Preacher and teacher of preaching Tom Long once related a story he heard from a colleague who served as a hospital chaplain. On Ash Wednesday one year, this chaplain left work long enough to take in a midday service at which he had ashes imposed upon his forehead. When he returned to work and entered the hospital room of an elderly woman, she spied the smudge of ash on his face and immediately grabbed a Kleenex, saying, “Come here, dear, you’ve gotten into something!” The chaplain then explained the meaning of the ashes. “This reminds me that I am a sinner and that I am mortal but that Jesus sacrificed himself to forgive me and give me life eternal.” The woman thought for a moment and then said, “I’d like to get in on that.” So the chaplain ran his index finger over the ashes on his forehead and made a smudge on her head also (Thomas Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, 2004, pp. 127–8).
As much as anything, we preachers should hope that after hearing our sermons about the grace of God and the beauty of the kingdom of God, those listening to us will say too, “I want to get in on that.” In a recent preaching seminar, participants were pondering how to motivate people to feel gratitude toward God and to live lives that display ongoing gratitude for all of God’s gifts to us. It’s a worthy question for all preachers to reflect upon.
All preachers know that altogether too many sermons seek to encourage virtue or moral living by waving the proverbial bony finger in people’s faces. Preachers warn. They threaten. They cajole. They use guilt to motivate people to behave better. In doing so they preach what I have referred to in this column before as “should-y sermons” that conclude with long to-do lists through which people may earn the favor of God.
And it may be the case that guilting people works. Guilt and fear of punishment are strong motivators. But alas, inducing guilt simultaneously accomplishes a few other things that we preachers ought to avoid. Guilting people can lead to thinking of God as stern, fierce, punitive. God is depicted as forever holding a rolled-up newspaper over our heads, ready to swat us such that we cower before God the way a dog cowers before an angry master.
Guilt also can be a short hop, skip, and a jump down a path that leads to a legalistic framing of our salvation. People have a hard enough time remembering that “there but for the grace of God go I.” When people ponder the difference between themselves and nonbelieving neighbors or coworkers, there is a tendency to compare the moral arc of our lives. The difference then is not that I have been swept away by the glorious grace of God that forgives and renews me beyond all telling of it and infinitely beyond my deserving; no, the difference is that I am more moral than some of the nonChristians around me—I live better. We can understand why people think this way. Grace is invisible, while moral behavior and good deeds are easy to see and seize upon. Still, neither the portrait of an angry God (due apologies to Jonathan Edwards) nor a works-righteousness should be what our preaching props up week after week.
So how should preaching motivate people? By presenting the kingdom of God and our lives as new creations in Christ in such vivid, beautiful ways that people find themselves wanting to get in on that action. “I want to be part of that,” people may say in response to the portrait of God’s kingdom of grace that our sermons sketch for them. We want our sermons to give people new eyes—or better said, we want them to use the new eyes they have already received in their baptisms and through their subsequent union with Christ.
Theologian Ellen Davis once wrote about a friend who teaches art classes at a large public university. Few of her students would ever actually become professional artists, but that did not discourage the professor. “My goal,” she said, “is to teach them how to see, so they never have to be bored again” (Ellen Davis, Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament, 2005, p. xiii).
A new way of seeing. A new way to apprehend the signs of God’s kingdom that break through the veil of this world in ways that quicken one’s pulse and thicken hope. Preaching can depict God not as forever ready to swat us, but as a generous God who is eager to share the wonders of creation and of the kingdom of God’s Son with us all.
A key way to accomplish this in our preaching is closely connected to one of my mantras as a teacher of preaching: “Show, don’t tell.” This is something we learn from TV and movies. When a movie moves you, causes you to well up with tears of joy, how does the filmmaker accomplish this? Well, it is not through long descriptions of abstract ideas that never get down to brass tacks. No, it is usually through a moving portrayal of someone’s love in action, a vivid vignette of what mercy looks like.
Think of the conclusion of the film Field of Dreams. We know for almost the whole movie that the lead character, Ray Kinsella, had had a falling out with his father that never got resolved before the father died. And we knew that Ray’s teenage rebellion expressed itself by dissing his father’s beloved game of baseball, leading Ray to refuse to play catch with his father.
At the end of the movie, it turns out that Ray’s father is among the long-dead baseball players who come back to life on the magical ballfield Ray built in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Finally we know the meaning of “If you build it, he will come.” And when Ray, with a voice choked with emotion, says, “Hey, Dad? You want to have a catch?”, most of us dissolve into puddles of tears. That same emotional reaction would never come about if someone merely analyzed for us the dynamics that might underlie such a reconciliation. No, the movie showed it to us in indelible ways such that we wish we could get in on the action—we long for a similar reconciliation with the people from whom we may be estranged.
Jesus knew this as well, which is why he never dryly explained the principles of his kingdom. Rather, through imagery, parables, and dialogue among the characters of his stories, Jesus showed us what the kingdom looks like. For those who understood Jesus’ meaning, surely there was a desire to “get in on that” in their own lives and experiences.
Doing this well is one of the greatest challenges in crafting our sermons. That may be why so many sermons stop just short of showing concretely what this all looks like on a Wednesday afternoon or a Friday morning. But when the beauty of God and of God’s kingdom is shown vividly, people may clamor to enter that world themselves.