s91-13 "Prayer Before Sermon

"The Prayer Before the Sermon"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

1/22/06

(These words are taken from the charge delivered by Dr. Channing at the Ordination of Charles F. Barnard and Frederick T. Gray as Ministers at Large in Boston. The several sources I have checked show no date, but it is probably from the mid 1830's)

In performing the office [of preacher], let me exhort you to the scrupulous observance of a plain but often neglected precept. It is this, reverence truth. Preach what approves itself clearly to your own minds as true, and preach nothing else. Teach nothing because others teach it. Inculcate nothing because expected to inculcate it. Speak from no human master, from no human creed. Speak from your own calm convictions, and from nothing else. Do not use stronger language than your own minds warrant for the sake of making greater impression. Do not seek the reputation of eloquence, by assuming a bold, confident tone, which exceeds your private belief. Exaggerate nothing. Paint nothing beyond the life. Be true, -- the hardest lesson to the minister. Preach nothing, however gratifying to the imagination or the heart, which cannot stand the scrutiny of the deliberate judgement. Distort no truth for the sake of effect. ...I have said, beware of exaggeration. Beware also of the opposite vice, of softening down, of diluting, obscuring the truth, till its power and pungency are gone, in order to accommodate it to the prejudices and passions of [people.] No [one] is fit to preach who is not ready to be a martyr to truth. We indeed recommend to you prudence; but the great office of prudence is not to disfigure or conceal the truth, but to secure it against misapprehension, and to place it before [people's] minds in the light which will probably gain for it the readiest reception. Be prudent for the truth's sake, not for your own sake, not for the sake of popularity, not from weakness or timidity. Be cautious, lest you be over-cautious. Fear to stifle any great truth. Let your preaching be the frank expression of the workings and convictions of your own minds....

Whenever you catch a new glimpse of God's character, of human nature, of human perfection, of life, of futurity, of the [religious] spirit; whenever a familiar truth rises before you in a new aspect; whenever a new principle dawns on you from a number of facts, which had before lain without connections in your minds; whenever a sentence in a human work, or a text of Scripture, reveals to you, as by a flash, some depths in your own souls, or scatters suddenly the mist which had before hung over some important doctrine; whenever a new light of this kind gleams on you, prize it more than volumes or libraries....

It is by this welcome to truth, springing up in our own souls, that we are to grow in energy of thought and feeling; and growth is the great condition of increasing usefulness.

During my summers at Chautauqua, I get to hear a lot of preaching by prominent ministers, both American and foreign. One of the things that has intrigued me are the prayers that many of the ministers speak before preaching. Some of those prayers seem designed to intimidate the congregation -- some have seemed to say, "Lord, let these people recognize that the words that are about to pass through my mouth are Your words and not merely my own - for I am but the medium for transmitting your eternal Truths. (That is not, of course, a direct quote.)

This is the prayer before the sermon spoken by The Rev. Joanna Adams of Atlanta one summer:

May it be, O God, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts will be acceptable to you and useful to your purposes of grace.

Now, that is more modest. She asked only that what she said, and what people thought about it, would be acceptable and useful, in the eyes of the transcendent. She owned her words, and deftly noted that it was not only what she said, but also how people meditated on them, that mattered.

That got me to thinking about sermons and what my unspoken prayer is when I enter this pulpit. Joanna made explicit what her goal was, and I wondered how I would express mine.

I've been preaching sermons for forty-four years now - forty-eight if you start with the Youth Sunday sermon I delivered as a high school senior. I can find no record of having actually delivered a sermon on sermons -- of having spelled out what it is I am trying to do in these moments we share - except this one.

It may well be that many of you, having been on the receiving end of many of these sermons, have a better idea of what I am actually doing than I do, but it seemed as if it might be mutually beneficial to check my intentions against your perceptions, so you can let me know if there's a gap.

The finest preacher I've ever heard, Dr. Fred Craddock, a Disciples of Christ minister and teacher of preaching, points out that when a minister enters a pulpit, he or she is not inventing the wheel. Preaching has a tradition, it has a context.

We know from the Jewish Scriptures that a part of worship in that tradition has historically been the reading and the commenting upon sacred texts And there were prophets who went about the countryside exhorting the people to follow the ways taught in the ancestors’ writings. In the Christian tradition, we read that Jesus went about among the people, relating traditional teachings, as he understood them, to the needs of the times -- in some cases, challenging the tradition. Jesus, according to the reports, spoke as one who had authority directly from the highest possible source. We know that he sent his disciples out also to proclaim 'The Good News." Those who heard Jesus didn't always like what he said, and his disciples met with even more mixed reactions.

After the crucifixion of Jesus, those who had known him went about telling and interpreting the stories about him. Then people who heard the stories told them, and people who heard the stories from people who heard the stories, told them. We know that in the early Christian churches, the worship consisted of hymns, prayers, scriptural readings, and sermons interpreting the readings, and often the sharing of a memorial meal. Sermons from the early days of Christianity still exist and some are revered as great even today.

Over the years, the emphasis shifted in the Christian church from the spoken word to the drama of the Mass. In the churches of the middle ages, the lectern was placed out of the way of the altar, which was where the action really was.

The Protestant Reformation brought the spoken word back. The reformers were convinced that the people had been distracted by the magic of the mass, and that the great religious truths were buried in the pages of the Bibles, from which they needed to be resurrected. The minister became a teacher, helping to reveal and unfold what was obscure. The ideas were there, but they needed explication. Luther moved the pulpit back into the center of the church -- physically as well as philosophically. The proclamation of the Word, the sermon, became the heart of worship.

Luther wanted the pulpit to be unfettered, until preachers started to exercise that right. When preachers started to express ideas with which he did not agree, when preachers started describing parts of the elephant that Luther had not touched, he began to restrict them. Preaching was bound not only by the words of the Bible, but by the acceptability to Luther of the interpretations of those words.

For dissenters, for those who break away from the common path, the pulpit becomes even more central. If we hold ideas that differ from those generally accepted, we have a need to explain how and why we arrived at those conclusions. This is what Channing was talking about in his charge to the Ministers to the Poor of Boston. He insisted ideas didn't just need to be Biblically rooted - what they needed was to be rooted in truth, as perceived by the preacher - truth that sprung up in his or her own soul, whether or not the ideas were popular.

Channing himself became unpopular with some because of his opposition to slavery and war. Unitarian pulpits have historically been centers of controversy. We have affirmed the freedom of ministers to speak from their consciences, but the experiences of several of my predecessors in this pulpit in the years prior to the Civil War, who alienated enough of the conservative members to cause their salaries to dry up, have not been rare exceptions. The freedom of the pulpit is inextricably intertwined with the freedom of the pew to refuse to support what it is unwilling to hear.

One student of this congregation’s history suggested that the actual liberation of this congregation's pulpit came about with the founding of the new Church of the Christian Union in 1870, when the conservative members of the Unitarian Church moved to Second Congregational Church to avoid Dr. Kerr's radicalism. It is clear that this church has, since that time, offered resounding support to its ministers. Drs. Kerr and Connolly, and Jack Mendelsohn and Alan Deale and Tony Perrino and I have been blessed with the challenge of a very free pulpit.

There are people today who suggest that the sermon is an historical relic -- that television has so shaped the modern mind that people are unwilling to wrestle with ideas that are not predigested. A church growth CD issued by the UUA has a segment in which a speaker advocates the regular use of panel discussion among members in place of a sermon.

One eminent Unitarian Universalist minister suggested that we probably shouldn't use many words in our sermons that are beyond the vocabulary of an average eighth grader. A study in 1945 showed that

"Life Magazine was written so that a thirteen year old could easily comprehend almost 90% of its language; Time, 70%, The Atlantic Monthly 30%. A random sample of Unitarian sermons showed them including only words of which only 18% were in a junior higher’s vocabulary.

(I hasten to add that that was in in 1945 when the average thirteen year old probably had twice the vocabularly that is common today.)

Others stress that the average person is only able to concentrate on an idea for a very few minutes, and sermons must therefore be drastically simplified: the “Sesame Street Syndrome.”

When I enter the pulpit, I carry with me what I understand to be what Unitarian Universalist congregations expect of their ministers, based in part on my experience of the church in which I grew up, what I learned in seminary, and the preaching to which I have been exposed over the years.

The fact is that a sermon is, as I say over and over on FUSION, not just what a minister says, but what is heard. Fred Craddock suggests that members of congregations should be asked where they "got their ears" because what is heard is very much a product of expectations. The criteria by which listeners judge a sermon are significantly based on their own experience, which is why two people can react very differently to the same sermon.

There was a comedian I saw once or twice on television years ago whose schtick was to come out and tell the audience that comedy was a two-way street, and instead of only the audience judging the comedian, he had begun rating audiences, and they would be rated on their responsiveness to his jokes. At the end, he would give the audience a score based on the how well it had responded. For some reason, I have never forgotten that -- at least in my fantasies.

The most basic assumption I make about sermons is that they are central to our religion. The sermon is the means by which the principles in which we believe are applied to the realities of our lives. By "the sermon," I don't mean the words that are spoken by the minister so much as the words that are heard by the congregation. The minister is responsible for initiating the dance, but the partners in the pews hold the key to its success in their response. The real measure of most sermons lies in whether any action is produced. Does it result in looking at something in a different way? Does it help bring about a new awareness? Does it affect how we feel about something important? Does it affect the choices we make?

After affirming that the sermon is central, the next most basic assumption for me lies in the story about the Blind Men and the Elephant which was told by the Buddha. I carry with me, at all times, the belief that reality is greater than any individual will ever know. We are in touch with only portions of what is true in any situation: the whole of it is beyond our grasp. A preacher can never express "The Truth," but, at best, only a portion of it. As Channing suggested in the words of our reading, we are charged with reverencing truth. We are responsible for being as certain as we can that what we say is true, but we should never delude ourselves into believing that what we have said is all there is to know about any subject.

Some ministers believe that they can be most effective by offending as few people as possible, thus the "best" sermon is a balanced one in which the minister takes no stand. While I do not take the opposite stance -- "that the best sermon offends as many people as possible" - I do believe that if our goal is to stimulate thinking and wrestling with ideas, that is done best by the sermon taking a point of view which represents the portion of the truth that the minister knows. It is likely that there will always be someone will take offense. [I did love the recent New Yorker cartoon which showed a congregation exiting from church battered and bruised.]

If my experiences tell me that the elephant is like a plow, because I have felt its tusks, I am responsible for advocating that view, while recognizing that there may be more to the whole than I know. I have never delivered a worthwhile sermon about which there was not more that could be said. I am responsible, however, for selecting those portions of the truth that fairly depict the whole as I know it -- it is dirty pool to distort reality to make my case.

Another fundamental assumption I make comes from my basic optimism. I can never relate to the suggestion that some people have made over the years that I am a pessimist. The very act of talking about an issue is based on the belief that something can be done - that we are not fated to be stuck where we are forever. Some people suggest that one should only raise a problem to which he or she has a simple solution. It is my belief that all of us is smarter than any one of us. By raising an issue and thinking on it together, we may be able to come out together with a solution than no individual could have conceived. And sometimes, the problem isn't going to be solved in our time, but we are responsible for at least defining it and exploring it with the hope that those who come after will be able to do better than we have done. I would stop preaching if I ceased having hope.

I have focused on "problem-centered" sermons because I believe they are very important. I want to be clear, however, that I do not believe they are enough. When I look back over a year's sermons, as I do in each year's Annual Report, I am anxious to see that I have focused on some social problems, and some problems in individual lives, and that I have also celebrated festivals, and our Unitarian Universalist tradition, and exemplary people, and delivered sermons that have tried to help us to expand our vision of the interdependent web of existence.

I do this knowing that there will always be people who will say, the evidence notwithstanding, "All of Weissbard's sermons are political" and/or "Why doesn't Weissbard deliver enough political sermons?" "Why is Weissbard such a male chauvinist" and "Why is Weissbard such a feminist?"

The final assumption, which I keep struggling to accept, is that virtually no sermon I have ever delivered has ever fully expressed what I wanted to say about an issue. Every sermon could benefit from more thought, more reading, more discussion, more polishing. They always miss the mark to some extent. But I keep trying - and sometimes I come closer than others. I remember only one that I thought was a total failure, and that was many years ago - you might be able to suggest others. [And there was a member of that congregation who remembers that sermon as her favorite.]

May the subject that I have chosen to address be one that matters to someone here today, and may the things I say about it be judged true and fair, even by those who disagree;

May the seed that is planted here, grow by being deemed worthy of further thought by those who hear;

And may those who have other insights and ideas about this share them with me, so that I can end this day knowing more, or understanding more deeply than I do now.

I wonder, is there prayer that YOU say to yourself as I enter the pulpit on a Sunday morning?