be king. No doubt the producers thought the story needed this kind of tension to keep up the interest. But rivalry and jealousy are foreign to the donegality of chivalry. In the novel, Caspian’s first words to Peter are, “Your Majesty is very welcome,” a greeting to which Peter replies, “And so is your Majesty. I haven’t come to take your place, you know, but to put you in it.” It isn’t that power struggles don’t happen, but they don’t happen in a chivalric story. In Chivalry, such relationships are governed by codes that are clear and clearly understood. To drag in the sort of bickering that a modern audience would expect among, say, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may heighten the tension or the drama, but it destroys the very atmosphere Lewis so carefully crafted.

A third example and I’ll stop. No, I won’t: I have a fourth to add. And a fifth. My third is the fact that the Susan of the movie is a gimlet-eyed killer. She slices down foe after foe with her bow and arrow, all with a haughty look of triumph that would be more fitting for Dirty Harry or Rambo. Yet in the novel neither of the girls takes part in the battle. Indeed, they never actually enter the Narnian Alamo of Aslan’s Howe. The Lion has already stated in the first book of the series that “battles are ugly when women fight.” Now, that kind of talk might make Gloria Steinham chew up a chair but it is Chivalric talk. The pleasure we get from it is the pleasure of entering a world where those who are strong have the privilege of defending those who are weaker. Nor is this a matter of women weakly receiving service. “A desire to have all the fun,” quips Dorothy Sayers’ sleuth-and-English-gentleman Peter Wimsey, “is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.” By agreeing to forego the glory of battle the female characters act to keep a part of the society free from bloodstains.

For a fourth instance, consider the entirely apocryphal raid on Miraz’ castle. Nothing in the novel anticipates this; it is pure invention on the part of the producers. Or perhaps I would be more accurate to say “impure” invention. True, the scene treats us to some nifty special effects and some exciting swordplay but, once again, no Chivalry. Stage the same scene with camo-clad commandos, replace swords with M-16’s, and the scene loses nothing. One recalls here Lewis’ complaint about the “King Solomon” movie where two dangers replaced one as if danger were the whole point. The producers of “Caspian” seem to have subscribed to a similar inflationary econcomics of drama: excitement counts and two battles have twice the excitement of one. The fact is just the reverse: Peter’s cage match with Miraz has the specific excitement of a deadly combat waged according to strict codes of conduct - the full intent to kill an opponent combined with the determination to let him recover from a stumble because it was an accident irrelevant to the test of skill.

And now to my fifth example. Lewis complained of the “totally irrelevant young woman in shorts” in the movie version of King Solomon’s Mines. He quickly says that this flaw does not concern his main point. Given the boys’-club nature of Haggard’s books I’m not so sure he’s right, but let it go. My point is that “Prince Caspian,” the movie, contains, not a totally irrelevant young woman but a totally irrelevant quasi-romance between a young woman and a young man. We find early on that Susan and Caspian sense an attraction to one another, a feeling which ends in a passionate kiss just before they part for good. I think that the hot-pants-hottie in “King Solomon” and the love-interest in “Caspian” are there for the same reason: the producers thought the whole thing needed jazzing up with some romance - or at least sex. Again, this seemingly innocent innovation violates the donegality of Chivalry. Under the code of Chivalry the two young people might indeed have fallen in love, but any contact between them would have taken place through a Byzantine labyrinth of negotiations, bows, curtsies, letters and other protocols. However they functioned in historical fact, the ideal purpose of these dance steps would have been to protect the virtue and honor of both parties, as well as their families and, in the case of nobility, their entire community or nation. To have the young folks fling themselves at one another like two American teenagers after a school dance introduces the sound of an electric guitar into a Beethoven symphony.

All of this, of course, leaves the larger question: so what? What does it really matter if the story being shown is not the story Lewis told? As several people have said to me, it isn’t the same, but if you hadn’t read the book, or if you just forgot about the book, it was enjoyable to watch.

In one sense, this argument has a certain validity. If Hollywood does not like chivalry, or does not think it will sell, or is simply too mentally clumsy to see it (I still have not made up my mind how much of the mulching of the novel was due to sinister intention and how much to simple incompetence), then let them make whatever story they wish to tell. I could wish that they had not linked it to the name of an author who would not have approved of their treatment of his story, but merry old middle earth has seen far worse injustices.

In another sense, one can enjoy the movie by forgetting the book, and that is just the problem. As Ward points out in his excellent study of the Chronicles, Lewis had a view of symbolism which amounted to the sacramental. If a symbol worked well, the reader took in the numinous thing signified without really knowing it. Just as the children become “Narnian” by breathing the air of Narnia or the breath of Aslan - without realizing it and with no effort to analyze the process - so Lewis intended that those who read his stories would be changed by the very atmosphere - the donegality - of what they conveyed. “The head rules the belly through the chest” Lewis states in The Abolition of Man. In other words, when one is encouraged to imagine a noble and chivalrous world, one gains the capability of chivalry. A similar idea lies behind his comment to Malcolm that “if the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble,” and Screwtape’s cynical but accurate observation that “All mortals turn into the thing they are pretending to be.” Lewis took great delight in the reviewers’ failure to notice the theological implications of his space trilogy and his children’s books, not because he did not want to come out of the Christian closet, but because he thought the stories could do better work under cover. But if the atmosphere is polluted, viewers will breathe in something different from what the author intended.

Lewis intended to encourage children to imagine themselves to be chivalrous - knights and ladies. This movie encourages viewers to imagine themselves to be conquerors pure and simple. The movie may - as some have hoped - motivate more people to read the books, but I see two problems with this. First of all, I do not think it is true. I rather think that most people, children and adults alike, in this image-addicted, book-shunning society, will forego the solitary and demanding task of reading and instead content themselves with the movie. But secondly, even if they do go on to read the book, their expectations will already have been shaped by the movie.

A couple more thoughts and I will have ranted myself out. In explaining the decision to turn Peter into a petulant brawler, co-writers Andrew Adamson and Stephen McFeely explain that “itʼs an area Lewis left mostly untouched. Lewis memorably examined what it would be like for a 1940s school kid to become King of Narnia. However, he didnʼt much consider what it would be like for a King of Narnia to return to being a 1940s school kid. Their year back in London must have been awkward at best. Given their different personalities, each Pevensie handles the situation with varying levels of success.” The tin ear displayed by such a comment stuns the reader. Lewis sharply distinguished “stories,” tales written “for the story” from the “novel of manners where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of social conditions.” Lewis isn’t concerned about how their Narnian adventures affect his characters because his characters serve his story. Again, his aim is an atmosphere, a donegality, not an exploration of adolescent social development or psychology. And, as I pointed out earlier, to the extent that the stories do allow us to ponder their effect on the characters’ psychology, the movie writers have gotten it exactly wrong.

Finally, it is important to remember that Lewis described himself as “absolutely opposed” to any movie version of his Narnia stories. “A human, pantomime, Aslan,” he wrote, “wld. be to me blasphemy.” And though one can argue that Lewis could never have envisioned 21st century special effects, I still believe his instincts were right. The Aslan of the Narnia movies is a failure. He lacks the “hugeness” associated with the lion, and fails to convey the combination of ferocity and playfulness, of majesty and humility, Lewis so exquisitely crafted into with words.

Alistair MacIntyre considered the visual media irredeemable for Christian purposes, famously speculating that Jesus’ fourth temptation would have been an hour on prime time television. After two Narnia movies, my own verdict is that now as in the beginning (so John the Evangelist tells us) it not the image but the Word.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »