Choosing and Bounding the Text

Nehemiah 8 is one of the oldest and fullest descriptions in scripture of what a sermon is. A people recently returned from exile gather in the square before the Water Gate in Jerusalem, in the middle of the fifth century BC, and ask Ezra to bring out the Book of the Law. He reads it aloud from daybreak until noon. Levites instruct the people as they stand in their places (8:7), and verse 8 says what they did: they read from the book, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read. That is still the whole job. A text is read, its meaning is made clear, and the hearers understand. Everything in this track is an elaboration of that sentence.

Notice what had to happen before verse 8 could happen. Somebody had decided what was read. The Law of Moses is long, and Ezra did not read all of it in one morning. On the second day the leaders found in it the instruction about the feast of booths (8:14), and the reading continued day after day through the feast (8:18). So even in this first description, preaching involves selection: some part of the word, for this people, on this day. You face the same decision every week, and it shapes the sermon more than any decision you will make afterwards. A brilliant sermon on a passage cut off in the wrong place is a brilliant sermon on something the Bible does not say.

There are two parts to the decision, and this lesson takes them in order. The first is where a passage begins and ends, which is a question about the text and has better and worse answers. The second is how a preacher decides which passage to preach at all, which is a question about the church, the calendar and the congregation, and on which faithful traditions differ. Learn the first as a skill. Weigh the second as a judgment.

One more thing from Nehemiah 8 before we leave it. The reading was asked for. The people told Ezra to bring the book (8:1); he did not have to persuade them. And the response to understanding was first grief (8:9), then joy (8:12), then obedience (8:14-17). A preacher who chooses a text is choosing what a congregation will grieve, rejoice at and do that week. That is a reason to choose with prayer and with care, not a reason to be afraid.

The Bible was not written with chapters and verses. The Hebrew scriptures had ancient section markings and verse divisions preserved by the scribes, but the chapter divisions now used in almost every Bible go back to Stephen Langton, a teacher at Paris in the early thirteenth century who later became archbishop of Canterbury. The verse numbers in the New Testament come from the printer Robert Estienne, known as Stephanus, whose Greek New Testament of 1551 was the first to carry them. His son later told the story that he marked them while travelling between Paris and Lyon, and whether or not the detail is embroidered, the system was a printer's convenience, not an author's design. The Geneva Bible of 1560 brought numbered verses into English throughout.

These divisions are a gift for finding your place, and a trap for preaching. Some of Langton's breaks fall in the wrong place. 1 Corinthians 11:1, 'You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ', is the last sentence of the argument about food and conscience that runs through chapters 8 to 10, not the first sentence of the instruction about worship that follows. Mark 9:1 completes the saying about losing and saving one's life that ends chapter 8. And the fourth Servant Song does not begin at Isaiah 53:1 but at 52:13, with 'Behold, My Servant will prosper', so a sermon on Isaiah 53 that starts at the chapter number has cut the head off the passage.

Paragraph headings in modern Bibles are better, because translators chose them knowing the structure, but they are still editors' decisions. Different Bibles place them differently, and a heading tells you what an editor thought a section was about, which can quietly become what you think it is about. Read past the heading. The question is never where the Bible you are holding breaks the text but where the author does.

The word the church has used for a self-contained passage is pericope, from a Greek word meaning a piece cut out around the edges. The image is exact. You are cutting a unit out of a longer fabric, and the cut should follow the seams the author sewed, not a line drawn across the cloth by someone else.

A preaching unit is a passage that holds one complete movement of thought, long enough to say something whole and short enough to be explained in the time you have. It is usually larger than a verse and smaller than a chapter, though in narrative it can be a chapter or more. The author leaves clues where a unit begins and ends, and you can learn to see them with nothing but a Bible and a pencil.

In stories, look for a change of time, place or characters. Mark 4:35 opens with 'When that evening came', and Jesus proposes crossing the lake; Mark 5:1 opens with 'On the other side of the sea', in a new region with a new character. Between those two markers lies one complete episode, the calming of the storm, which ends with the disciples asking who this is. That question is where the unit lands, and the next verse changes the scene. In the Gospels and in Old Testament narrative, scene changes are the surest seams.

In letters, look for changes of subject and for the small words that join and divide arguments. In 1 Corinthians Paul marks his own sections: 'Now for the matters you wrote about' (7:1), 'Now about virgins' (7:25), 'Now about food sacrificed to idols' (8:1), 'Now about spiritual gifts' (12:1), 'Now about the collection for the saints' (16:1). Elsewhere watch for therefore, so then, finally, and for a change from statement to command. Romans 12:1 begins with 'Therefore', which tells you that what follows rests on everything before it, and that a sermon on Romans 12 must at least know what the 'therefore' is there for.

In poetry, look for refrains, changes of speaker and repeated opening and closing lines. Psalm 8 begins and ends with the same exclamation about the majesty of the LORD's name, a frame that scholars call an inclusio, and the frame tells you the psalm is one unit and what it is about. Psalms 42 and 43 share a refrain, which is why many readers treat them as one poem. In the prophets, watch for the messenger formula, which the BSB usually renders 'This is what the LORD says', and for closing formulas that mark the end of an oracle, and for shifts between judgment and promise.

Then test your boundaries in both directions. Read your passage alone, then read it with what comes before. If the earlier verses change the meaning, they belong to the unit, or at least to your introduction. The classic case is Luke 15. Verses 1-2 give the setting: tax collectors and sinners gathering to listen, and the Pharisees and scribes grumbling, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them'. Verse 3 says Jesus told them this parable, singular, and three stories follow: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. A sermon on the prodigal that begins at 15:11 usually ends with the father's embrace and leaves the older brother standing outside as an afterthought. A sermon that begins at 15:1 knows that the older brother is the point, because he is the grumbling Pharisee in the story, and the parable ends with him still deciding whether to come in.

Test in the other direction too, by asking whether the verses you have chosen still say what they say when they are lifted out. Ruth 1:16, 'wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God', is read at a great many weddings. In its setting it is the vow of a widowed Moabite woman to her widowed mother-in-law, on a road out of Moab, after Naomi has urged her to go back to her people and her gods (1:15). Read in its unit, it is a conversion: a foreigner binding herself to Israel's God at the cost of everything familiar, which is the hinge on which the whole book turns. Read alone, it is a sentiment about married love. The words are the same; the passage is not. A wedding sermon on it is not forbidden, but a preacher who uses it should know what he has cut away, and might find the original more searching than the borrowed one.

Finally, make the unit fit the hour. A whole book can be preached in one sermon as an overview, and a single verse can be preached if it is a complete thought in its context, as many of Charles Spurgeon's sermons show. But a first sermon does best with a unit of roughly five to fifteen verses in a letter or poem, or a single episode in a narrative. Long enough to have a shape. Short enough that you can explain every verse without rushing, which is what Nehemiah 8:8 asks.

Choosing which passage to preach is older than the church. Acts 15:21 says Moses was read in the synagogues every Sabbath, and Acts 13:15 describes the reading from the Law and the Prophets followed by a word of encouragement. Christians inherited the habit of reading appointed scripture in worship, and over the centuries three main ways of choosing have grown up. Each is held by serious people for serious reasons. Module 1 described these traditions; here the question is narrower: what does each do to the passage you will preach next Sunday?

The lectionary. A lectionary is a fixed table of readings for each Sunday and feast. The most widely used today is the Revised Common Lectionary of 1992, which grew out of the Roman Catholic lectionary issued after the Second Vatican Council in 1969 and is now used across many Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and other churches. It runs on a three-year cycle and gives, for each Sunday, an Old Testament reading, a psalm, an epistle and a gospel reading, arranged around the Christian year from Advent through Easter and Pentecost. Its defenders make strong points. The congregation hears far more of the Bible than any one preacher would choose. The preacher is protected from riding his favourite subjects. Churches across the world hear the same texts on the same day. And the hard Sunday comes round whether the preacher wants it or not.

The lectionary's critics are also serious. Any table of selected readings omits, and the omissions are not random: passages of judgment, violence and difficulty are underrepresented, so the congregation hears a gentler Bible than the one that exists. Readings are sometimes cut mid-passage, which reproduces in a new form the bounding problem described above. And because the readings are chosen to serve the church year, the Old Testament is often read for its connection to the gospel of the day rather than in its own right.

Reading straight through. The Latin name is lectio continua, continuous reading: take a book and preach it passage by passage from beginning to end. John Chrysostom preached series of homilies through whole books, including Genesis, Matthew, John and Romans, at Antioch and Constantinople in the late fourth century. Huldrych Zwingli began his ministry at the Great Minster in Zurich on 1 January 1519 by announcing he would preach through Matthew from the beginning, setting aside the assigned readings. John Calvin preached through book after book in Geneva, and the story is often told that on returning from exile in 1541 he resumed his exposition with the next verse after the one where he had stopped three years before. Its defenders say it teaches a congregation how to read a book of the Bible, forces the preacher onto the passages he would avoid, and lets each passage be read in the context of its book, which is exactly the bounding discipline this lesson teaches. Its critics say it can be slow, can leave a congregation in Leviticus for a year while its life is falling apart, can neglect the shape of the Christian year, and in practice tends to favour the preacher's favourite books, since someone still chooses which book.

The preacher's choice. Here the preacher chooses a passage each week in prayer, for the people in front of him. Spurgeon worked this way, and he described in his Lectures to My Students how he waited on God for the text. Many African, Asian and Latin American pastors work this way, as do many Pentecostal and Baptist preachers, because a congregation facing a funeral, a drought or a persecution needs the word that meets it this week. The method's strength is responsiveness. Its weakness is the preacher. Left to himself, he will return to the texts he loves and the themes he is comfortable with, and a congregation can go years without hearing whole books of their Bible.

The honest summary is that each method protects against the weakness of the others, which is why many pastors combine them: a series through a book for most of the year, the lectionary or the church calendar at Easter and Christmas, and freedom to set both aside when a congregation's life demands it. Whichever method you use, the bounding work in section 3 does not change. A lectionary reading still has to be checked against its context, a passage in a series still has to be cut at the author's seams, and a text chosen in prayer still has to be read with its neighbours.

This track is built so that by the end you have written, and can preach, one sermon of your own. This module takes you from a passage to a main idea, and it starts now, with the choice of text. Choose with three questions. Is it a passage I can understand well enough to explain, with the tools I have? Is it a complete unit with clear edges? And is it a word this congregation, or the people I will most likely preach to, needs to hear?

For a first sermon, avoid two kinds of passage. Avoid the passages the church has argued over for centuries, not because they should never be preached but because a first sermon is the wrong place to settle them; leave Hebrews 6:4-6 and the beast of Revelation 13 for later. And avoid a passage so familiar that you will preach what you have always heard rather than what the text says. If you choose Psalm 23, be ready to read it as if you had never seen it.

Good first passages share a shape: one clear movement, a manageable length, and a meaning you can find with careful reading. Mark 4:35-41, the storm on the lake. Luke 15:1-7, the lost sheep with its setting. Philippians 4:4-9, on rejoicing, prayer and peace. Psalm 121. Ruth 1:1-18. James 1:2-8. Nehemiah 8:1-12 itself. These are suggestions, not a list to pick from. The best passage is one that has already worked on you.

Once you have chosen, bound it. Read the whole chapter, the chapters on either side, and, if you can, the whole book in one sitting; for most books of the Bible this takes less than an hour. Then mark where your unit begins and ends, and write down the clue that tells you so: the change of scene, the new subject, the 'therefore', the refrain. If you cannot name a clue, you have not yet found the seam.