Best Easter sermons Reverend Peter Mullen
This Easter, vicars shouldn’t be obscure or arrogant in the pulpit. Like Jesus, they should be funny, says Reverend Peter Mullen
‘Love God and do as you like,’ said St Augustine of Hippo.
That’s the way to write a sermon: get your punchline in at the start.
Understand that the art of preaching is not to sound as if you’re preaching. Nothing is more off-putting than the bellowing revivalist with his banana-split smile and ego bigger than the gospel.
John Bunyan knew all too well the seductiveness of clerical self-esteem.
One morning, a parishioner praised him: ‘Fine sermon, Pastor John!’
Bunyan said, ‘Aye, Satan told me that before I got down from the pulpit!’
The task of the preacher is not self-expression but self-effacement. The message is the thing, not the medium.
The prototypes for all sermons are the spoken parables of Jesus. These witty utterances, nearly always preached on the Galilean hillside, are full of ironical humour. They were meant to be funny.
Take the one about the man who went to a wedding without his wedding suit.
His host, the king, asked, ‘ “How camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?”
‘And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ’
That’s not very funny, is it? Until you get the joke: that it was the host’s job to provide his guests with proper togs.
There are more than 30 such parables in the Gospels and – because truth is best expressed in riddles – they are packed with irony. If I were writing a book about them, I would call it Jesus’s Jewish Jokes.
The form of the sermon has changed down the centuries. Medieval sermons were originally written in Latin by scholarly monks and handed out to the less well-educated parochial clergy. They would read, mark and inwardly digest them, and then preach them in the local tongue to their parishioners.
The local priest would extemporise matters of local interest – so there was nothing po-faced and moralising about them. The image of the insufferable, pompous priggish parson was the creation of Jane Austen’s exquisite satires.
In the Middle Ages, the sermon was an occasion for a good night out when the village got together to hear the latest news. In fact, sermons were the mass media of the age – sometimes they were distinctly tabloid, even ribald.
In England, the great age of the preachers was the 17th and 18th centuries. The sermon developed into a literary form in the hands of men of such voluminous scholarship that most moderns are pygmies beside them: Swift, Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Berkeley and Lancelot Andrewes. There was vivacity in their speech, and people went to hear them in order to be ravished.
John Wesley modestly boasted, ‘I design plain truth for plain people.’ After Wesley came the madding crowd of hellfire-and-damnation preachers. Their sermons were often like music-hall performances, with the congregation answering back.
The late Ian Paisley repeated an example of this sort of sermon, in jesting self-deprecation: ‘Ye are all bound for damnation. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!’
From near the back, an old woman piped up, ‘And what about us what has no teeth?’
The preacher answered, ‘Teeth will be provided!’
It was not always the parson who preached; there were lay sermons.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a volume of them. One day, he boasted to his friend Charles Lamb, ‘You’ve heard me preach, haven’t you Charles?’
‘Why, I never heard you do anything else!’
The Church is a comprehensive collection of sinners, and preachers might be gathered from the four winds.
When I was at St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, we heard Ann Widdecombe (twice), the tenor Robert Tear and Roger Scruton, who fixed his bike to the church railings like a Wild West gunslinger tying up his faithful steed.
Archbishop Cormac Murphy-o’connor came, and the next day it was announced that the Pope had made him a cardinal. ‘There,’ I said, ‘See what happens when you come and preach at St Michael’s!’
Great preachers do not waste time explaining, and academic theology is left where it belongs, under the dust sheet. Instead they offer images of the spiritual realities and they incarnate thoughts in things. Their words are made flesh.
In their sermons, God speaks English. Bunyan translates the vices and virtues into living characters such as Obstinate, Pliable and the Shining Ones. And so they achieve real presences.
No one does this better than Lancelot Andrewes. On Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus in the resurrection garden, there is none of that wafty talk of the discursive theologian telling us Mary ‘experienced new life’.
Instead, at Eastertide, Andrewes places his hearers there in the garden with Mary and Christ the Gardener:
‘He touched her, and she greened all of a sudden.’