How To Listen To A Bad Sermon

Lis­ten­ing to a bad ser­mon is like eat­ing crab legs. It’s a lot more trou­ble than it should be, but you can still get a lot of meat if you are dili­gent.

So how do you do it?

Here are some tips that I some­times find help­ful, in order of pref­er­ence. I don’t want to make you too excit­ed: noth­ing is going to make a bad ser­mon good. But these might help mit­i­gate your suf­fer­ing.

1. Be mer­ci­ful. Preach­ing con­sis­tent­ly good ser­mons is a lot hard­er than it seems. Think about your worst day on the job and how you would like your cowork­ers and cus­tomers to respond with com­pas­sion and under­stand­ing. Now extend that same com­pas­sion to the preach­er.
2. Over­look the stu­pid stuff. Every once in a while even sol­id and reli­able preach­ers will say some­thing that’s com­plete­ly ridicu­lous — usu­al­ly when they ven­ture out­side their area of exper­tise. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when preach­ers begin using sto­ries to illus­trate a point they are try­ing to make. It can real­ly throw you for a loop. Tune it out the same way you tune out that one cousin at fam­i­ly reunions. Even your favorite book has some bor­ing pas­sages, but you judge the book on its high­lights. Judge ser­mons like­wise.
3. Be ran­dom­ly inspired. I learned this from Dary Northrop in a sem­i­nar: you should bring a note­book to ser­mons not because of how insight­ful and mag­nif­i­cent the preach­er is going to be, but because the Holy Spir­it will spark new and amaz­ing insights in you which are only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to what is in the speak­er’s notes. Few ser­mons are so bad that there is no good­ness in them — even a three-year-old will say some­thing pro­found and/or hilar­i­ous if you lis­ten to them long enough. So wait for a clever turn of phrase, an obscure or unex­pect­ed Bible ref­er­ence, or a fact that you were hith­er­to unaware of and begin writ­ing furi­ous­ly. Doo­dle as well. Repeat as nec­es­sary.
4. Pre­tend it’s oppo­sites day. don t look now free down­load
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   had a tra­di­tion in his Chi Alpha min­istry. Once a year he would preach oppo­site: “Why You Should Not Pray”, “Why God Is Untrust­wor­thy”, etc. He did it dead­pan (well — as dead­pan as Har­low ever gets). The first time he did it he was wor­ried his stu­dents would­n’t catch on that he was mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing and then repeat­ing their own doubts back to them in order to demon­strate how ridicu­lous their doubts were, but it was a huge suc­cess. Even the guests got it. It became an insti­tu­tion. Ever since he told me that sto­ry, I game­ly pre­tend that a real­ly bad ser­mon is mere­ly the results of “oppo­sites day”.

5. Improve the ser­mon.
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   This is risky because it can lead to pride and also can be dis­rup­tive if peo­ple around you notice what you’re doing, but there are times when it’s your only pos­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal defense. There are two fun­da­men­tal kinds of bad­ness. There’s bad deliv­ery. That’s the best kind. The preach­er has good things to say, but the inabil­i­ty to say them well. The whole ser­mon can be spent fruit­ful­ly para­phras­ing and improv­ing the sol­id con­tent of the ser­mon. For exam­ple, you might reorder and reword the out­line for greater impact or log­i­cal flow. There’s bad con­tent. The preach­er is dis­tort­ing the text or not think­ing things through. That’s hard­er, but can be even more divert­ing. You can com­pose your own out­line from scratch on the same pas­sage or top­ic that the preach­er is endeav­or­ing to address. One or two of my best ser­mons has come about this way.

Final­ly, my apolo­gies to those who have had to endure a stinker from me. I know it has hap­pened before and have no doubt it will hap­pen again. It’s my job to be the best speak­er I can be and it is your job to be the best lis­ten­er that you can be. I’ll do my job whether or not you do yours, but if we work togeth­er this whole thing will go much more smooth­ly.

And a note to my pas­tor — relax, this was not inspired by your ser­mon this week. You did­n’t even preach. We watched a movie, remem­ber? 🙂