What I Expect From A Sermon
By MARY B. BRUCE
S a Scot, I was brought up in the belief that I went to church in order to listen to a text and a sermon. After„, the service was over, no one ever asked what hymns we had sung. The inevitable question was : " What was the minister on today ? " The singing and praying and reading were, I understood, the garnishings; the sermon was the solid meat. It was a distorted view, and I set it down because I am trying now not to write in that spirit. A sermon cannot be judged as a detached -or isolated utterance; it is part of an act of worship. And the loudest critics of sermons, be it noted, are those who hear fewest.
It is addressed to a special audience—a congregation. We are rich and poor, old and young, cultured and barely literate, a cross-section of the neighbourhood or parish, but we do possess a unity. We are (however fitfully and inadequately) believers." It is clear at a glance that we lack the white-hot fervour of first-century Christians. But neither are we specu- lative Athenians on Areopagus. Habit or convention or conviction has brought us to chutch, and we want our shaky faith made stronger. What is preached must be relevant to us. It is no use denouncing us as atheists or scolding us for neglecting the ordinances of worship. These things need to be said to the people outside. Our need is different. We may sing of ourselves as "soldiers of Christ," but we are in fact rather inadequate volunteers, not quite sure that we ever want to see_ active service, and yet concerned about doing our bit. " Lord, we 'believe: help Thou our unbelief " is probably our most fervent prayer, and we look to the pulpit for strengthening. A sermon, too, must depend on the situation in which we find ourselves. The preaching of the 'first century had an intense fervour—partly because its hearers believed the Day of Judge ment to be at hand. Richard Baxter tried to preach " as a dying man to dying men." It is an arresting phrase that reveals a desperate urgency, whiCh few of us • feel. " We walk by faith as strangerS here, but Christ shall call us home "—so runs the seventeenth-century paraphrase. ,We had better be honest and admit that the twentieth century finds us very much at home in this world. That confession is perhaps a measure of our paganism and materialism, and perhaps it is Baxter we need. At any rate our preacher must get it across to us that we are citizens of two Worlds, a temporal and a spiritual. Ser- mons that are " this-worldly " rapidly degenerate into social ethics. Sermons that are completely " Other-worldly we should probably denounce as unpractical.' But we have a desperate need—to live in this world as part of a Christian pilgrimage, and we must be taught to " redeem the time." Ourt- is an age of specialists; yet it is odd how we ignore them. Give a man sufficient fame, and we-accept what he says on any subject. Truth sits upon the lips of film-stars, footballers and physicists, and we are credulous. Now the clergy are specialists in theology. We should therefore expect, first and foremost, theology from them. Many sermons con- tain far too little theological backbone. A demand for more theology is not a demand for fundamentalism. But a Church, is meaningless without a creed, and for years the Reformed Church has soft-pedalled dogmas. Daily we are blown about, with every wind of doctrine—mostly pagan doctrine. The current jargon of- much (not all), psychology, educational , theory, politics, economics and ethics is, however plausible, a, hotchpotch of Christian and anti-Christian ideas; and we can- 1 not achieve a wholeness of outlook without a firmer grounding in dogma. We suffer from a fatal facility today for belonging; to "camps "—either Christian or Communist—and from a lot, of muddled thinking that makes us assume that if we are not Communist we must be Christian. Against such evils (of. our own thinking)-the good sermon will protect us.
But a mere peppering of theological terms will not suffice.i These terms must be related to -our own condition. Preaching about the atonement must obviously first place its theme; against a backgrOund of Jewish thought, but it cannot leave it there. The theme- must be worked out in relation to this century's needs. Has " salvation " a meaning for' us ? Too often it has been made to -sound like part of the " bank where - anyone can be insured . . . against the undiscovered risks of the hereafter." (I quote Maritain.) We need it interpreted; in terms of our own neuroses and split personalities. What do we understand by " grace " ? I know nothing more arid and chilling than the kind of sermon which bandies these words about as things we have got to believe in, without our realising in the slightest why and how they apply to us. This is beginning to sound as if the sermon must bring in politics. Yes, I suppose it must. This does not mean—Heaven forbid !—that we should expect a sermon to support or attack the party line. What is needed is something much deeper— the application of Christian doctrine to the contemporary situ* ation. If this merely results in a diatribe against " godless Communists," we are no better off. The attack must be directed against ourselves and our own society—so that we may see and repair the weaknesses that have left us so exposed to the totalitarianism of the day. There are countless prolv lems—from colour bars to napalm bombs—where we expect the Church to speak out, and to shed light. To shed light, because ours is a journty through, darkness. I have demanded more dogma, yet I dread the word " dog- matic." Nothing alienates me more than the preaching of the man who " knows all the answers." " Behold, I chew you a mystery," wrote the Apostle. Religion is a mystery, and we cannot hope for more than partial illumination along our road. Newman humbly asked for no more. But we all know the preacher who makes us feel that he has reduced all the mysteries of the faith to the compass and compactness of a local railway time-table. Humility is a great' Christian virtue, and it does not mean either diffidence or timidity. The preacher must pro- claim to us the words of Christ—" I am the way, the truth, the life "—but he must remember that he too is a traveller.
The last word, though, is with the preacher. I have accused him of an occasional lack of humility. It is his task all the time to accuse us of complacency and to shake us out of it. The most depressing feature of the Church today is its respec- tability. - Most of us inside it refrain from committing the more colourful of the sins—and forget that we are guilty of the more insidious ones. We like to think of ourselves as " good Christians " when the best we can ever hope to be is very bad ones. Salvation," am sure, is a continuous, not a finished, pro- cess; and we are needing all the time to be jolted into awareness of our shortcomings—our lack of charity and imagination, our social irresponsibility, our ratalism, our fiypocrisy. There is need for more, not fewer, sermons. Let them avoid poly- syllabic affectation, let them never assume a conviction they do not feel, and let them be prompted never by self-righteous- ness but always by charity. Then, if we have ears, we shall hear.
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