Songs and Sermons

I started trying to write songs when I was twelve years old. My parents argue that I started writing poetry when I was eight, when I owned a small detective agency. Anyway, even as a teenage songwriter I understood that a song needs a basic unity. Well, at least, I understood this musically. I understood that you wanted the song to stay in the same key, unless you modulated to another key. And I understood that songs I liked to sing all had a few words that were repeated, called a refrain, a chorus, or a hook. What I failed to understand as a budding songwriter is what I’ve failed to understand as a preacher: sermons, as well as songs, need unity in their content and in their intended purpose.

The more I’ve been evaluating my own preaching, the more I sense that my sermons lack unity. I spoke about this with my professor, Robert Smith, and he made a strong point. Sermons must always look at the preaching text from eternity. Read the Bible backwards. As a Christian, we must do this. How do things look in light of Christ? Thus, Christ becomes the one who holds Scripture together. Christ is the Chorus.

There’ve been three areas that homileticians typically see as indispensable to the sermon: Fallen Condition Focus (Chapell), Redemptive Center, and Sermonic Eschatonic (Smith). Dr. Smith sees the sermon as a recipe for spaghetti. Don’t be enslaved to the order of inclusion, but always get ALL the ingredients in. Lost people need to be made aware that they are lost (Fallen Condition), and they need to see how Christ meets the fallen condition with His own perfect, atoning sacrifice. But all Christians need hope. Hence, pointing to the eschaton, or the last things, heaven, etc, which is also fundamental to the book of Revelation, is fundamental to the sermon. And Christ is all over the sermon. He is the song we sing. As Paul noted, “We preach Christ crucified.”

Unfortunately, too many sermons end with the preacher trying to get people to give money. They take a good sermon on the resurrection of Christ and make a beeline to the parishioner’s wallet. We live in a hopeless time, which is ironic, since we’ve lived a very prosperous few decades. We are seeing that the things for which we incurred so much debt, our many investments, our many purchases, our toys, our fancy, well-decorated houses, our hardwood or marble floors, our summer homes, have not satisfied us. We are as desperate and hopeless as we ever were. So, when I speak of hope, I don’t simply mean “comfort.” Rather, I mean that the object of our hopes needs constant adjustment, and the only thing that sobers our hope is remembering that Christ is coming. Read Acts 17 and see how Paul does this as quickly as a Judo throw. Creation, rebellion, depravity, condemnation, CHRIST, reconciliation, Day of Judgment, these are there in one brief “talk” at the Areopagus. The whole scope of redemptive history is there, and it must show up in our preaching. An even more astounding example of this is Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7, a sermon which, I might mention, Saul of Tarsus heard.

I’m hoping that this rationale for preaching will help both my songwriting and my sermons. But more than anything, I’m praying for changing trends in Christian preaching. Congregations, let your preachers study and preach the Word! Pastors, study and preach the whole counsel of God! Drop the CEO mantle and don that of the theologian. Make Christ the chorus of what you do, and may Christ receive glory, as He eternally glorifies the Father in the Spirit.

~ by argo80 on April 23, 2008.