Glen Davis

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? 🙂

I was recently thinking about 1^st Timothy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one intermediary between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all, revealing God’s purpose at his appointed time.” (New English Translation)

These verses highlight the aspect of Christianity that bothers Westerners most: its exclusivity. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vexes many people.

This morning a thought occurred to me: almost everyone who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most people just don’t realize it.

For most people I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/good/sincere/altruistic/empathetic/enlightened/adjective-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of niceness is no less limiting than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes people just as surely and it is far more arbitrary. 

This is counterintuitive to some people, so allow me to explain.

It is exclusive in that some people just aren’t nice enough. More on that later.

It is arbitrary in that the devil is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what constitutes the right kind of niceness, anyway? After all, there’s no real reason to suppose that an infinitely smart Being would measure niceness in the way that makes the most sense to you. 

The Christian principle of exclusivity makes more sense, for it flows from the simple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh. 

Thinking about this for a second should make the reasoning clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as nonsensical as saying you can go to Los Angeles without going to California. 

In other words, all that Christians are insisting is that you can’t come to God without coming to God. This hardly seems controversial. You may reject the premises of the argument (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but granted those two the belief can’t be categorized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just consistent.

The real problem most people seem to have isn’t that Christianity is exclusive. Their real problem is that Christianity appears to be unfairly exclusive. This is most often expressed as follows, “What about those who have never heard of Christ? How can God exclude them simply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actually some very reasonable answers to those questions. Here’s one, here’s another

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this question distresses you then dig into it. You won’t agree with everything you read. I certainly don’t agree with every argument in three articles I linked. Figure out what you believe for yourself. 

But here’s the important thing to realize: the same problem confronts the niceness standard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ancestors owned slaves in accordance with the customs of their culture (this is true regardless of your ethnicity) — did they fail a test they didn’t know they were taking? 

Some of them likely burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the niceness test merely because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that matter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grandchildren will deem immoral? Perhaps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a reasonable standard of niceness.

You might object that we should judge people relative to the standards of their own culture, so we don’t need to worry about what standards our grandchildren will hold us up against. Perhaps. Believing that would require you to stop judging dictatorships, sweatshops, modern-day slave trafficking, and racism in other cultures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Crusades and the Inquisition. This is just one the problems that emerges from the notion that moral standards are completely relative to culture or personality. There are several detailed critiques available: here’s one

, here’s another, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf written by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Christianity is that it’s exclusive, examine your own beliefs carefully. You might be surprised to discover just how exclusionary they turn out to be. 

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