Preaching and Preachers

The Sermon and the Preachingbigger involved. The total person is engaged on both sides; and ifwefail to realise this our preaching will be a failure.Let me enforce this particular point by quoting from a paganphilosopher who certainly saw this point very clearly with regard tophilosophy. A young philosopher went one day to Epictetus to askhim for advice. The reply Epictetus gave him is very good advice alsofor preachers. He said, 'The philosopher's lecture room is a surgery.When you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain, forwhen you come in something is wrong with you. One man has put hisshoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache. Am I thesurgeon then to sit down and give you a string of fine sentences thatyou may praise me and then go away-the man with the dislocatedarm, the man with the abscess,the man with the headache-just as youcame? Is it for this that young men come away from home and leavetheir parents and their kinsmen and their property to say, "Bravo toyou for your fine moral conclusions"? Is this what Socrates did orZeno or Cleanthes?'That is most important for the preacher. Epictetus says that this istrue even of the philosopher for he is not discussing abstract problemsand questions. Even philosophy should be concerned with men, withliving themes and with problems and with conditions. That is thesituation, he says; these people come because there is somethingwrong with them. One man, metaphorically, has put his shoulder out,another has an abscess, another a headache. That is true; and it isalways true of every congregation. These people do not come just asminds or as intellects, they come as total persons in the midst of life,with allits attendant circumstances and its problems.and its difficultiesand its trials; and the business of the preacher is not only toremember that but to preach accordingly. He is dealing with livingpersons, people who are in need and in trouble, sometimes not consciously;and he is to make them aware of that, and to deal with it. Itis this living transaction.Or take another statement by the same Epictetus: 'Tell me,' he saysin a challenge to the philosopher-and an equally good challenge to55