I Read Sermon Books
By Walter B. Shurden
The siren warning blasted in seminary from all fronts: “Don’t read books of sermons.” I never believed them. So I never followed their advice. I thought it stark tomfoolery then and I do now 60 years later.
I know the temptation of plagiarism they feared. But I came to believe that all originality and no plagiarism, openly confessed, made for poor preaching. I also know that once someone gets a unique bead on a text that it is hard for me to tear myself away from that interpretation. But I ask: Why should I?
I am glad they required me in those late ‘50s and early ‘60s to drink from the deep theology of Tillich, Barth, Augustine, Anselm, Athanasius and Aquinas. But when they were not looking, I feasted on Riverside Sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, and books of sermons by Leslie Weatherhead (conservatives called him “Wesley Leatherhead”), and Carlyle Marney, among others.
As far as any of us knew in my generation, Don Harbuck, too soon taken from us by cancer, was the brainiest who ever graduated from New Orleans Seminary. He wrote his dissertation on Paul Tillich; but one day he whispered secretly in my ear the name of J. Wallace Hamilton. I eventually bought all of Hamilton’s books of sermons. What a preacher! Harbuck also pointed out to me that Tillich and Barth each had some good sermon books that no preacher should overlook.
As a 29-year-old pastor, I received weekly sermons from John Claypool at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and Ernest T. Campbell from The Riverside Church in New York City. In addition to teaching me about sermon-making and preaching (something they did not do a good job teaching or I did not do a good job of learning in seminary), they, along with sermons from Fred Craddock, kept my soul afloat and my mind alert. They were and still are prized possessions in my library, most of which I have given away.
I am an unapologetic and unrepentant connoisseur of sermon books. Any serious Christian, pew-sitter or preacher, layperson or theologian, who wants to grow her soul, should devour the two volumes of The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin.
I listened with amazement to Chuck Poole for nine years while he was my pastor. When he began publishing what I had already heard on Sunday mornings, I gobbled up his books, “Chuckology” we still call it at our church. To this day, I go online and read his sermons. Renewing and forceful, beautiful and challenging, Chuck Poole’s sermons lift and liberate. So do the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the incomparable Howard Thurman.
As my foregoing list would indicate, I have been highly selective in the sermon books I read. My sermon books are from theologians in the trenches–preachers who could have taught in anybody’s seminary, but who chose the pulpit for their outlet. They could talk theology in the classroom with the best of them; but they excelled at interpreting the ambiguities of the Christian life in the courtroom, the counseling room, the funeral room, the emergency room and the boardroom. Unless one can do that effectively, I have concluded, one’s theology may be little more than a head-trip aiming for tenure. It is difficult to find a better place to deepen devotion, hone theology or sharpen your ethical conscience than a good book of sermons.
All of this is to introduce you to Daniel Whitaker’s The Way of Christ: Its Toils and Its Joys. I once asked Roland Bainton, celebrated church historian at Yale Divinity School, to name his most successful students. “Oh, these Nobel prizes people want me to hand out,” he complained. “Who knows? It may be an unknown pastor who labored for 35 years in the small parish in some out-of-the-way village in New Hampshire.”
Dan Whitaker never served as an archbishop in Baptist life, presiding over some big-steeple church and owning a television ministry of regional influence. Rather, he faithfully served as pastor at Westside Baptist Church in Gainesville, FL, First Baptist Church, Ringgold, GA, and First Baptist Church, Forsyth, GA. But how fortunate those three churches!
Read these 14 sermons and you can easily guess that he majored in literature at Stetson University. Note his biblical and theological sources, never ostentatiously worn on his sleeves, and you will not be surprised that he paid close attention at both Southeastern and Southern seminaries as he wound his way through all the theological disciplines toward a Ph.D. in New Testament. His well runs very, very deep, exceedingly wide, and every pail you bring up offers fresh, living water, slaking the thirst of the parched heart.
Of these 14 sermons, “All’s Lost” and “All’s Found,” chapters two and three of the book, come closest to “Whitakerology.” But others such as “Gratitude Is a Choice,” “Interrupted by Praise,” “Heaven’s Gate Was Open Wide,” and “She Has Done What She Could” made me wish I had said that.
Several features of Whitaker’s sermons arrest me. First, his theology, rather than slapping you down, slips upon you. In speaking of Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem and human freedom, he says, “I know of no doctrine of predestination that spans the distance between Jesus’ ‘I would’ and Jerusalem’s ‘would not’.” And of our sin, he concludes, “Paul sees all mankind caught in a mysterious, dark undertow that sucks us, even against our will, into our own individual renditions of Adam’s trespass.”
Of the literary nature of Genesis: “It never poses as empirical historical research, like some modern epidemiologist seeking to track down the actual spinach farm that triggered a national outbreak of E-coli.”
Second, he lets his illustrative material, voluminous and valuable, carry the weight of his affirmations. He makes his point quickly, and rather than continuing in didactic, philosophical fashion, he lets his stories, some of which are gorgeously corn-pone and his apt literary quotations, perform the exposition. Here is a golden lesson for all preachers, young and old. Transform spiritual insights into stories. Make your point. Tell a good story. Move on. People listen to that kind of preaching.
Third, he almost always keeps in mind that another sermon exists on the other side of the one he is preaching. Though celebrating our newfound and glorious humanity in Christ by saying, “All’s Found,” he reminds us that, “Becoming what we are is the painful, laborious work of a lifetime.” Affirming Jeremiah’s belief in a new beginning for all of us in the story of the potter who remade a piece of marred pottery, he notes that the analogy breaks down with human beings. The clay has no choice in being remade, but the human must consent.
Four, he has a doxological way of bringing some of his sermons to a conclusion. In a most practical sermon titled, “A Call to Kindness,” he ends by claiming that our kindness comes from God’s measureless reserves of grace and kindness. His last line: “All hail to heaven’s bank!” In a clever reading of Romans, he spots Paul interrupting his theological and ethical letter with several outbursts of praise. Whitaker closes his sermon with this admonition: “In the gray hum-drum, in the monotony of days without lift or lilt, who knows? Maybe praise lies hidden somewhere. Let it break in!”
There is a poet here. Whitaker is also a theologian, a biblical expositor, a church historian, a Christian ethicist, and a savvy reader of human nature. Novelist Gustave Flaubert advised a friend about how to read Montaigne, the essayist: “Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.”
I have read the sermons of Fosdick, Weatherhead, Marney, Campbell, Claypool, Craddock, Coffin, Tillich, Barth, Poole, King, Thurman and now Whitaker that way. They help me live.
Non-celebrity that he is, Whitaker’s book will not be found at Harper’s, John Knox, or even Smyth-Helwys. It came from Rocky Comfort Press. You are able to order from Amazon.com by typing in “Whitaker, The Way of Christ.” Cost is $9.95, plus shipping. If you enjoy it half as much as I, you will get your money’s worth.
— Walter Shurden is Minister at Large, Mercer University.
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