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Ideas from music by Peter Relf
Just like a piece of music, a sermon exists in time. From silence, the composer begins a musical idea and shapes it until a desired conclusion is reached. The preacher takes a similar journey when crafting a sermon. It is not the same journey. A sermon that slavishly followed a musical form could quickly become ridiculous. Even so, there might be some insights for sermon construction from exploring how music is put together. Let’s see, or rather hear, what might happen.
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The sermon was a success, but... |
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The famous story about Saint Anthony of Padua, set to music in a song cycle by Gustav Mahler, Saint Anthony, finding his church empty, goes to the river to preach to the fishes who come in droves and enjoy his sermons immensely. However, with the sermon ended, the pike remain thieves and the eels lovers, the lobsters still crawl backwards, the codfish remain stupid and the carp eat voraciously. The fish have not changed at all. According to the translation in my CD notes, ‘The sermon was a success, they stay as they were.’
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If you are a preacher of long standing, I wonder how your experience compares with mine? When Methodism gave me a note to preach over 40 years ago, my only formal support and advice on the craft of sermon writing came from the Superintendent Minister as he read through my first attempt (which if I spoke slowly, lasted about 10 minutes). He commented that originality of thought was likely to be hard to come by. For the past 35 years as an accredited Local Preacher, I have been proving him right.
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