What is the Point of the Sermon?

It was Søren Kierkegaard who once observed, in a manner that was both characteristically intense and less than pellucid that “anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy”.  I was moved to recall this comment by a recent sermon, which then prompted the wider question of just what the point is of the sermon as such a key structural fixture in most of our liturgies? 

One rather modern –and perhaps rather Protestant– way to respond  would take us straight back to Kierkegaard, for it would see the Sermon as a way of addressing our prevailing anxieties, and yet more exactly our religious anxieties, be they personal or societal. To frame things in such a way is very definitely modern and fits rather well with a fundamentally therapeutic notion of what the church itself is about. This purpose is, by implication,  improvement be that of wider society or ourselves individually.

Here, the Kierkegaardian insight is to see this as a project fundamentally driven by anxiety –something he had a lifetime of experience to draw upon, since he seems forever to have been possessed by the chronic and disquieting feeling that something not so good was about to happen. As he put it in a diary entry, “All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable, I most of all..” But he then went on to add a very theologically laden and very dark perspective by observing that, “to me all existence is infected, I most of all. My distress is enormous, boundless; no one knows it except God in heaven, and he will not console me….”

One contemporary commentator responded brightly to this by asking, “Is there any doubt that were he alive today he would be supplied with a refillable prescription for Xanax?”  Such a response tells us yet more about the unwillingness to engage seriously with the deeper challenges of life that much of our contemporary culture embraces! 

Sidestepping theological anxiety, however, will not do. And it was to his very great credit that one of the fruits of Kierkegaard’s entire life was his concern to deliver the antidote to such reckless escapism. As he went on to write:

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (See Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety)

And what is meant by this is that, in an important respect, our emotions may not always be an impediment to reason as a cognitive datum but rather comprise a reality impelling us to discern and grapple with the truth.  

Here there is however a deeper and specifically Christian point to be made, which is that, as Jesus Christ himself famously declared (John 8, 31), “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”.

This declaration is very different from that of much “Existentialism,” which wants to say instead that it is in our anxiety that we come to understand feelingly that we are free, in the (bizarre) sense that the possibilities are endless, we can do what we want — be that to jump off the cliff or whatever!  Such a concept of freedom is merely one reduced to the maximisation of choice in the face of nothingness and ultimate entropy. This could not be more different from the meaning behind the declaration of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel where the wider text reads:

If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;  and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

In our present culture, anxiety is usually seen as a symptom and a problem to be fixed –chemically if need be. Kierkegaard, by contrast, saw that “Only a prosaic stupidity maintains that this (anxiety) is a disorganization”. And while anxiety can indeed lead to all manner of what psychologists would call “maladaptive behaviors,” from drinking on to far worse, all these actions are but attempts to avoid dealing with reality. And that was what led Kierkegaard to say that “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate,” since that opens the door to the hard work of engaging truth.

And this brings us right back to what is the true end or telos of every Sermon. 

The sermon as a distinct form within Christian worship actually has its roots –as with so many aspects of liturgy– in the Jewish homily which was delivered in the synagogue, as the Bible illustrates repeatedly in the unfolding of Jesus’ own ministry. The reading of Scripture was traditionally followed by an explanatory and exhortatory address. And this darshanim tradition of expounding Torah provided the immediate liturgical context in which Jesus himself preached (Luke 4:16–21).

The apostolic addresses preserved in Acts share many structural features with this prior model. 

As Hughes Oliphant Old has argued in the vast work: The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (7 vols., 1998–2010), the earliest Christian preaching was fundamentally a form of prophetic proclamation rooted in the typological interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. 

And when we come to the Pauline letters we see traces of this but then also a sophisticated oral and rhetorical tradition that was shaped by both Jewish and Hellenistic conventions.  (See on this C. Clifton Black and Duane Litfin in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period. ed. Stanley Porter, 1997).

It was in fact one of the defining characteristics of the early patristic period (c. 100–600) that Christian preaching clearly emerged as an actual literary rhetorical and theological art. And this reflects the further fruits of engagement with the arts of Greco-Roman rhetoric. 

We see in Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254) also the tradition of exegesis verse-by-verse analysis of Scripture — with the homilia then as a running. Chrysostom (c. 347–407), whose very name Chrysostomos (“Golden-Mouthed”), signaled his preeminent reputation as a speaker brought this expository tradition to its zenith in the East, combining painstaking philological attention to the text with urgent moral and social application. And in his De Sacerdotio (On the Priesthood), we find one of the earliest treatments of preaching, which makes clear that for the early Eastern church the sermon was from the first a defining priestly activity.

In the West, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) provided both a theological and a rhetorical theory of preaching. Book IV of his De Doctrina Christiana (c. 426) constitutes a systematic treatment of Christian homiletics, deftly appropriating the Ciceronian rhetoric (in which he had been brought up educationally) for ecclesial purposes, while insisting that the preacher’s ultimate aim is not eloquence but, as with the message of St. John, primarily the communication of truth and the movement of the will toward God. 

Pope Gregory I (c. 540–604), whose Regula Pastoralis addresses itself almost entirely to the preacher’s vocation, extended this tradition and ensured its transmission into the medieval West. And while that initial Gregorian insistence on preaching’s centrality was formally acknowledged, the centuries that followed, and the Carolingian reforms notwithstanding, saw a tendency for the sermon to retreat from something addressed at all to something more often set out to the learned in choir — a process hastened as Latin became increasingly inaccessible to ordinary worshippers and the sacred drama of the Mass itself became the dominant locus of attention and sacred action. 

Where things changed again was with the recovery of preaching brought about by the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century onwards. The Franciscans and Dominicans were constitutionally committed under their founding purposes, as Religious Orders, to the work of popular proclamation and this was clearly transformative. 

And in parallel, we then find such figures as Berthold of Regensburg and Thomas of Chobham (in his Summa de Arte Praedicandi c. 1220) setting out the ars praedicandi as a formal discipline. The further artes praedicandi manuals, (See James J. Murphy in Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1974)), specified structures such as the thema, prothema, divisio, and subdivisio — thus establishing a highly schematic, scholastic form of sermon where the composition prioritised logical subdivision over exegesis and wider rhetorical efficacy.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century next famously produced a further revolution in the theology and practice of preaching, the consequences of which have continued to shape the entire Western Church, both Catholic and Reformed. 

This reflected the impetus that so moved Luther, for whom preaching the word was the primary means by which the living and transforming Christ was encountered; indeed, it can he held that his theology of the verbum externum gave the sermon a quasi-sacramental status. For Calvin, the faithful preaching of Scripture was of a piece with the Word of God through the illuminating Spirit speaking internally to the hearer through the external human voice of the minister. 

Hence the physical rearrangements that followed in churches, as the sermon accordingly moved to the liturgical centre, often displacing the altar – with the pulpit at the architectural heart of the Reformed church building.

The Anglican experience in response to all this was – as ever—unique. Certainly, the peculiar character of the English Reformation, comprising as it did a settlement, that held in some tension competing theological and ecclesiological perspectives with a homiletical via media emerging that was distinctive.

The most structurally significant early Anglican contribution to preaching came through the creation of the Books of Homilies — the first in 1547 under Cranmer, the second in 1563. These were authorised collections of model sermons to be read from the pulpit by clergy, who were evidently deemed insufficiently learned at times or theologically reliable, to be left to their own devices. 

The Homilies served simultaneously as instruments of doctrinal formation, Reformation propaganda, and devotional instruction, and their authority was built into the formularies: Article XXXV of the Thirty-Nine Articles commends them as “godly and wholesome” doctrine. This system institutionalised preaching as a mechanism of doctrinal constraint and evidently needed theological support in the face of academic inadequacy amidst many parish clergy.

But it was arguably the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries which produced a generation of Anglican preachers of special distinction and variety. 

Hugh Latimer (c. 1487–1555) represented the evangelical, vernacular, prophetic strand — his sermons, notably the “Sermon on the Plough” (1548), are colloquial, combative, and deeply Erasmian and possessed of a satirical edge. 

Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), as Bishop of Winchester, and one of the leading translators of the King James Bible, developed a style of preaching entirely rather different from the Reformed Continental tradition. His XCVI Sermons (published posthumously in 1629) are densely learned, patristically saturated, and formally complex — employing the classical sermon’s divisio but pushing it towards a positively baroque elaboration through extended word-play, etymological analysis, and multilingual citation of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. 

T. S. Eliot famously identified in Andrewes an “ordonnance” and “relevant intensity” that set him apart from the “atmospheric” religiosity of John Donne. His style was certainly not that of the plain expository style of Calvinist preaching, nor however was it the scholastic kind of elaboration that characterised some of the Counter-Reformation Catholic homiletics. It was rather in a very Anglican manner learned, literary, patristically grounded while also inhabiting the rhetorical world of classical humanism.

John Donne (1572–1631), Dean of St. Paul’s, represents a different but equally characteristic Anglican mode: the metaphysical style, in which theological argument, devotional passion, and rhetorical extravagance combine in a form that is both homiletic but also unmistakably literary in a style of prose of a high rhetorical order. 

Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) extended this tradition into the Caroline period; his XXV Sermons and theoretical work, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, represent the Anglican sermon at its most richly devotional yet once again one which at its heart addresses both the quest for and presentation of truth that we see as at the heart of the Gospels, while also recognising the importance of personal transformation along the way – something that takes us right back to that opening insight of Soren Kierkegaard.