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PREACHING SKILLS
How to Preach Like John Grisham Writes
I needed to move from principle to plot
Bill Oudemolen

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During a recent vacation, my wife and I ventured across town to another church. The jammed parking lot and crowded lobby suggested a scintillating sermon. The preacher was articulate and entertaining. His sermon was biblical, with four crafted principles from the text.

But as we left that morning, I realized, as William Willimon has said, I got the sermon, but it didn't get me.

Fast-forward to a couple of days later, same vacation: Sitting under a thatched umbrella on a beach, I'm reading John Grisham's The Chamber, a novel about capital punishment.

Toward the end of the story, Grisham describes Sam Cayhall, the death-row inmate, taking off the clothes he has worn for so many years. His new clothes lying on the bed are for his execution in the gas chamber. The portrayal overwhelmed me, and I began to weep. As a tear rolled down my cheek, I silently asked the Lord to forgive me for my past hatred of death-row inmates.

It struck me that Grisham's novel had "got" me in a way the principled sermon I'd heard hadn't. I began studying what makes a good story work. As I applied the elements of plot to my sermon structure, they revolutionized the way I create and deliver a sermon.

A plot-based sermon is not one with more stories in it. It is not created by cramming more illustrations into a sermon or seeing the sermon as one lengthy illustration.

The very structure of a plot-based sermon is different. The difference between a plot-based sermon and a principle-based sermon is not hermeneutical but homiletical. A plot-based sermon still requires traditional exegesis; I still have to immerse myself in the text. But once I do my exegetical spadework, I head in a new direction. I steer away from principles and launch out into the realm of surprise, tension, and disequilibrium.

Obviously, this is easier with narrative literature, but every text is set in a context, in a story and a situation. And every situation has some disequilibrium or tension.

As I begin thinking about my sermon, I ponder what my audience might expect from this text. Then I do my best to avoid their expectations. As I start the sermon, I want people to wonder, "Where is he going with this?"

In The Homiletical Plot, Eugene Lowry illustrates with the old Quincy TV show (a more recent example is CSI). Both shows start with a dead body—no surprise there. The interest factor is the uncertainty—"Who did it?" "How did they do it?" "Why did they do it?" "How will Quincy or Jessica figure it out?"

In a recent sermon on the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12, for example, the congregation expected I would oppose the Rich Fool. So I showed how much I identified with him. I viewed him as a financially fortunate farmer: "The Rich Fool seems wise to us. He earned his money honestly. He was hard-working. He invested and expanded. He used his surplus to plan for his retirement. Money magazine would profile him as a financial genius."

I used a quote: "If this man is a fool, then a lot of Americans are fools!" I told my audience I had recently calculated the money I'd have for retirement in twenty years if, instead of giving to the church and missionaries during the past four years, I had invested it. The tally was more than $200,000. I then asked them to decide whether having $200,000 less at retirement was wise or foolish.

To my suburban congregation, that created disequilibrium, tension, and surprise.

In the exegetical phase of sermon preparation, I search carefully for any textually-based disequilibrium.

While preaching on the life of Paul, for example, I found some delicious disequilibrium in Acts 27. Luke tells about riding out a storm with Paul. The storm rages with no word from God. Luke writes in 27:20 that they finally "gave up all hope" of being saved.

I could have ruined the sermon at that point by chiding my audience, "But of course, we all know the doctrine of omnipresence, so we know God was there—the principle of his presence!" The temptation is to play down disequilibrium in the text, as if it's my job to make God look good. One commentator on this passage used the four anchors from Acts 27:29 as "four anchors to keep us from shipwreck during life's storms." But the problem here is not only homiletical but theological—Paul's ship does shipwreck!

My goal is to play up the tension. In all good stories, things unravel, creating more tension until the climax. My tendency has been to reach the last chapter too quickly. But the heart of the sermon, like the heart of a novel, is a thickening plot.

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