The Toughest Sermons You’ll Write

The Toughest Sermons You’ll Write

We turn now from what we can learn from advertising about the forms and content of preaching.  The next several posts will be about the toughest sermons you’ll write in your career.  Those sermons will be required during times of pain, suffering, disillusionment and doubt in the life of your congregation and/or community.  I will be leaning heavily on a book by Bryan Chapell, teacher of preaching and chancellor at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis.  Prior to and after that position, he pastored churches.  He gathered information from many well-known pastors on the hardest sermons they had to preach.  So, we will be looking at the suggestions given for burying a baby, a diagnosis of cancer, an accidental death, etc., etc.  The book’s title is The Hardest Sermons You’ll Ever Have to Preach.  A link to the Amazon account for this book is here.

What Do You Do With Tragedy?

Recently I heard Joni Eareckson Tada talk about dealing with two bouts of breast cancer.  For those of you who don’t know Joni, let me give you a little background.  She was a hero to me as a teenager for her faith.  You can read her story here.   At the age of 17, this athletic teen dove in water that was too shallow.  She broke her neck.  From that day on paralysis from the neck down was her life  This was in 1966.  Since then, she has been unable to walk, limited to depending on others for the basic duties of life like dressing, cleaning, etc.  A wheelchair is her primary mode of transportation.

Her life, she said, had enough suffering in it that she could not believe that God would allow her to develop cancer, too.  Yet, she found a lump in a breast that tests determined was cancerous.  A mastectomy, followed by extensive chemo treatments were endured.  Then, it happened again.  The cancer returned.

Imagine preaching in her church, and you’re going to preach about human suffering.  That will be one of the toughest sermons you’ll write in your career.

A Tough Sermon, to Explain Human Suffering

What would you say to people like Joni?  Imagine yourself sitting in your study, and you are going to do a sermon on human suffering.  What would you say?

In general, it is really quite easy to give the theological  explanation for suffering.  God created the world good.  In fact, when he completes the creation, God saw what he made, and behold, it was very good.

That all changed as a result of the events told us in Genesis 3. There the first man and woman, the crown of creation, the people created in the image of God, chose to disobey God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  From that day on, the creation, as Paul describes it in Romans 8, was subject to frustration.  Things are twisted in our world, and therefore, sickness comes.  Natural disasters happen.  People attack people to injure them.  Wars are a constant in our troubled world.  Children starve to death.

That is the simple, yet complex theology of human suffering.

But how do you put that into an explanation of God’s love when you are standing at the graveside of a 3 month infant who has died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome?  How do you make that theology comforting when a leader in your church dies from a heart attack while driving home from his son’s house?  How does that theology make sense when a Joni Eareckson is in your church?

These will be the toughest sermons you’ll write in your ministry.

Conclusion

That’s what we will explore in the coming weeks in posts in this blog.  How do you make a sermon on subjects like these when your own heart is breaking?   So stay tuned.