Someone has taken the time and trouble to collect and edit the sermons of one of the most celebrated pulpit-pounders of the ’70s, William Sloane Coffin. I found this review in the online edition of the Christian Century:

John Ames, 76-year-old Congregationalist minister and narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s stunning novel Gilead, keeps his old sermons in boxes in the attic. “Pretty nearly my whole life’s work is in those boxes,” he says. “I’m a little afraid of them.”

I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment, really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night thinking, That’s what I should have said.

Old sermons a foretaste of the Last Judgment? What thoughtful preacher would disagree, would not feel a tinge of fear over the possibility of pawing through past homilies, would not dread the remorse of discovering in their yellowing pages that, to paraphrase the old prayer, we had “said those things we ought not to have said and left unsaid those things we ought to have said”?

To be sure, in much of Christian thought, sermons are viewed as bearers of the eternal Word, but they are also ephemeral literary objects composed on the fly, products of the passing circumstance and the fleeting moment. To pull an aging sermon out of the files is precarious, something like opening up a long-forgotten photo album. One could be moved and inspired, but one could also be found wearing a homiletical poodle skirt or bell bottoms. (In my own files is a fading manuscript in which I callowly exegete lyrics from Jesus Christ Superstar with all the awestruck reverence due the servant songs in Isaiah. I will leave that one to molder in the box.)

Westminster John Knox has figuratively gone into the attic of the late William Sloane Coffin and published a massive anthology of sermons he preached at Riverside Church in New York in the 1970s and ’80s (over 150 sermons in this first volume, with a second, equally hefty volume already on the shelves). Flush from the success of Credo, a beautifully edited collection of some of Coffin’s provocative quotations and memorable sermon quips, issued shortly before Coffin’s death in 2006, the publisher has returned with this riskier project. It’s one thing to present someone’s bons mots to the world, but the ups and downs of weekly parish preaching? How well can a full diet of any preacher’s craft stand up to scrutiny?

When it comes to Coffin, quite well. To read these sermons, some of them over 30 years old, is to be impressed all over again by what a singular, remarkable and consistently scintillating preacher Coffin was. As a public figure, Coffin tended to be seen in one light, as the swashbuckling, fast-talking, left-leaning social conscience of a nation. But here, through the steadily advancing frames of weekly sermons, a more complex, multifaceted picture of Coffin’s preaching gifts emerges. Here, to be sure, is Coffin the prophet, boldly taking on presidents, powers and principalities and bluntly announcing, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.” But here also is Coffin the pastor, comforting the congregation with the promise, “God will take care of us. She hears our prayers.” Here also is Coffin the dedicated parish minister, taking up the mundane but necessary task of urging the folks at Riverside to increase their stewardship pledges. And here is Coffin the heartfelt evangelist pleading with his hearers to look in repentance to Jesus, “who humbled himself that we might be exalted, who became poor that we might become enriched, who came to us that we might return to God.”

There’s much more, so visit the link. You might be surprised (I was) to find that he was a fan of G.K. Chesterton.