When the late William Barclay was asked in a radio programme if he minded that some preachers reproduced as sermons his reflections on a passage contained in one of his commentaries in the famous Daily Study Bible series, he replied in his gravely voice: “No: that's why I wrote them”.
There are some legendary accounts of preachers borrowing the sermons of others. It is told that James S Stewart, whose advertised appearance in a pulpit in the nineteen fifties and sixties could guarantee queues forming long before the hour of public worship, once worshipped in a country church where he heard one of his own sermons preached, word for word. Shaking hands with the preacher at the door, Stewart gently asked him how long the sermon had taken him to prepare. “About four hours” came the reply. “That's interesting said Stewart, “it took me four days”.
When Harry Whitley, who was later to become minister of St Giles' Cathedral was a minister in Port Glasgow, he volunteered for service as a chaplain during the second World War. He had been an assistant to George MacLeod in Govan, but by the time the war started MacLeod had left the parish ministry to found the Iona Community, and so was free to preach in Whitley's Port Glasgow Church, as it happens on the Sunday after a divinity student had conducted worship there, and preached, word for word, one of George MacLeod's sermons, which MacLeod chose to preach the following Sunday After he had conducted worship, the leader of the Iona Community was somewhat taken aback to be told in the vestry afterwards that it was disgraceful that a preacher of his stature needed to steal a sermon from a divinity student!
My favourite (and most appalling) example of a preacher blatantly using another preacher's sermon is told with some restrained anger by Bill Shaw, formerly professor of theology at the University of St Andrews . In a volume of sermons by a range of preachers, published many years ago now, there is a very powerful sermon for Palm Sunday by Bill Shaw. Its point is that Palm Sunday illustrates the difference between authority and authoritarianism, between emotion and emotionalism, and between triumph and triumphalism. One Palm Sunday Bill was driving to a church where he intended to preach this sermon to the waiting congregation. Turning on his car radio he was rather upset to hear his sermon being delivered to listeners to Radio Scotland without acknowledgment by another preacher. He found himself hastily cobbling together another sermon lest, like George MacLeod, he was accused of stealing his own work!
Of course there was a time when nobody expected a preacher to produce his own work, as Sir Roger de Coverley testified. Recently, however, I came across reference to the old practice of making it clear whose sermon was going to be read, and then reading it to the congregation. The journalist Libby Purves quoted from Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Living History , Mrs Clinton's experience after her husband has finally admitted to her the truth about the Lewinsky affair, and she goes to Martha's Vineyard on holiday and looks up at the night sky and thinks about navigating through life. And she remembers her old youth minister Don Jones reading out a Paul Tillich sermon. “Its premise is how sin and grace exist through life in constant interplay; neither is possible without the other. The mystery of grace is that you cannot look for it. ‘Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,' wrote Tillich. ‘It happens or it does not happen.' Grace happens. Until it did, my main job was to put one foot in front of the other and get through another day,” wrote Hillary Clinton.
In the season of Advent we are often reminded of the “sermon” which Jesus preached in Nazareth, applying to himself the prophecy of Isaiah about being anointed to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed: a sermon which Isaiah preached on a passage from Leviticus Chapter 25 about the jubilee year. So I suppose there is some kind of dominical authority for preaching someone else's sermon! What's the phrase? “There is no copyright in the Kingdom of Heaven ”?