Steven Hovater

Tag: Preaching

  • What Is a Sermon?

    “Sermon” is a common enough word, and it’s used in lots of different ways. We gain something by examining the word a little more clearly though.

    In my view, a sermon is a moment that occurs when a person leads a worshipping congregation in listening to the word of God. That definition excludes some things that we commonly call sermons, but puts a little more shape on the essence of the practice.

    First, note that what I’m calling the sermon refers to the moment itself; the moment in which the congregation receives the word of God. There is a distinction between the moment itself and a couple of things which we might commonly call a sermon, such as the manuscript that is used to prepare for the moment, or perhaps an audio recording of the moment. Those things are artifacts of the moment, but they are not the thing itself.

    The thing itself is the moment when the word is preached and received by a worshipping, gathered church. That context is the second critical feature, and it is at the heart of the difference between a sermon and an essay, or even a speech. A sermon is a moment shared by a group of believers who are worshipping—they’re engaging in the practice of submitting themselves to God. They are particularly primed to receive the word because of their worship posture, and the presence of the spirit in the congregation.

    This “moment” based description of the sermon’s essence also holds another way that sermon differs from other speech acts: because it is in the context of worship, it is given in a space in which all present—speaker and hearers—are subjecting themselves to God. The preacher is just as subject to the word proclaimed in the sermon as the hearers. The word is for the whole gathered church, including the preacher! Indeed, the same spirit which moves the preacher to preach is also moving the church to receive the word! As a part of the congregation, the preacher does not stand apart, delivering a word as an outsider. Rather, it is as a part of the body that the preacher speaks, and necessarily the preacher must receive the sermon along with the rest of the congregation.

    I know it’s quibbling, but If someone sends me a document, and says “Hey, read this sermon.”, in my own head I think it’s important to expand the shorthand a bit, because I don’t think that technically, I can read the sermon either before or after it’s moment. I can read the manuscript of the sermon, and I think maybe very usefully. But it’s not the same as the thing that happens when the church gathers together, and listens for a word from God.

  • Technology is Pedagogical

    (Or: Why I Made a Sermon Design App.)

    The tools that you use to do a task shape the way you think about the nature of the task.

    This is not a new insight. After all, most people have heard the axiom: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

    That principle is part of the reason for the coding work I’ve done adjacent to my work as a minister. I wanted to dive into the process of tool-building, because it helped me better understand the nature of the work itself. Sermon Design was the first foray into trying to build a tool for myself and my colleagues. A couple of observations led me into that rabbit hole.

    If I went about the work of trying to create a sermon in a word processor, then I tended to approach the sermon like it was an essay. I wrote the sermon, making choices of style and rhetoric like a writer. I would use very precise language, which is fine, but the language was often dense—something that helps good writing feel powerful, but makes oral delivery feel heavy and heady. A densely written sermon often comes off as too intellectual in the actual moment of its delivery. They are harder to listen to because the hearer has to process everything as quickly as it is read, and sermons written like that often don’t give the hearer the chance to process. Writing for speaking requires a great amount of experience if the spoken word is to feel natural in the moment.

    There’s much more to be said about the differences between written and spoken media, but for my purposes here, I want to simply note that the tool for writing—the word processor—subtly influences the kind of thing produced in the end. Indeed, different kinds of word processing apps probably influence the process sin their own way—Word, Pages, and Google Docs1 all exert slightly different bits of influence on the writers that use them.

    On the other hand, sometimes I’ve thought through what I want to do in a sermon by plotting it directly in slide design software. My app of choice is Keynote, but the general influence of building a sermon there will be similar to using its siblings PowerPoint, Google Slides, or something like Canva2. Depending on the version of the software and the preacher’s usage, it may train the preacher to think about the sermon as a sequence of points, or perhaps as a presentation of information. That sort of process will tend to create sermons with flow and structure, but which may be much looser in their detail.

    I’ll leave it to the reader to consider whether “sermon as essay” or “sermon as presentation” is better, but the point is that the kind of tool used to prepare the sermon will heavily influence what the sermon becomes. That observation is what drove me to really consider trying to create a tool that reflected the kind of process that would lead to the kind of sermon I wanted to create.

    The process of coding forced me to slow down and consider what a sermon actually is. It was a vehicle for exploring how the process of creating it contributes to what it eventually becomes. It made me think of where a sermon comes from, from the initial space of discerning what our church’s preaching schedule should look like to the release of the manuscript that will become the preacher’s guide in the moment of the sermon itself. It tries to honor the process of carefully listening to the text and considering the process of building rhetoric for the specific purposes of a sermon.

    In some ways, the app that resulted from that process of coding and reflecting is aspirational. It’s a process I’m reaching towards each week, even if the various stages are somewhat incomplete. The app is also pretty idiosyncratic, meaning that it reflects my ideal process, not necessarily anybody else’s. This app is sort of my contribution to homiletical instruction; it’s a sort of tutor in the process of creating a sermon.

    To mix axioms, I wouldn’t argue that everyone needs to reinvent the hammer. You don’t have to learn to code to consider the tools you use and the influence they have on you. But I do think that process of discerning the way we approach our work can give us insight into the work itself. Ideally, we come out of that process making sure that our proper task is being pursued with proper tools, instead of thoughtlessly letting the technologies available to us, in vogue at the moment, drive the way we go about the work of preaching.

    Sermon Design 3 is an app for creating intentional sermons. It’s available on the macOS and iOS app stores.

    1. There are many more, of course. For example, I’ve used Ulysses, a minimalist WP for years. Ironically, it took me a second to know how to insert a footnote here because I’m writing in my blog’s web editor, and the feature was buried. I almost gave up, which would have been an example of the tool and its assumptions changing what I wanted to create! This happens all the time, where the tool subconsciously shapes the product by making some things easier and some things harder. ↩︎
    2. Again, though I’m speaking of the broad effect of this kind of app, the particularities matter! The features that each of these apps brings to the front, and which are buried will subtly influence the way the preacher thinks about the nature of the sermon being created. ↩︎

  • Homiletical Mirror-talk: Cleaning the House

    Cleaning-the-House.001.jpg

    Homiletical Mirror-talk: Cleaning the House(I’m working on doing a bit of analysis on my own preaching, as a way of improving. So this is kind of like a preacher doing film-study…I want to catch the places where I need improvement, and also just be able to look back and learn from the sermons themselves.)I’ve been working on migrating this site, and part of the process for doing so has meant moving over a bunch of sermon files. I’m trying to do a bit of archival work on some of those, so I can have easier access to them later. While I’ve been doing that, I’ve been listening to a few of my own sermons, which I think is an underutilized practice for most preachers, myself included. Doing some reflective critique on your own recordings can be an intensely formative exercise. (Also, doing so with another person! Basically, I’m in favor of most forms of intentional reflection.)Cleaning the House.001 This morning, I listened to a sermon from this summer, called “Cleaning the House” (July 20, 2014). It’s from the Luke series, and revolves around the episode in Luke 19:41-48 where Jesus laments over Jerusalem and then clears the temple. I chose to include that lament with the temple story, rather than with the preceding account of the triumphant entry, because I think together the lament and the temple clearing create a fierce critique of the power plays of Jerusalem. Here’s the sermon audio:Here’s a little bit of what I see in the sermon, looking back.

    1. There’s a lot of wind-up. I chose to illustrate the idea of “Place as symbol” in multiple ways, and I think there might be a layer too many. I think it works okay, but I probably could have pared that down to be more efficient without really losing too much of the punch. As it is, it takes a while to really get to the heart of the text. The sermon weighs in at 27 minutes, and it could have perhaps lost 5 here.
    2. This sermon is a bit pedagogical, and relies on a nuanced interpretation of the text. While I generally avoid selling the exegesis in the sermon, I think in a case like this it’s a little more important. I think one of the places this sermon needed a little more was in showing how the temple was a symbol that carried multiple meanings (as a sign of economic oppression, for instance). It’s implicit in the sermon, but I’m not sure if it would have really carried for someone who wasn’t already on board with that particular interpretive line.
    3. I think the bit towards the end where it moves to talking about prayer as dependence on God is pretty useful. I also like that it returned to that piece of the text with the language of “the things that make for peace”. I think that the sermon gives that phrase the space to have some resonance. Ultimately, that’s the kind of thing I think I’m trying to do with a lot of my preaching…carve out some space for the text to echo around in, letting it play and find a place to do some formative work.

  • Powerless Preacher, Powerful Word

    I think every preacher worth more than his salt has a memory chest full of moments like mine from this past Sunday.  It had been a tight week, the sermon had puzzled me all week, and when it was finally together, I wasn’t particularly pleased with it. I never really came to a sermon structure I particularly liked, and the sermon teetered between being too simplistic and useless and overly dramatic and bullyish. It was a tricky sermon to get out, partly because the text (Luke 6:27-36) is so raw that it seemed to be defying me to do anything but read it slowly.  It didn’t want to be massaged or tweaked, it just wanted me to listen to it.Anyway, whatever the cases for my unease, I just didn’t feel like I had my A-game that day.  I just wasn’t feeling great about what I had put together.But nonetheless, people were, in that instance still able to hear the Word of God in the sermon moment.  I felt like I was at my least effective moment, but the effect of the word was clearly felt by many in the church.Look, count me among the people that gets a little gagged when I hear things like “God really showed up!” when we talk about stuff like this.  I usually don’t like it because it feels really trite and cutesy.  I’m not a robot, but I just don’t like that kind of emotional stuff.  It’s probably because I really value intentionality and control.But this past week was one in which I really did feel as though the power of the word of God was functioning in a powerful way in our community, regardless of my performance.  For someone that flirts with hubris, that’s a good thing.  (I have a website with my name in the domain, people.  I’m more vain than I should be. If I didn’t realize I had arrogance issues, that would be an issue.) It’s a good thing to realize that preaching, even when I am practicing my craft well, isn’t really about how well I perform.  Preaching is about how honest I am with the word, and how well people hear the word. So, this week I want to do the best I can, but I know that the best part of the sermon won’t be some cute saying I made up with or any smoking hot exegesis.  It’ll be in the moments with the Word, when we simply listen together to the Word.That’s where the power is.  That’s where the power has always been.

  • Sermon on the Plain—Cedar Lane Edition

    This past Sunday’s sermon was our introductory foray into the sermon on the plain, an extremely distilled dose of Jesus’ vision of what his disciples are like. Part of the challenge of this past week’s sermon was to get in a mirror, eyeball to eyeball with ourselves, and think about three questions:1. Who am I becoming?2. Who decides who I become?3. How does Jesus’ message change the way I see other people?I shot a little video of some Cedar lane folks reading through Jesus’ sermon on the plain, as a way of helping us hear it.  I want to invite you to settle in, hear these words, and spend some time meditating on those questions. May God bless the hearing of his word.