Getting Into the Pulpit, and Letting Fly

Sermons should not be “addressed to nobody, owned by nobody, and if an hundred people were to read it, not one of them would think himself concerned in its contents . . . [a sermon’s sentences should be] “pounded together until they crack, and where figure, trope, allegory, metaphor, antithesis, interrogation, anecdote — anything that can awaken interest and deepen impression is resorted to — sermons supported  and sinewed with the ‘thus saith the Lord,’ and then charged with living truth, and aimed directly at the conscience and the heart” (Fish, Power in the Pulpit, p. 9).