A RECIPE FOR A BAD SERMON (12/27/10)

For my last post in 2010, I want to say something about bad preaching.

I regularly listen to Dean Snyder at Foundry United Methodist Church in downtown DC, who is one of the best exegetical preachers I know.  In the last place I lived, I had two of the best preachers in America within a mile of my house: Wesley Wachob at First United Methodist Pensacola and Russ Levenson at Christ Episcopal.  (Levenson is now rector at St Martin’s in Houston.)  So maybe I am spoiled.

 But I heard a really bad sermon on Christmas Eve - in a location that shall remain blessedly undisclosed.  And I am still reeling from it.  And pondering how a pastor in a church that big could have an off-night of that magnitude.

So I want to offer a recipe - step by step instructions - for bad preaching.  I am not going to list ‘read a manuscript,’ as part of the recipe - because even though a lot of folks really butcher manuscript preaching - a lot of others do it really well, including all three of the folks I listed at the top of this page.

But here we go.

1.     Don’t spend too much time with the text.  Don’t dig around.  Don’t challenge your conventional first reading.  You are going to use the biblical text as a diving board anyway into whatever you want to talk about this week.
2.     Talk fast, because in your heart you are afraid that what you have to say will be boring.  Do not slow to a conversational pace - don’t do it!!!  Speed up your pace of delivery until it seems like you are tanked up on Red Bull, and you will be able to hold the attention of that listless audience out there.
3.     Tell stories and illustrations from the 1940s.  That is an era that almost nobody can remember, but the internet is full of sermon illustrations from that time.  Make them sappy if you can.
4.     Drop a bomb in the middle of the sermon - out of nowhere.  Like seagull poop right in the middle aisle.  Preemptive strike.  In the middle of the service when no one can talk back or ask a question!  On Christmas Eve the pastor did this brilliantly by jumping to endorsement of the new START Treaty, without assisting us in how this related to his text or his topic.  As this was a Southern city, he lost a third of his crowd at that moment - or I might should say, the third of the crowd still trying to follow him.
5.     End the sermon in an esoteric post-modern manner.  Just stop randomly.  Do not tie it up.  Its cooler this way.  Forbid that you should offer us an invitation to do something or to live differently.  Just stop your car in the middle of Main Street, get out, and walk across the chancel.  Leave the rest of us wondering, “What the hell just happened?”

Now there is the making of a wonderfully bad sermon.  Chill for 30 minutes and serve immediately.