The Sermon as the Center of Baptist Worship
The Second Warren Carr Lecture on Preaching
First Baptist Church; Elkin, North Carolina
Ralph C. Wood
I have argued that we live in a time of famine, a famine of the preaching and the hearing of God’s Word. I have summoned us to be less busy doing and less noisy talking in order that we might become hearers of the Word, but that we will not be able to hear unless we have preachers who believe that their first and last call is to proclaim the Gospel. Everything else derives from this fundamental fact that we cannot hear and know Jesus Christ without the proclamation of his Word by authentic preachers: “How shall they hear without a preacher?” For this reason I hope that churches will learn to speak again of the Pulpit Committee rather than the Pastor Search Committee, since the pastor’s many other responsibilities and privileges spring from and center upon this pulpit-act of preaching.
My aim in this lecture is to show that worship is the proper context for the hearing of God’s Word, and that the sermon lies at the center of our worship as Baptists. This is not true for other traditions. Catholics and Orthodox, Episcopalians and even Lutherans, have a fixed liturgy as the heart of their worship. Like Methodists and Presbyterians, all these traditions also have the creeds to carry the weight of worship. We have no formally prescribed liturgy, and we do not recite the creeds. We often suffer, therefore, from a liturgical lack. Our services of worship frequently have a homemade air and rather crude quality about them. We need to do better by way of our pastoral prayers and congregational responses, so that they are not mere off-the-cuff effusions. Notice how predictable and trite most “spontaneous” prayers prove to be: “We thank Thee, O Lord, for the privilege of gathering in thy house on this beautiful day (even if it is raining cats and gerbils!) to worship Thee…” etc.
The congregation needs also to be carried into the presence of God by the choir’s anthems and the congregation’s singing. Worshipful music should thus complement the sermon rather than displacing it, as so often happens in our time. Our classic hymns must not be abandoned, chiefly because they serve as our Baptist creeds, the real carriers of our beliefs. When I find myself in a moment of extraordinary glory or terrible crisis, it is the hymns of Watts and Wesley, of Fanny Crosby and B.B. McKinney, that come pouring forth. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “I Know Whom I Have Believed,” “O Jesus, I Have Promised,” “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand.” This explains why the displacement of traditional hymns by so-called praise music has such deadly theological consequence. Our people will eventually come to have a faith, I fear, that is as trite as our music. True preaching, by contrast, should always find its appropriate echo and reinforcement in hymns and anthems that glorify rather than trivialize God.
It’s interesting that Scripture lays such great stress on hearing rather than seeing God. Notice well the biblical claim that no man shall see God and live. From Adam and Abraham to Noah and Malachi, nearly every major Old Testament character hears God, though none ever sees him, except Moses-who spies only God’s hind end as He passes by, while Moses is hid in the cleft of the rock. So it is in the New Testament: there we who are the new Jews called Christians are instructed to walk by faith rather than by sight, to listen to God rather than to behold him face to face. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). Only in the life to come will sight of the holy God bless rather than destroy us. It is in “this hope [that] we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it in patience” (Romans 8:24-25).
Why is God invisible? Wouldn’t it be better if God were palpable, so that we could see and touch him, and thus know that He is real and not merely imagined? Most pagan religions indeed make their gods visible by creating statues and images of them. In Acts 17, we hear that the Athenians have erected an idol even to an unknown God. Such visibility is what the God of Israel and Jesus Christ expressly forbids: Thou shalt not make a graven image of me. God wants to be heard rather than seen. A visible God would be a tyrant. There would be no room for faith or trust, no place for doubt or struggle, if God were open to view. The young Samuel does not request, therefore, that God show himself. Such a sighting would make Samuel’s obedience compulsory rather than voluntary. “Speak, Lord,” we hear Samuel pleading, “and thy servant heareth.” A visibly undeniable God would be a dictatorial deity. And we would hate him for being such a silent Bully.
There may be a strange link between the decline of audibility and the rise of unbelief. Ours is a supremely pagan and thus a supremely visual culture. Almost everything important comes to us through the eye, almost nothing through the ear. It is not by chance that rock music issued in MTV: it is not sufficient to hear but also to see erotic music enacted. That the lyrics are mangled and indecipherable does not matter. Gyrations and other visual stimuli take their place. The literary critic Irving Howe once said that we Americans have become virtual mushrooms: we grow only in the dark, by the light of a flickering screen. George Will doubts whether we grow very much. Will once observed that there is more mental work in reading any cheap Harlequin romance or detective thriller than in watching the most sophisticated movie. Film is a lazy and passive medium insofar as it requires no imaginative labor but forms our images for us. Such sensory bombardments enervate both the intellect and the imagination. Because we are the passive recipients of such relentless stimuli, we come to believe that the rest of the world operates in similar fashion-passively-and thus that whatever is, is right. All moral and religious discernments and distinctions thus are glazed over by a film of visual stimuli.
In the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis speaks of the dread modern triumph of the eye over the ear. The cosmetic and fashion and advertising industries celebrate this mighty victory of seeing over hearing, as we come to have increasingly superficial notions of beauty and attractiveness. It is not the human face that reveals our souls, Lewis insists, so much as it is the human voice. Thus do I encourage my students to fall in love not only (or even chiefly) with another’s image but with his or her voice, for it is in the voice that lasting friendship and commitment and true love lies. The Greek word for person comes from the giant masks that actors wore in performing the great public dramas of Athens and other Greek cities. Person literally means “to sound through.” We are what we declare, what we speak, what comes sounding through us. Our ancient Christian forebears understood the primacy of hearing over seeing. Thus did the saints of the early church practice what they called “the discipline of the eyes,” being even more careful about what they saw than what they heard.
Why is the spoken and heard word so much more important than its written and read versions? It is interesting to note that neither Jesus nor Socrates, the two most famous teachers in world history, left anything in writing. They both failed to publish, wags have said, and therefore they perished. Both men were indeed killed for their action-inciting words. Speech is our unique gift, the very image of God in us. Animals can do everything that we humans can do, except the most important thing of all: they cannot speak. This explains why, given the awful choice between sight and hearing, the wise and courageous person would choose sound-giving up the enormous ease and pleasures of the visible world for the irreplaceable world of the human voice. Winston Churchill was not the first to note that deafness is infinitely more isolating than blindness: it cuts us off from true human communion.
We ought therefore to reverse the trite aphorism about sticks and stones. They merely break our bones, while words can truly help or hurt us. A word of care and kindness can heal the deepest of wounds. A word of spite and deceit can rankle and fester forever. Once words are out of our mouth, we cannot retract them, any more than we can unscramble an egg or put toothpaste back in the tube. Their effects are permanent, for good or ill. Words are so powerful that the Epistle of James calls the tiny tongue the most dangerous of all bodily organs, far more hazardous than the genitals. A single word therefore-most especially when it is the Word of God-is worth more than a thousand pictures.
When Luther and Calvin and the Anabaptists revolted against the medieval Roman church, they did so in protest that the proclaimed Word had been eclipsed by the same works-centered religion that Paul opposes in his Letter to the Romans. The Reformation was thus a preaching-movement intended not to create a special branch of Christendom but to renew the whole church in the doctrines of grace. The sermon thus became the Protestant sacrament of grace, our equivalent of the Roman mass, the very center of the worship and praise of God. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues, in fact, that Israel understands God in fundamentally verbal terms. It is not God’s miraculous acts in history nor his divine being in himself that matters so much as it is the unique Word that issues from God’s revelation to Israel.
Scripture refers far more often, in fact, to God’s speaking than to his doing. God is indeed a doer-the Maker and Redeemer of the universe-but He acts chiefly by his speaking. In the first chapter of Genesis, God speaks the cosmos into being. God doesn’t take things into his own hands and fashion the world out of something prior to it. He says instead, “Let there be.” We know, of course, that Genesis 1 is a theological story and not a scientific report. God is not a material being but the divine Spirit. He has no mouth or tongue, and he doesn’t speak Hebrew or Greek, English or Ebonics. God speaks through his people Israel and finally through his Son Jesus Christ, the One Man in whom he has fashioned his own image.
The sermon is the center of our worship, our veritable sacrament, because there we encounter Christ himself in the heard Word. The Swiss Calvinists of the 16th century went so far as to declare (in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566) that “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” The Gospel is not something to be preached, therefore: the Gospel is preaching itself. This is a radical claim, but I think it is exactly Paul’s point. Fides ex auditu. “Faith cometh by hearing,” we remember from the King James, “and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:8). Note exceedingly well what St. Paul doesn’t say: He does not say that faith comes by seeing, and that what is seen comes by writing, and that what is believed comes through reading. In his second letter to Corinth, Paul explicitly warns against an overemphasis on the merely written word. There he says that the word which is written down often serves to kill-while the Spirit, acting through the proclaimed Word, gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6).
We can close our eyes to what is seen. We can put down a book and either daydream or go change a light bulb. We cannot so easily dismiss the spoken and the heard Word. We have eyelids for shutting out pictures and scenes that we don’t want to see, but the ear has no flap for fending off the words of men or the Word of God. Our ear lobes are meant to increase our hearing, not to close it off. Jesus does not say, “Let those who have eyes, see,” but rather “Let those who have ears, hear.” “Stick your eyes in your ears,” said Luther, “when you hear the Word of God preached.” Luther calls us to see in a new way, through the proclaimed Word. We thus learn to look rightly at the world when we have first truly heard the Word. It follows, said Luther, that “the church is a mouth-house, not a pen-house.” At church we don’t write essays or take notes, lest our scribbling become a clever and pseudo-academic means of stopping our ears to the God who engages us as we listen rather than write.
It needs to be said that we Baptists run a great risk in focussing on the sermon. Christian worship centered on the proclamation of the Gospel is not the safest but the most perilous activity of the week. The worship hour is the hour of great risk. Something splendid occurs when we come to hear the Word proclaimed, or else something terrible. When the Word is not preached, everything else fails. Indeed, an awful sacrilege has occurred. Nothing can salvage a service that is void of true proclamation. Someone has described Hell as a perpetual church service minus the presence of God. I would add that Hell is an interminable sermon without the proclamation of the Gospel.
Faithful preaching is even more dangerous than its unfaithful counterpart. Calvin confessed, for example, that the truly proclaimed Word makes the world at once better and worse off. “For while there was no preached Gospel,” he declared, “all the world was without care and at rest. There was little to argue or dispute about.” The world remained at ease in its ethical slumbers. But with the true preaching of the Gospel, Calvin added, “the world is plunged into conflict.” Faithful preaching-Calvin is saying-permits no neutral response, as if we had attended a civic club luncheon or PTA meeting. It makes us either hugely glad or unbearably sad. It either saves or else it damns. To hear God’s Word is gladly to acknowledge his grip on our lives. It makes us eagerly seize the brass rung of grace for all we are worth. It prompts us joyfully to practice the Faith every day and every night until our last day and last night. Or else it forces us to turn away in wrath and scorn, spitting and scoffing at this call to devote our lives to Jesus Christ and to none other. There is no convenient middle path between these drastic extremes. Whether we know it or not, we are either hearers of the Word or else we are haters of the Word.
The early British Baptists were so convinced of what is dangerous and drastic about the proclaimed Word that they became suspicious of the merely written Word. Lest the Bible become a substitute for hearing the living Word, these our foreparents in the Faith prohibited worshippers from bringing their Bibles to church. They knew that in worship we come to hear the Word of God, not to look at it. The man whom this lecture-series honors never asks the congregation to follow along in their Bibles when he reads the sermon text. Such a request would mean, as he wittily says, that we don’t really trust him to read it aright. Like an apostle, he declares simply but forcefully: “Listen.” When we truly hear, the sermon becomes God’s Word. Sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the joint of bone and marrow, it rends our hearts and cleaves our souls. It wounds us to the quick, lancing the suppurating sores of sin, in order that it might heal us forever.
Most of us could not truly confess Jesus Christ if the sermon had not been the focus of Baptist worship. Yet few of us could honestly declare that our faith has been similarly formed by the Lord’s Supper. My own childhood church observed it only quarterly, and then on Sunday evening, as if to admit that it wasn’t very important. A friend who belongs prominent Baptist church in my city complains that there has not been a single communion service there during her two years of membership. How much wiser was Karl Barth to insist that the sermon is inseparably linked to the Table, that preaching proclaims the meaning of communion, even as the Supper gives dramatic and embodied life to the sermon. I wonder whether the slappy-happy, sloppy-agape atmosphere that prevails in much Baptist worship today is not the result of our low regard for the Lord’s Table. If there is to be a recovery of preaching in our time, it must be accompanied by a recovery of the second and much-neglected sacrament of the Supper.
We come to a final claim that is as simple and drastic as it is startling and dangerous: the voice of Jesus Christ is none other than the voice of the one who proclaims his Word. The faithful preacher, I again repeat, is the voice of the living Lord. The first and still the greatest Protestant, Martin Luther, said it sharply: “When the Holy Spirit enables me to preach the Word of God, it is no longer Martin Luther but Jesus Christ who speaks.” John Calvin, our other chief founder, made a similar case. “The Word of God,” said Calvin, “is not distinguished from the words of the Prophet.” The God of the Gospel, Calvin added, “is not separated from the minister.” The preacher of the Word actually does God’s own work. These are perilous sayings indeed. We all know preachers who think that they not only proclaim Jesus but that they have become Christ himself. Thus do they lord it over their people according to this terrible self-perception. They swagger and bully and dominate their flock, as if they were not only the audible but also the visible God.
We who are not fundamentalists have become so afraid of their heavy authoritarianism that we have sadly diminished the role of the preacher. We are reluctant to speak of our pastors as having primary authority within our Baptist churches. We saddle them with such smarmy euphemisms as “servant-leader” or–God forbid!–“congregational facilitator.” These are weasel phrases that dodge the true primacy of the preacher. Warren Carr has often noted the result: there are very few preacher-jokes. We make fun only of those things that we take seriously. Notice, therefore, that most of our jokes are sexual–sex being the one pseudo-vocation that our culture takes with utmost seriousness.
To diminish the primacy of the preacher is to ignore the fact that–in a tradition like ours which makes preaching the central act of worship–the preacher is bound to be the center of the church’s witness and its religious life. Willy-nilly, he or she is the shepherd of the flock, the preacher of the Word, and thus the primary figure in the congregation. My friend, the British theologian Daniel Jenkins, sums up the matter well. The Protestant pastor, says Jenkins, serves as the exemplary Christian. He or she is set apart by the local congregation to do directly and full-time what the other church members are able, because of other exigencies, to do only indirectly and part-time: to proclaim and enact the Word of God. Yet let us be ever so clear that the preacher is not the political but the spiritual head of the congregation. When the church is in conference, the Baptist preacher is indeed one among equals: one man, one vote. Even so, I confess that I always eagerly await the pastor’s point-of-view about any important matter that we are voting on.
Richard Neuhaus makes a similar claim about the primacy of the preacher in his splendid book called Freedom for Ministry. Neuhaus argues that ministers are called to serve as a virtual lightning rod: to receive fire from both God and man. Precisely because of the authoritative Word they proclaim in the pulpit, preachers are the singular individuals through whom the divine presence is brought to earth, even as they are the people through whom the hard human questions are clarified and rendered creative rather than destructive. A former student who is now a Methodist minister illustrates the point powerfully. He tells about a drunk running down and killing two members of his congregation, a mother and father who innocently walked along the roadside. Four children under the age of thirteen were instantly orphaned. Great was the grief and distress of the family and friends who quickly assembled. God was by no means absent from that terrible scene. Prayers had already been made, and assurances had already been given, when my friend arrived. God was already at work. Yet everything changed when the preacher entered that house. Those prayers now had a single voice, and those assurances came from one who spoke not only for himself but for the God of the Gospel. Now the great grief and the furious anger had both a focus and a target: the preacher himself. There he acted as no mere servant-leader or pastoral counselor. There he became God’s own surrogate, the one through whom Christ himself was made manifest.
It is not only during times of great crisis that the preacher’s primacy should be observed. It should also happen during ordinary times. Preachers who are not afraid of their own authority and primacy will have such startlingly original things to say on Sunday that we who are their parishioners will seek their counsel during the week. Knowing that we have heard what can be heard no where else on earth, we will refuse to confine our conversations to polite palaver. We will not be content with mere congeniality. We will engage our preachers in the deep and hard and joyful things of the Gospel precisely because our ministers have first engaged us in those very things. Such vital exchanges between preacher and flock will symbiotically feed our preachers’ own proclamation of the Word. No longer will they take their illustrations from television shows or sermon books but from felt and lived experience, and no longer will they preach what I call messages to the cosmos: Time-Life discourses addressed virtually to anyone and thus truly to no one in particular. Instead, our preachers will speak, as the Quakers used to say, to our condition-to our fallen and redeemed condition.
“How shall they hear without a preacher?” The answer for us Baptists lies in making the sermon serve as the center of our worship. There we will help restore the priority of hearing over seeing in a culture that will soon blind as well as deafen itself. There we will give unabashed pre-eminence to the preaching and hearing of the Word. And there we will acknowledge the true pastoral primacy of the preacher in the faithful life of God’s flock.
