The “two dogs” story we discussed here yesterday is a very popular sermon anecdote. That’s not necessarily bad when it’s presented as such — as a little fable without the colonial embellishments of fake Cherokee/Eskimo/African attribution.
But the popularity of this sermon-favorite has become a good reason never to use it. This story has been done to death in pulpits and youth groups and chapels and campfires. It has run its course and should now be sent into a well-earned retirement.
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I’d heard that story dozens and dozens of times over the years. My guess is it’s one of the Top Ten most repeated sermon illustrations I’ve heard. It’s up there with the tightrope walker asking for a volunteer. And with the endless variations of the Trolley Problem repurposed as illustrations of substitutionary atonement.
This has me wondering what other immensely popular (or, less charitably, immensely trite and overused) sermon illustrations would round out the Top Ten.
This varies across different churches and settings, of course. I’m still seeing the two-dogs-fighting story pop up occasionally in the evangelical blogs I read, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard it in an actual sermon. (The sermons I hear these days are more likely to repeat, say, the story about the man throwing starfish back into the sea.)
This is why compiling a Top Ten list will have to be a group exercise, tapping the sermon-hearing experience of people across as wide an array of generational, geographic, and denominational experience as possible. What hoary stories and sermon illustrations have you heard more than once? More than twice? More than 10 times? Which stories belong in a sermon-illustration Hall of Fame? Which stories need to be retired due to the strain of overuse?
We should make a distinction here between sermon illustrations in general and what I think of as sermon legends — the myths and urban legends that sometimes get spread and recycled and embellished from the pulpit. This line is sometimes fuzzy, as our example of the two-dogs-fighting story shows. That one can be presented as a simple fable with an obvious moral lesson. Or it can be presented as an “old Cherokee story,” pushing it more into the category of a legend or a lie. I’ve heard the stories of Eric Liddell and/or Christy Mathewson invoked many times in sermons, often as simple illustrations of faithfulness and obedience and honoring the Sabbath. But sometimes the actual stories weren’t “good” enough to hammer home the point the preacher wanted to make and those stories got stretched and polished into the category of sermon legend.
The oft-repeated stories of George Müller’s reliance on divine providence also tend to fall into this fuzzy space between sermon illustration and sermon legend. See also almost anything from the Martyr’s Mirror or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (or, for those in Catholic circles, from the even longer and stranger collection of saint legends and lore).
We probably need a separate list for the outright legends — such as the Hell Hole or NASA and the Missing Day from Joshua/Hezekiah or the Heaven/Hell tourism NDE stories, etc. Compiling a greatest hits list of these might be fun, but it can also be helpful as a cautionary guide: “Here are the Ten Most Outrageous Sermon Legends: If you hear any of these from the pulpit, run to the nearest exit and don’t look back.”
Anyway, what stories, illustrations and legends have you heard?
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