The Craft of the Sermon

Description: How to get that "Aha!" moment.

Question: What impact does your work have on the world?

Transcript: Well I have it on good authority – that is the people to whom I do preach and the people who take the time to tell me about it over many years – that I make people think. I make them imagine . . . see things that they would not have seen before. Or ask about things that they hadn’t thought about asking before. Or even I have the capacity, I hope, from time to time to lead people to what the theologian calls an “Aha” experience. Or, “I’ve never thought of that before!” Or, “What an interesting notion.” I rejoice in that. It’s the same skill and the same thrill that a teacher gets when somebody finally gets it after you’ve tried to put it before them. That’s the thrill of preaching for me, and I think I have the ability to do that in many cases.

Question: Do you have a creative process?

Transcript: I never give the same sermon twice because I’m never in the same place twice. I’m always reacting. And I’m reacting to the text, I’m reacting to the circumstances, I’m reacting to the congregation. It’s a very different phenomenon every time. So if you’re . . . If you try to give the same sermon twice – and I have tried to do that – it’s a fruitless exercise. You’re simply going in reverse gear. You’re always trying to remember, “Well what worked the last time? How can I get the same effect?” And you’re retrieving instead of advancing. I’d rather the risk of getting it wrong but moving along forward, then recapturing some idealized moment in the past. And I think that’s what – again, to use my musical analogy – I think that’s what conductors do. They do not try to reproduce their ideal moment. They try to make new discoveries along the way, which is why no conductor ever conducts the Beethoven Fifth in the same way. It’s always something new. You’re always discovering something new. When I work with the biblical text, I’m always discovering something I hadn’t seen before. When I talk with people, I’m always hearing things I hadn’t heard before. It is not the “same old, same old” by any stretch of the imagination. And the proof of that for me is I read some of my old sermons and I say, “Oh my goodness! How ever did I say that?” Well it was because I was in a different place than where I am right now. Very unlikely that I would ever repeat an Easter or Christmas sermon, because Easter this year is, for me, very different from Easter last year. It is not standing in the same place and just hoping people will remember and go along. It’s a new chemical reaction. It’s a new sensation. It’s an extraordinary enterprise.

Recorded on: 6/12/07