Christmas Preaching

Christmas Day and Boxing Day sermons to preach and another Christmas is done. This will be my eighth at IPC and I'm officially out of jokes and illustrations.  The tank is empty, the screen is blank, there's no juice left in the legs.

As I've said previously we get more outsiders in at this time of year than any other; at least we normally do when London isn't covered in snow.

The pressure on the preacher, rightly, is considerable. He's got one shot with some of these folk. These are people who've been prayed for and invited by the congregation. The preacher needs to be faithful, clear and logical but I fear that what most people want the preacher to be is funny; to have a funny opening story and lighten the mood, to keep it relatively entertaining. There is truth to this caricature. I think the preacher does need to put his listeners at ease.  We've all sat during those interminable sermons where everyone in the whole room is tense and uncomfortable including the speaker. One well known UK preacher used to speak of illustrations functioning as mental cigarette breaks, which lighten the intensity.

My fear is that we often fall into the mistake of equating a lack of humour with being boring. Sermons need to have direction and a sense of urgency with faithfulness to the text but they don't of necessity have to be funny. There are certain preachers blessed with a great sense of humour that they use well as a God given gift but there are others of us who haven't been given that gift and we've got to work hard to communicate well but we shouldn't desperately  be trying to be funny. There's nothing worse than a trier or those kind of twee stories that we've got from 1001 best illustrations. You're better off without that kind of thing.

I know Lloyd Jones had an issue with humour in the pulpit and probably went too far in the other direction, particularly in his counsel, if not his example. Of course there's also the clown in the pulpit who no one wants to listen to but in our culture where humour is held so highly there's a danger in thinking faithfulness is not enough; I've got to be funny.

So you're all very welcome to IPC on Christmas Day and Boxing Day to what are at the moment sermons without illustrations or funnies but I've got two days to go!