Was It Condescension or Just Inexperience?

A few weeks ago, in the absence of our pastor, our young pastoral assistant gave the sermon for the Sunday service that I attend. (We have two services, a “traditional” and a “praise” or “contemporary” service. I normally attend the first one.) This assistant is a good kid, enthusiastic about his work with our new youth program, excited about his relationship with God (however he might understand God to be) – but I mean it when I say he is a kid. We hired him as a part-time staff member a little over a year ago, just as he was graduating from high school, because he wanted to work with the youth program and he is interested in becoming a minister.

I’ve heard a couple of his sermons. My basic impression has been that his thoughts are all right but not well developed, and his delivery can use some work. His greatest weaknesses as a speaker and preacher are his youth and inexperience, and those will dissolve as he studies and matures.

But that sermon a few weeks ago wasn’t like the others I have heard him give. It sounded to me like he was repeating things he had heard our pastor day. It didn’t seem well organized. I wasn’t sure exactly what he thought he was focusing on. The woman sitting next to me in the pew said later that it was condescending. My own opinion, however, was that our young pastoral assistant was basically parroting what he has been taught and has not yet begun to take his faith and make it personally appropriated. I think he will be much stronger as a minister and speaker once he has gone through that process. So again, I thought his youth was his major “obstacle.”

It got me to thinking about sermons. What should a sermon do? Inspire you to change your life? Teach you about the contents of the Bible? Teach you about Jesus? Relate the scriptural text to the way you live your life throughout the coming week? All of those are good for a sermon to do. It may depend on the situation you are in; any speech, sermon or otherwise, is shaped by the occasion and the audience.

The text and sermon should be clearly related to each other. The pastoral assistant’s text that morning was the one after the Beatitudes where Jesus talks about not hiding your light under a bushel but letting it shine before men to glorify God. We heard a sermon about the moon and also watched a video about lamps. At least the text mentioned lamps. It said nothing about the moon or even about the sun, whose light the moon reflects. It would have been clearer – also noticeably shorter – if he had just left the moon out of it. A more experienced speaker might have been able to make it work.

The sermon should focus on its object and not get diverted into side avenues. That was the other tension created by the example of the moon. In his hands, the sermon just lost its focus and its point.

And a sermon will reflect the maturity and life experience of the speaker, along with that speaker’s faith. It can do nothing else. Giving a sermon, like giving any other type of public speech, has a performance element, and every live performance forces the performer to bare his or her soul. Between preparation, content, and delivery, that is what happens in performance. At least, that is how it has been for me whether I am playing the piano, singing, or speaking. If your performance hasn’t done that, it hasn’t been effective.

I didn’t think the young man’s sermon that day did any of those things. What it revealed, I thought, was an unformed kid who has not yet begun to question and develop his own personally appropriated faith. I don’t mean to be hard on him. I’m just making an observation. If he is serious about becoming a pastor, he should be starting to understand what he believes and why he believes it. I hope his mentor is guiding him into doing that.

Just for grins, I took his text and started trying to develop my own sermon on it. Lo and behold! I too would like to talk about the moon! Maybe that’s because he got me to thinking about it. It’s tough to make the moon relevant with such a text; it would be better to find a text that talks about the moon, if I want to go ahead with this plan. I may wind up with as confused a sermon as our pastoral assistant did. But one thing I can be sure of – whatever my own sermon’s weaknesses might be, it will at least reveal a speaker with a personally appropriated faith.