Homiletics 2 File 24 Professor David Schmitt Questions by: Nick and Joshua >> NICK: I have no trouble coming up with ideas to use in my sermon. Stories just seem to flow naturally for me. I work on the sermon during the week and see so many things I want to talk about from the Bible and from the lives of the people. But putting all this together? Well, that's a different story. How can I handle this problem? >> JOSHUA: Before you answer that, I'd like to say that I have the opposite problem. I wish I could come up with things to say in my sermon. I usually have a basic idea of what I want to communicate, but when I try to flesh it out, nothing comes to me. Sometimes I just sit there staring at the wall wondering what I'm going to say. I'm afraid I'll get up to preach and finish in less than a minute. My people might like that, but I want the sermon to be a little more substantial. What's going on here? >> PROF. SCHMITT: Nick and Joshua, your questions capture two of the fundamental experiences of sitting down and writing a sermon. I know that as I've been preaching over the years, and when I was a pastor, I definitely had struggles in these areas, and having taught preaching for several years, I've come across students who have had these struggles as well. Our time together in this course will approach both of these topics that you're asking. On the one hand, you've got guys that have trouble in the area of arrangement, the area of organization. I know this very well because I'm one of them. When I was a pastor, I used to have so much difficulty coming up with a way that I was going to arrange all of these ideas. You see, I'm one of those people that loves to tell stories. I can come up with so many stories as I look at a text and think about my people. There's just so much I want you to know. For example, I was once working on this sermon that was for these parishioners You see, I told you, sometimes you need to pull back and think about the the fuller organization. I had a student once who was a salesperson before he decided to come to the seminary, and this guy this guy could tell a story that would keep you enraptured. I remember sitting there listening to him preach, just loving it as he was going through story after story. But, you know, every once in a while I'd find myself pulling back and thinking, "Where's this all going? How does all of this stuff hold together?" And that's the question of organization. Some guys simply have the ability to come off with story after story after story, but they have trouble putting it all together, putting it into an organized form. On the other hand, you've got those who have trouble not with organization, but those who have trouble with development. I had a student once who had formerly been a police officer before he came to the seminary, and I still remember listening to some of his sermons. He'd get up there to preach, and as he was preaching, he was very direct, very forceful, and he just seemed to go through idea after idea after idea after idea, until finally there was so much information, I had trouble figuring out what was going on. I was I was amazed. I wanted to stop him and say, "Could you just stop for a second, just for a second, with one of those ideas?" You see, it wasn't a problem of knowing the idea. I sometimes I understood what he was talking about. But I wanted to hear more. I wanted to experience this thing that he was talking about. It might have related to something in my own life experience that I felt like I had someone that I could talk to about it and I wanted to hear what he thought and what he was feeling as that happened. Sometimes they were ideas that I wasn't exactly sure what he was talking about and I needed a little bit more information. In either case, I wanted this this guy to just stop for a moment and give me a little bit more explanation at that point in the sermon. You know, afterwards one time we were talking about the class and preaching and about his sermons, and I said to him, I said, "You know, you've got some great ideas in your sermon. I just wish that sometimes you'd slow down and focus on just one of them." And he smiled and he said, "Well, you know, I was a police officer," he said, "and I learned from my life experience that the last thing you want to do is give too much information." He says, "Whether you're on a crime scene or if you're writing up a report," he said, "if you put in too much information, it can only get you in trouble. So I try to stay with just the facts." You see, our life experience can sometimes fashion the way we write and the way we feel comfortable preaching. You have those who are extroverted, those who are engaged in social situations where they're talking and entertaining and speaking with dozens of people, and they have no problem coming up with stories, but organizing it, that poses a distinct challenge for them. They're the ones who, somewhere in the middle of the sermon, they kind of stop and say, "Now, what was I saying?" On the other hand, you have guys who have problems not with organization, but with development. They can come up with idea after idea after idea, but they have a difficulty developing them in a long, sustained moment for their hearers. They're the ones who, as they're thinking about an idea, they say the idea and then they say, "Well, what more can I say?" My brother's an engineer. I know that he often says, "Well, you know, I mean, it's just the facts, and so this is the idea you give. Why develop it any more?" Two completely different types of experiences. From my experience in teaching preaching, I would say almost two different types of people: Those who have trouble developing ideas; those who have trouble organizing them. And my belief is that those two experiences are the basic, fundamental experiences of a sermon. Not just of the preacher who gets up into the pulpit and tries to preach God's word to the people, but of the people who sit there and listen and reflect and interact with the preacher in the midst of preaching. Every sermon will have both of those experiences going on. On the one hand, a sermon will have that experience of progression. You could chart it horizontally over a page. It's that temporal movement from one idea to another idea to another idea that slowly leads you from the beginning to the very end of the sermon. On the other hand, you have that experience of development. It's not a time when the sermon is moving forward; it's a time when the sermon is staying still. And the listeners, for a moment, are caught up in thinking about one main idea but thinking about it fully again and again from this angle and that angle. And this you could chart vertically on the page. When you're thinking about your sermon, putting together sermons, I'd ask you to think about organizing them this way, looking at what their horizontal progression is, that temporal progression from idea to idea to idea, and thinking developmentally about that vertical progression as you spend time on one idea or another. Both of these aspects of a sermon are so important for the listeners as they're engaging with your material. For example, think about making a trip to the Holy Land. Use the analogy of a pilgrimage. If you were going to go to the Holy Land and let's say you had the luxury of traveling through the Holy Land for 40 days. Now, if you wanted, you could spend 40 days out in the wilderness, be like the prophets, be like our Lord. I doubt many people would choose that option. If you wanted to do something besides that, you'd need to make some decision about where in the Holy Land you were going to go. This is that decision of organization. You have 40 days. How are you going to divide them up? Where are you going to find yourself during those 40 days? Some people might decide to travel chronologically in the footsteps of Jesus, so you start your journey in Bethlehem at the place where Jesus was born. You then find yourself getting onto the tour bus, driving up to Jordan, and there at the Jordan you can see where he was baptized. You go out into the wilderness, to the area where he was tempted. Then you make your way on up to the Sea of Galilee, the area where he was engaged in ministry. You go up to Capernaum to Caesarea Philippi where Peter confessed him to be the Lord. You make your way all the way back down to Jerusalem for the last days of his passion and his resurrection. And so you find your whole journey is organized according to that temporal progression of chronology, the life of Jesus. But that's not the only way you could organize your time in the Holy Land. If you wanted to, you could do your time in the Holy Land as an examination of holy places. You could organize it spatially. You could examine the Holy Land in term of the desert, see what type of of spiritual exercises, spiritual events occurred in the desert for the holy men and women of God, and how there was a whole movement of Christians, the desert fathers and mothers, who were there in the desert and engaged in these aesthetic practices. Then you could go up to Caesarea Philippi. There you could see the lush greenery and the mountains, and even a waterfall there in Israel. You could see the spring that's constantly bubbling where there was the worship of Pan and the other gods of that era. And then you could see how deeply important Peter's confession that Jesus Christ was the Lord is when it occurs in a space like that. And then you could enter into the holy space of Jerusalem, examine that place. So you could examine the Holy Land not temporally or chronologically in the footsteps of Jesus, but you could look at it spatially. Many different ways to organize it, but the idea is that you would want an organization. Because without an organization, imagine what the experience is like. You go on a tour. You go on a pilgrimage. You get onto the bus. The first thing you do is you stop off at the Jordan River. You look at the Jordan River, you see what it's like, you get back onto the bus and there you are in Bethlehem and while you're there, you might as well go down into the desert, so you go down to the Dead Sea. You go back up to Caesarea Philippi. You have no idea how all of these things hold together. You may be very interested, very involved in each of these situations, but when it comes to having some sense of how it all holds together, what its purpose is for you as a pilgrim, that you lose sight of because there isn't any organization. That aspect of organizing the sermon, that temporal progression throughout the sermon, gives a sermon purpose. When your hearers are listening to idea after idea after idea, and yet they're not able to figure out how what is happening in Bethlehem relates to what happened at your house last Christmas, the sermon tends to lose a sense of purpose. On the other hand, the sermon needs moments of development. If we use this analogy of the pilgrimage, imagine what it would be like on this pilgrimage to get in the bus and of course you're going to follow the chronological pattern of the life of Jesus, so you'll start with Bethlehem, go to the Jordan River, go to the desert, go up to Galilee, but you never get off the bus. All you do is look through the window and drive by. So you see for a moment the place where Jesus was born, but then next thing you know, you're off to the to the Jordan River, and heaven forbid you should sleep or you might start out in Bethlehem and end up in Galilee. This is what can happen to hearers if you don't have moments of development. In the sermon, there are going to be times when you simply stop the sermon and focus on one idea. It's like inviting everybody to come off the bus for a moment, to come with you, enter into that place where Jesus was born, see the grotto, kneel down, look into the cave, and for a moment just look. Imagine what it was like. Stop, if you want, and meditate, pray. And then, when you've got a really good sense of what Bethlehem was, get back on the bus and go to the Jordan River. Get off once again, take off your shoes, put them in the water, feel what that water feels like. Look at it. See that it's not as clear as you thought it was and it certainly isn't as deep and you didn't know it would run like this. And contemplate what it was like to have crowds coming to these banks, listening to a preacher, admitting their sin and diving into that water, and then to see your Lord. Step therefore, you, and get back onto the bus and go up to Galilee. And there in Galilee, you finally get a meal. There you have fish and bread cooked over stones and you look out over that sea and you think, "My Lord walked there. And not only did he walk there, he sat out there on a boat and he spoke with a voice that resounded in the hills, so that the people who surrounded could listen to parable after parable after parable as he's suddenly introducing into this world the kingdom of God in flesh." On the journey, you're going to stop at each major point and you're going to spend time there developing what that is like, meditating on it, thinking about it, relating it to your own life experience, so it becomes much more than an intellectual idea on a page. It becomes part of your life experience. Now, sermons that have organization but don't have development, they sometimes don't seem to have relevance for the hearers. They understand what you're saying, they see where you're going, they recognize the purpose, but it just doesn't seem relevant for them. So you're going to be preaching on charity or giving to the poor. Yeah, I understand what you're talking about. Yeah, pastor, I know we all should do it. But what poverty is, how it becomes a special place in the hands of God where his grace and his life can be seen and touched, why, these things, they don't relate to my life experience, and so I understand it, I see its purpose, but it doesn't have relevance for me. When you preach, you're constantly going to be joining together these two activities, moving forward in a progression from experience to experience to experience and making stops along the way where you get off the bus, you go out into that life, and you think and you meditate until it becomes relevant. And these two units of the course are going to help you work in those two areas. Our first unit will be on arrangement. It's the second of the five rhetorical canons. Some people would call it outlining. Others would call it structures. Others would call it arrangement. Basically what we will do in this unit is we will think about how to organize the events of the sermon. And I will help you define what a sermon's structure is, and then identify three different places that this structure can come from. We'll see how a structure can come from the text, how a structure can come from a teaching, and how a structure can come from the experience that the hearers are going through during the sermon. We'll also consider what the function of a sermon's structure is, and finally, along the way, we'll consider how we as preachers integrate that proper distinction between law and gospel into the arrangement of the sermon. The second major unit of this course will be of this part of the course will be on development. It's going under the name of the rhetorical canon style, and I would like to spend a lot of time with you considering how we develop specific moments in the sermon. In this section of the course, we will consider what a rhetorical unit is, and we'll offer six different ways to develop for your hearers an experience of one single idea. We'll also spend a little bit of time talking about the difference between an oral style and a written style, and we'll work a little bit with illustrations for you. And I trust that taking time out of your schedule, taking time out of your work as as beginning preachers will give you a chance to work on these two skills, the skill of arrangement, the skill of development, and working on both of those things and integrating them into your ministry will greatly increase the effectiveness of your preaching.