WORSHIP

The Rev Roddy Hamilton says the sermon should be an invitation to an ongoing discussion.

IS the sermon a debate? Does it ask open questions without giving answers? How often do you hear the words ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’?

I am sure we have all sat through sermons thinking “I don’t agree!” but have no way of expressing that other than not going back!

If we are still going to use sermons, then might they not become more creative ways into engaging the faith with each other, inviting response and debate rather than a monologue to a captured audience?

I’ve heard sermons that are attempts at wiping clean your doubts, as if there is a list of things we need to believe and God’s People all ought to believe the same thing. This dogmatic style may still be the minority, hopefully, but it suggests an opportunity.

Is a sermon not written and preached in community? It is a piece of work that comes from the conversations and experiences of all of God’s people. Is that not where it always begins?

And if it begins there, does it not also end there too, in discussion and debate, rather than a line being drawn under what is expressed in the pulpit? The pulpit part of a sermon is just a verbalisation of how this particular person hears this particular community in this particular time on this particular passage. It is never conclusive.

If it is offered to a living community, by a living preacher(!), then the sermon might well offer a completely different offering on the very same passage the following week.

The sermon is an invitation into an ongoing conversation between text and world. Worship then becomes less a place for inductive faith but rather of deductive experience.

Where are the safe places in our worship where questions can easily be asked and honoured and discussed and preachers don’t take things personally?

Can we say: there is no one way to believe everything in the bible, and there is no one set of words we need to use in worship, and there is no line beyond which we cannot stray in our thinking about God, and there is no definition of faith we will not listen to? That might define how open or fearful we are to engaging debate.

The world seeks certainty, and increasingly finds it in populism. Where our worship cuts through that is to offer not certainty but honesty, not concrete thinking but dialogue, not circling the wagons but compassion for the world.

As we move further right, the Church moves along with our politics in its language and hymns and decisions. For many of us the debate feels smaller and smaller and saying ‘I don’t believe that’ is more and more difficult. I wonder if by offering less monologue and more invitation to critical thinking within a congregation we might end up more robust and compassionate when this ‘reformation’ of our age settles down.

“ The world seeks certainty, and increasingly finds it in populism.

Such a regular pattern of sermon discussion surely invites congregations and worship leaders to be more creative together, engaging with a breadth of diverse opinion, enabling each other to stretch beliefs and let God grow.

Perhaps, also, continuing sermons through debate and discussion, we might grow to trust each other to help nurture a wider experience of God and make space for the honest approaches to faith we don’t always share.

Discussion anyone? ¤

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick