Over the last nearly ten years I have had the privilege of writing more than forty “For Pastor” columns in this space. But with Reformed Worship’s transition to an online-only format, this will be the last such column.
In my first column, way back in RW 117, I wrote:
Very often when talking to students about their upcoming preaching careers, I remind them that no single sermon is remembered for very long. Even sermons that go over well and that garner lots of wonderful comments at the narthex door sooner or later—and it’s very often sooner—fade from people’s memories. What sticks for people is the pattern of any given preacher’s sermons. What are the themes that get hit again and again, week to week and month after month? What words, phrases, emphases, and priorities build up in the congregation like a lovely residue over time? Those are the things—far more than individual sermons—that shape the congregation’s lived-out theology.
—Scott Hoezee, “Missional Preaching for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany,” Reformed Worship 117, © September 2015, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Used by permission.
Looping back to that in my final column seems fitting. Beyond whatever specific thoughts on preaching I conveyed in any given issue of RW, what I hope has stuck with you is the overarching theme of how vital I deem preaching to be in Christ’s church. The first thing that happened after the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost was a sermon, and subsequently in the book of Acts there are about as many sermons as there are chapters in the book. There has never been an era in the history of the Christian church when preaching was not a central part of worship. Lengths, formats, and styles of preaching have varied from time to time and from tradition to tradition, but there has never been a time or place where someone concluded, “I think we can do without preaching.”
Preaching has endured across the millennia, and the reason seems plain enough: the Holy Spirit likes to work through the sermon. It was how the Spirit got things rolling on Pentecost, and nothing about the Spirit’s work has changed since that day. Preaching has persisted not because the majority of sermons in history have been so stellar. Indeed, the church has always had to contend with preaching that may qualify as weak or dull. But somehow the Spirit gets things done even in those situations because, as Neal Plantinga often observes, when the Holy Spirit of God is blowing in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning as the sermon is being proclaimed, you never know what might happen.
Rev. Fred Rogers—better known as children’s television host Mister Rogers—once related the anecdote of having sat through a sermon one Sunday morning that he deemed less than effective. Rogers turned to the person sitting next to him to convey as much when he was stopped in his tracks: his neighbor in the pew had tears streaming down her face, having been moved and comforted by that very same sermon.
Experienced preachers also know that a preacher will somewhat regularly be thanked by someone for something the preacher did not say. There is a sense in which no sermon ever delivers only one message. By the Spirit, people hear as many different versions of the sermon as there are people listening to it in the sanctuary. Preaching matters, and the church has survived centuries’ worth of subpar sermons because somehow this is the vehicle through which the Spirit builds up faith and thickens our union with Christ. Preaching challenges us, preaching consoles us, preaching teaches us, preaching comforts us, preaching convicts us. Preaching keeps the good news of the gospel in front of a world desperate for something to hold on to.
Preaching is particularly needed in this season of fierce divisions and conflicts around the world. Preaching has never been easy, and perhaps it’s not supposed to be. But many pastors say they are navigating some especially difficult sociopolitical and cultural shoals of late. Yet I contend that the very things that make preaching a bit perilous today are exactly why preaching remains so vitally important for the church. In a world where everything seems up for grabs, in a time when so much is shifting beneath our feet, people everywhere need to hear over and over that old, old story of Jesus and his love. In these disorienting times, we desperately need the reorientation that can come when we encounter afresh the living word of God in preaching.
One of the themes of this final print issue of Reformed Worship is crossing thresholds. Indeed, we seem to be living in a liminal moment. Following the COVID pandemic and in a time of great political turmoil, we have this sense of leaving behind a world we once knew and crossing a threshold into a future whose exact contours are by no means clear. We may never get back to how things once were. The disruptions we have experienced in the last decade will (we hope and pray) eventually even out. But what the new world we pass into will look like is not clear.
Our primary hope is that what will endure from one time period to the next is the holy word of God. The gospel has survived times of persecution as far back as the Roman Empire. The gospel has survived the era of the catacombs. The gospel has survived the bubonic plague, world wars, holocausts, slavery, racism, tyranny, communism, socialism, and every other thing you could name as a historical epoch. The faithful preaching of God’s word and Christ’s gospel is not the only reason the truth of God and the hope of Christ Jesus our Lord have survived. But preaching certainly has played a big role in keeping the bright and beautiful things of God before the watching eyes of an oft-weary world.
This “For Pastors” column is coming to an end, but Reformed Worship will continue to find ways to support preaching because the need for faithful heralds of the word will never end until such time as the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth the way the waters cover the seas, until that time when no one will have to teach their neighbor about Jesus Christ because every knee will already be bowing to and every tongue will already be confessing Jesus as Lord. Especially as we cross thresholds into new worlds, we will continue to declare in public worship, “The word of the Lord,” and God’s people will always respond, “Thanks be to God.”