What is a sermon?
Assuming for the sake of this reflection that we are considering only biblically faithful creedally orthodox sermons, what is this event we have in mind?
1.
It is a kind of public address.
But it is a particular kind of public speech whose value is not the degree to which it matches-up to other forms of public speech. After all, one can go and listen to more entertaining kinds of public address (like stand-up comedy). One can find better speakers than most pastors. One can get from other public addresses things that you’ll likely not hear in a sermon. But we don’t, or we ought not to, adjudicate sermons vis-a-vis these other kinds of speech.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people get dismayed at pastors who think that the sermon is totally definable by any of these examples. We may enjoy a pastor who uses humor, but we don’t really want a stand-up routine at church. We may value a pastor who preaches prophetically and brings the Scriptures to bear on current social and political events, but we really don’t want our sermons to be 100% political speeches.
2.
It is a chiefly concerned with the explication of the Holy Scriptures, which is “God’s Word written.”
At the same time it is not merely exegesis. It is not merely the recitation of one’s study notes, nor is it primarily valuable for its deftness in handling the original languages (though that’s excellent and much to be desired in a good sermon). It is not a lecture. Even if we think lectures have a didactic place in the church’s life, the sermon is not that place.
It is also not merely the transfer of “information.” AI can write texts to be used for sermons, but these, I would argue, are in fact not sermons at all. And even if one were to take a sermon written by Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or whatever (setting aside all the ethical concerns), it would not meet our needs for a biblically faithful sermon. Why? Because a biblically-faithful sermon is the result of human theological metabolism. I do no arrive to the sermon waiting for “the answers”. I arrive to hear what this shepherd in God’s house speaks to me based on his wrestling with the Word of the Lord.
The value of the sermon is the embodied person who does the preaching. God glorifying His Name in and through the incarnate life of this or that minister who is filled with the Spirit. I listen to Pastor Commonname preaching because it is something of a sacrament: the Word of God incarnate in these thoughts, this person, this office, their perspective, our parish, that larynx, these idioms of speech and tricks of phrase.
3.
It is, therefore, a kind of epideictic sacrament.
It is ritual speech spoken to the assembly of saints which serves to gather them into the Reality of what the living God is doing in their midst.
The office of pastor is one that is uniquely bound-up in his person. God has deigned to move through all the particularities of this person.
To return to the image of AI and LLMs etc. The sermon is not analogous to the prompt that one might enter into a Claude query, nor is a sermon analogous to the generated results that Claude might iterate after such a prompt. A sermon is the generative process, it is the fact that the generation happened, is happening, in the pastor.
The sermon is the pastor’s weekly speech to the Body of Jesus in response to the eternal haunt of the question of Christ: “who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:13-20). Jesus does not ask for a kind of generic answer, he congratulates Peter not merely for giving a kind of universal, abstract “correctness” but because Peter gave the “correct answer” in a uniquely Peterine idiom, with all of Peter’s idiosyncrasies, sutters, vociferousnesses, etc. Peter does not give a Johannine answer, nor a Pauline one.
A sermon is the incarnation of the Word of God in the broken words of the pastor. Like the fraction of the Bread at Holy Communion, it is the event whereby the Word is broken, reconstituted, and distributed for the life of the world.
Pastors in this age of universal slop (human slop and AI slop) must be careful to cultivate within themselves the kind of capacities that allow them to rightly handle the word of God in season and out of season because that is the sermon: Christ in them, the hope of glory. It is the wrestling with the Living Word of God and not letting Him go until the sun comes up and He blesses us at the fords of the Jabok. The sermon is the new limp and the new name the pastor walks back to his church with week after faithful week.
Beware of those things that would offer to do the wrestling for you. The wrestling with the Word is not a means to the end of sermon. It is the sermon itself.