3 questions to guide sermon prep for special occasions or crisis circumstances (A Guest Post)
Beverly Zink-Sawyer
Beverly Zink-Sawyer is professor emerita of preaching and worship at Union Presbyterian Seminary. An ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she served churches in Pennsylvania and Tennessee for fifteen years. She is the editor of the Abingdon Women’s Preaching Annual, Series 3, one of the authors of the 2008 New Proclamation Commentary (Fortress) the author of From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen (Westminster John Knox) and, most recently, co-author with Donna Giver-Johnston of For Every Matter under Heaven: Preaching on Special Occasions(Fortress). In retirement she continues to preach, teach, and write with a special interest in the history of women in American religion and American preaching history.
Donna Giver-Johnston
Donna Giver-Johnston has done pastoral ministry in small, medium, and large churches across the United States. She is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv) and Vanderbilt University (PhD), where she served as a teaching assistant in preaching courses and mentored field education students. Her passion for preaching inspires her writing about preaching and worship. Publications include Claiming the Call to Preach: Four Female Pioneers of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford Press, 2021) and For Every Matter Under Heaven: Preaching for Special Occasions (Fortress Press, 2022) and others.
Website: revdrdonnagiverjohnston.squarespace.com
Facebook: Rev. Dr. Donna Giver-Johnston
LinkedIn: Donna Giver-Johnston
Most of us who preach were well trained in seminary to prepare sermons for Sunday worship.
We were taught how to choose a text (from a prescribed lectionary or a discerned need), how to exegete that text (sometimes from the original Hebrew or Greek), how to form a sermon, and how to connect the message to the lives of our listeners.
That training serves us well—until we encounter a day or situation beyond the usual pattern of Sunday morning worship.
And those days and situations will come.
They might come in the form of a natural disaster or a tragic mass shooting in your or a neighboring community.
They might come in the form of the untimely death of a beloved church member or the climax of a congregational conflict.
They might come in the more benign—but nevertheless confounding—form of national holidays, or church anniversaries, or commissioning services, or interfaith community gatherings.
They surely will come in the form of weddings and funerals and baptisms and holy days and holidays that define the life of any congregation.
As people of faith, we believe God is present and active and has a word to offer to us in all times and seasons of our individual and corporate lives.
In our book, For Every Matter under Heaven: Preaching on Special Occasions, we address specific preaching occasions that arise from calendars, celebrations, or circumstances. We lead preachers through a process of preparing sermons that seek and then speak God’s word for the occasion.
Such occasions present the pastor with a difficult challenge: preach a sermon that is biblically grounded and also relevant to the particular occasion and to the listeners, often with limited preparation time given the demands of congregational life.
Special occasions can easily render pastors overwhelmed and grasping for words to offer in the face of unique or unanticipated moments in their ministries.
And yet it is often in such moments that people, some of whom are not regular churchgoers, are most open to and needful of a word from the Lord to make sense of life events or at least to find solace.
These out-of-the-ordinary preaching occasions provide unique opportunities to deepen or renew the faith of those gathered and bring them into the presence of God.
A Reliable Approach to Out-of-the-Ordinary Sermons
In order to create biblically-grounded, relevant sermons for special occasions, preachers need a reliable approach to thinking about the occasion and then finding an appropriate Scripture text that will serve as the basis for the sermon.
An appropriate text might be found among the appointed lectionary texts for the day, or it might emerge from a thoughtful and prayerful process of reflection on the occasion.
What is most important is that both the centrality of Scripture for proclamation and the work of God in the context of a special day are preserved.
What we offer preachers in our book (and in our upcoming Collective+ workshop) is a way of thinking about a special occasion by raising three questions:
What is going on?
Who is listening?
Where is God?
By first answering these questions, the preacher will gain important insight for selecting an appropriate Scripture text.
While moving from a situation to a text rather than the other way around may seem antithetical to what many of us were taught, we believe there is a way to make that move carefully, prayerfully, and responsibly in order to construct an essential bridge between context and text.
For those who are lectionary preachers, we offer theological concepts, derived from consideration of the occasion and those who might be listening, that can serve as “lenses” through which to view the texts appointed for the day. Both the character of the day and the integrity of the stated readings are thus maintained.
For those who are not bound or inclined to follow a lectionary, we hope this process will lead to a Scripture text that might speak God’s word for that day.
How it Works: Consider Question 2 (Who is listening?) for All Saints’ Day
To demonstrate how the answers to one of those questions can shape the movement to a sermon, we can consider the upcoming holy day of All Saints’ Day in terms of the second question, Who is listening?
Here are some possible answers to sub-questions that inform the question itself, enabling the preacher to discern who might be listening on that special day:
1) What word do these listeners in this time and place most need to hear?
All Saints’ Day is the ideal time to remind worshippers that we are not alone but surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses”—in both the “church militant” and the “church triumphant”—whose work and witness continue to inspire and encourage us in our efforts to be Christ’s disciples in the world. The listeners also need to hear that our faith did not spring ex nihilo but is a gift handed to us from those who walked the way of faith before us.
2) How might the listeners be feeling? What do they bring to the service?
Most worshippers will bring deep gratitude for the “saints” who shaped their own lives and faith as well as those who shaped particular congregations. Some will come still grieving recent losses in their lives or community. Many churches use All Saints’ Day as a kind of Memorial Day for members of the church, meaning that family and friends of recently-deceased members may be present with mixed feelings of sadness, thanksgiving, and, hopefully, celebration as loved ones are remembered.
3) How do the identities of the listeners shape the way they might hear the message?
The message might be heard differently by regular Sunday worshippers who will surely be thinking of the individuals and congregations who shaped their faith commitments and worshippers who are present that day (perhaps because of family members or friends who are being memorialized) who have lost their faith or never had a particular faith instilled in them or who claim a different faith.
4) What do we hope the listeners will take away? How might this sermon change the listeners and the worlds they inhabit?
The preacher’s hope (and prayer) is that the listeners will leave mindful of and grateful for those who handed the faith to them—both as individuals and as the community of the church—and will continue to live in ways that honor that gift and ensure that it endures. Even those present who might not claim any particular faith or who reject faith entirely can be inspired to appreciate the people who shaped their lives and to live so as to honor their legacies. Preachers can also send the listeners out with a broader, more inclusive understanding of the surprising ways we have been formed and the surprising people who are numbered among that “great cloud of witnesses” who cheer us on as we run the race of faith.
The Ultimate Hope
One of the few things predictable about pastoral ministry is its unpredictability!
With that in mind, we hope we have created a process for crafting sermons that will meet the challenge of any occasion that might arise within the life of a congregation or community.
Our hope and prayer in writing our book and in the ensuing conversation among Backstory Preaching participants is that our model for creating sermons will help preachers to articulate the truth that no matter where we are or what we face, God’s grace endures forever and bears us through every time and season of life.
We hope you will join us as we help preachers find new ways to proclaim a faithful word from the Lord in all times and seasons.