Serving the Word: Preaching as Sacrament
The sermon is not an utterance, and not a feat, and not a treat. It is a sacramental act, done together with the community in the name and power of Christ’s redeeming act and our common faith. It has the real presence of the active word whose creation it is. If Christ set up the sacrament, his gospel set up the sermon. And if he is real in our sacramental act still, no less is his deed real in our preached word which prolongs that deed.— P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 1907
Most new pastors start out thinking that they can do it all, and most seasoned pastors can tell you the moment when they came to the realization that they could not. It is not surprising, then, that the apostles, the new pastors of this new thing called church, began by doing it all. They taught the faithful and brought the story of Jesus to those who had never heard it before. They presided at worship and celebrated what we now call the sacrament of communion. They ordered the life of the community, including the collection and disbursement of the goods they held in common. In addition to all of this, every day the apostles personally visited the poor and gave them a daily distribution of food from what had been gathered from the community.
To be sure, they probably set out to do all of these things themselves because they were the ones who had been commissioned and sent forth by Jesus to do so. And, as new pastors, they were eager to do it all. But also, the various aspects of their ministries were so closely bound together that they probably could not envision how any could be isolated sufficiently to be handed over to someone else to do. For instance, in the early church the ministries we commonly describe as fellowship, worship, and pastoral care were all of a piece. The members of the community would bring to their gatherings an offering of food. It was a potluck supper. (“If your name begins with A–L, bring a loaf of bread. If it begins with M–Z, bring a jug of wine.”) But it was also worship, because those offerings of bread and wine would be used in a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Whatever food was left (there are always a lot of leftovers after a good potluck supper) plus special offerings of money from those who could afford it were then distributed to the poor and the widows (and, of course, in that time to be widowed was to be poor). Food itself is an expression of care, of course, but when you bring it yourself you have an opportunity, casserole dishes in hand, to express care in other ways. You can chat a bit. You can bring news and greetings. The food becomes an entrée in more ways than one.
So it is easy to understand why the apostles tried to do it all. But then controversy breaks in. The Hellenists in the congregation complain that their widows are not getting their fair share in the distribution of food. The Hebrew widows are getting more, they say. Could this be because all of the apostles are Hebrews themselves? The apostles, previously so eager to juggle their various duties, begin to see the benefits of delegation when one of the duties they are trying to juggle starts to look like a very sharp knife. In that moment and in that realization these early pastors, now sufficiently seasoned, recognize that they cannot, or at least should not, do it all. Let someone else handle the distribution of food. Perhaps the apostles are too proud to let anyone think that they have given in to pressure. Or perhaps they simply want to help the community move beyond the controversy as quickly as possible. Whatever the reason, when they gather the community together to tell them about their decision, they make no mention of the controversy, saying instead, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word” (Acts 6:2b-4).
The verb translated serving is, in the original Greek, diaconia (from which we get the word “deacon”). It is the same word used to describe serving at table. It is the work of a waiter. What a curious image to use to describe preaching! We might speak of proclaiming the word, or declaring the word, or even simply preaching the word. But in this context the apostles spoke of serving the word in the same way one would speak of serving a plate of lamb stew or serving the sacramental meal.
To be sure, using the same verb to describe the role of those who serve meals (sacramental and otherwise) and the role of those who preach was a way to affirm the unity of the two means of mediating God’s grace. Using the same verb in association with both makes this an early affirmation of the “unity of word and sacrament.” More than this, the verb diaconia is so closely associated with the sacrament that its use in reference to preaching serves as an affirmation that preaching itself is something sacramental.
In a sacrament, God’s grace is manifest and made available through ordinary elements of life. God’s presence is embodied through the everyday — through something as ubiquitous as water, as common as a shared meal. In fact, the very ordinariness of the elements through which grace is mediated is central to the sacrament, a tangible reminder that God’s grace reaches into the everyday, into the kind of lives we live. In a sacrament, the everyday is given some of the dimensions of eternity; through the familiar, mystery is encountered. And it is an irreducible mystery. Even careful analysis cannot chase down all that it means or explain fully how it works.
The same is true in the sacramental act of preaching. In preaching, God uses the ordinary to serve up the mystery of grace. Words, often as plain as bread, are somehow able to usher people into the presence of God. Through something as tangibly ordinary as a preacher something of the divine can be revealed. There is a mystery at the heart of preaching that is every bit as startling and persistent as the mystery that pulses through the sacraments.
In recent years more Protestants have begun to reclaim the unity of word and sacrament. Increasingly we have seen that they belong together. But interpretations for why we need both table and pulpit most often affirm that they belong together because they are so different from one another. The sacrament of communion is described as embodied, experiential, and mysterious. By contrast, we tend to describe preaching as rational, linear, direct; the ways in which it works are traceable. Interpretations of communion usually stress the mystery of how God can be at work through such a meal. Just how Christ can be present through the simple, common elements of bread and wine is a stubborn mystery. So John Calvin concludes, after writing at great length about communion,“I would rather receive it than understand it.” The mystery of how God works through this meal helps underscore that it is all about grace. After all, it is difficult to manipulate something you cannot fully understand. We cannot make Christ any more or any less present in this meal. Gratefully, God does everything necessary. We just have to show up.
By contrast, most books on preaching deal at length with how preachers can get it right. They teach techniques. The preacher learns how to make the right homiletical moves (Buttrick), how to preach narratively (Lowry) or inductively (Craddock). Unlike the sacrament, it seems that much is up to us. Christ will be revealed if we preachers do our job well. In preaching, in contrast to the sacrament, it seems as if we are the ones who must do everything necessary.
Preaching the Odd, Odd Story
What I am suggesting is that the ways we have tended to contrast word and sacrament have not given an adequate account of the mystery that animates preaching, a mystery not unlike that which we encounter in the sacrament. Several years ago the journal Pulpit Digest asked me to write an article reflecting on how preaching had changed in the years since they began publishing in the late 1930s. To prepare for that article I read many sermons. What I discovered is that until very recently — say, the last twenty years — the preaching revealed an underlying assumption that there is a sure continuity between the best human thought and the Christian Gospel. Sermons were generously sprinkled with quotes from virtually every human endeavor. The preacher might use the words of a poet, the findings of a sociologist, the research of a scientist, and the observations of a contemporary journalist to support the sermon’s point. To be sure, there were also references to Scripture, but often these references were made as if they were a summary of all that had gone before. The Gospel was treated as the capstone of human experience.
There was also talk about Jesus, but the abundance of references to other sources and the ways in which they were treated as having authority gave the impression that what we receive from Jesus could be obtained by other means. Often the Gospel was used as a kind of crowning sermon illustration, underscoring truths that were there for us to grasp if we were but open to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. There seemed to be a kind of implied question: How could we not listen to the Gospel when other authorities from a variety of disciplines seemed to be saying the same thing in their own ways? A curmudgeonly friend of mine seemed to capture something about this approach to preaching. He said, “You hear what the psychologist says, what the historian says, what The New York Times editorial writer says, and then the sermon concludes with, ‘And perhaps Jesus said it best.…’” In this approach to preaching, typical in the previous generation or two, there is a seamless continuity between the Gospel and what is heard elsewhere. Notice, however, that this continuity can make the Gospel seem little more than a rarified form of the common wisdom. By purveying this common wisdom the sermon can become something like an edifying talk, offering good advice with a religious accent. About as much mystery is evident in such a sermon as in a commencement address.
By contrast, in most mainline churches today sermons are much more likely to be centered in a scriptural text and quote other sources much more sparingly. The very fact that we honor something ancient — this old, old story — and give it a place of privilege is quite odd in itself. We do not choose our scripture, and we are not invited to amend it, either. It is remarkable, indeed, that we recognize the authority of something that is given to us — whether in some way given by God or simply given by those witnesses who have gone before us. Twentyfirst century Americans normally will not submit to any authority that does not arise from the self. The scriptural story — this odd, odd story — does not make sense in the way good advice does. It points to a mystery. Insofar as preaching derives its power from Scripture, it both points to the mystery and can become part of the mystery.
William Willimon tells a story in Good News in Exile that serves as a reminder that, in a culture such as ours, preaching is a strange activity.
[As Will] was meeting with a group of students
at Duke Chapel he invited them to ask
questions about why the congregation there
does what it does in worship on Sunday
morning. To warm them up, he asked,
“Which act of Sunday worship do you find
the most strange?”
One student immediately replied, “It’s when,
just after we all get there, there is that big
parade…”
“You mean the procession?”Will asked.
“Yeah, the procession, and at the end of the
choir, just before the clergy march in, somebody
always brings in that great, big book.”
“The Bible?”Will asked.
“Yeah, the Bible. And she always puts it up
there and opens it, then looks at the preacher
as if to say, ’There. Work from that.’”
At first Will wondered why that particular
aspect of worship struck the student as
“weird.” Then he realized that her observation
was perceptive, indeed. After all, nothing
like that was happening elsewhere on
campus. That hundreds of late-twentiethcentury
people should gather to hear from
an ancient, disordered book from another
time and culture and approach such a book
as if it had authority over our lives is weird.
To preach from such a text, week after week, is odd behavior. And yet, more striking still, there is still an ineffable power in it. There is still power in someone plainly telling others what has been seen and heard in that person’s engagement with the ancient story of God’s interaction with the world. There is still power in someone simply telling the story of a God who so loved the world that the only begotten son was given, born in a small corner of a big world, that all might have eternal life. When preaching is not a form of good advice, but rather proclaims this good news, it has the ability to nurture and nourish a congregation in ways that cannot be fully measured. It shares in the mystery it proclaims. We might take a stab at describing or justifying the practice of preaching in more conventional ways. After all, a sermon can edify or inspire, challenge or comfort, and we have some understanding of how words can do those things. But just how a sermon can lift up a corner of life to give us a glimpse of the eternal, or how our plain and simple words can help us experience the presence of Christ afresh, somehow alive again in our hearing, is something that eludes our best explanations. The mystery remains, a mystery as enduring as the mystery of how a sacrament does its work. So when Augustine uses the wonderful phrase “aural sacrament” to describe preaching, he is attesting to this mystery. A great art historian who spent his life interpreting art eventually concluded that the most important part of great art — and, in the end, the only part that really matters — is the part that cannot be explained. The same could be said of a sacrament; and, I would contend, the same could just as aptly be said of preaching.
Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling the Truth, describes the ways both preacher and congregation approach the preaching moment. He pictures the preacher standing in the pulpit, switching on the lectern light, and spreading out his sermon notes much as a riverboat gambler would deal cards in a game of poker. Those in the congregation wait for the sermon to begin with a sense of hushed expectation, as if they are waiting for a miracle.
All of this deepens the silence with which they sit there waiting for him to work a miracle, and the miracle they are waiting for is that he will not just say that God is present, because they have heard it said before … but that he will somehow make it real to them. They wait for him to make God real to them through the sacrament of words.
The Sacramental Word
Preaching is sacramental in at least three ways. Preaching is sacramental in that it is an embodied word. It is not a timeless religious discourse. It has its life as the Holy Spirit breathes through the preacher and billows through the congregation. That is one of the reasons why the best sermons are preached by a congregation’s own pastor. When the sermon is preached by a body who does not leave when the sermon is over, but continues to live and move within the body of Christ that is the church, the word is palpably enfleshed in ways that are more evident than when the sermon is given by a visiting preacher who is just passing through. By the way, this is also one of the reasons why an attempt to preach another person’s sermons ceases to be preaching. The sermon then becomes something else — a disembodied word, a chimerical experience — offered at a remove from both fleshy life and spiritual life (which are always inextricably bound). To offer an embodied word is itself an affirmation of the incarnation.
Preaching is sacramental in that it works through the ordinary. The preacher — once the most educated person in town and once the only show in town — now cannot help but seem common and ordinary compared with the smart, articulate people who populate the slick and saturated airwaves. Nevertheless, there is still tremendous power in someone simply standing before others and declaring what she has heard, what she has seen with her eyes, what she has touched with her hands, concerning the word of life. If the preacher’s voice sounds like a duck call, or if he always has soup stains on his tie, or if she has never learned how to tame dangling participles, so much the better. Such badges of ordinariness can help the congregation avoid confusion about the source of the preacher’s power. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” wrote Paul, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (2 Cor 4:7)
Preaching is sacramental in that it mediates grace in ways that are ultimately mysterious. In some respects the preacher is given a special glimpse of the mysterious power of preaching. The preacher both knows what he or she has put into the sermon and also hears from the congregation how much they have gotten out of it, a loaves and fishes miracle reenacted on a weekly basis. And people remember the most unlikely sermons, the ones you as the preacher were convinced were the runts of the litter, not strong enough to live through the day. Yet here, perhaps months or even years later, that sermon remains robust in someone’s memory. It may be a word you were embarrassed to preach, and yet — miracles of miracles! — it is the very word that someone needed to hear. Or someone speaks about what a sermon meant to him. In the process, he paraphrases what you said that was so helpful—and it is as if he is talking about someone else’s sermon, because you don’t recognize a word of it. The thought he is so joyfully carrying away is not the thought you meant to convey. Is that merely an example of someone’s hearing what he needed to hear? Sometimes it may seem that way. But other times it seems that the Holy Spirit has taken our words and spoken through them in ways we did not intend. Or we can be reminded that there is a mysterious power in the preaching moment when we read the printed sermon afterwards. All the words are there, every striking image, every flash of insight. But something is missing, something more than the ways the words were spoken, something more than the look in the preacher’s eye as he stood in the pulpit, something more than the communal experience of listening to a sermon together. Something else is missing, that mysterious something extra that makes all the difference. And there are times when that something else cannot be described so much as named. What is missing — or at least is not so evident in the same ways — in the printed sermon is the presence of the Spirit who breathed through the words of the preacher in the preaching moment and claimed that moment as the Spirit’s own. So reading a printed sermon can seem like staring at lightning bugs caught in a jar the night before. The next day these creatures that glowed in the night seem so ordinary that we can wonder why we ever tried to capture them.
So what are some of the implications of understanding preaching as sacramental?
For one, we will have reverence for what we do as preachers, for the role we play in the unfolding of grace. Not only are we witnesses to the mystery, but in some sense we also become part of the mystery of the God who takes on flesh. A wick dare not take credit for a flame, any more than a cello can accept praise for a sonata. Nevertheless, it is awesome, indeed, to have even the slightest glancing realization that God has taken whatever we have offered — our fractured words, our fragile witness — and has spoken through them in ways that are clearly beyond us.
Just as surely, we will have humility about what we do as preachers. Rarely are we the best judges of our own efforts. Seldom are we even given a glimpse of what our preaching does, and so we can come to suspect that it does very little at all. We are like itinerate farmers, sowing and watering where we do not reap. Or perhaps it is as if we plant seeds in the dark, hoping, praying that some growth is taking place, perhaps at times almost hearing something grow, but never seeing the growth in its full shape and color. We simply never know what our preaching is accomplishing. Only God knows where the word might take root. Only God gives the growth. Our part is the planting and watering.
Particularly because preaching seldom has measurable results, it requires faithfulness over time. In a letter to the editor a churchgoer wrote, “I’ve gone to church for thirty years now and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them. So I think I’m wasting my time and the preachers were wasting their time.” In a subsequent issue, a letter of response was printed: “I’ve been married for thirty years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals for me. But for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I know this: they nourished me through all of my days.” That, it seems to me, is what we preachers are called to do: to serve the word week after week, as one would serve a meal.
When Paul finished preaching in Antioch, the worshipers who shook his hand at the conclusion of the service said, “Please preach that sermon again next week.” (Acts 13:42) What a startling request! (To be sure, no one has ever said that to me.) People are usually drawn to what is new. We want to be up on the latest. We read today’s newspaper with interest; tomorrow that same paper will seem good for nothing but starting a fire in the fireplace. The people of Paul’s day were no different: it was a new day and ordinarily they would want to hear a new message.
So what could Paul have said in that sermon in Antioch to elicit such an unlikely response? Quite simply, he told the story of God’s interaction with the world, first through the people of Israel and then through Jesus of Nazareth. Paul spoke of God’s faithfulness throughout history, about the covenant God established with Israel, and about how God rescued the people from slavery in Egypt and led them into the Promised Land. He told them that all of history had been a preparation for Jesus’ birth and that, when the right time came, God sent Jesus into the world out of God’s own being. Paul told the people that, though Jesus was blameless, he was crucified, but the promise of his coming was fulfilled when he was raised from the dead. And in his life is the source and meaning of our own lives. To that sermon, the people said, “Please preach that sermon again next week.” In some form or another, that is the story we preachers have been telling ever since. That is the story that we are enjoined to share with those for whom it is as new as today’s headlines. That is the story we serve up week after week to those who have heard it all before. And that is the story that, even as we are telling it, we long to hear ourselves. We may have preached it all before and they may have heard it more times than they would care to count, but the story is told and heard again because it nourishes us and forms us. It is a story about a mystery, and in the telling of it we can share in the mystery. God has come to us in the most common of elements: incarnate in a man from Nazareth, kneaded into bread, breathing through the preacher, reaching into our lives with a bare word that we take to be God’s own nourishing word.
Although the story is not new, it renews us. And so we do not tire of it, any more than we tire of bread or sunlight, and we need it just as much. So we serve it up, sometimes with a flourish, as if it were cherries jubilee, sometimes in the straightforward manner of a mother serving oatmeal to her children on a blustery morning. Day by day we serve up the word, like daily bread, like the bread that is broken and the cup that is shared that our eyes may be opened and the Risen Christ might be known to us in the breaking of the bread.
