Storytelling and Sermons: Wordsmithing Tips from the Pulpit
February 9, 2011
I’m wondering today… What can novelists and songwriters and scriptwriters and memoirists learn from the process of writing a sermon?
I’m musing over some fine, floor-shaking sermons I’ve been privileged to hear (and also some real sleepers, but we won’t go there). And I’m wondering what good preachers know about images that stay with us, about stories that hold their listeners’ interest, about how to flesh out big, radical, counter-cultural concepts (wait…the last shall be WHAT?) for a roomful of people too jaded and despairing and distracted to see past next Tuesday.
Granted, some of us reading this work with words in ways that can’t often cross the line into, well, “preachiness.” But the best preachers are careful crafters of words. They’re close observers of life in all its pain and suffering and joy. They pay attention to sounds and metaphors. They understand that we’re drawn into stories–and that we learn the hard stuff best when we don’t know we’re being taught.
So I’m hoping some of you who are clergy yourselves, as well as those of you who’ve heard enough sermons that you qualify as experts on what works hermeneutically speaking (and what doesn’t) will tell us what you’ve learned—and maybe are still learning.
What do YOU think?
What CAN novelists and songwriters and scriptwriters learn from an excellent sermon?
And what can preachers learn from novels and lyrics and film?
[Coming soon: Storytelling and Songwriting:
What Can Be Learned From a Good Song;
Anne Lamott on Resurrection;
Phyllis Tickle and Donald Miller on the Human Need to “Story” Ourselves
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Connect with Joy
Preachers can learn from good song writers and hymn writers how to “preach a sermon” in 5 minutes or less – how to make every word count.
However, we as songwriters would do well to listen to how good preachers craft a sermon. Think of the hours preachers spend in preparation to not only “know” the subject academically, but “know” it under the guidance of the Spirit, listening to that still small voice. We need to listen to how a preacher delivers with words that roll of the tongue like a lyrical melody of sound – the “rhythm” of preaching – and how the cadence fits the context. We also can learn from how preachers build a sermon, from the seed of the beginning to the grand finale at the end where it is all brought home in a great exclamation. Not only should we listen to sermons, we probably should read them as well – to see the construction, the development of thought, the use of literary devices, and the confidence with which a good sermon is preached.
We as songwriters should probably also go to preaching conferences and listen to good preaching as much as songwriters nights at the Bluebird.
Joy, I agree that a good story, well told, can entice us lift the veil off the intended message, stick in our memory, and change our lives. I always enjoy an authentic story told from a point of vulnerability, about an issue with which we all struggle, but we are afraid to admit. It gives us permission to enter the story ourselves and enjoy God’s intended outcome.
BTW, Enjoying Blue Hole Back Home – I’m proud of you Purple Paladin.
My sermons were usually related to what I heard in the community and from informal gatherins; I.e. people’s stories as their story relates to The Story. Phillis Provost, Bill Moyers’ “_he role of myth” as well as exegesis of the text all contribute to the story as I listen to the voices of life
Fred Craddock says all preachers need to sit in two chairs each week: and exegetical chair and a homiletical one. The first is a wooden ladder-back chair that requires you to sit up straight. The preacher sits here to do the serious work of digging into a biblical text, unearthing key points. There are no shortcuts to doing this kind of hard research. But the second is the La-Z-Boy recliner into which your bring all the fruits of the Exegetical Chair so as to lift those insights up into the light of the imagination. As a preacher, you now know what the text means. Now it’s time to do the equally hard work of connecting to the lives of your hearers by doing some dreaming, some whimsical free associating, so as to discover just the right image, anecdote, story, or analogy that takes wing into the present moment.
Craddock says neither chair exists without the other, and each properly informs the other, too.
For me, the verb, to “sit” in reference to these chairs is not adequate for the action required to produce “said story”– it’s something more like “sequester yourself– sink deep into the four-legged cavern– stay still until tingles ravage your ‘sitter,’ and panic overtakes your ‘thinker,’ and silence has confused your ‘feeler,’ and the passivity of waiting has become your only producer–
until slow-suddenly, that story leaps up and out in a motion you are sure you couldn’t have initiated, except your sense of the strange toll it took on you, it’s birth mother.”
Since I’m now on vacation and away from my computer, I’ll post a reply in a couple of days. Plus, postponing my response will give me a little more time to ponder your question.
I know you are wanting to hear about the preaching – the making of the sermon, but your writing made me ponder the difference in preaching for a movement of peace and justice from the whole community (which is what Martin Luther King, Jr. seem to do well) versus the preaching that aims at individuals to make a personal decision about how they are going to relate to their world and to their God. I wonder if our churches would be more moving and alive if they were challenged to respond more as community than as individuals. I am pondering that now. Thanks for giving my thoughts new food to chew.
Joy, thanks for stirring the sand. At the moment I am working on a book as well as the weekly sermons. I find that, for myself at least, it is necessary to surrender to two separate energies:
First, I need time and space for “moodling”, as Brenda Ueland put it: “long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
And second, sometimes a preacher/novelist/songwriter just needs to get swept up in the current — something bigger than ourselves. I always think of that (probably over-used) quote by Jack Keroac: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Yep. Both are necessary.
These are fabulous insights. All of you above write better and more insightfully in your blog comments than I do on most days of my professional writing life. Lots to ponder here…
Several things strike me. First, I have to have a definite direction, which usually means simplicity. I have mentored several lay licensed ministers, and I learned that, if they could not give me their sermons in single, simple sentences, I was doomed to hear sucky sermons.
Second, a lot of my sermon prep is intuitive – I have to get a feel for what’s going on in the biblical text and I have to get a feel for how to proclaim it.
This intuitive part includes a sense of flow – what I say in the sermon, as well as how I deliver it.
What I say is rarely difficult; how I say it is the hard part. Although our understandings and framings of the good news of Jesus change over our lifetimes and from one historical period to another, the basic story probably stays much the same; thus, how I frame it, shape it, reference it, and articulate it is important.
It is critically important to know my hearers. At one time, I wanted to give highly literate sermons in the way that Fosdick, Buttrick, and many others who were well known in the first sixty years of the 1900s gave, but, when one speaks to the needs and situations of people one personally knows, it is hard to be so literate. Unless, perhaps, one’s hearers are also highly literate and formal.
Often, I look for tensions and difficulties – not that I have to try; I simply do so by nature. Sometimes, my tension is with the biblical text; sometimes my tension is with my hearers; at other times, I try to give voice to the tensions that my hearers may have: “Jesus, if you weren’t the Second Person of the Trinity, you probably would not have said that!” “Paul, are you sure about that?” “Oh, writer of Genesis, how come my dad believes that I don’t believe you just because I also believe that most good physicists, astronomers, and paleontologists say that we’ve been around for a LONG time?” “John the Revelator, I hope that you, too, believe that the Left Behind series is goofy!” “Come on, people, you can’t be that holy! You’re no better or worse than gay people; besides, many of the best pastors I know are gay!” Eugene Lowry’s THE HOMILETICAL PLOT helped me years ago with this matter.
Because I would otherwise be an academic space cadet (I am a big-time INFP, MBTI speaking), I have to stay grounded in several ways. My three-year-old does that, as does being with my parishioners, even visiting with them at their homes and going trap shooting with them. Reading and listening to good preachers all the time helps me stay grounded in another way. (When I was in seminary, I discovered recordings of many good sermons and lectures. I listened to them and recorded them. I continue this habit, but now I hear many good sermons and lectures online. To help me know what recordings have, I have obsessively indexed all of them – about 20,000 of them when you count recordings, books of sermons, and various manuscripts of sermons that I have picked up from the many churches I have visited over the years – in a large computer database.) Also, I keep potential sermon thoughts and stories, whether they derive from my readings or from my personal experiences, in a computer database.
Your question, Joy, presumes that we write sermons. I took four classes in preaching at two different seminaries from four different professors. All four profs taught that we should write sermons, some even saying that we should include footnotes! I was in the habit of writing sermons because that is the way I had been trained. Then, one Sunday at my church in Philadelphia, I gave a pretty sucky sermon for the early service. I knew that I had to change it during the Sunday school hour. I did, but, of course, I could not write it down. The sermon that I preached for the second service was, it seemed to me, so much better, in part because I used a very different slant, in large part because I did not use notes. Even if one writes one’s sermons, preaching is a VERBAL art, a verbal performance; the manuscript is only a part of preaching. I’m surprised I didn’t catch on to this earlier because I had been studying for several years about the differences between liturgies that are written (such as those of Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans) versus those that are not (such as those that are often found amongst Baptists, Pentecostals, and others). The differences between writing/reading and speaking/listening are so great that I’m not so sure that you’ll find as many differences between the processes for writing novels and writing sermons as you will find between the processes for writing any work and giving verbal performances. Walter Ong was a very important contributor to this discussion, especially in the 80s and 90s, as were other contributors in the disciplines of folklore, classics, and even biblical studies. If you want what I humbly (!) consider to be a good summary of these differences (orality versus literacy), I’ll gladly e-mail you a Word document of an article that I wrote for liturgy journal.
These are my thoughts so far!
Joy,
What a wonderful and challenging question. For some reason, it is difficult for me to articulate the “how” of preaching or storytelling, but I’ll offer a few random thoughts here, for what they’re worth.
The whole process of creating a sermon is still a bit mysterious to me. I spend time studying, exegeting, reading commentaries. Then, during the week I have two different Bible studies that explore the text together. When Friday afternoon comes around, it’s time to compose. These days, I don’t write my sermons at all. If have found it works better for me for the whole process to be oral and not written. I pace around the house and “talk them out.” (Okay, so that visual is a bit embarrassing…). I’ve had a few experiences in my life when a sermon was just given to me, plopped into my lap in its entirety. (I have a songwriter friend who says that about some of her songs.) But most of the time, it’s more of a struggle, more work, more of a process.
When it comes to telling stories, my first approach is to invite people into the story of the Scripture text itself. Paint the picture of Jesus in the crowds or the Israelites in the desert. A lot of people feel unfamiliar with the Bible, and if I can get out of the way and let people walk around in the text themselves, then that’s what I want to do.
Another question I always keep in my mind is, “Will this make sense to the children? The teenagers? How can I say this in a way that they can understand and relate to?”
So, just a few thoughts on a Saturday morning. Thanks for asking the question. I love reading everyone’s thoughts.
Peace to you and yours,
Carol