I've been reading several books on the history of
preaching, most recently Richard Lischner's excellent The Preacher King: Martin
Luther King Jr and the Word That Moved America.
I am about to make some sweeping generalizations, in
order to encourage discussion.
I think the concern some have expressed over
plagiarism in preaching is misplaced. It seems that our concerns in this area
come from a desire to make a connection between preaching and academic research
- that the work of constructing a sermon is comparable to writing a term paper
or essay. And this is not surprising. After all, most of us learned the means
of constructing a sermon from our professors - academics at home in the world
of research and necessarily obsessive about documentation.
However, preaching is not really like writing a
research paper. It is the telling of a story. Really, it is the retelling of a
story. And we pull as much from the "oral tradition," the years of
hearing the same story told multiple times, as we do from any commentary or
other secondary source.
An illustration: I suggest that it would be pedantic
if we were to hold FDR accountable for failing to attribute his famous quote,
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," because he neglected
to document the quote as a paraphrase from Seneca the Younger. Of course, you
would lose points on your high school paper if you did not do so - if your high
school teacher knew enough to accurately translate Seneca, or even knew enough
to look it up. However, we recognize that FDR had more important things to do
in his first inaugural address than cite proper sources. Nor do we criticize
MLKJr for misquoting FDR as "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
My point is - we don't care whether or not the statement is original to FDR. We
only care that it was exactly the right thing to say to move a nation to action
in the middle of the Great Depression.
The problem comes, it seems to me, when we are
forced to suggest that anything we are saying is an original idea. Not only is
what we are preaching not original, but we should not strive for it to be. If I
am telling the story that has been told for thousands of years, if I have an
original thought or perspective, that should serve as a red flag that I am not
correctly telling the story. After all, my task as preacher is, in the words of
C.S. Lewis (note the attribution) not so much to offer something new, as to
remind the congregation of that which they have heard many times but seem to
have forgotten. Possibly more accurately, we are called to be like the
grandparent who, sitting on the front porch or around the campfire, is asked to
"tell us the story again," the story that was told to me by my
grandparents.
When I was a college chaplain, I had the opportunity
to bring to our campus a gifted preacher and storyteller. Now I knew that some
of the stories he told were not original to him, even though he presented them
that way. (Truthfully, he did receive some flack for this from other well-known
preachers, but he really didn't care.) All I know is that the students who
heard him, some 20 years later, still speak of these moments in chapel as
seminal to their walk with the Lord.
Now, this is not offered as an excuse for preachers
not to do their homework, to reference the scholarly research in order to
rightly divide the word. Nor am I suggesting it is appropriate for preachers to
pull entire sermons off their shelves or off the internet and present them as
their own. What I am suggesting is that we do a disservice to the preaching
enterprise when we tie it to the rules and rigors of academic research, an
activity that is meant to enlighten, but not meant to move people to passionate
action, as preaching is called to do.
Do we really think anyone in our congregation wants
to hear multiple citations? Are we
expecting every preacher should have the burden of writing "original"
material every Sunday? I don't think so.
What do you think?
