Elemental Preaching

The irriducible qualities of gravity, light, and air give life to a sermon and to those who hear it.

Mark Labberton | posted 3/16/2010

Preaching provides many things, but chief among them should be gravity, light, and air. Like the gospel itself, these elements are essential but invisible, and their absence in a sermon will be felt. Preachers and their congregations are to live an incarnational faith in an incarnational God in a real world of gravity, light, and air. No Gnostic escape route is available. The gift of preaching is part of God's way of helping a world desperate for the kind of Good News that grounds, guides, and fills.

Where's the center of gravity?

By gravity I don't mean preaching that is grave or ponderous. The gravity I have in mind is not limited to a mood or personality or form. Gravity is the central pull on the preacher's life. What does the preacher's life demonstrate to be his true center as he dares to stand and speak in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?

I first realized how the preacher's life and words reflect his center of gravity during a very difficult season of my life. I was a Christian, but I was full of questions and uncertainties. I came to worship each week hungry for a word that would ground my life. Adding to my instability, I was church-shopping. As I visited various churches each week, looking for a spiritual home, I longed for simple evidences of a stable hope from beyond myself, beyond those sitting there in the seats, beyond the preacher, beyond what could be seen. Work, relationships, fears, and decisions swarmed within me. Global news brought wider stories of social, political, and military storms into my life.

Week by week, I was hungry for something. Hot, hip, techno worship was not what I wanted. Nor was it a particular kind of music, tradition, liturgy, or church size. I longed for some assurance and evidence of the gravity of God for ordinary life, for encouragement that the gospel was the defining and drawing Center from which all other dimensions of life could be lived. From the welcome to the benediction, I tried to discern each church's gravitational center. I especially hoped the preacher's life and words would draw me towards the One who "holds all things together."

I was not looking for the spectacular or even the dramatic. I did not need some sort of personal connection with the musician or the preacher. I was just trying to discern if the people leading were actually grounded in the basics of a centered life: the evidence of a passionate, honest engagement with Jesus Christ. Sadly it wasn't as easy to find as I had anticipated.

Every week I did find centers of gravity, just not the sort I was looking for. I encountered preachers whose center of gravity appeared to be their own personality, gifts, hair, coolness, speech, body, education, spouse, or children. Their words pointed beyond themselves at times, but all the subliminal messages—their gestures, their attitude, their examples—seemed to point back to themselves as the center. You could come to God only through encountering and receiving the preacher; the medium became the message. This was truly "their" church. My impressions could have been wrong, of course. But I did not attend these churches very long.

In other churches I visited, the center of gravity seemed to be the preachers' theological confidence. Not necessarily the doctrines, or whether their beliefs were true, but the passion and conviction with which they believed it. In still other settings, the center of gravity seemed to be the stage—the trappings of size, technology, music, popularity, volume, fame, and power. Yet, there was little evidence of the God who emptied himself and became weak and poor for our sake.

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