Poets and SpaceX engineers have more in common than you might think. Poets express powerful emotion within the constraints imposed by meter and rhyme. SpaceX engineers use exacting specifications to direct massive explosions. In both cases, arduous technical effort leads to transformative experiences. Just ask someone who has ridden a rocket. Or anyone whose life has been altered by a poem. When the exacting and ecstatic come together, astronauts reach new heights, and readers see new horizons.
Pastors should preach like poets (and like SpaceX engineers). Unfortunately, some pastors preach more like technical writers — too much exacting clarity and not enough exuberant curiosity. Others preach like Jackson Pollock painted — lots of vibrant energy but little clear specificity. Neither approach propels God’s people to where they need to be. All energy and no order? The rocket explodes on the launchpad. All order and no energy? The rocket remains on the launchpad.
When pastors preach like poets, minds are awakened, imaginations engaged, affections stirred, and actions changed. Truth sinks deeper in, and transformation spreads further out. Please don’t misunderstand. Poet-like preachers don’t speak in compressed, complex, allusive language, nor do they rhyme their words or use archaic speech. Poet-like preachers may be completely uninterested in iambic pentameter or in what John Donne did. They certainly don’t rely on the power and precision of their words to persuade congregants (1 Corinthians 2:1–5).
So, what exactly does it look like for the exacting and ecstatic to come together in a sermon? What does it mean to preach like a poet? Here are three answers.
Poet-Like Preachers Cherish Words
Pastors who preach like poets labor to avoid speaking of beautiful truth in boring language. They know that to do so dishonors beauty and defrauds hearers. Limp-lettuce phrases put people to sleep. Poet-like preachers also avoid using exquisite words like “grace and mercy” as mindless filler phrases. Instead, they cherish truth deeply and choose language carefully, aware that the words employed to describe a truth can give hearers an experience of that very truth. That’s why George Herbert said, “Beauty and beauteous words should go together.” Words should beckon us to the realities they name, not place roadblocks in our way.
What do you feel when you hear the name Wormtongue? The word itself grants an experience of the man Tolkien depicts. When a word fits a thing (like the darkness of “Mordor,” the harshness of “Orc,” or the ponderous wisdom of “Treebeard”), the word serves as both a thermometer and a thermostat for our experience of the thing. It tells us how we’ll feel about it and how we should feel. You don’t need to have met C.S. Lewis’s character Shift to know whether he’s a good or evil ape. The name is enough. And is it any surprise that the donkey Puzzle is good-natured but naive? Fitting language leads us.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney once described his childhood perception of a plug of tobacco: “Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit.” That may be the best seven-word description of tobacco in the English language! Can you see that dark and earthy plug? Can you sense its exotic, alien, adult status through young Seamus’s eyes? If a chaw gets such treatment, how much more should preachers select apt words for the glories they proclaim?
Poet-Like Preachers Deploy Metaphors
Poets love metaphors, one-word stories that guide us from what we know to what we don’t. “Juliet is the sun!” (Shakespeare). “I’m a riddle in nine syllables” (Sylvia Plath). “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” (Langston Hughes). If you’ve ever felt the radiant warmth and governing centrality of the sun, you’ll understand how Romeo feels about Juliet. And you’ll not just understand but experience — because a good metaphor delivers more than true thoughts. It’s freighted with feelings.
Consider “The Lord is . . . my fortress” (Psalm 18:2) and experience the weight of thick walls, the unyielding mass of protection between you and danger. Isn’t that richer than saying, “God is strong and protects us”? Metaphors teach and stir. They inform and transform. That’s why the Bible is loaded with them. “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5). “The Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). “Your word is a lamp to my feet” (Psalm 119:105).
Pastors who preach like poets encounter biblical metaphors as gifts to unwrap for their congregations with oohs and aahs. They experience metaphors as spark plugs that fire the engine of Christian imagination. They look through biblical metaphors to see the far-off come close-up, like gazing into a telescope.
And poet-like preachers develop and deploy their own original metaphors. One pastor began a sermon on Psalm 139 by inviting his congregation to ask, “Does this psalm fit me?” He suggested that they think of him as a changing-room attendant, helping them to discern the answer. Then he showed them that the psalm first fits its author, David; that it fits David’s greater Son, Jesus, even better; and that it fits all those united to Jesus as well. The simple metaphor carried the congregation along, helping them grasp an important hermeneutical point without ever hearing the word “hermeneutics.”
Poet-Like Preachers Preach from the Imagination to the Heart
All preachers bear a responsibility to proclaim the truth of God’s word. They don’t make up new things, because they know they can’t improve what God has already said. Instead, they do the hard work of seeing and saying what’s right there in front of them in the text. And as poet-like preachers meditate on the light of God’s unchanging truth, it shines through their sanctified imaginations. Fresh images, illustrations, and turns of phrase emerge with kaleidoscopic creativity. Poet-like preachers speak with verve.
The great church historian Philip Schaff once wrote that Protestantism “appeals to the intellect and conscience” while Roman Catholicism appeals “to the senses and the imagination.” May it never be! Why choose between intellect and imagination? The best pastors and preachers aim for both. Charles Spurgeon recalled listening to a sermon series on the New Testament book of Hebrews, each sermon increasing in dullness, and frequently wishing “that the Hebrews had kept the epistle to themselves”! Poet-like preachers don’t produce boring sermons. Their words flow from the living imagination of men made in the image of an endlessly creative God.
I know one pastor who preached on Psalm 87, a psalm in which God welcomes the people of the nations, counting them as natives of Jerusalem, granting them a new identity as part of his family. That glorious vision of Jerusalem inspired John Newton’s hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.” Unfortunately, Newton’s hymn says nothing about the central theme of the psalm — God’s adopting the peoples of the nations. So, the pastor added his own verse to the hymn, capturing the main point of the psalm and the imaginations of his congregation:
There, in Zion’s God-blessed precincts
All the peoples now belong;
Those from every tribe and nation
Formed into a blood-bought throng.
Over them the Lord pronounces,
“You are mine, your birthplace here,
Fully members of my family,
Once far off, now ever near.”
God’s people are more than mere minds. When pastors preach with imaginative creativity, with words that emerge from Bible meditation, they speak to hearts. They preach to whole people.
Pastors, Preach Like Poets
Pastors, we don’t need to be George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins in order to preach like poets. But we do need to care about how we express the glories we see as we study God’s word. Let’s not deliver the filet mignon of gospel truth on the paper plate of lazy language. If we want to grow in poetic preaching, we must first feel deeply the glory of God and his gospel. Eloquent words are empty apart from earnest passion, and congregants can tell whether the fire burns within the preacher.
As we glory in biblical truth, how might we grow in telling it? A few suggestions come to mind. We could listen intently to preachers who steward words well, asking how and why their words and images stir us. We could ensure that we prepare our sermons at a time of day when we’re fresh and have creative energy — when our affections and imaginations are most alive and engaged. We could budget an unhurried hour or two toward the end of our sermon preparation to enjoy improving our words and expressions, playing in the homiletical sandbox of sounds, images, and metaphors. We could add some great fiction to our reading diet in order to engage our imaginations. And we could select a poet or two whose expressions intrigue and delight us, and then linger and learn for a year, or two, or more.
However we do it, pastors, let’s preach like poets.