Recently I had a book published titled Introduction to Spirituality: Cultivating a Lifestyle of Faithfulness (Baker Academic, 2023). In this contribution to Baker Academic’s Foundations for Spirit-Filled Christianity series, I promoted a Pauline, fully trinitarian, theologically real, “I-Thou,” lifestyle spirituality. This is a Spirit-empowered, Christ-honoring, God-the-Father pleasing way of being in the world that produces a spiritual, moral, and missional faithfulness before him.
In the paper I’m proposing here, I intend to explore how such a fully trinitarian, theologically real, lifestyle spirituality impacts the logos, ethos, and pathos of Christian preachers and their sermons. My contention in a new book I’m currently working on that bears the working title “Sacramental Sermons: Prophetic, Incarnational, Truly Transformative Preaching” (Cascade Books, forthcoming) is that there is such a thing as a sacramental sermon. Genuinely anointed preaching is prophetic (Spirit-empowered), incarnational (Christ-evincing), and truly transformative (God-the Father pleasing because it is both biblically and missionally faithful). It’s possible for sermons to be sacramental in the sense that they are encounter-facilitating: i.e., they do more than point to Christ; through the Spirit the wisdom, courage, compassion, and authority of Christ is experienced in real time for the strengthening, encouraging, comforting, and challenging of those with ears to hear (1 Cor. 14:3).
A first step in the preparation of sacramental sermons is the preparation (spirituality) of the preacher. Hence, this essay. After explaining the what and why of the sacramental sermon, and distinguishing it from the practice of sacramental exegesis, I will provide a brief overview of the Pauline, fully Trinitarian, “I-Thou,” lifestyle spirituality which enables preachers to live into the trinitarian realism that sacramental sermons are products of. I will then provide a careful consideration of how several specific spiritual practices, when approached in a theologically real way, can greatly increase the likelihood that the sermons we preach will prove to be Spirit-empowered, Christ-evincing, and God-the-Father pleasing (biblically and missionally faithful), and thereby play out in a sacramental, encounter-facilitating manner. For sure, sacramental sermons are not something we preachers can conjure or manufacture in our own strength. But they are a thing, and something we can put ourselves in a position to deliver with the help of our trinitarian God.