When the Preacher Shuts Up – And God Speaks in the Silence.

AnastasisYears ago in College R E O White, Principal, scholar, and teacher not to be messed with, taught us amongst other things, to be better preachers. Well, you can either preach or you can't, he said – if you can, you can improve. If you can't, you might learn the techniques and practicalities, but as REO insisted, calling implies gifts and if you say you have the calling, but don't have the gifts, perhaps it's time to reconsider.And by the way, he would remark, others, not you, will be best able to tell if you have a gift of preaching!

Gifts can develop, skills can be learned, practice and experience enables us to grow and mature. The act of preaching, by which REO meant the practice of preaching, and not that preaching was a performance, was its own education, and the examiners and crit specialists would be the congregations who had to enjoy or endure the sermon. His lectures on preaching were themselves a mixture of the theory and practice of homiletics; a renowned teacher-preacher himself, he was careful not to impose his own style or approach. But the basic disciplines of study, thought, planning, prayer, imagination and conscientious prioritising of preaching in an overall ministry, were to be built into the habits and life patterns of a lifetime.

One day he was lecturing on the importance of conclusions. The last minute or so, the final sentences, the climax and application that could evoke the response of the heart to God, that would nourish, or convert, or strengthen, or move the heart of the hearer nearer to God, this was to be carefully thought through and delivered with persuasion, conviction and within the context of trust and shared humanity of preacher and hearer. He gave an example – if you have been preaching on zeal and commitment as being energized by the Holy Spirit, and you have built the sermon around the idea of enthusiasm, hearers will ask the valid question so what? What would that look like preacher? The worst possible conclusion would be to say as your final words, "So be more enthusiastic!"

REO's own education was in philosophy and then divinity – and both degrees were completed part time while working in pastoral ministry. He learned the hard way, he valued perseverance and was  both baffled and angry if students didn't work hard and make the best of the opportunities for learning and training at University and College. He knew about the connections between enthusiasm, determination, motivation and perseverance. When it comes to preaching on enthusiasm, what is needed is examples that inspire, a renewed experience of the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit, not so much a moralistic dig (Be more enthusiastic – which is a guilt making cop out by a lazy preacher), but a vision of a grace sufficient, a love endlessly merciful, a calling on our lives that ignites everything in us that will burn for the love of God, and some idea of what enthusiasm for God might look like, and feel like. Enthusiasm is the inpouring of the Holy Spirit, quite literally the meaning of the word. Thomas Chalmers the Scottish minister, social reformer and leader of the Free Church of Scotland famously spoke of the "expulsive power of an opposite affection".

An important benefit of a small College was the way our lecturers taught more than one area of theology – REO also taught Christian ethics and pastoral theology. As an experienced minister, a shrewd and at times a tough judge of character, he understood the inner life of Christian spirituality in the Evangelical tradition. The self induced guilt, the sense of not being good enough, the irony of fiercely holding that we are saved by grace, while just as grimly holding on to sin, or slowly slipping towards a complacent faith, gradually losing its edge as grace declined in amazingness. To turn the eyes of the congregation on Jesus, to lift up the cross, to proclaim the resurrection, to celebrate the gift and presence of the Holy Spirit, to invite and encourage the gathering around the Lord's Table, to remind regularly the gift and promises of baptism – any one of these and other foundation truths of the lived Christian faith is the note to be struck in any sermon on enthusiasm, and each represents a high place on which the sermon should conclude. 

I've never forgotten that lecture on sermon conclusions. Not because it was specially good, but perhaps because it pointed me to a homiletic practice that, to get it right, requires that everything else be dedicated to that end. The last words of a sermon remain hanging in the air, in the silence, allowing space and time for these words to become to each hearer, and indeed to the preacher, God's word and God's words. Those words are to be gospel. Not moralistic dig, but invitation to grace; not guilt, but gratitude is the deep motive of the faithful follower after Jesus. Preachers should never forget that.  

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