Poetic Pastoring: Using Poetry in Preaching by Jesse Baker

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by Jesse Baker

My interest in poetry began around the same time that I found it hardest to write sermons. Obviously, as a pastor, writing poor sermons is not a good thing, but I was not finding any real help to get me out of my slump. The commentaries I had in my library and the other academic books I owned, while full of information, were not quite giving me the tools or images I needed to bring a message to life. I felt that most of my sermons were fact-heavy but did little to inspire the heart or ignite the imagination. On top of that, if you had asked me on any given Sunday what my sermon was about, I wouldn’t be able to give you a quick answer. I would almost have to tell you half the sermon before conveying the gist. I had a sense—and was perhaps once explicitly told—that if I couldn’t summarize a sermon in a sentence or two, it likely wasn’t a well-constructed sermon. As someone who was trained to preach and who had taken classes on the practice of writing, this was both frustrating and a little embarrassing. 

During this writing dilemma, I started reading Malcolm Guite’s books Sounding the Seasons and Parable and Paradox. While I couldn’t state it then, Guite’s words were seeds that, in time, gave rise to a new way of writing sermons. If you are not familiar with these books, the former is a collection of sonnets based on days and seasons in the church calendar year, and the latter includes several sonnets meditating on various passages of Scripture. As I read poetry I found I also wanted to write poetry. I did not have any sense of a rhythm or habit in these beginning days. One week, however, I decided to take the text I was preaching on and—Guite-like—tried my own hand at writing a sonnet based on the reading, study, and meditation that was already a normal part of sermon preparation. To my surprise, I produced something. I remember one of the early poems actually helped me think about the text in a new light. I took a raw idea I had encountered and tried poetically to put flesh on the bones. I recall it being the backbone of the sermon.