Introduction

The night before they hear your sermon next Sunday, perhaps, many of your listeners may be absorbing their favorite highly-produced podcast or enjoying their favorite Spotify playlist. They may indeed be riveted by what they hear. When they walk into your church the next morning, you will be addressing people whose attention span may be shrinking annually, maybe even at an alarming rate.

It is true, you offer them something the world cannot—the living Word of God delivered by a preacher called by God and speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit. That’s one of the big reasons why so many come back week after week. Still, they will likely be bored, distracted, or restless. And some of the questions preachers must confront include:

-Will we deliver our words about the Word with an eye toward the beauty, clarity, drama, wisdom, and humor that draws people in?

-Will our listeners have to fight to hear the truth, or will they be effortlessly invited to experience it? Will the Biblical story and other stories you inevitably relay captivate the listener?

To the degree that preaching is an “art” (as well as a “science”), preachers are debtors to artists. Since preachers traffic in words, we are wise to pull up a chair and listen closely to those who use words cleverly and beautifully … poets, to be sure, but I am thinking about the more accessible form of poetry that comes to us in songs.

Why Songwriters?

We could begin to answer that question by reminding ourselves that a sizable portion of the Scripture we are called to preach falls into the genre of songs, including the Psalms and notable passages like Miriam’s Red Sea Victory song (Exodus 15) and the Christ Hymn of Philippians 2:5-11.

Yet we find deeper reasons for the power of songs. Many songs accomplish what we wish our sermons would—they serve as vehicles to express someone’s affection (“I Will Always Love You”) or patriotism (“The Star Spangled Banner”) or resolve (“We Shall Overcome”). Many couples have “their song.” Perhaps it was on the radio when they first met and fell in love, or the song they selected for their first dance at a wedding. And if this couple is still in love, whenever they hear that song, or sing that song, it fills them with joy.

I remember a high school boy who was dating a girl I knew. He bought her an album by the band Chicago and, along with it, handed her a piece of paper. He had typed her name at the top, signed his name at the bottom, and in the middle reproduced the lyrics of Chicago’s hit song “Color My World.” I remember thinking at the time, “Smooth move.” That’s their song. That song colors their relationship, in the best sort of way.

So many people I talk with have a sermon in their past that was so beautiful, poignant, or memorable that it has served a similar purpose. That sermon functions like their song, one which symbolizes their love for and fresh commitment to God.

The best songwriters use an economy of words to engage our hearts, delight or challenge our minds, and lift our spirits to a new plane. Their stanzas take us on a journey and their refrains continually bring us back home. Many elements contribute to a good song—skilled and passionate vocalists, a unique rhythm, strings and keys and horns and guitars ranging from soft acoustic to driving rock. Still, the songs that tend to transport us have a durable, memorable, and poetic lyric that moves us. Songwriters work extremely hard to make the music feel effortless.

So let’s see how our attentiveness to the best songwriting can enliven our preaching.

Songwriters Teach us to Wait

During his 2011 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, singer/songwriter Tom Waits compared songwriting to fishing: “You know, it’s like setting a trap for a song. You have to be real quiet to catch the big ones.”[1] Not only does Waits believe in a creative patience, he also maintains that songwriters benefit from knowing the importance of structure and a variety of forms for songs. In a 2002 interview, he said that a song’s “form itself is like a Jello-O mold,” and being familiar with a variety of forms can only help the songwriter (and preacher, we might say).

Perhaps you are not like me, but I believe that a lack of time for creative “waiting” has prevented many of my sermons from moving from being merely true to engaging. Waiting helps me diagnose a serious flaw in much of my preaching—I race from exegesis to structure. In my anxious enthusiasm to put the sermon together, I settle for the first idea that comes to mind. Then I grab an all-too-familiar Jell-O mold from the pantry—“three ways to experience the Holy Spirit,” or “three things Saul did wrong,” or “three things Samuel did right.”

Recently, I’ve been attempting to intentionally place some space between finishing the bulk of my exegesis (do we ever truly finish exegesis?) and the time when a structure must be fleshed out. In between, I mind map, pray, and experiment with structure and wait for divine inspiration. I wait creatively, in other words, and ask the same Holy Spirit who hovered over the chaos of Genesis 1 to hover with me.

One of the things we can do while we wait—that is, while we intentionally place some creative space between exegesis and sermon formulation—is to explore how preachers in different traditions than ours use different “Jell-O molds” and different approaches to expand our minds about sermon possibilities.

For example, last fall during a seminary class on preaching, I assigned my students the task of listening and briefly commenting on one sermon podcast a week. The assignments I gave them were quite diverse, with sermons varying in provenance (US, UK, Australia), length (from 14 to 55 minutes), and style (strict exposition through a passage to musing on a singular idea from a passage). My students and I had invigorating discussions about this broad menu of sermons, and I warmly recommend this practice to you as well. Regularly consuming a wide variety of sermons (especially those which differ from your normal style) can stimulate your creativity as you wait upon God for a fresh way to present gospel truth.

Songwriters Train Us to ‘Hook’ Our Listeners

One of the most important gifts songwriting can make to your preaching can be easily trivialized—and that is a hook. The hook is that often repeated, funny, or poignant line, that links the song’s pieces together and rivets them to the mind of the listener. The hook is often captured in a song’s title.

Merle Haggard once wrote a song that simultaneously praised his righteous mother and mourned his misspent youth. It was titled “Mama Tried.” That two-word line, repeated throughout the song, beautifully captures those twin themes.

Darrell Brown (a songwriter who has written for artists like John Mayer and LeAnn Rimes) defines “hooks” as these “bits and pieces of rhyming syllables or words … strung together in some fresh way so they never leave your brain, so you can’t stop thinking about or humming that song wherever you go.”[2] Brown lists one of his nominees for a great hook—Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.”

So take a good look at my face

You'll see my smile looks out of place

If you look closer, it's easy to trace

The tracks of my tears

That phrase—“tracks of my tears”—not only rolls off the tongue but also sticks in our brains, that dry river bed of sadness that runs through the pasted smiles of broken-hearted people we meet.

For the preacher, the hook often finds its sermonic counterpart in the Big Idea, as Haddon Robinson ably taught us. The hook, returned to again and again in song (and sermon), unifies the overall impact.

Years ago, a pastor friend preached a sermon on suffering. Sadly, I don’t remember the Biblical text, but what I have never forgotten is the use he made of a line from a poem by Robert Frost. The line was “the best way out is always through.” In his sermon, he simplified that poetic line, repeatedly claiming that "the way out is the way through." This was the path Christ took on our behalf, and the path Christ leads us to take. It is not mounting the “wings of a dove” and flying away from suffering (as David wishes in Psalm 55:6), but rather learning how to cast your burdens on the Lord and find his sustaining grace in the midst of the struggle (Psalm 55:22).3

The late John Claypool fashioned a different kind of hook for listeners enduring suffering. Riffing off a quote from a Frederick Buechner novel, Claypool memorably built a sermon on Genesis 50 around the phrase, “the worst things are never the last things.” That line, sprinkled five times throughout the message, speaks honestly about Joseph’s suffering and even more forthrightly about Joseph’s hope.

I tried my hand at a hook a few months back. In a sermon on the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:1-20, I highlighted the diverse reactions to Jesus, as demonstrated by the townspeople on the one hand and the healed man/former demoniac on the other. The local citizens, realizing how much Jesus has already cost them in pig losses, say, essentially, “Leave us.” The recently healed man, on the other hand, says, “Lead us.” Throughout the sermon, I asked listeners for their response to Jesus: “Is it ‘leave us’ or ‘lead us’?”

Songwriters Train Us in Evocative Speech

Much of my formal education in preaching emerged from the more scientific side of exegesis (which is good!). I learned to parse verbs and locate villages on maps and outline the logical flow of the Biblical writer’s argument. I was trained to wield exegetical tools with great precision and to present hard truths with accuracy and clarity. Yet today, if I’m not careful, a kind of coldness or perhaps personal distance can emerge in my preaching.

Songwriters, on the other hand, help us swim in the warmer oceans of mood and emotion, soul and spirit. Take, for example, Tom Waits’ “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night.” In this song, a young man has gassed up his Oldsmobile and is “barrelin’ down the boulevard” in search of the mythical beauty of a “Saturday night.” All week long, he’s been stuck in what is presumably an unfulfilling and menial job. But now, “you comb your hair and shave your face, tryin’ to wipe out ev’ry trace of all the other days ….” To try to mine the mystery of Saturday night, Waits speculates on its ingredients: “the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin,” perhaps. Or maybe the look in the eye of the barmaid smiling. By the time the song is done, we feel what Waits feels.

Most humans, at one time or another, have experienced the pain of an unrequited love. But in Bobby Braddock’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” made famous by George Jones and called by some the greatest country song of all time, we feel it.

A man told his girl he’d love her until he died, and when she broke up with him, she told him he would “forget her in time.” But he didn’t—keeping her picture on his wall, underlining her love letters in red, and loving her right up until the day he was laid out in a coffin. When the song is done, our hearts are broken for this poor besotted man, finally achieving a tragic sort of peace!

Do our listeners feel what we want them to feel? I don’t mean emotional manipulation, but are we using similarly evocative language so that we don’t just talk about gratitude, loneliness, anxiety, or joy, but demonstrate it? Can we help them sit with Bartimaeus, hungry and blind and perhaps bored from begging each day in dusty Jericho? Can we use details that help people feel what desperation looks like in a man who cries out to Jesus for mercy? Such desperation that when those who watch the Jesus Parade try to quiet him down, he “shouted all the more” for mercy (Mark 10:48)? No doubt many people we address from the pulpit on any given Sunday will feel something of that desperation for Jesus to call for us and grant us mercy and healing.

I wanted my listeners to dive deeply into a powerful phrase about worldly temptation in Ephesians 2:2—“in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world.” Since this topic can easily feel shopworn and clichéd, I felt led to use the image of an undertow. Most of my listeners have stood waist-deep in ocean water, feeling a current pulling them away from the safety of the shore. My prayer was that this image could frame the constant hidden current we experience in virtually every movie we watch or conversation we enter. I wanted them to feel the sand moving under their feet, as the ever-present rush of temptation undermines their efforts to walk towards the shore of God’s faithfulness.

Songwriters Teach Us to Play

One of the things we love about the music that fills our earbuds, headphones, or car stereos is a certain playfulness. At times, it is a play on words. When an ambitious young immigrant named Alexander Hamilton declares that he is “not throwing away my shot” in Act 1, listeners feel a deep foreshadowing of the end of the musical, when during a duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton will indeed fire his shot straight up into the air.

Good songs not only play with words but they play with familiar images and characters, often juxtaposing the whimsical with the profound. In Miranda Lambert’s “Tin Man,” the title points to the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz, with his frequent need for oil, as he joins the other misfits like the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion on the Yellow Brick Road. The song’s deep melancholy informs the Tin Man, absent a heart, how lucky he is: “You shouldn’t spend your whole life wishin’ for something bound to fall apart.” The irony of envying someone who so clearly lacks something so essential makes its point with painful clarity.

Our sermons can do something similar. They can take a well-known character—say the pessimistic Eeyore of Winnie the Pooh—and use him as an object lesson for how often a pessimistic worldview fails to view life through eyes of faith (“the conviction of things not seen”—Hebrews 11:1 ESV).

A reporter for the New York Times named Alexandra Levine recently reminded me of a lesser known but powerful image in Martin Luther King’s final sermon.[3] King was reflecting on the time in 1958 when he was signing books in Harlem and a woman stabbed him. When he was rushed to surgery, the surgeons worked to carefully extract the knife. He was later told that any sudden action—including a sneeze—would have cost him his life.

A few days after his surgery, King received a letter from a 9th grade girl who said she was writing to say, “I’m so happy you didn’t sneeze.” Then, in majestic fashion, King said, “I, too, am happy I didn’t sneeze … Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters.” Nor would he had seen the freedom riders in ’61, and so many other powerful markers of the civil rights movement. In King’s hands, a charming line from a student’s letter became a playful yet powerful refrain, like a song, to engage his listeners and take them higher.

Yes, a preacher like King may not come along but once a century, and what I’ve described in this essay is by no means easy. Those times when a lyrical outline just falls into our laps are rare. Many are the hours I’ve doodled on a legal pad, praying against despair, and waiting for my collection of exegetical facts to find a melody.

Just this week, in fact, I struggled to present the genius of how God used Andrew’s life in the Gospels. The basic idea was clear in my head: Andrew was a connector. He connected his brother Peter to Jesus in John 1:35-42 (my primary text), but he also connected his Master with a little boy and a lunch to feed thousands, and with some Greeks who first approached Philip with the request, “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21 KJV).

I know that some people will never see Jesus unless someone like Andrew intervenes and connects the two. Yet, for some reason, building a sermon around the idea of “Andrew the Connector” was not making my heart race. So I wrote “Hook ideas” on a sheet of paper and forced myself to write as many as I could think of (seventeen in all). They ranged from “you’ve got a friend in me” to “be a friend of the Friend” to “take me to your leader” to many that are too embarrassing to list.

At some point, I wrote down the phrase “extension cord.” And that image took life in my mind. What if Andrew (and we) are called to be like a “power strip”? We are not generators—only Jesus can supply spiritual power. But when we abide with Jesus (John 1:39), we become a “power strip” where his grace is conducted through us to many others. My prayer is that image of the “power strip” will hook my listeners, and that this sermon won’t just land but will actually “sing.” I pray the same for you.

[1] Songwriting Approaches of the Masters: Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. https://reverb.com/news/songwriting-approaches-of-the-masters Accessed. 2019-05-04

[2] The Three Hs - Measure for Measure - Opinion - New York Times Blog

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com//2008/04/02/the-three-hs/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/nyregion/new-york-today-martin-luther-king-sneeze-izola-ware-curry-ive-been-to-the-mountaintop-speech.html

Larry Parsley is the senior pastor of Valley Ranch Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of An Easy Stroll Through a Short Gospel: Meditations on Mark (Mockingbird Ministries, 2018).