403. The Coming Sermon

The Coming Sermon

Luk_9:60 : ’93Go thou and preach the kingdom of God.’94

The Gospel is to be regnant over all hearts, all circles, all governments, and all lands. The kingdom of God spoken of in the text is to be a universal kingdom, and just as wide as that will be the realm sermonic. ’93Go thou and preach the kingdom of God.’94

We hear a great deal in these days about the coming man, and the coming woman, and the coming time. Some one ought to tell us of the coming sermon. It is a simple fact that everybody knows that the sermon of today does not reach the world. Of our own city’97as moral a city as there is on the planet’97of our six hundred thousand population, not one hundred thousand come into the churches; and of the one hundred thousand supposed to be in the churches, I do not think twenty thousand carry away practical help and inspiration. The sermon of today carries along with it the dead-wood of all ages. Hundreds of years ago it was decided what a sermon ought to be, and it is the attempt of many theological seminaries and doctors of divinity to hew the modern pulpit utterances into the same old proportions. Booksellers will tell you they dispose of a hundred histories, a hundred novels, a hundred poems to one book of sermons. What is the matter? Some say the age is the worst of all the ages. It is better. Some say religion is wearing out, when it is wearing in. Some say there are so many who despise the Christian religion. I answer, there never was an age when there were so many Christians, or so many friends of Christianity, as in this age’97our age’97as to others a hundred to one. What is the matter, then? It is simply because our sermon of today is not suited to the age. It is the canal-boat in an age of locomotive and electric telegraph. The sermon will have to be shaken out of the old grooves, or it will not be heard and it will not be read. Before the world is converted the sermon will ’93have to be converted. You might as well go into the modern Sedan or Gettysburg with bows and arrows, instead of rifles and bombshells and parks of artillery, as to expect to conquer this world for God by the old style of sermonology. Jonathan Edwards preached the sermons most adapted to the age in which he lived; but if those sermons were preached now they would divide an audience into two classes’97those sound asleep and those wanting to go home. But there is a coming sermon; who will preach it I have no idea; in what part of the earth it will be born I have no idea; in which denomination of Christians it will be delivered I cannot guess. That coming sermon may be born in the country meeting-house on the banks of the St. Lawrence or the Oregon or the Ohio or the Tombigbee or the Alabama. The person who shall deliver it may this moment lie in a cradle under the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas, or in a New England farmhouse, or amid the rice fields of Southern savannas; or this moment there may be some young man in some of our theological seminaries, in the junior or middle or senior class, shaping that weapon of power; or there may be coming some new baptism of the Holy Ghost on the churches, so that some of us who now stand on the watch-towers of Zion, waking to the realization of our present inefficiency, may preach it ourselves. That coming sermon may not be fifty years off. And let us pray God that its arrival may be hastened, while I announce to you what I think will be the chief characteristics of that sermon when it does arrive; and I want to make these remarks appropriate and suggestive to all classes of Christian workers.

First of all, I remark that that coming sermon will be full of a living Christ in contradistinction to didactic technicalities. A sermon may be full of Christ though hardly mentioning his name, and a sermon may be empty of Christ while every sentence is repetitious of his titles. The world wants a living Christ, not a Christ standing at the head of a formal system of theology, but a Christ who means pardon and sympathy and condolence and brotherhood and life and heaven. A poor man’92s Christ; an overworked man’92s Christ; an invalid’92s Christ; a farmer’92s Christ; a merchant’92s Christ; an artisan’92s Christ; an every man’92s Christ. A symmetrical and fine-worded system of theology is well enough for theological classes, but it has no more business in a pulpit than have the technical phrases of an anatomist or a physiologist or a physician in the sick-room of a patient. The human race wants help, immediate and world-uplifting, and it will come through a sermon in which Christ shall walk right down into the immortal soul and take everlasting possession of it, filling it as full of light as is this noonday firmament.

That sermon of the future will not deal with men in the now threadbare illustrations of Jesus Christ. In that coming sermon there will be instances of vicarious sacrifice taken right out of everyday life, for there is not a day somebody is not dying for others. As the physician, saving his diphtheritic patient by sacrificing his own life; as the ship-captain, going down with his vessel, while he is getting his passengers into the lifeboat; as the fireman consuming in the burning building, while he is taking a child out of a fourth-story window; as, this summer, the strong swimmer at Long Branch or Cape May or Lake George himself perished trying to rescue the drowning; as the newspaper boy, this summer, supporting his mother for some years, this invalid mother, when offered by a gentleman fifty cents to get some especial paper, and he got it and rushed up in his anxiety to deliver it, and was crushed under the wheels of the train, and lay on the grass with only strength enough to say: ’93Oh, what will become of my poor, sick mother now?’94 Vicarious suffering. The world is full of it. An engineer said to me on a locomotive in Dakota one day: ’93We men seem to be coming to better appreciation than we used to. Did you see that account the other day of an engineer who, to save his passengers, stuck to his place, and when he was found dead in the locomotive, which was upside down, he was found still smiling, his hand on the air-brake?’94 And as the engineer said it to me, he put his hand on the air-brake to illustrate his meaning, and I looked at him and thought, ’93You would be just as much of a hero in the same crisis.’94

Oh, in that coming sermon of the Christian Church there will be living illustrations taken out from everyday life of vicarious suffering’97illustrations that will bring to mind the ghastlier sacrifice of him who, in the high places of the field, on the cross fought our battles, and wept our griefs, and endured our struggles, and died our death. A German sculptor made an image of Christ, and he asked his little child, five years old, who it was, and she said: ’93That must be some very great man.’94 The sculptor was displeased with the criticism, so he got another block of marble and chiseled away on it two or three years, and then he brought in his little child, eight or nine years of age, and he said to her: ’93Who do you think that is?’94 She said: ’93That must be the One who took little children in his arms and blessed them.’94 Then the sculptor was satisfied. O my friends, what the world wants is not a cold Christ, not an intellectual Christ, not a severely magisterial Christ; but a loving Christ, spreading out his arms of sympathy to press the whole world to his loving heart.

But I remark again, that the coming sermon of the Christian Church will be a short sermon. Condensation is demanded by the age in which we live. No more need of long introductions and long applications and so many divisions to a discourse that it may be said to be hydra-headed. In other days men got all their information from the pulpit. There were few books and there were no newspapers, and there was little travel from place to place; and people would sit and listen two and a half hours to a religious discourse, and ’93seventeenthly’94 would find them fresh and chipper. In those times there was enough room for a man to take an hour to warm himself up to the subject and an hour to cool off. But what was a necessity then is a superfluity now. Congregations are full of knowledge from books, from newspapers, from rapid and continuous intercommunication; and long disquisitions of what they know already will not be endured. If a religious teacher cannot compress what he wishes to say to the people in the space of forty-five minutes, better adjourn it to some other day.

The trouble is we preach audiences into a Christian frame, and then we preach them out of it. We forget that every auditor has so much capacity of attention, and when that is exhausted he is restless. An accident on the Long Island Railroad one memorable night came from the fact that the brakes were out of order, and when they wanted to stop the train they could not stop, and hence the casualty was terrific. In all religious discourse we want locomotive power and propulsion; we want, at the same time, stout brakes to let down at the right instant. It is a dismal thing after a hearer has comprehended the whole subject to hear a man say: ’93Now, to recapitulate,’94 and ’93a few words by way of application,’94 and ’93once more,’94 and ’93finally,’94 and ’93now to conclude.’94 Paul preached until midnight, and Eutychus got sound asleep and fell out of a window and broke his neck. Some would say, ’93Good for him.’94 I would rather be sympathetic, like Paul, and resuscitate him. That accident is often quoted now in religious circles as a warning against somnolence in church. It is just as much a warning to ministers against prolixity. Eutychus was wrong in his somnolence, but Paul made a mistake when he kept on until midnight. He ought to have stopped at eleven o’92clock and there would have been no accident. If Paul might have gone on to too great length, let all those of us who are now preaching the Gospel remember that there is a limit to religious discourse, or ought to be; and that, in our time, we have no apostolic power of miracles. Napoleon, in an address of seven minutes, thrilled his army and thrilled Europe. Christ’92s sermon on the mount, the model sermon, was less than eighteen minutes long at ordinary rate of delivery. It is not electricity scattered all over the sky that strikes, but electricity gathered into a thunderbolt and hurled; and it is not religious truth scattered over, spread out over a vast reach of time, but religious truth projected in compact form that flashes light upon the soul and rives its indifference. When the coming sermon arrives in this land and in the Christian Church, the sermon which is to arouse the world and startle the nations and usher in the kingdom, it will be a brief sermon. Hear it, all theological students, all ye just entering upon religious work, all ye men and women who in Sabbath Schools and other departments are toiling for Christ and the salvation of immortals. Brevity! Brevity!

But I remark, also, that the coming sermon of which I speak will be a popular sermon. There are those in these times who speak of a popular sermon as though there must be something wrong about it. As these critics are dull themselves, the world gets the impression that a sermon is good in proportion as it is stupid. Christ was the most popular preacher the world ever saw; and, considering the small number of the world’92s population, had the largest audiences ever gathered. He never preached anywhere without making a great sensation. People rushed out in the wilderness to hear him, reckless of their physical necessities. So great was their anxiety to hear Christ that, taking no food with them, they would have fainted and starved had not Christ performed a miracle and fed them. Why did so many people take the truth at Christ’92s hands? Because they all understood it. He illustrated his subject by a hen and her chickens, by a bushel measure, by a handful of salt, by a bird’92s flight and by a lily’92s aroma. All the people knew what he meant, and they flocked to him. And when the coming sermon of the Christian Church appears, it will not be Princetonian, nor Rochesterian, nor Andoverian, nor Middletonian, but Olivetic’97plain, practical, unique, earnest, comprehensive of all the woes, wants, sins, sorrows and necessities of an auditory. But when that sermon does come there will be a thousand gleaming scimiters to charge on it. There are in so many theological seminaries professors telling young men how to preach, themselves not knowing how; and I am told that if a young man in some of our theological seminaries says anything quaint or thrilling or unique, faculty and students fly at him and set him right and straighten him out and smooth him down and chop him off until he says everything just as everybody else says it. Oh, when the coming sermon of the Christian Church arrives, all the churches of Christ in our great cities will be thronged. The world wants spiritual help. All who have buried their dead want comfort. All know themselves to be mortal and to be immortal, and they want to hear about the great future. I tell you, my friends, if the people of these great cities who have had trouble only thought they could get practical and sympathetic help in the Christian Church, there would not be a street in New York or Brooklyn or Chicago or Charleston or Philadelphia or Boston which would be passable on the Sabbath day, if there were a church on it; for all the people would press to that asylum of mercy, that great house of comfort and consolation. A mother with a dead babe in her arms came to the god Siva and asked to have her child restored to life. The god Siva said to her: ’93You go and get a handful of mustard seed from a house in which there has been no sorrow, and in which there has been no death, and I will restore your child to life.’94 So the mother went out, and she went from house to house, and from home to home, looking for a place where there had been no sorrow and where there had been no death, but she found none. She went back to the god Siva and said: ’93My mission is a failure; you see I have not brought the mustard seed; I cannot find a place where there has been no sorrow and no death.’94 ’93Oh,’94’91says the god Siva, ’93understand, your sorrows are no worse than the sorrows of others; we all have our griefs and all have our heart-breaks.’94

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

We hear a great deal of discussion now all over the land about why people do not go to church. Some say it is because Christianity is dying out, and because people do not believe in the truth of God’92s Word, and all that. They are false reasons. The reason is because our sermons are not interesting and practical, and sympathetic and helpful. Some one might as well tell the whole truth on this subject, and so I will tell it. The sermon of the future, the Gospel sermon to come forth and shake the nations and lift people out of darkness, will be a popular sermon, just for the simple reason that it will meet the woes and the wants and the anxieties of the people. There are in all our denominations ecclesiastical mummies sitting around to frown upon the fresh young pulpits of America, to try to awe them down, to cry out, ’93Tut, tut, tut! sensational!’94 They stand, today, preaching in churches that hold a thousand people and there are a hundred persons present, and if they cannot have the world saved in their way it seems as if they do not want it saved at all. I do not know but the old way of making ministers of the Gospel is better. A collegiate education and an apprenticeship under the care and home attention of some earnest, aged Christian minister; the young man getting the patriarch’92s spirit and assisting him in his religious service. Young lawyers study with old lawyers, young physicians study with old physicians, and I believe it would be a great help if every young man studying for the Gospel ministry could put himself in the home and heart and sympathy and under the benediction and perpetual presence of a Christian minister.

But I remark again, the sermon of the future will be an awakening sermon. From altar-rail to the front doorstep, under that sermon an audience will get up and start for heaven. There will be in it a staccato passage. It will not be a lullaby; it will be a battle-charge. Men will drop their sins, for they will feel the hot breath of pursuing retribution on the back of their necks. It will be a sermon sympathetic with all the physical distresses as well as the spiritual distresses of the world. Christ not only preached, but he healed paralysis, and he healed epilepsy, and he healed the dumb and the blind and ten lepers.

That sermon of the future will be an everyday sermon, going right down into every man’92s life, and it will teach him how to vote, how to bargain, how to plow, how to do any work he is called to; how to wield trowel and pen and pencil and yardstick and plane. And it will teach women how to preside over their households, and how to educate their children, and how to imitate Miriam and Esther and Vashti and Eunice, the mother of Timothy; and Mary, the mother of Christ; and those women who on Northern and Southern battlefields were mistaken by the wounded for angels of mercy fresh from the throne of God.

Yes, I have to tell you the sermon of the future will be a reported sermon. If you have any idea that printing was invented simply to print secular books, and stenography and phonography were contrived merely to set forth secular ideas, you are mistaken. The printing press is to be the great agency of Gospel proclamation. It is high time that good men, instead of denouncing the press, employ it to scatter forth the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The vast majority of people in our cities do not come to church, and nothing but the printed sermon can reach them and call them to pardon and life and peace and heaven. So I cannot understand the nervousness of some of my brethren of the ministry. When they see a newspaper man coming in they say: ’93Alas! there is a reporter.’94 Every added reporter is ten thousand, or fifty thousand, or a hundred thousand more souls added to the auditory. The time will come when all the village, town and city newspapers will reproduce the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and sermons preached on the Sabbath will reverberate all around the world; and, some by type and some by voice, all nations will be evangelized.

The practical bearing of this is upon those who are engaged in Christian work, not only upon theological students and young ministers, but upon all who preach the Gospel’97and that is all of you if you are doing your duty. Do you exhort in prayer-meeting? Be short and spirited. Do you teach in Bible class? Though you have to study every night, be interesting. Do you accost people on the subject of religion in their homes or in public places? Study adroitness and use common sense. The most graceful, the most beautiful thing on earth is the religion of Jesus Christ, and if you awkwardly present it, it is defamation. We must do our work rapidly and we must do it effectively. Soon our time for work will be gone. A dying Christian took out his watch and gave it to a friend, and said: ’93Take that watch, I have no more use for it; time is ended for me and eternity begins.’94 Oh, my friends, when our watch has ticked away for us the last moment, and our clock has struck for us the last hour, may it be found we did our work well, that we did it in the very best way; and whether we preached the Gospel in pulpits or taught Sabbath classes or administered to the sick as physicians or bargained as merchants or pleaded the law as attorneys or were busy as artisans or as husbandmen or as mechanics or were like Martha called to give a meal to a hungry Christ or like Hannah to make a coat for a prophet or like Deborah to rouse the courage of some timid Barak in the Lord’92s conflict, we did our work in such a way that it will stand the test of the judgment. And in the long procession of the redeemed that march around the throne, may it be found there are many there brought to God through our instrumentality and in whose rescue we are exultant.

But oh, you unsaved, wait not for that coming sermon. It may come after your obsequies. It may come after the stonecutter has chiseled our name on the slab fifty years before. Do not wait for a great steamer of the Cunard or White Star Line to take you off the wreck, but hail the first craft with however low a mast and however small a hulk and however poor a rudder and however weak a captain. Better a disabled schooner that comes up in time than a full-rigged brig that comes up after you have sunk. Instead of waiting for that coming sermon’97it may be forty, fifty years off’97take this plain invitation of a man who, to have given you spiritual eyesight, would be glad to be called the spittle by the hand of Christ put on the eyes of a blind man; and who would consider it the highest compliment of this service, if at the close five hundred men should start from these doors, saying: ’93Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not. This one thing I know, whereas I was blind now I see.’94 Swifter than shadows over the plain, quicker than birds in their autumnal flight, hastier than eagles to their prey, hie you to a sympathetic Christ. The orchestras of heaven have already strung their instruments to celebrate your rescue.

And the angels echoed around the throne:

Rejoice, for the Lord brings back his own.

That coming sermon will be delivered in the fresh and spirited language then in use. It will not be inherited humdrum. One of the mightiest hindrances to the progress of the Gospel now is much of the sermonic vocabulary. It has for the most part come down from the ages past. Certain styles of phraseology were adopted by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which the nineteenth century has appropriated for religious use. Why should we put our thoughts for pulpit address in modes of expression belonging to other times. As well adopt for our day the cocked hat, and the knee buckle, and hair twisted into a queue, common in 1776. Clergymen animated and interesting on platform and at literary banquets, and in social circle, are often dull in the pulpit. It is a fact that everybody knows, although it may be hazardous to state it, that the phraseology in sermonic delivery is often soporific. People who are troubled with insomnia on Saturday night when they want to sleep, the next morning in church nod their heads in somnolence when they want to keep awake.

Some of the greatest efforts of all our lives have been the efforts to keep attentive while seated under some able and learned sermon on ’93Foreordination,’94 and ’93The Eternal Generation of the Son.’94 The themes of the Gospel which are the sublimest and most stirring themes in the universe, when put into phraseology which we have heard and read all our lives, act as a lullaby, a religious narcotic, a holy anodyne, a pious opiate. What right have we to shut ourselves up to a few hundred words of utterance, when out of the more than one hundred and fourteen thousand words of our language we might make an entertaining and arousing selection. What a glorious legacy Noah Webster left us in his dictionary. Although his friend Trumbull said of him: ’93Webster has returned and brought with him a very pretty wife. I wish him success; but I doubt, in the present decay of business in our profession, whether his profits will enable him to keep up the style he sets out with. I fear he will breakfast upon institutes, dine upon dissertations, and go to bed supperless.’94 Fortunately the prophecy failed. When, with such opulence of words as Noah Webster put before us, we confine ourselves to a worn-out, threadbare diction, we are like misers who have fifty thousand dollars in bonds and mortgages, and yet live on ten cents a day. In the religious vocabulary how often we find enfeebled adjectives, and conjunctions that do not conjoin, and verbs that fail to express action, and the words that have so long run through churches and religious circles that they have no power to arrest attention.

The most effective ministers of the Gospel in the past would not consent thus to be bound. When Jonathan Edwards preached his renowned sermon on ’93The Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God,’94 and Thomas Chalmers his famous sermon on ’93The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,’94 and Merle d’92Aubigne his sermon on ’93The Three Onlys,’94 and Dr. Candlish his sermon on ’93The Universal Doom,’94 and John Cumming his sermon on ’93The Great Tribulation,’94 and Francis Wayland his sermon on ’93The Moral Dignity of Missions,’94 and Tholuck his sermon on ’93Christ, the Touchstone of Human Hearts,’94 they chose an independent, and, therefore, potent, phraseology. Rufus Choate, in his profession of the law, used eleven thousand six hundred and ninety-three unrepeated words; John Milton, in literary productions, employed eight thousand unrepeated words, and Shakespeare, in his dramas, wielded fifteen thousand unrepeated words; but the majority of us preachers of the Gospel employ less than three thousand. ’93Oh,’94 says some one, ’93words are nothing!’94 My reply is that the Holy Bible is nothing but words inspired, and words, under God, will yet redeem all nations. What we, the preachers of the Gospel, most need today is, first, more Holy Ghost power, and next, an enlarged, and enriched, and regenerated vocabulary. But there will be no lack in the coming sermon of which I speak. It will not be the vocabulary of the seventeenth or eighteenth or nineteenth century, but of the time in which it will be delivered.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage