I have to admit that over the years I’ve become something of a snob about the art of preaching. It’s a condition I often ask for both deliverance from and forgiveness for having. But struggle with it I must, often when I’m visiting new churches when, frankly, the sermon is the biggest event on display.

I’ve never had any formal training in homiletics, so my snobbery is grounded in two things: the first is the majority of a decade spent listening to some absolutely wonderful sermons by two of the best preachers in Canada. The second is that, as a writer, I’m quite attuned to the craft of communication and can see what is thoughtfully created engagement with the Gospel, and what is ecclesiastical hackwork of the highest order.

In the North American Anglican tradition of which I am a part, the sermon, or homily, is the place for people to connect and engage with the readings of the day as given in the Revised Common Lectionary, in particular the Gospel reading. The sermon is meant to be a bridge between the readings and our own experience. A great sermon is a dialogue between the preacher’s experiences, the imagining of the divine as given in the readings and the societal influences that surround both the people in the readings then and the people listening today. A great homilist is able to discern all these things and somehow tie it together.

Let me say right here that’s unbelievably hard to do.

I’ve been permitted to preach as a layperson every so often and I find it both an awesome privilege and a tremendous challenge. How do I reflect what I discern to be the message of the readings, balance it out with research about the culture and literature the readings came out of, all the while connecting it to the narrative of my own life and the narrative of the community I’m in? Many has been the time when I’ve stated at a blank computer screen pondering this situation—often at 7am on the Sunday morning when I am preaching in three hours!

It’s because I’m painfully aware of it all that I can be unbelievably insufferable listening to sermons that fail to even try to accomplish this. And to this end I thought I would name some of the more paltry efforts I have encountered over the years…

1. The Sentimental Approach

Probably the sermon that angered me the most in recent memory is the one that used the most charming and touching story imaginable. The homilist in question—for no particularly compelling reason that I could see from the readings given in the lectionary or the context we were in—decided to recite to us Robert Munsch’s beautiful children’s book I’ll Love You Forever (you know, the one about the mother who sings the same song to her boy as he grows up and then the boy, now a man, sings it to her when she’s old and frail). Now I think this is a gorgeous, moving story. And I’m man enough to admit I get all misty-eyed when I hear it. I think it’s as beautiful a metaphor for God’s love as one can find (God singing God’s love for humanity as it grows up and humanity then singing back that same love is a beautiful idea). But there was no reason for it, no context except it was something nice and lovely to say on a Sunday morning.

That, to my mind, is lazy and cynical. Use the lovely soppy stories, please. I think emotional moments in a sermon help connect the listeners to the preacher and to the message. But, if you’re going to use them, have the decency to use them in some kind of a context. Otherwise you’re just trying to please a crowd, and doing that you cheapen the work of the preacher and, worse, you cheapen beautiful stories like that.

2. Let me tell you about something I read recently…

Sentimental children’s stories don’t have a monopoly on things to pad out a sermon. Way too often I’ve stumbled across the homilist who isn’t so much interested in talking about the readings, the Gospel or even the Christian faith as the book they’ve got on their bedside table. A case in point has to be a sermon I heard where the preacher at first was making an effort to connect our experience as a community to the readings, but then started talking about Steven R. Covey’s The Seven Effective Habits of Successful People. At first it was a really great example, but as time wore on it became eminently clear that the Gospel reading had been long forgotten while the interesting stuff (to the preacher) in The Five Effective Habits eventually became his primary text, to the point where I caught myself muttering, “How wonderful it is that Jesus taught his disciples to ‘think win/win’ at the Sermon on the Mount.”

Now I’m not some boring ascetic who thinks that a person should preach only to the text in hand. Quite the contrary, in fact. One of my favourite preachers in the evangelical tradition is Tony Campolo who peppers his sermons with excerpts from great books, pop culture references and real-life examples. I think there’s a lot of real-world wisdom that we as a church should talk about—Steven Covey’s included—but it needs to be working as a dialogue with the wisdom we access from the readings, not a monologue.

3. Right Day, Wrong Sermon

Every year for decades now, my father and I go to his parish church for Christmas Day services. I do this because it’s a nice way to spend time with my Dad at Christmas, but I also do it because the lectionary readings for Christmas Day are so awesome. Nothing can beat the sheer mind-blowing poetry that is the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. …in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” This is an amazing reading that speaks to the central incarnational mystery of the Christian faith.

Suffice it to say I was at first confused, and then distinctly not amused, when the sermon I heard was the one written for Christmas Eve, when all the readings are about the nativity and the birth of Jesus. As Christmas Eve sermons go, it was pretty good (though a touch evangelically dour for my taste) and it was quite perceptive and well-delivered. But there was one big problem: the readings of Christmas Day aren’t about the nativity, they’re about the awe-inspiring wondrous mystery of the incarnation. They’re not interchangeable. It’s lazy corner-cutting to think otherwise.

To my mind, one of the reasons the Anglican Church is a participant in the Revised Common Lectionary is so churches use the same texts and we’re not subject to picking and choosing texts (and sermons) and the abuses that can arise with that. And yet more preachers than I care to admit still blithely ignore the readings which I think does a grave disservice to the power of the Gospel.

4. Isn’t It So Awful

Then there are the times where the homilist not only ignores the readings but the very message of hope the Gospel seeks to convey. I saw this happen one Sunday when I visited a ‘progressive’ church on Pride Day when I witnessed what I can honestly say was the worst sermon I have ever heard. The preacher was a somewhat dreary layperson who began her sermon with the image of seeing a building get burned down and then be rebuilt. I should have that something was awry when she concluded her story with “The Church, unlike the phoenix, does not have much experience of rising from the ashes”—which left me wondering she had heard of someone known as Jesus Christ.

The basic summary of her sermon was that, in spite of the societal gains gays and lesbians have made with same-sex marriage, the church is still oppressive. And, though it is getting better, this is quite honestly true. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the need to be prophetic. What I minded was that it had no orientation toward hope. As an exercise in looking at the glass as empty, it couldn’t be beat. It avoided all the good news from the culture with same-sex marriage. It quoted extensively from gay people who were writing in situations that occurred before Stonewall as though it were still going on, and in what I thought was a criminally selective tactic, quoted from a discussion document about the oppressive lives closeted gay priests endured, but ignored that this was from a discussion document used by the Diocese of New Westminster as part of the process for that Diocese to take the radical step of ordaining gay priests and supporting gay unions. In short, the homily was depressing, dreary and lacked hope in the gospel’s message or, in my view, even pride in being gay.

One of the things that I despise about the liberal wing of the church—I say this as a card-carrying member—is the need to castigate and apologize for Christianity. I’m not denying that the church has a lot to answer for, and will continue to do so. And I’m not saying that it doesn’t anger me to see so much oppression happening in the name of my God and my church. But I don’t think the response to this is for the church to behave like Eeyore, apologizing for any kind of a message of hope, because a Christian message must offer hope and healing and pride for all. If I didn’t believe that I honestly have better things to do with my time on a Sunday morning. If someone is angry or ashamed of being at the pulpit, it’s not the place for them.

5. Playing Insider Baseball

I read and collect comic books, and there’s a saying in that medium that goes “every comic book is someone’s first comic book.” Meaning writers and artists ought to take care within it to situate the new reader rather than starting the action off in medias res—making the story impenetrable to people who just happened to pick up a comic book at a 7-11 or a Chapters.

I say this because I remember there was one Sunday where I went to a church I hadn’t been to before and listened to a sermon preached to a particular congregation about a particular matter and the particular nuances of it. Very little of which had anything to do with the readings and none of which was relevant to me, as an outsider, or the friends that were with me.

All of which made me think. “Geez, these people have issues.”

I know the sermon provides a captive audience but there is also something called announcements. There is the bulletin. There is even discussion during coffee hour.

Obviously you want a sermon to be relevant to the life of a community. And yes that means talking about things, people and events that are relevant just to people within that community. But it needs to be balanced with a view to the bigger picture, with the possibility that there are always strangers to be welcomed in our midst. Because the type of conversation you have from the pulpit says something about the health of a congregation’s internal conversations. And every sermon is someone’s first sermon.

Believe me, I know that writing a sermon is one of the hardest things in the world to do well. Writing one that is creative and evocative as a divine art. However, at the end of the day, the goal should be to craft something that is simple, effective, and engaging. Something that doesn’t take the easy way out through relying on irrelevant stories. Something that doesn’t avoid the readings altogether. Something that has hope and can be understood by outsiders.

That’s not easy. But we need to do it all the same..