John Irving on How to Write a Sermon

What kind of preaching is this? Got any good examples? Do you do this? Ever try it?

Wow, quite the content in just a few paragraphs:

The afternoon sun dappled through the palladium windows in Kirby Parlor at Perkins School of Theology one autumn afternoon a couple years ago. It lit up the rugged, handsome features of an athletic 60 year old man seated in a circle of about 30 young preaching students. He was John Irving, the novelist, author of The World according to Garp, Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany among other novels. He was on campus to do the Tate lectures at SMU and graciously agreed to spend an hour with my preaching students. They provided the topic: What do sermon writing and novel writing have in common?

“Where do you start when you write a novel?” asked one young student.

Leaning forward, he said, “I always begin at the end, with the last scene. I put in it, in excruciating detail, what I want the reader to see, smell, taste, feel, hear …Then I flashback to the very beginning,  to what I call the inciting incident that jumpstarts the whole plot. Then I flash forward, scene by scene, each scene a domino that hits the next, that hits the next, that hits the next, each domino absolutely necessary to the next one, all crucial to the final one, until I arrive once again where I began, at the end.

Leaning forward even further, with an almost religious zeal in his fine brown eyes, he said:  “The trick is, friends, to make people realize there is so much at stake that they must keep reading, from one scene, one domino to the next, with each one asking “Why?” and “What is next?”, feeling that life as they know it can’t go on until they reach that final scene that they read last but that I wrote first.  That’s how I write a novel. You preachers should try it sometime.

Who am I am to ignore John Irving’s advice? Think about preaching a “John Irving” sermon on Zacchaeus. You could use this form on lots of different texts- probably narrative texts would work best.

Start at the end and flash back to the beginning and show how the ending depends on every scene that precedes it.