The Bezalel Guild
On sermons, spirit, craft, and aprons in the gilded age of attention
The first people in the scriptures to be filled with the Spirit of God are Bezalel and Oholiab. They are artists, the creative directors of the tabernacle, the roving wilderness dwelling for God’s presence. The fact that the first people in the scripture filled with the scriptures are artists tells us all we need to know about God’s perspectives on beauty. Beauty is not extraneous adornment, a nice add-on. Beauty is essential—essential to reveal God and essential to being human. I see a not-so-subtle parallel in Acts 3. There Peter and John filled with the Spirit of God are going to the Jerusalem temple, the supposed settled dwelling for God’s presence. Luke tells us that they are entering at the temple gate called Beautiful which again grounds our perspective that we should be on the lookout for beauty to emerge. But what we see is that God in all of his healing glory is not, in fact, in the temple, he is indwelling the hearts of these two men and wherever they go carrying this news of Jesus’ death and resurrection, beauty breaks forth.
Peter and John encounter a man born lame. He asks them for alms, presumably with his head bowed because the poor are so accustomed to being humiliated and tolerated. But Peter says, “look at me.” The man instinctively extends his hands to receive something. But Peter says I don’t have any money for you. Whereas the construction of the tabernacle of Bezalel and Oholiab is defined by an abundance of silver and gold, Peter this newly minted, embodied roving tent of God’s presence says “Silver and gold I have not but what I have I give to you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.”
“Where else do you gather in a room and listen to someone lecture for 30-40 minutes?”
The tension between meeting people where they are and offering them a way to somewhere else is a constant one for preachers. Recent measurements of attention span suggest that the average time a person can focus on a coherent thought is down to about 8 seconds. Famouly, that is less than the attention span of a goldfish. YouTube videos, Instagram stories and reels, and Tik Tok videos are largely quick cuts, a waterfall of novelty. A recent survey of highly rated colleges showed that a large number of incoming students had not developed the skills to coherently engage with a book from cover to cover. Church attendance is largely down and and much more infrequent. With all of this devastating data in hand, shouldn’t preachers stop going against the flow, offer a quick story, a quick application and instead of sending everyone to lunch, send them to brunch?
My suspicion is no. Fully acknowledging that this may just be self-serving and that I and others like me may just like to ourselves talk. I think the fairly recent acceleration of both our media distillation and our ability to consume into hyperdrive actually demands that we as preachers lean into the slower, the sustained, and the sacred and that we recover just what exactly this ancient craft was intended to do.
First, this divergence in the practices of preaching and the habits of our people actually crystallizes some of the myths around sermons. There are endless websites and social media platforms that promise to help the “busy preacher” with the constant demands of crafting sermons. These services promise to cut the time we spend doing that so we can do the “real work” of being with our people. Now these services have a new super-charged tool in AI where not only can we search large swaths of information, but AI can actually compile this data into (mostly) coherent thoughts. Essentially, AI could write the sermon for us. More efficiency! More impact!
I sincerely don’t know a single preacher who wants this. Because we all know, at some level, that sermons are not content delivery systems. Sermons have never been about efficiency. They are about the rhythmic, patient telling of ancient stories, of cultivating a communal imagination of the nearness of the kingdom of God, proclaiming the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, of allowing the Holy Spirit to form a cathedral of the promises of God; adorned of by the preacher’s style and skill and the congregation’s participation, full of mercy, healing, joy, hope, and glory— a house with many rooms (John 14), spacious enough for our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. John Stott quotes Phillips Brooks, 18th century rector of Trinity Church in Boston:
Preaching is the communication of truth by man to man. It has in it two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither of these can it spare and still be preaching…Preaching is the bringing of truth through personality…The truth is itself a fixed and stable element; the personality is a varying and growing element. (Between Two Worlds, p. 206)
Preaching then is not so concerned with the “best” content or the “best” communication strategy but is an event, a moment in time where the presence of God is manifest through the proclaimed promises of God meeting his people, where the cross meets with craftsmanship, where all are invited to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
I would love to tell you that each week I stand before our incredible congregation in Princeton, NJ that I am met with rapt attention, people hanging on every word and laughing at every joke. I can see people’s minds wondering at times. Sometimes that’s my fault and sometimes, it’s not. I can see them making grocery lists, or sending texts to their co-workers. This could cause me to become self-conscious or even annoyed: “Why can’t people pay attention?” But mostly, it just reminds me of my role.
The role of the preacher is to be theatric without theatrics. To hold the wisdom of the world loosely while holding tighter to the foolishness of the cross. To allow our attentiveness to God and to those listening us to define the attention span in the room.
Yes we should strive for better structure, better editing, better storytelling better exegesis, and yes, at times shorter sermons. But this striving is not in service of accommodation or acquiescence. This striving for better is a part of the ancient quest for craft, for mastery. I have often thought about the artisans in our culture. They have garments not only for when they are presenting but when they are creating. Painters, chefs, woodworkers, potters; they all wear aprons. They steal away to their studios, their shops, their kitchens to try and craft something beautiful, something satisfying, something well-made that will stay with all those who encounter it.
I haven’t taken to donning an apron as I write my sermons in the middle of coffee shops in Princeton, NJ. But all of this talk about efficiency, attention span, and content reminds me that I am a steward of an ancient, sacred trust. I am a craftsperson filled with the Spirit of God harmonizing with my own unique personality and skills to join with God in building places where he will dwell and glorify. That my labor is not with defined by silver and gold either in its raw materials or its rewards but that where this news is proclaimed in the power of the Spirit of God, people are set free, people are restored, people see God.