Sermon Illustrations on Legacy

Christopher Wren spent decades rebuilding London after the fire of 1666, and St Paul's Cathedral is the largest thing he left. He is buried in its crypt under a plain slab. The Latin inscription on the wall nearby ends with a line that has become famous: reader, if you seek his monument, look around you. The man has almost no memorial. The building is the memorial.

Sourcing: Documented: the inscription in St Paul's Cathedral, composed by Wren's son, includes "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice". Wren died in 1723 and is buried in the crypt.

The story is told that Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune from explosives, opened a newspaper one morning and found his own obituary printed by mistake after his brother's death, under a headline calling him a merchant of death. He is said to have been so appalled at how he would be remembered that he redrew his will and founded the prizes that now carry his name. The prizes are real. The newspaper is the part nobody has produced.

Sourcing: Widely retold and poorly sourced. Nobel's brother Ludvig died in 1888 and Nobel's will establishing the prizes was signed in 1895, but no copy of the premature obituary or its "merchant of death" headline has been produced. Tell it as a story, not as a fact, and say so.

Edward Kimball taught a Sunday school class in Boston and worried about a barely literate young man in it who worked at his uncle's shoe shop. He went down to the shop, found him in the back among the stock, and spoke to him about Christ. The young man was Dwight Moody, who became the most prominent evangelist of his generation. Preachers usually extend this into a chain running through several later names to Billy Graham. The first link is on record; the chain is a construction, and it grows longer every time it is told.

Sourcing: Moody's conversion through his Sunday school teacher Edward Kimball in 1855 is attested in Moody biographies, though Kimball's own accounts of the conversation differ in detail from the versions preachers tell. The longer "chain of influence" to later evangelists is a devotional construction: do not present it as documented.

A rabbinic story tells of Honi, who saw a man planting a carob tree and asked how long it would take to bear fruit. Seventy years, the man said. Honi asked whether he expected to be alive to eat from it. The man answered that he had found carob trees in the world when he arrived, planted by those before him, and he was planting for those coming after. The story is old, and it is a story rather than a report.

Sourcing: From the Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit 23a: a rabbinic narrative of Honi the Circle-Drawer, not a historical incident. Cite it as an old Jewish story and it is entirely safe to use.

Writing to Timothy, Paul says he is reminded of the sincere faith that lived first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, and is now in him. That is the whole account. Two women are named, no achievements are listed, and neither of them appears anywhere else doing anything notable. Between them they produced the man Paul left in charge of Ephesus.

Josiah is one of the great reformers. He finds the neglected book of the law, tears his clothes, purges the shrines, restores the Passover, and 2 Kings says there was no king before or after him like him. He dies at Megiddo, and within about twenty years the reforms are gone, his sons have undone the work, and Jerusalem falls. The text does not treat his faithfulness as wasted. It simply refuses to pretend that it secured the outcome.

Imagine a mason on a cathedral, carving the back of a stone that will face the inside of a wall: a surface that will be sealed in when the next course goes on, and that no human being will look at again. A visitor asks him why he is bothering with a face nobody will see. He says he can see it. And, he adds, so can God.

Sourcing: Offered here as an invented story. Versions of it are told as fact about various medieval cathedrals with no supporting record; if you prefer that framing, say plainly that it is a legend.

What is a good illustration about legacy?

Wren's epitaph in St Paul's, if you seek his monument, look around you, because it locates a life's legacy in something other people live inside. The carob tree story from the Talmud does the same job for intergenerational work.

Where do preachers find illustrations?

For legacy, the richest source is your own congregation's history: the person who started the food bank, the family who kept the building open through a bad decade. Local, checkable, and it makes the sermon impossible to have preached anywhere else.

How many illustrations should a sermon have?

Two or three. At a funeral, one carefully chosen image plus the details of the person's actual life is usually the whole budget.

Do I need to cite an illustration's source?

Yes, and this theme is a good example of why. The Nobel obituary and the Kimball-to-Graham chain are both told constantly as fact and neither is documented in the form preachers use, so a clause like "the story is told that" is doing real work.

How do I preach legacy at a funeral without flattering the dead?

Say specific true things. Two concrete habits of the person are more honouring, and more believable, than a paragraph of general praise that could apply to anyone.

What do I say to someone whose children have left the faith?

Josiah. His reform was thorough, genuine, and undone within a generation, and the text still calls him faithful. That separates a parent's obedience from an outcome they were never able to control.