Homiletics 2 File 27 Professor David Schmitt Question by: Nick >> NICK: When I write a sermon, sometimes the arrangement just comes to me. I know what to do and I do it. Other times, however, the arrangement doesn't come at all. I'm stuck with a bunch of ideas on a page, and I don't know what to do next. Where do I go to start putting them together? >> PROF. SCHMITT: Nick, I appreciate the way you describe this experience, sitting there with ideas listed on the page and trying to figure out where you can go to put them all together. That is precisely what this whole unit on arrangement is about. Some people are going to go to a law then gospel design as a way to arrange those ideas together, but there are many other places that you can go. And so I'd like to spend a little bit of time now talking about three different places that you'll be able to go to come up with structures or ways of organizing the experiences for your hearers. The first category or the first place that you can go is to logic or propositional structures. Propositional structures usually have a central thought that will be explicitly stated for the hearer, and then the rest of the sermon will spend time developing that thought in a very clear, logical pattern. This is the way preaching was done for centuries, actually. The propositional form became quite popular in the 17th century and continued through the 19th century. It is only recently, in developments in the field of homiletics, where that particular form has been broken apart as other structures have arisen. In a propositional structure, you're going to have a central thought and then you're going to try to think through what is the logical pattern that you're going to use to develop each of those ideas for your hearers. If you think about a propositional form, notice how the law/gospel crutch has been taken away from you. The sermon is not going to start with sin and then move to grace. It's going to offer your hearers, say, four teachings about prayer. And the question that now confronts you as a preacher is, "How do I bring law and gospel properly divided into that sermon that has four teachings on prayer?" Although it's harder, it can actually be quite enjoyable, because now you have an opportunity to preach the law and the gospel again and again and again in the sermon. So you can offer your hearers four teachings about prayer and when they walk away from the sermon, they say, "That was one of the best sermons I've ever heard." Why was it one of the best sermons? Not because of the structure. Because the law and gospel were properly divided as they heard and thought about those four different teachings on prayer. If you're going to work with this form, I guess one piece of advice would be, when you look at that central thought, when you think of that statement of your your purpose or your goal in the sermon, try to have God as the actor of the sentence. Have God as the subject of the sentence, and have an act of grace, a gracious working of God in the lives of his people, as the verb. Having that as your subject and your verb, your subject and your predicate, you're going to have a sermon that is centered around a gracious activity that God is doing on behalf of his people, and is going to use logic to help your hearers organize that particular sermon that deals with that activity of God. So one particular place that you can go to develop a structure would be the propositional category. A second category of sermon structures is those that we call textual structures. Textual structures are not based so much on a central thought that's being logically divided for the hearers. They're based much more on the text itself. And there are three different kinds of textual structures. The first kind is what we would call expository preaching, or verse by verse preaching. Verse by verse is probably not the best way to describe it, simply because it's not always one verse by one verse. It's usually a unit of thought by a unit of thought within the text. But in this particular structure, the preacher walks sequentially through the text with the hearers. As the hearers listen to the sermon, what keeps them going, what helps them recognize that they're making progression, they're making a movement toward an end, is that as they listen, they can watch as the preacher starts at the beginning of the text and slowly walks his way through one step at a time. That would be the verse by verse structure. The other another form would be what we call text application. In this particular form of a text based preaching, you start the sermon out with all of the information that you want to present about the text, and after you've finished that section, you then move to all of the information that you want to offer about application of this text in lives of the people today. So the sermon basically has two parts. The first part is that of the text; the second part is that of application. The the third category under textual structures would be a text a structure based on the genre of a text. In this case, you're not going to follow verse by verse through a text, and you're not going to simply have the text at the beginning of the sermon and application at the end. Instead, you're going to be much more creative, and you're going to think about what kind of text is this. Is it a parable? Is it a proverb? Is it a psalm? Is it a piece of apocalyptic literature? Is it an oracle from one of the prophets? And you're going to let that particular form guide you in coming up with a sermon design. For example, let's say you were preaching on Romans 6, where Paul is using the rhetorical form of a diatribe. That is, where he is arguing with imaginary opponents. And he is offering for the hearers or the readers the opponent's viewpoint saying, "What, should we go on sinning then, so that grace might therefore abound?" and then Paul answers, "By no means. You've died to sin. How could you ever live any longer in it?" And they're the whole text is structured on this back and forth, back and forth of a man, a teacher, an apostle, arguing with the people who are presenting a contrary opinion. If you've got that kind of a form, you might think, as a preacher, what kind of sermon would embody that type of give and take? And it might be that you would use a dialogue sermon. You would have a member of the congregation take the opposing viewpoint, and you and that member of the congregation, working back and forth, would help your hearers see how engaging this text is, and how much of an argument it becomes for the people. If you were to take a proverb, proverbs have different forms. With a proverb, you know, a proverb can be lifted out of one particular life situation, raised and taken to another life situation, and it throws light on how God is at work in that situation. That's the nature of a proverb. And wisdom arises in being able to see how that particular proverb can be applied according to the fear of the Lord in different situations in life. If that's the case, if you have a proverb as your text, you could structure a sermon that simply raises up one life situation, lets the proverb drop in and helps the hearers think through how this sermon applies, how that proverb applies to this life situation, and then moves to another life situation and then another life situation. If you're very creative, you can actually have chancel dramas of various life situations that the proverb then comes into as the preacher helps the people think through how God's word guides and enlivens people in these different areas in life. So genre is a much larger category underneath textual structures, where the preacher looks at the text, asks what kind of text is it, and then thinks through how does the nature of the text enable us to have a particular sermon design. And one particular genre that we'll look a little bit more clearly at in this course is the genre of narrative. How do we, as preachers, work with stories from scripture in preaching? So we have propositional structures, structures that pick up a central thought that's going to be communicated to the people and then logically divides that thought for them, and then we have narratives or textual structures, structures that either work verse by verse going through the text, work with one large body of text and then application, or creatively take the genre of the text and try to create a sermon that somehow appropriates that genre for the people today. The third category of structures is that which we call dynamic structures. Dynamic structures are not working on the basis of logic. They're not working on the basis of the nature of the text. They're working more on the basis of the experience of the hearer sitting out there in the pew. And dynamic structures are often structures that are hidden from the hearers. The hearers may not recognize exactly what you are doing in terms of how the sermon is moving, but they intuitively know this is the right way to go. It's a it's a structure that relies much more fully on how your hearers are experiencing particular aspects of this sermon. The one form of that structure we've already spent time with is that of the law/then gospel structure. The primary experience of the hearer in this particular case is an experience of movement theologically from sin to grace, and so the sermon is structured on the basis of that movement, helping the hearers move from an experience of sin to an experience of grace. There are, however, many other dynamic structures. You could, for example, create a sermon that is based on images and how people who are viewing images tend to relate to those images, can devotionally contemplate those images. So a preacher who is preaching in a particular congregation might take a cross that's on the wall and work with that cross, helping the hearers to look at it, to see it, to see its mosaic, put together of many different colors, and talk about how the body of Christ is composed of so many different people, so that the image itself resonates with the hearers and they're brought to the truth and the experience of God's grace through contemplation upon an object. Particularly in congregations where you have ecclesiastical art, which is a wonderful method. This way, when the hearers come back into that church, they're able to meditate before the service on that particular image. Images, the experiences, the movies there are some writers who have actually come up with the television sitcom experience and said, "How does a sitcom operate and how can we take the movement as a sitcom and use it as part of our sermon structure?" I hope you notice here what's going on. In the dynamic structure, usually what is happening is the experience of the culture is being evaluated by the preacher and then being baptized and used in service to the proclamation of God's word. It's as if the preacher looks out at the people and says, "How do they experience life? What is the normal way in which they enter into life experience? And how can I use that experience as the easiest way for them to come to know Jesus and to experience the power of the gospel?" So we've got three different categories, three different places you go when you've got all those ideas on the page. You can look at the propositional structures, central thought divided up logically. You can look at the text as a way of organizing the sermon either verse by verse, text application or working with the genre of the text. Or you could move to the dynamic structures. If you want, you could go law, then gospel. Or you could work with images, you could work with other experiences of the hearers. The main thing to be aware of at this moment in time is the idea that I will call an organic development of structure. You're sitting there with a whole bunch of ideas on the page in front of you. Now, there's two ways to approach coming up with a structure. One way is what we would call a very static approach. You simply choose a structure and you put it on top of that material. It's kind of a cookie cutter approach. You take the structure of law, then gospel. You stick it on top of that material. You say, "Where's the law? Where's the gospel? Voila! I've got a sermon." You take the sequential structure. You say, "I'm just going to walk verse by verse through the text," and that's how you do it. That's a static approach to structure, and it's not one that I would recommend. And I don't recommend it because it doesn't honor the way in which God is actually working in your life experience and the way you meditated on this text and came up with various ideas. The other method for structure is an organic method. It arises from the writing of the sermon itself. Rather than reaching outside to impose a structure on this material, you look at the material itself and you see what type of structure best fits this kind of material. Where is this material taking your hearers, what are the experiences you went through as you worked with this text, and how can you use those experiences and mold them into a structure that will make it easy for the hearers to follow the sermon? So two different ways of approaching structure, either statically or organically. I would recommend the organic way. And when you work organically, where are you going to look for various structures? Well, you've got the propositional structures, the textual structures, and the dynamic structures. So far in the course, we've already covered one dynamic structure. We're going to spend time looking at the other structures as well.