There's a story about a church that had trouble getting Sunday morning, worship to take off into joyous celebration. Things were so bad at that church that the preacher and congregation could not have conspired to make Sunday services more boring than they already were.

The typist of the congregation's worship bulletin brought the gravity of the situation to light with a Freudian slip on the church's IBM Selectric. By an unintentional act of office prophecy the Sunday bulletin's call to worship read: "Prose the Lord."

It takes no special gift of spiritual discernment to realize that much of our Sunday morning preaching and worship often substitutes wordy prose for the poetry of celebration. For some reason many preachers and worship leaders drone on with "prose the Lord" week in and week out! Too many sermons tend either to flagellate the congregation with moralisms or dabble in a kind of therapeutic psychobabble.

Meanwhile other worship leaders (both liturgists and musicians) often meander in other directions: wordiness, didacticism, or rank sentimentality. With such an atmosphere typical of much of our weekly preaching and worship, no wonder we can't really seem to get it together some Sunday mornings!

What makes the situation all the more ironic is the fact that so many tools for fixing the problem are already at hand. After all, we live in an age when many clergy and lay worship leaders have begun again to treasure the intimate relationship between preaching and worship.

In the move toward greater frequency of eucharistic celebration we reclaim the fundamental link between Word and table. With new orders of service for Sunday worship many denominations are reemphasizing the importance of proclamation and response. Even the increasing use of the lectionary betokens a greater respect for the value of preaching within the framework of the traditional, seasonal cycles of the Christian year. For all intents and purposes, our preaching and worship ought consistently to be scaling new heights together!

Yet something is amiss in our seeming paradise. Preaching has yet to rise to the new occasion. Granted, we are fortunate to live in a day of great homiletical innovation. New approaches to preaching have proliferated as in no other time. Still, in many ways people in the pews from Sunday to Sunday have not yet really benefitted from this sea change in homiletic theory.

So perhaps the problem goes deeper than just what sermons can be. Maybe the difficulty we face is an inability to discern what preaching can do.

An Alternative: Preaching toward Doxology

The chief end of humanity (to paraphrase the Westminster Shorter Catechism) is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Perhaps it is now time to claim that doxological destiny as a proper end for preaching!

To do this will not only broaden the choices available to preachers on Sunday morning but also provide a desperately needed point of contact between our preaching and worship practice. Certainly preaching ought never be reduced to any one aspect. Yet with a doxological end in view, the sermon can clearly become an even more powerful act of worship to God. Preaching toward doxology simply reclaims a lost part of our homiletical repertoire -- a part that lends itself to integration in worship.