Quotes from Eugene L. Lowry

In the case of the movie High Noon, it is obvious that the viewers are not held by their intrinsic interest in the history of the American frontier, in law enforcement, or in noon trains.

The set of outline notes of our poorer sermons, however, will likely reveal that they were shaped by the nature of their substantive content, not by the process of the narrative experience that is anticipated.

Note, too, that fiction writers inevitably catch their central characters in situations involving ambiguities, not contradictories. The marshal in High Noon was being asked to choose not between a good and a bad but between two goods (or two bads, depending upon your angle of view).

It is a disservice to any form to elevate it as the form.

Transforming our intuitions into articulate form is precisely the purpose of this book.

It is indeed The Story, and our task is to tell it, to form it, to fashion it—not to "organize" it.

So it is that much homiletical advice tends to function in reverse—that is, it works reasonably well in evaluating a sermon already formed, but provides very little help en route!

Whatever the thinking of Prof. Lowry and his editor, they obviously share the conviction that The Homiletical Plot can sit comfortably on the shelf with the scores of books on preaching since 1980.

the primary purpose of sermon introductions is to produce imbalance for the sake of engagement.

Sometimes a sermon idea seemed to emerge on its own, possessed of its own power, and required a developmental process more akin to pruning than putting together.

I noted a second time appreciation for the author's making room for intuition in the sermon process. Most of us give lip service to the fact that preaching is an art as well as a science, but then we become afraid that someone will think we speak of preaching as an art as an excuse for ambiguity, sloppy thinking, and poor reasoning. In defense, we omit all art and artistry and proceed to offer the reader an adequate technology for framing and delivering the message.

Says Robert Roth in Story and Reality: "For the Greeks . . . words were definitions. . . . For the Hebrews, on the contrary, words were descriptions." 14

A sermonic idea is a homiletical bind; a sermon is a narrative plot!

The plain fact was he knew how to do it intuitively, but he could not articulate what it was that he did.

It is not enough to probe the question of what the text is saying. It is equally important to discover why it is saying what it says. The question of why is most often the context for the transition into homiletical form.

So it is that once a person has settled on the question as to what is wrong, the choice of cures is limited.

One might say that any sermon involves both an "itch" and a "scratch" and sermons are born when at least implicitly in the preacher's mind the problematic itch intersects a solutional scratch—between the particulars of the human predicament and the particularity of the gospel.

The term plot is key both to sermon preparation and to sermon presentation.

So it is that once a person has settled on the question as to what is wrong, the choice of cures is limited. You do not prescribe surgery for a minor cut, nor do you put a Band-Aid on cancer. The question of the human condition is, I believe, the most fundamental and consequential question of all.

diagnosis is central to our homiletical task.