Thunder in the Soul

When I went back to church after studiously avoiding it for more than a quarter century, I was lucky to wander into a sanctuary that seemed most compatible to me. I often have thought that my life since might have turned out quite different if I’d happened into any number of other services that Christmas Eve, 1980. A happy twist of Humphrey Bogart’s famous line in “Casablanca” comes to mind when I consider my good fortune: “Of all the gin joints in all the world, I walked into this one.”

Among the attractions of King’s Chapel in Boston (one of the few Christian churches in the mostly humanist Unitarian-Universalist Assn.) were the sermons of the Rev. Carl Scovel, a natural storyteller and gifted teacher. On visits to other churches, I have sometimes heard harangues that fit the second definition of “sermon” in my American Heritage College Dictionary: “An often lengthy and tedious speech of reproof or exhortation.”

The sermons I heard from my own minister met the standards of another Boston preacher of the Unitarian denomination, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his memorable “Divinity School Address” of 1838 Emerson said, “The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed through the fire of thought.” No abstract exhortations devoid of experience meet this standard, nor do unexamined personal anecdotes designed only for entertainment or easy uplift.

The influential Presbyterian pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick believed that “every sermon should have for its main business the solving of some problem. . . .” James Baldwin, the son of a minister and himself a street-corner preacher in Harlem in his teens, believed that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was beloved by his congregation because of “the forthrightness with which he speaks of things which hurt and baffle them.”

Sermons are written and preached for instruction, exhortation, inspiration, proselytization, eulogy; there seem to be as many uses, styles and categories of sermon as there are of what William James called, in his classic study, “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Yet the form is seldom regarded as literature, which is how it is presented in two new collections, one of sermons throughout history and one of American sermons.

The editors of these volumes are not alone, however, in judging sermon writing as a literary enterprise; Samuel Johnson believed that “sermons make a considerable branch of English literature, so that a library must be very imperfect if it has not a numerous collection. . . .” Johnson himself was a ghostwriter of sermons, usually for two guineas apiece, which helped support his other literary pursuits. Like most writers, Johnson “was never greedy of money, but without money he could not be stimulated to write,” according to one of his biographers.

I learned this and a great deal more from “Tongues of Angels, Tongues of Men,” which presents nearly 90 sermons by people ranging from Jesus to Desmond Tutu, provides a fascinating introduction to the subject and helpfully divides the works into historic periods (“The Apostolic Era,” “The Medieval Pulpit,” “Colonial America” and so on). The editors are a book agent and a freelance writer whose passion for the material serves the common reader better than an academic or theological approach. Their commentary gives a context for understanding the preaching and the preachers’ relevance to their own times as well as ours. This alone makes the book interesting and important.

It is puzzling as well as unfortunate that “American Sermons” offers no such guidance but simply plunks down 58 sermons between its covers. The only help for the reader is a brief paragraph identification of each author in a section of biographical notes at the end and a dry 2 1/2-page “Note on the Sermon Form.” The editor who “selected the contents and wrote the notes for this volume” is identified only by name.

Although the majority of the sermons in both volumes are by Christians, I learned from “Tongues” that the form began with the Jews in the 5th century BC after the return from exile in Babylonia. The prophet Ezra, pronouncing a blessing on the assembled multitude before reading the Torah scroll at daybreak in the main square of Jerusalem, “ushered in the tradition of the public sermon.”

The editors of “Tongues” lament the “decline of preaching” today, which they believe is “because live public speech is no longer fostered. . . . [S]o-called communications skills are prized above permitting the word to flow through the heart and mind.” Yet sermons have always been subjected to harsh criticism, from the time when Jesus returned to preach in his hometown and was chased out to the edge of a cliff (inspiring his famous line “No prophet is accepted in his own country”). In the 6th century, the Bishop of Arles “ordered his church doors barred to prevent early departures.” In his role as Anglican clergyman, the novelist Jonathan Swift (who didn’t confine his satire to his books) gave a sermon called “Upon Sleeping in Church.” He proclaimed, “Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.” In generous understanding of the sleepers, Swift also observed, “Wit and eloquence are shining Qualities, that God both imparted, in great degrees, to very few. . . .”

The small-town Yorkshire parishioners of another writer-preacher of the era, Laurence Sterne, were harder on his sermons than the critics who praised his novel “Tristam Shandy.” When he ascended the pulpit, “half the congregation of his church [or later his cathedral] walked out.” I might have walked out or fallen asleep during some of the weightier sermons in these volumes by famous preachers of their time like Clement of Rome, St. Bernard of Clairvoux and Cotton Mather, yet I don’t see how anyone could nod off during Sterne’s sermon on the Prodigal Son, in which he imagines the son’s misadventures when he leaves home for the far country (“How shall the youth make his father comprehend, that he was cheated at Damscus . . . that a whore of Babylon swallowed his best pearl . . . that all had gone wrong since the day he forsook his father’s house.”

It is easy to second-guess selections for such wide-ranging volumes, but I wish “Tongues” had included several of the sermons found in “American Sermons,” especially “What We Might Do Together” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Polish rabbi who became a professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Delivered at an ecumenical conference, this sermon speaks for the true followers of any religious path, whether Jewish or Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, Quaker or Shaker or Sikh:

“God is not a concept produced by deliberation. God is an outcry wrung from the heart and mind; God is never an explanation, it is always a challenge. It can be uttered only in astonishment.”

Annie Dillard in one of her essays advises serious parishioners to wear crash helmets when they go to church, not for fear of hitting their heads if they fall asleep but in recognition of Rabbi Heschel’s definition of God as “an assault, a thunder in the soul. . . .”