When I left the role of Pastor in 1997 I laid off preaching for a while. I didn’t preach (other than to my children) for eight years. But as I’ve taken up this new call to Slovakia, part of my work has included some preaching. So I’ve been thinking again about what makes a good sermon.
You probably have your own ideas about what makes a good sermon. After I expound my little theory, please feel free to chime in with your comments. I by no means pretend to have the last word on preaching.
My approach is simply to find what is essential to a good sermon – that is, what elements, if missing from a sermon, will truly be missed. In other words, I’m defining what the adjective “good” means when it is used to modify the noun “sermon.” Before I reveal what I think is essential, I will mention a few things that are not. (more…)
I submit the following quotation as one person’s answer to the question of whether the Bible’s message and truth can be exhausted by our human exegesis (see my previous post on Inexhaustible Profundity).
… I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them – even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.
Marilynne Robinson
“Psalm Eight”
in The Death of Adam
At the World66 web page you can create a map of the USA or the world that shows the states or the countries you have visited. I’ve added a few states (Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and DC) to my US repertoire this spring and summer with our itineration travels. My states appear in red below:
The city we call Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia, was once called Presburg and was for a time the capital of Hungary. The 19th-century engraving below depicts Bratislava castle on the hill overlooking the Danube (Dunaj).
Here’s something to chew on from Marilynne Robinson’s essay on “Darwinism.” If we have debunked religion and philosophy, how do we determine value in our culture?
We try now to establish value in economic terms, lacking better, and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of contemporary culture. But economic value is extraordinarily slippery. Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making. The consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they are expensive. So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which make it either commonplace or passé.
Clearly true. And I think an interesting follow-up line of questions would be this: how do people who don’t have a “great deal of money” to spend assert or demonstrate their value? Is it possible for those without discretionary income to live according to this mercenary value system?
My sweet, beautiful wife has caught up with me – we are the same age now.
But no one will ever catch up with her in the things that really matter – she will always excel the rest of us in her kindness, love, compassion, hard work, selflessness, service….
You can read about her here.
Our pastor has been preaching through Luke’s gospel for a while, so I’ve been meditating my way through it in parallel. I’ve been camped for several days on two words in two episodes. The first is in chapter 15 and the second in chapter 19. Here are the verses in the ESV:
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” [15:1-2]
And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” [19:5-7]
Jesus can’t win with the Pharisees: (more…)
I have already begged you to read Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gilead. Overwhelmed by her fine writing, I picked up her collection of essays The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m captivated by her approach to history and civilization, and her two-pronged critique of those who naively condemn or praise those from history who have significantly influenced us. I’ll give you the better part of two paragraphs to whet your appetite – but keep in mind that her argument in her introduction requires a full read to be appreciated.
Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx. (more…)
I’ve mentioned Sovereign Grace Ministries before, and had the privilege and joy of presenting a conference to a few of their congregations this year. The New Attitude website is associated with them, and is worth a look. In addition to their useful articles, they interviewed me.
I’ve read enough about Michael Polanyi to stir my interest in his writings, so when at Half-Price Books I stumbled across a collection of his essays called Knowing and Being, I snatched it up. It didn’t take many pages for me to figure out that this is heady stuff – as in “over my little heady.” But now and then I get glimpses of clarity – as if I’m walking in a dark forest at night, then step into a small clearing and the light of the moon makes it possible for me to make out the shapes of rocks and logs lying on the ground….
I’m reading in a section about the philosophy of science, and some of his ideas suggest to me analogies to the way we explore the scriptures. [Caveat: since I'm no scientist, no philosopher, and no theologian, everything I say in the rest of this post must be read with the deepest suspicion. But, after all, this is the Internet....] (more…)