CHAPTER 1
The Controlling Image
Taming the Beautiful Mess
Sermons start with a beautiful mess.
After fifteen years of writing sermons every week, I saw that my sermon preparation followed a predictable pattern. If you're a preacher, see if this resonates with you. If you're not, welcome to my world! An average week of sermon preparation looks something like this: You start with a biblical text; maybe it's one that you chose that week, maybe it's one that's been assigned as part of a sermon series, maybe it's out of the lectionary. It doesn't matter. On Tuesday morning (or maybe Monday) you open your Bible and start your sermonic journey. You read the passage carefully and prayerfully. As you read you ask yourself, What is God saying to me here? What is God saying to our congregation? Inevitably this careful reading leads to various thoughts and observations. You write these down. Sometimes the passage reminds you of a story you heard, or something that C. S. Lewis once said, or maybe it reminds you of a poem. You jot down these things too.
After reading it in English, you dig into the Greek (or Hebrew) version of your text. What are the passage's key words? Does the English capture the full sense of the Greek? Are there other nuances in the original language that the English versions can't translate? If your level of proficiency in the biblical languages is similar to mine, this can be a painstaking process. But it's necessary, so you do the digging, and anything your language study unearths gets thrown onto the pile.
Next come commentaries. Devout scholars have thought about your Bible passage for two thousand years, creating a treasure trove of communal insight. You have to spend at least some time at their feet. Between your bookshelf commentaries and the online materials, you have a mountain of information on your text right at your fingertips. You plow through as much as you can and make notes on all the exegetical issues you find. There are usually a couple dozen issues per text, which means you scribble several pages of notes detailing the various interpretive debates and questions. You throw these notes into the exegetical mix.
On top of what the commentaries say, there are also topical books of theology and spirituality that apply to your text. Suppose, for example, you're preaching on the Holy Spirit. It's a good idea to poke your head into a book or two to see what the great theologians of the past have said about the Spirit's work. So you read a couple of pages of Calvin; you take a look at your favorite contemporary book of systematic theology; you do due theological diligence. Again, whenever you read something interesting, something illuminating, you put it on the pile.
When all these investigations are over, by Thursday morning you have what might be best described as a beautiful mess. You have dozens of stories, assorted insights, scribbled Greek words, pages of quotes, stacks of observations, note cards with little insights hand-scrawled on them, books stacked upside down and opened to a favorite passage—the treasures of your exegetical digging scattered across your desk. Much of this material is exciting. The Spirit and the Word have given you quite a treasure mound. The passage has moved and challenged you; it has opened your eyes. It really is beautiful stuff you've found! But it's a mess.
And this beautiful mess presents you with what is in my experience the main problem of preaching: Somehow you have to take this beautiful mess and shape it into an orderly sermon (mine tend to be twenty minutes). You have to take this chaos of exciting observations and craft a disciplined message that speaks to everyone in the congregation: young and old, rich and poor, the joyful and the distressed, the skeptics and the deeply believing. And you have to speak to these people in all their dimensions. Your sermon must touch the listeners in their hearts as well as their minds.
Here is where preaching becomes very, very, very hard. How do you find your way through the beautiful mess? Where do you begin your journey? What treasures do you pull out of the pile to show to the people? Which insights do you leave for another time? How do you organize this material into a coherent, artistic whole?
Artistic is just the right word here. Moving from the beautiful mess to a finished sermon is an artistic task. The ability to take the information gathered from hard exegesis and make it into a winning sermon is a creative endeavor that rivals the craft of any painter, musician, or poet.
In my experience, seminary prepared me very well for making the beautiful mess. I was equipped with the exegetical, linguistic, historical, and theological tools to gather all sorts of treasures from a single biblical text. In the words of one of my classmates, seminary made me into an "exegetical ninja." But when it came to taking my beautiful mess and making it into an effective and affective sermon, I was mostly left to my own devices. I moved ahead but worked mainly by intuition and feel.
To put this in Fred Craddock's terms, I left seminary feeling equipped for the hard-chair side of sermon preparation but not for the soft-chair side. Craddock tells students that good preachers need two chairs to finish their sermons. The preacher starts by sitting in the hard chair. That's where you do your rigorous exegetical work: the language study, the commentary reading, the theological reflection. It's a hard chair because this material is gathered only by disciplined work and intense study. This is the chair in which you accumulate the beautiful mess.
The second chair is the soft chair of creative reflection. This chair is more comfortable, a living room armchair instead of an upright desk chair, the sort of chair in which you can lean back and let your imagination wander. Here is where you dream up connections and stories and analogies. Here is where you begin to craft. Here is where you begin to shape your beautiful mess into a meaningful sermon. I feel like seminary gave me lots of tools for the hard-chair side of sermon making but relatively few for my time in the soft chair.
This book will provide some tools for the soft chair. It won't provide all of them. Writing a sermon is an extraordinarily complex task and there are hundreds of books to be written on how to make a sermon out of the beautiful mess. Read a broader study of homiletics, like Paul Wilson's wonderful book, The Four Pages of the Sermon 2 or Thomas G. Long's The Witness of Preaching,3 and you get a sense of the complexity. I will not reflect on all the parts of sermon preparation, and I do not suggest that the observations I offer are sufficient for creating great sermons. The homiletical toolbox needs to be stocked with many tools; I'm reflecting on only one of them, and it's critically important. For the preacher looking to make that step from the beautiful mess to an ordered, meaningful sermon, I think it's one of the best tools available. I'm thinking of the controlling image. Learning to use controlling images effectively is central to the craft of preaching.
What is a controlling image? I will explain it more fully later, but for now let me offer this definition: a controlling image is an evocative picture or scene that shows up repeatedly in a sermon and communicates either the trouble or the grace of the sermon theme, therefore helping to accomplish the sermon's goal.
In Defense of Sermon Craft
Before we look at what it takes to shape a controlling image and before we get too deep into the art of shaping an image, let me say a few words about the place of craft in sermon making.
I minister in the Reformed tradition, which places a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God. In my tradition the Spirit leads the work of salvation and all human action is a grateful response to the Spirit's work. As a result, when preachers talk too much about the craft of preaching and the art of sermon making, some people begin to worry. Are we paying too much attention to artifice? Are we studying how to manipulate people with our rhetoric? Is homiletics becoming a specialized form of marketing? Are we, by all our human craft, edging the Holy Spirit out of the picture?
This is a real concern. Every time a task requires human skill, every time we do a job that requires our intellect and our effort, we run the risk of moving the spotlight from our Lord to ourselves. Anytime we do work that others might admire and praise for its excellence, we are at some level of spiritual risk.
How do you handle that risk?
You could simply avoid applying human skill and excellence. You could avoid any kind of work where others might praise you, and where you might be tempted toward pride. You could simply bury your gift. But surely that's not what God intends. At least one of the lessons learned in the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30) is that God wants us to use our gifts and skills so that the kingdom might be built. In this parable, the servant who chooses not to use his talent doesn't fare so well.
The other option is to strive to use every gift to the best of your ability, to take every talent and develop it to its fullest extent, but to do it with humility so that everything is done for the glory of God. That seems the more biblical route. That sounds like Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:31: "So, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, you should do it all for God's glory."
In my tradition, people have been comfortable when preachers exercise the gift of the intellect in the work of exegesis, using the excellence of their minds to make theological distinctions and translate verbs and appeal to the listener's reason; we have been less comfortable when the creative gifts are used to create beauty and appeal to the imagination. This is an unfair bias. Both faculties are gifts of God. Both faculties can be used in the building of the kingdom. Both faculties can be abused and manipulated for personal gain. Both faculties are meant to be used in humility, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, for the glory of God.
Besides, as Paul Scott Wilson clearly recognizes, it's impossible to preach a sermon without some sort of craft:
Typically preachers add something to the biblical text. To tell a biblical tale effectively one does not simply repeat it. One puts the text—whether a story from the gospels or a passage from the epistles—into one's own words and adds emphasis and emotion. One retells it in a life- like setting, usually as an episode in some faith journey. One adds certain pieces of information to it to make it come to life in the present day, and this can leave the preacher open to the charge of distorting or otherwise misrepresenting the text. Every time we preach a biblical text, no matter what method we use—classical exposition or contemporary narrative—we add something to the text that is not in it, be it history, geography, archaeology, translation, tradition, explicit discussion of a doctrine, information from other texts, or understanding and experiences from our own settings and cultures. It is impossible to preach by keeping the biblical text in the sermon exactly as it is in the Bible.
We are not Docetists. We believe in the Word made flesh who walked among us, we believe that at Pentecost the Spirit filled the church, body and soul, and we have seen that the very first movement of that Spirit caused Peter to preach a sermon, a sermon rich in craft that didn't just speak to people's minds; it cut them to the heart.
The Sermon Theme and Its (Limited) Uses
When it comes to taming the beautiful mess, homileticians have done a good deal of thinking. Significant ink has been spilled telling preachers how to turn their pile of exegetical notes into a sermon. Usually that advice starts with the sermon theme.
Discussions of sermon theme are everywhere in homiletics books. Virtually all these books insist that preachers center their sermons on a theme sentence. There's a good reason why beginning preachers hear their instructors insist on a sermon theme, why most of us practicing preachers usually spend a little time every week trying to write down the subject of our sermon in one pithy sentence: bad sermons lack focus and limp in seven different directions, leaving the listeners unable to articulate what they just heard. So, for generations, homiletic orthodoxy has been: sermons must be about one thing!
"Proper theme formulation is intended to keep the sermon on the right track," says Sid Greidanus, and he quotes homiletician Donald Miller to reinforce his point: "Any sermon worthy of the name should have a theme.... Ideally any single sermon should have just one major idea ... two or three or four points which are not part of the same great idea do not make a sermon—they are two, three or four sermons all preached on one occasion." Bryan Chappell shares this perspective: "Sermons of any significant length contain theological concepts, illustrative materials and corroborative facts. These components, however, do not imply that a sermon is about many things. Each feature of a well-wrought message reflects, refines, and/or develops one major idea." In The Witness of Preaching, instead of using the language of theme, Tom Long talks about a focus statement, "a concise statement of the central, controlling and unifying theme of the sermon," and he thinks every sermon should have one. While some recent homileticians have raised questions about themes, calling them rationalistic and reductionistic (Eugene Lowry is one of these questioners), most teachers of preaching agree that every sermon needs a central focus, a main idea, a unifying statement, a theme. In the first volume of this present series, Paul Scott Wilson has compared the theme sentence in the sermon to the focal point in a work of art and says it is "the single most important source of unity and hence beauty in a sermon."
A good theme has many uses. When it is properly derived from the text, it provides a focal point that keeps the preacher from wandering off into extrabiblical speculation. When openly stated in the body of the sermon, it helps the listener follow. Ultimately, however, a theme often can't get the preacher very far down the sermon-writing road. This is because it's too simple, too narrow a statement to really inspire. Listen to some of the themes suggested by homileticians in their preaching books and you'll see what I mean. Sid Greidanus suggests that the sermon theme for John 13:12-17 should be "Followers of Christ ought to render humble service to one another"; the theme of Jeremiah 9:23-24 could be "Glory in knowing the Lord"; and for 1 Timothy 4:7-8 it could be, "Train yourself in godliness." These are good themes as far as they go. They are clearly based on the text and they provide a focal point, but if the preacher writes this theme at the top of his or her sermon manuscript on Thursday morning as he or she prepares to write, does he or she feel inspired by this theme? Does the preacher feel ready to put pen to paper? Does the preacher have a clear idea about how to make this sermon sing? I doubt it. Most preachers I know need a lot more than "train yourself in godliness" before they are ready to start writing. A bare proposition is simply not enough to anchor a sermon—it's merely a good start.
Of course not all homileticians suggest theme sentences that are quite so spare. Tom Long admits that for a pastor preaching on John 5:1-18—the story of the healing at the pool of Bethesda—a theme such as "Jesus was a controversial healer" is "too broad to be genuinely helpful to the preacher." Long promotes lengthier, more detailed thematic constructions, ones that give the preacher a little more clay to knead. So, for a sermon on Romans 8:28-39 Long suggests the theme: "Because we have seen in Jesus Christ that God is for us, we can be confident that God loves us and cares for us even when our experience seems to deny it." That's definitely an improvement. The preacher has more to work with.
Paul Scott Wilson also holds out for richer themes, although his concern isn't so much length as vibrancy. He wants preachers to write themes that use God-active language. He says theme sentences need to proclaim the action of a living God in our lives. Theme sentences like "God wants Israel to change" or "Jesus calls us to repent" are too weak. They make people the main actors in the drama of salvation. Better that the theme have God as the subject of a vivid, active verb. So instead of "God wants Israel to change," Wilson suggests "God brings Israel to a new place," and instead of "Jesus calls us to repent," Wilson suggests "Jesus brings us to repentance." For preachers trying to cook up higher-octane themes, Wilson offers five rules for theme construction:
1. Keep it short.
2. Make it a declarative sentence (not a question).
3. Make God the subject of the sentence.
4. Focus on God's action of grace.
5. Use strong, active verbs.
