The best sermons ever

This Easter, vicars shouldn’t be obscure or arrogant in the pulpit. Like Jesus, they should be funny, says Reverend Peter Mullen

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‘Love God and do as you like,’ said St Augustine of Hippo.That’s the way to write a sermon: get your punchline in at the start.

Understand that the art of preaching is not to sound as if you’re preaching. Nothing is more off-putting than the bellowing revivalist with his banana-split smile and ego bigger than the gospel.

John Bunyan knew all too well the seductiveness of clerical self-esteem.

One morning, a parishioner praised him: ‘Fine sermon, Pastor John!’

Bunyan said, ‘Aye, Satan told me that before I got down from the pulpit!’

The task of the preacher is not self-expression but self-effacement. The message is the thing, not the medium.

The prototypes for all sermons are the spoken parables of Jesus. These witty utterances, nearly always preached on the Galilean hillside, are full of ironical humour. They were meant to be funny.

Take the one about the man who went to a wedding without his wedding suit.

His host, the king, asked, ‘ “How camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?”

‘And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, “Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” ’

That’s not very funny, is it? Until you get the joke: that it was the host’s job to provide his guests with proper togs.