“Do you believe that a preacher should proclaim the Gospel in every sermon?”
This was a question from a student in class. After pausing for a minute to consider what was perhaps behind and within this question, I responded by saying, “No…but I think that is the right idea.”
The reason I told my student “no” is based on a specific understanding of what a church service is, and what happens in a church service. If I didn’t have this same understanding, or if I was preaching at a different church, I would have to give a different answer. I said no because the gospel is proclaimed every Sunday in and through our liturgy.
If you are interested in going deeper on this, here are two sermons I gave, the first on the nature of the church, and the second on the nature of liturgy:
Every Sunday in my church, we follow a specific movement:
We intend to be with God (in and through our prayers of intention), starting every service in silence, opening our hearts to the Lord to consider where our hearts have already turned that morning, and then offering the Lord an intention to draw near to him.
We lift up our voices with each other as we praise the Lord, often singing the Lord’s Prayer.
We collect our prayers together during the prayers of the people, and in three sections we have space for extemporaneous prayers from the congregation.
We hear the Word read in the public reading of Scripture, and we hear the Word declared in a sermon, followed by private confession of our sins as we consider what the Word read and preached did in our hearts.
We declare publicly a corporate confession, and we hear the good news that Christ has died for our sins and that if we have faith in him we are called to draw near to the table of the Lord, sharing in what Paul calls spiritual food and spiritual drink.
We hear an assurance of pardon if we have put our faith in Jesus.
We hear a benediction from Scripture.
So when I preach, my sermon is caught up in a much broader movement of gospel proclamation. This movement is called “liturgy,” which simply means the “the work of the people.” A church congregation is not an audience. We are at work together, drawing near to the Lord to present our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1).
There is a very important point here that is easy to miss. There is no such thing as a Christian church that is a non-liturgical church. There are churches that have thinner or thicker liturgies, but none that have no liturgy. I’ve never been to a church that literally does something new every week, such that no one ever knows what is going on or what is going to happen. Instead, some churches have a thin liturgy, which might be: singing, announcements, sermon, singing, and then leave. The congregation I attend has a thicker liturgy.
The liturgy reminds us that the sermon, or music, or confession, etc. are not the only things that matter, or even the main things we do. Imagine having a 1000 square foot house. If you decide to renovate your home with an 800 square foot kitchen, there are going to be some real problems. You might not get a bedroom or a bathroom! In a similar way, when we bloat one feature of our liturgy above the others, we diminish and lose fundamental aspects of our drawing near to God.
Instead of square feet, you have time to draw near to the Lord. What do you do with that time? How do you invest that time in a kingdom way? What is your current liturgy seeking to cultivate, and what kind of person are you calling people to be in order to be in harmony with the church as a whole? Or, put otherwise, what sort of economy is your liturgy helping to establish in a person’s body and soul, and how will that help them walk in the Spirit as they leave your church service?
This leads us to an obvious, but often unstated, question: what should define Christian liturgy?
Let me suggest that every Christian church enacts a liturgy based on the exodus. God delivered his people out of the land of servitude and death, birthing a people out of this slavery into the presence of the Lord for life with the Lord. They were led through the water (baptism), after which they sang praises to the Lord, shared spiritual food and spiritual drink, as they journeyed to the mountain to hear the Word of God proclaimed (see 1 Cor. 10:1-5). We too are called to journey through the water of baptism, leaving the land of death behind us, to sing praises to him and journey together to his mountain, sharing spiritual food and drink as we come to hear the Word of the Lord.
The sermon, therefore, is not the same thing as a TED talk, or a motivational lecture. The sermon is embedded in a grander movement of drawing near to the Lord, to “present ourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and our members to God as instruments for righteousness” (Rom. 6:13).
A sermon is a part of this overarching movement of drawing near to the Lord together. But this movement is a large movement, that includes the full range of struggle, joy, sorry, and confusion that we find in the Psalter. This is why sermons that stand on their own are forced to do too much. A sermon cannot bear the weight of the whole liturgy. A sermon is one part of a greater journey a people are walking together.
But this also means, as a hearer of the Word, you have to be on this same journey. You have work to do. You are drawing near to your Lord, not alone, but with your brothers and sisters in Christ. You are a part of a people who have walked through the waters of baptism, have sang songs of God’s deliverance, and who partake of spiritual food and spiritual drink together. Now you stand before - not the preacher - but your Lord who has called you to himself.
This is why we begin our church services with a prayer of intention. We don’t draw near on accident. We have to intend. If you want to read more about the prayer of intention, see my co-authored book with John Coe, Where Prayer Becomes Real, and for more on the exodus as our liturgy see, my co-authored book with Jamin Goggin, The Way of the Dragon of the Way of the Lamb.