WHAT follows are the five most valuable pieces of advice I have received from writers over the years. Since I have test-driven them myself, they have my handprints all over them, which include my biases about what makes a sermon alive or dead. I will let you decide what sounds helpful to you in your own particular situation, and what does not, but I am giving away most of my secrets today. If they work for you, then I hope you will give them away, too.
Establish a routine and stick with it
Wanting to be a writer and writing are two different things. The world is full of people who want to be writers. I know people who buy writers’ magazines, go to writers’ conferences, buy comfortable chairs to write in and lightweight computers to write on, without ever making a regular practice of writing.
There are all sorts of reasons for this. Some think that writing is a matter of inspiration. You don’t sit down until you feel like it. You don’t write until the muse comes to you, telling you — quick! — to catch the words she is pitching you before they fall to the ground. Until she does, you are free to continue thinking how wonderful it is to be a writer so exquisitely tuned to the elusive nature of your art.
Other would-be writers think that writing is a practical matter. You have to have an idea before you sit down to write. You have to know what you want to write about and who the audience will be — or better yet — who the publisher will be. You don’t sit down to write until you have a good beginning in mind. You don’t start until you have clarity of thought and purpose.
And finally, there are those who think that writing is a matter of having time to write. They save writing until they are through working, working out, throwing some dinner together, cleaning up, catching up on emails, helping the kids with their homework, walking the dog, doing a quick load of laundry, calling mom, watching the news just long enough to get the headlines, and — well, maybe there will be more time tomorrow, or next weekend, to sit down and write.
Clergy are no busier than other people, all in all. It is just that so much of our busyness gets mixed up with God. When other people don’t return phone calls, they are lax — but you, you risk pastoral negligence. When other people forget to visit a sick friend, they are busy — but you, you are an unfaithful shepherd.
No wonder your sermons can sometimes get so thin that you and everyone else can practically see through them. No wonder you are tempted to borrow someone else’s sermons, even when that amounts to borrowing someone else’s soul.
I remember when preachers were taught to set aside one hour of preparation for every minute of a sermon, which sounds ridiculous until it works. When you spend that much time, there is not only enough time to read and write but also enough time to look at the backs of your hands — thinking about the people you want to reach with your words, and why — letting God hold you while you imagine different ways to do that, which will include thinking about the people who have reached you with their words, and being grateful to them whether they are living or dead. If their words are still reaching you, can they ever be dead?
There is no substitute for this kind of time — no magazine, no conference, no chair, or computer. There is no substitute for establishing a routine and sticking to it — because this is how God deepens your soul, no matter what you call it: writing, composing a sermon, being in the divine presence, prayer — and you cannot do your work with a shallow soul.
Show, don’t tell
This is one of the first things any writing instructor tells her students. There you are trying to be Ernest Hemingway with your short, spare prose. “The woman is tired,” you write, going straight for the bottom line, but why should your readers believe you? You have told them something you apparently know about the woman, but you have not given them a chance to make up their own minds. You have kept the details entirely to yourself, so that their only choice is whether to believe you or not. Jesus is Lord. God is love. The gospel is true.
“Show them,” your teacher says. “Don’t tell them the woman is tired. Show them how tired she is.” This is much harder. Finding a way to help people see takes more time than telling them what you see. How do you know the woman is tired? What is it about her gait, her posture, her face, her breath that says “tired” to you? If you can find the right words, you may be able to help people name their own tiredness on their way to seeing just how tired this woman is.
“The woman looked as if she had been moving rocks all day, as if everything she had touched since the moment she got up had been heavy, hard, and grey.”
“The woman came through the door like a patient pushing an IV pole and fell into the first chair she saw.”
“A clump of the woman’s hair stuck to her damp cheek. When she lifted her hand to brush it away, she left a streak of dirt as dark as her eyes.”
It is easy to overdo this. You don’t want to show everything — just enough for your reader to make the announcement instead of you: that woman is tired. You give your listeners an active part in the making of meaning, and you trust them to know what to do with it. They may not connect the dots exactly the way you would, but that is the beauty of the exercise. You are giving them the same latitude that God gives you. All you get to do is show them something you hope they will see. They remain free to see what they see, as they join you in the act of bringing the Word to life.
“There is no lack of information in a Christian land,” Kierkegaard once said, “something else is lacking, and this is a something which the one man cannot directly communicate to the other.” When we show people what we mean instead of giving them our conclusions, we invite them into a charged space with us, where God can go on reminding all of us how the word becomes flesh.
Use body language
Given a choice between conceptual language and body language, trust the body. Language that appeals to the five senses is language that is able to work below the radar screen of reason, evoking lived experience in reader and listener alike that lasts long after the book, the story, or the sermon is over.
“All tactile things are doors to the infinite,” the poet, Charles Wright, said. “Poems are made up of details; good poems are made up of good details; great poems are made up of luminous details.” Body language is full of such details, appealing to the eye, the nose, the tongue, and the skin, as well as to the ear.
Such language has weight and scent to it, texture, and temperature. It does not tell you what to think. Instead, it describes lived experience so well that you cannot stop thinking about it. It gets the reality so right that you want to read it out loud to someone else, hoping that person will say, “Yes, that’s exactly right, isn’t it?” This springs you both from solitary confinement for a moment, delivering both of you from the fear that there is no one else in the world who sees what you see or feels what you feel.
Sometimes, when I am working on a biblical text, I take five coloured markers — one for each sense — and colour-code the words in the passage that appeal to each one. Plenty of words require two colours, the same way “cotton candy” does. At the feeding of the five thousand, the dried fish get at least three colours, for their taste, their feel, and their smell. I do not need to mention all three in my sermon, but all three make the fish real for me, a living bridge between that time and my time, between the hunger of those people and my own.
“If you desire God, hold fast to the world,” Bonhoeffer advised his preaching students. “We can neither understand nor preach the gospel tangibly enough. A truly evangelical sermon must be like offering a child a beautiful red apple or holding out a glass of water to a thirsty man and asking, ‘Wouldn’t you like it’?”
Welcome provocations
As unlikely as it sounds, provocations can be a writer’s best friend. By bumping you off the road most travelled, a provocation can show you things you could not see from the pavement.
When I first moved to the land where I live, I shared it with a herd of cows. The first thing I noticed was that they were white. The second thing I noticed was how predictable they were. With a hundred acres at their disposal, they had worn narrow paths across those acres to their favourite watering holes and clover patches. When they wanted to get from one of those places to another, they lined up single file and followed the tracks they had made across vast expanses of pasture.
Following those paths myself, I quickly discovered why. In the first place, I could see where I was putting my feet. This is a good thing when you share land with rattlesnakes and groundhogs. In the second place, the tracks marked the shortest routes from point A to point B, favouring long stretches under leafy tree lines wherever possible.
I do the same thing when I drive to town by the same route every time. That track is so ingrained in my muscle memory that on days when I mean to deviate from it — to run an errand or keep an appointment in another direction — I sometimes find myself a mile past the irregular turn before coming to my senses.
This is normal creaturely behaviour, which means that something extra is needed to override it. Why override it? Because, once you leave the cow path, the unpredictable territory is full of life. Since you cannot see where you are putting your feet, you cannot afford to remain unconscious. Since you cannot count on the beaten path to make all of your choices for you, you need to wake up and take a look around. Where are you? Where do you want to go? How many ways are there to get there and what might you see if you left the path?
For do-it-yourself provocations, ask every question you can think of about a text. What does it mean? What else could it mean? Why did it happen that way? What if it had happened another way? When you come to a passage whose meaning seems obvious, try reversing the meaning.
“Truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17.20 NRSVA). You know what that is supposed to mean, right? If we just tried harder, we could rearrange the landscape.
But what if Jesus did not mean for his disciples to succeed but to fail? What if he said that so that James and John and all the other masters-of-the-universe-in-training went off to practise moving mountains, failed dismally, and came back ready to learn what else faith might be good for?
I am not saying this is true. I am just saying that it is provocative.
You may be in a clergy group or weekly Bible study that provide some provocation, but in my experience the people who show up are not necessarily the people you want. You want people who haven’t learned how to domesticate the gospel. You want people who haven’t learned to neutralise their visceral reactions to sacred texts with a coating of historical criticism. You want children who ask all sorts of inappropriate questions, and respond to all of your answers with, “Why?”
Once you have decided to welcome provocations instead of defending yourself from them, you will think of other ways to leave the cow path. There really are snakes in the grass, but there are also treasure boxes for those willing to buy the whole field.
Don’t lie
Fiction writers don’t have this problem — unless they are plagiarising someone else’s fiction — but memoirists and preachers do. Our work hovers on the edge between art and truth. Like the first four Evangelists, we are charged with telling a true story, but not the same way a historian would tell it, or a journalist.
We tell it in a particular context, from a particular stance of faith. We tell it to people who are looking for more than entertainment, and who are hoping against hope they can trust us to tell them something with enough power to save their lives.
The pressure can become so great that some of us lose heart in our own words. We borrow other people’s words, filling our sermons with long quotations from other people’s work, or — worst case — lifting a whole sermon and passing it off as our own.
This is homiletical suicide — not only because most of our listeners can find the sermon on the web as easily as we did, but because they would not have gone looking in the first place if they had not sensed that something was wrong. The person they counted on to be a witness was tripping over words all of a sudden. The person they counted on to tell them the truth was suddenly speaking in an unfamiliar voice.
After I caught more than a few college students doing this, I started asking for writing samples at the beginning of the semester. “How do you know what you know about God?” I asked the students, giving them 20 minutes to handwrite their answers in class. In this way, I gained a sense of their voices, their vocabularies, their facility with English grammar. Later, when they turned in more formal papers, I had a baseline to measure them against — especially when a 19-year-old turned in a paper with “teleological” in it.
Eventually, I learned that the students who plagiarised were not the ones trying to hold on to their scholarships, or the ones who thought they had better things to do than write a paper. The students who plagiarised were the ones with no faith in themselves. They borrowed other people’s words because they did not think their own were good enough. They borrowed other people’s ideas because they did not believe that they had any that other people would be interested in hearing.
Sending them to the dean’s office turned out to be double tragedy — a consequence of their choices that cemented their reasons for making those choices in the first place.
Of course, plagiarising is not the only way a preacher can lie. We can also embellish our stories, making them turn out better than most real human stories ever do. I still remember the preacher who brought me to tears with his description of an unhoused person who had crossed his path with the force of an angel of God, saying something oracular to him and then vanishing into the crowd.
“What a story!” I said to him afterwards. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that before?”
“Well, it was kind of a composite,” he said. Composites aren’t crimes. Neither are stories you make up from scratch. Jesus did it all the time. He also cued his listeners first, so they would know what he was doing.
“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed . . .”
“What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them . . .”
“There was a man who had two sons . . .”
Once you have let your listeners know what you are doing, your imagination can take you (and them) to places you could not otherwise go. Neglect to clue them in and you have become a writer of fiction.
But the best reason not to lie is because what you have to say is what you have to say. People did not come to hear someone else. They came to hear you, because you are their reliable witness. You are the person who knows them, who likes them at least 51 per cent of the time, and who has consented to live your life with them even on the days when you don’t.
This makes you one of the very few people in their lives whom they are willing to listen to, even on the days when they don’t like you either. It’s a rare thing, especially these days. So, don’t ever let your fear of failure turn you into a fake.
Because you are the real deal. You are the ones who chose and were chosen, and you know what that means? You have everything you need.
Adapted from an address delivered at the US Festival of Homiletics.
Barbara Brown Taylor will be speaking at the Festival of Preaching, 15-17 September: festivalofpreaching.hymnsam.co.uk.