“Son” Burn: The Over-Sonned Sermon

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.

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