Preaching, Plagiarism, and Living the Grind

There was a good article in the latest issue of Christian Century in which Tom Long discussed the ethical implications with “sermon” stealing. He uses a couple of interesting stories to lure the reader in, including one about a student of his who preached a wonderful sermon at the end of a course, only to be discovered. He also mentions stories of high profile situations in which a beloved or well respected preacher has taken someone else’s sermon and wholesale preached it to a congregation, implicitly taking credit for the words written.  

I have to tell you, the temptation to use someone else’s sermon is great at times. There are some weeks when I feel like I don’t get everything done, and it is easy to focus on the dozens of other responsibilities rather to work on a sermon. Some weeks I even find myself sitting in my home office on Saturday afternoons fretting over the awesome responsibility of proclaiming the crucified and risen Christ to our community, but with a blank screen and no ideas. At those moments, I have to fight the urge to go to sites like Textweek and “borrow” one of the many sermons that are linked through the site.

I can honestly say that I have never consciously preached a sermon written by someone else, save St. Chrysostom’s marvelous Easter Sermon. I – along with most clergy who love their craft and the Church – would be quick to condemn the practice of merely printing off the latest message from some preaching megastar and preaching it wholesale without credit. This is dishonest. Of course, it is not new. It is not unheard of that sermons would be written by clergy and then would circulate around various churches. In the monastic tradition (Derek, feel free to correct me if I am wrong), these sermons have been incorporated into the readings of the church during the Hours. Is this plagiarism of evidence of living tradition?

Let’s take it a step further. I preached a sermon this Easter on John 20:19-31. I talked about how Jesus barges in and interrupts our lives without warning, and no matter how many walls we erect or doors we lock, we can’t lock him out. This all flowed from my reflection on the text. However, when perusing through some materials that week, I found that William Willimon takes this approach in his Pulpit Resource journal. Now, there is a definite similarity here, and some of what we talked about was down right eerily close to one another. Neither Bp. Willimon nor I came up with this in a vacuum. We both have been formed by every sermon, every bible study, and every commentary we have ever encountered. Somewhere along the line we both absorbed the same information, and it came out in our thoughts on the text, though somewhat independently. If someone hears my sermon, and then reads Willimon’s thoughts on the text, would we consider this plagiarism?

I am reminded of a reading seminar I took on Augustine’s City of God with the always entertaining Bill Mallard. I was struck at how often I would read passages from that tome only to think to myself, “I’ve read this somewhere before.” Of course I had: Augustine imported quotes from the Bible wholesale without citation or reference into his writings, as did many other of the Fathers. The words that form us become part of us, taking up residence in our psyches and souls and ultimately becoming “our words”. This happens in the life of the preacher, which is why very often one can travel to any number of churches on any Sunday and hear sermons that are all similar in focus, form and function. The details and illustrations may be different, but the core of the message is the same. What do we make of that?

Some would say that is due to sloppy, unimaginative, or ineffective exegesis. In some cases, they would be right. I am the first to confess that I do not spend the time in exegesis that I would like to spend. I had a preaching professor once who told my class that we should be spending 10-15 hours per week doing exegesis. As a young seminary grad I was determined to do this. Then the reality of parish life hit me right in the face. Not once have I ever done that much exegetical work since starting parish ministry. I would like to think that the time in spend in exegesis and preparation is prayerful and intentional, if not always terribly original. I do depend on the work of scholars and preachers who know more than I do about the Bible. One of the blessings of the proliferation of information is that access to preachers and scholars who are advanced in their studies is easily accessible; I confess that I often stand on the shoulders of these giants.

How do I properly give credit to this? I am usually careful to say, “Some scholars think…” or “I once read…” in order to communicate to the people that I didn’t just pull this out of thin air and I certainly am not the one who originally thought this. But if I use a sermon structure or theme, must I say I am taking the basic structure from a sermon once preached by Tom Long, even if the body of the sermon is “mine”? I am not so sure. And should the “scholars” of preaching really be the ones making the “rules” of practice, when they are most often divorced from the weekly practice – discipline, if you will – of proclamation?

Derek said something in his comments about his original post on this that makes a lot of sense to me. He talked about instilling habits rather than methods in his preaching students. Methodologies come and go like the seasons. Habits of the heart remain. While I don’t pretend to have any answers to the types of questions I have posed, or that Long posed in his article, I do think that are some habits that can be instilled into the men and women who are training to fill our pulpits. I offer here for your consideration the way I usually approach preaching, and some general advice based strictly on my experience

1. Fall in love with the Bible. As we sing in the liturgy, “Alleluia, Lord, to whom shall we go. You have the words eternal life. Alleluia.” The words contained in our scriptures are the words of life for the people of God. Preparing to preach should be a time you come to look forward to, simply because you get to encounter those words.
2. Don’t rush to the commentaries and websites. Invoke the Holy Spirit to guide you. Read the pericopes. Chew on them. Sit with them. Make a set of cursory notes that are your observations and questions. If you are proficient in Greek and Hebrew, start with those texts. If not, get yourself a good parallel English edition and look for some of the different ways of expressing the thoughts. You aren’t making sermon notes here, by the way. These are just initial impressions. I find that lectio divina is helpful for me in this practice
3. Walk away from it for a while. Visit the sick, make phone calls, check email, buy your youth director lunch or something. Let the words sit with you for a bit.
4. Go back and look at your notes and the text. Do the notes still make sense? Do you have questions? Consult commentaries for your questions.
5. Try to determine what the text is saying. If you are stuck and you want to look and see what others think, check out other sermons. This is ok. How does this translate into what you will proclaim? (Or, as Tom Long puts it in his seminal The Witness of Preaching, try and determine a focus and function of the sermon).
6. Pray. Write. Pray some more. Write some more. Pray some more. Repeat until done.