Question 1: Did Jesus have to die for this sermon to make sense?

In an effort to be more than simply a snide, biting, cynical criticsm of preaching, our hope is to also put forward some legitimate, positive hopes for preaching. In short, we can not tell you what bad preaching is, if we can not agree on what good preaching would look like. Our series of questions will serve as the template we will use to grade sermons, and will give a ground to discuss and debate on. Likewise, these questions demonstrate that more often than not for us bad preaching is an issue of bad theology more than bad delivery. We all agree that the delivery of a sermon can certainly ruin a good sermon, but we also want to assert that the best delivery in the world doesn't make a bad sermon good.
We start these questions with, "Did Jesus have to die for this sermon to make sense?" This question is placed first because we genuinely believe this to be the single most important question regarding any “Christian” sermon. The phrasing of the question comes from a quote by William Willimon in a Modern Reformation article about six or seven years ago. We have been unable to track down the exact reference, and if any of you have it, feel free to send it our way. At the heart of this question is the crucial belief that the cross and resurrection mark center point of human history. It is in this cross and resurrection that Christians can begin to see the world anew and be recreated, faithful members of God’s kingdom. Preaching then, serves (at the very least) to tell the story of cross and resurrection over and over again. If the logic, the argument, or the big idea of the sermon all work without Jesus’ death and resurrection, then it is fundamentally not a good Christian sermon, and we will be forced to ridicule such a sermon.