I genuinely enjoy the “pundit accountability” posts that one sees in December and January. It’s good for professional commentators and political observers to look back and try to assess, in front of their audience, what they got right and wrong. I don’t think they’re significant apart from the relationship between writer and reader, but after existing for so long in a realm of consequence-free pontificating, it’s good for punditry to include these backward looks. And given how codependent and destructive the relationship between content producers and audiences can be in the age of social media, it may be braver than it looks for a columnist or Substack opinion-haver to say “here’s where the vibes-based bond between us did not serve you, the reader, especially well.”
And it makes me wonder what it would look like for a preacher to go back over a year’s sermons and do the same thing. Is there a sense in which we get things “right” or “wrong” analogous to the sense in which a political commentator does? What kinds of claims would get sifted in this way at all?
I am not going to do this
Yes, the headline for this newsletter is a ruse. I do not always find it mortifying to read or listen to old sermons, but I try to be somewhat judicious in my reasons for doing it. Sometimes they are stilted and I feel regret at having burdened anyone with them even for ten minutes. Sometimes they’re really good and I feel badly that I’ve forgotten them, and that everyone else who heard them has, and that I can’t seem to do the same things in preaching any more. These are both unproductive emotional rabbit holes. A sermon exists, first and foremost, for the people who hear it. When the moment of hearing has passed, it’s over and the most spiritually healthy thing to do is to forget it (unless you’re doing some kind of series, in which case you can only forget it once the whole series is done).
Still, one wishes to avoid repeating oneself too much, or making the same mistakes, or just getting stuck in poor habits. I once nearly rewrote (beat for beat, and in one place word for word) a sermon on the Annunciation passage, with the same Kierkegaard reference and everything, in an earnest and convicted frame of mind. I had no idea I was doing it until I went back to check my sermon from August 15 of a year or two earlier.
There may well have been no harm in just pushing through; if I’d forgotten that Dormition sermon, surely everyone else had too. The more important reason to check one’s own work is not to find self-plagiarism but actual mistakes, or, more positively, useful ideas and references. I am nearing the 400th Sunday/holy day sermon of my ordained life, which is a lot of opportunities to do something, good or bad.1 And it means that I probably have at least one sermon somewhere, in some format, on every lectionary day that comes around. It’s become too large an archive to ignore completely. So while I don’t go back in a systematic way and make retractions, I try to learn from my winces.
Getting things wrong
Something that is always baffling when I encounter it at the distance of a few years is what I’ll tentatively call mood or cultural atmospherics. The giveaway is a phrase like “times such as these” or a word like “crisis,” “chaos,” or “confusion,” or any way in which polarization or conflict are invoked as a defining feature of the preaching moment. Though it’s not always a doomy mood. I spent 2007-2008, all the way up to the end of the Democratic primaries, in a South Side church and it was definitely tempting to theologize the hopeful mood in Chicago’s Black community (and among white progressives) in those days. All of it, hopeful or gloomy, sounds strange and silly when I revisit it. A lot was wrong in 2015 but I don’t know what I had in mind when I turned on the rhetorical doom-fog machine in sermons that year.
In part, I think, I have fallen back on atmospherics because I’ve served politically diverse churches and it’s a way to signal gravity without directly implicating anyone or anything. It’s not concrete forces or specific actors but an age or an era or a pervasive sense that we must contend with. I don’t think I’m unusual among mainline clergy in doing this. And this falls flat for at least two reasons.
First, I suspect these vibes are more common among media super-consumers than among regular people. People catch moods, for sure, but I wonder how much they get expressed in a generalized sense of chaos or crisis rather than in personal, familial, or local terms.
Second, and perhaps paradoxically, the implied distinction of a period of present crisis before which there was presumably a period of order and stability is just wrong. Mainline American church figures have been talking about “crisis” and “our present age” of alienation, anxiety, dislocation, or whatever else, and it’s always been true and always been false. “The tradition of the oppressed,” Walter Benjamin famously and correctly states, “teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Things do change and develop, but it’s both difficult and necessary to break out of a picture of history in which our own period is somehow uniquely enlightened and disenchanted, alienated and interconnected, progressive and chaotic.
A related genre of homiletic failure is the take. I am thinking of this an inversion of the mood: offering a diagnosis or an opinion on something topical but specific. Clothing is a popular object of homiletic takes, along with linguistic novelties, video game violence, and politician misdeeds. But it can be anything. The take can irritate anyone who is left out of the little community of opinion-sharing it creates, but even apart from that, it always sounds trivial (especially in retrospect). Even worse are the preacher’s historical or theological musings inserted into the proclamation of the Gospel. I’ve tried with some success to purge this tendency from my own work because no one cares (or should care) and there’s a good chance my speculations about the meaning of the Trinity or the social conditions of Bronze Age Canaan are wrong.
This is tricky because we probably can’t help going beyond our competency (whatever that is), or least least I can’t. The line between a good-faith conjecture or extrapolation and standing on my little soapbox to give the world a piece of my mind is blurry. But blurry lines are there to teach us the value of watching closely and keeping our distance.
Getting things right
So don’t preach moods or takes. Got it.2 What did work upon re-reading or listening? One thing that just helped in general was getting free of the topic-assigning pressure of social media. I think we were all to some extent responsible for addressing the pandemic and the 2020 protests at the time, but it doesn’t need to be in preaching. One good thing about secularization is that we literally don’t have to narrate and make sense of the world for people all the time.
I’ve written or re-written a few sermons in response to events over the years and I don’t regret that. But one thing that has helped with topical sermons is specificity. Naming names works better than hiding behind generalities.
It also helps to talk about demons. Not as a first recourse, but if I can’t talk about concrete forces or human actors and am left trying to find a way to describe a zeitgeist or mood or some other prettied-up version of a spiritual cause, I try it out with demons. The first sermon I preached in 2021 was about the capitol insurrection and demons and looking back, despite the muffling KN95 and twitchy sound, I think it holds up. At least there’s not much I’d change. I was nervous about preaching it, and as it turned out I didn’t need to be. But more importantly, the blessing in being precise and specific and staying away from one’s own takes and axes to grind is that it’s easier to defend the claims on the merits if there is controversy.
But the surest way to avoid backward-looking winces (again, granting that this is not a purpose of preaching) has been to just find something to say about the text(s) and say it. I don’t consistently write ledes or introductory anecdotes any more, at least not unless they’re going to be integral to the structure of the whole thing. I don’t know if it actually helps to try to grab peoples’ attention. I usually feel good about jumping into whatever is happening in the reading I’m focused on and trying to make it sound like something. If you want to talk about Amos and Amaziah having it out in Bethel, it’s ok to go straight to Bethel and tell the story. It may not be easier to bring people along than starting with a joke or anecdote, but I doubt it’s harder.
Talking to ourselves
That, at least, is what I have gleaned from lying down where all the ladders start, the foul rag and bone shop of the sermons folder. The better part of wisdom, though, is avoid looking back altogether. There’s a preacher-saint (I want to say it was Francis Borgia but I’m not going to look it up) who taught that the audience for the sermon is God, who dispenses the take-away each hearer needs to their guardian angel. I don’t think this is quite right. As far as I know, there’s no Scriptural precedent for God appointing heralds, prophets, or apostles for the purpose of bringing messages to God. But it lingers in my mind because even if God is not the audience, God is surely the relevant critic. Trying to please the hearer or, worse, myself, is risky business. Better to say one thing you wouldn’t want to take back on Judgment Day than chatter away amiably to a congregation.
This is harder, at least for me, than it sounds because it’s nice to be praised and especially nice to think well of one’s own work. The pundit can hope to earn some painful credibility by owning up to failures rather than digging in to reinforce the emotional bond with the audience. The preacher also needs to resist the latter (and is far from always good at it). But that’s not for the sake of building a better record or more durable, discerning fandom. It’s just because the moment of truth is always now.
As of Friday we are caring for a new five year old, a girl this time, and my time for newsletter writing will get even shorter than usual. I have one or two more ideas I want to put out in the next couple of weeks, after which I’ll probably need to take another break. As always, if you liked this or any of the Parish Bulletins, please forward or share (or sign up, if you haven’t already). And if you have any questions or topics you’d like me to write about, please get in touch. I have no idea if I’ll ever get around to any of them but it doesn’t hurt to try. Keep the faith.
Yes, I keep track. I haven’t counted wedding/funeral/impromptu daily worship sermons, or whatever I preached before ordination, all of which is justly consigned to oblivion.
I have left out the biggest category of sermon whiffs, which is “claims that are neither true nor false, or whose truth or falsehood is not important.” It’s maybe better to get something actually wrong!