There are practical reasons why pastors use sermon illustrations. In preaching your pastor shares theology, insights from God’s Word, but we also know dry lectures aren’t effective in the pulpit. Illustrations give pew sitters a picture of the truth, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” And it’s easier to listen to an illustration than try to take in heavy theological teaching. Easier to preach too!
Sunday many pastors will preach on the temptation of Jesus. After He was baptized, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him” (Mark 2:12-13). Hmmm… How might I illustrate that?
Mars! Thursday NASA landed our fourth rover on the red, waterless planet. Talk about a wilderness! After a long journey, the rover “Perseverance” when through “seven minutes of terror,” NASA’s description for entering the Martian atmosphere, a dangerous time, the mission could end in disaster, and for those minutes of entry there is no communication. To the joy of everyone in mission control, Perseverance landed successfully and is in the wilderness. Hmmm… That might preach. Someone entering an alien, hostile world, “out in the wilderness.”
OK, good comparison but, as I asked my students yesterday, so what? How can that illustration help us in our here-and-now life and struggles? This is one of the hardest things about planning a sermon, trying to take a text into the hearer’s heart. In the 2015 movie, “The Martian,” an astronaut played by Matt Damon is stranded on Mars, few supplies, fated to death in that waterless place. Is that a picture of life on earth? For all the created goodness of Earth, so often life can be hostile, impersonal and evil forces all around and, akin to Matt Damon, without help here-and-now we’re fated to die?
When Perseverance landed, it sent back a photo. NASA tweeted the photo as if Perseverance had written it. “Hello, world. My first look at my forever home.” Is life in a hostile world, fated to die, your forever home? “And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.” You were baptized into the One who faced and overcame the forces of evil, first in the wilderness, and climactically at the cross and by His resurrection. Here-and-now, Jesus is our forever home. “Baptism promises and brings victory over death and the devil” (Martin Luther, “Large Catechism”). Water, Word, Perseverance.