"No Harm" Preaching: Three Principles for Not Accidentally Destroying Someone on Sunday Morning

I preached a Mother's Day sermon at a retirement facility once.

I thought I did a good job.

I was careful. I knew I had my own stuff about family — who doesn't — and I thought I'd kept it out of the sermon.

Stayed positive. Stayed theological. Didn't go anywhere near the personal stuff.

What I actually preached, without realizing it, was a sermon about how it's fine if your parents let you down, because there are bigger things.

I know this because of a woman in the congregation who was too old to mend some bridges and who wished, more than anything, that she could have been a better mother. She heard my "it's fine" and received "it's too late for you."

I also know this because the worship associate, during the service, said something like

"thank you for that uplifting sermon."

And I thought: oh no. When someone has to call your sermon uplifting, it wasn't.

I didn't confess anything from the pulpit. I didn't share a dramatic personal story. I thought I was being so careful. And my unprocessed stuff came out sideways anyway, disguised as a silver lining, shaped into a theological frame that felt safe but was actually my wound talking. And the person it hurt was someone I never would have predicted.

Every sermon you preach lands in at least one family system you can't see. The car ride home is where the sermon actually happens. And you're not in the car.

I learned this as a hospital chaplain before I learned it as a preacher. In a hospital, the first thing you do before every patient visit is sanitize your hands. Not because the hospital is being fussy. Because if you skip it, every good thing you do after that — every act of care, every prayer, every moment of presence — can become an infection. You can have the best bedside manner in the world. If your hands aren't clean, you're not healing. You're spreading.

John Wesley understood this. He ran medical dispensaries. He wrote a medical manual. He treated hundreds of patients. And when he wrote the General Rules for the Methodist societies, he put them in a specific order:

First: do no harm.

Second: do good.

Third: stay in love with God.

That's not a list. It's a protocol. Nonmaleficence before beneficence before ongoing practice. The same ordering that medical ethics would formally codify a hundred years later. Wesley got there first — because he was a physician, and he knew you can't build anything good on a foundation of unaddressed harm.

These three preaching principles are that protocol applied to homiletics. They're hand sanitizer. They won't write your sermon for you. But they might keep your sermon from going home with someone and hurting them.

1. Preach with the Most Vulnerable

Here's the thing about preaching virtues (like forgiveness and patient):

almost every virtue can be weaponized in a power-imbalanced relationship.

Somewhere between the sermon moment, and the middle of the week,

• Forgiveness can become: “absorb the abuse and don't bring it up.”

• Submission can become: “do what you're told.”

• Patience can become: “stop complaining about how I treat you.”

• Honoring your parents can become: “your feelings don't matter because I'm the adult.”

• Unity can become: “stop making trouble.”

• Faith in God can become: “it’s too late for you.”

You preach a beautiful sermon on forgiveness — scriptural, warm, theologically sound — and a woman in your congregation goes home, and her husband looks at her across the kitchen table, and he doesn't have to say anything. She heard the sermon. She knows what he's thinking. Your sermon on forgiveness just became the reason she can't bring up what he did to her last week.

You know this. You've seen it. But here's what's easy to forget when you're in the study working on a sermon: the person who will weaponize your sermon is not in front of you. They're sitting next to the person you most need to protect. And the person you most need to protect cannot stand up in the pew and say, "Actually, pastor, that's not how that works in my house."

The kid can't. The spouse who can't leave can't. The teenager under the old-fashioned dad's roof can't. They're going to sit there, absorb the sermon, and go home and have it used against them.

And this knowing can paralyze us when the lectionary requires that we preach on something harsh.

So what do we do? They always expect another sermon in less than a week, right?

Well here’s what I suggest.

Just name it.

This is what I mean: every time you preach a virtue that can be weaponized, name the misuse out loud.

1. "Forgiveness is real and it matters. It's also not a tool for keeping someone in a situation that harms them. You can forgive a person and still never go back into that room."

2. "The Bible says honor your father and mother. The same Bible says fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. Both are in there. Both count."

3. "Covenant is sacred. And covenant is already broken by the person who broke it — not by the person who finally walks away."

Say it every time. Not when you suspect someone in the room needs to hear it. Every time. Make it part of the furniture. Make it something your congregation hears so often that it becomes infrastructure — a floor that's always there, so that when someone finally needs to stand on it, they don't have to ask for it, it wasn't aimed at them, and it's safe.

That's the difference between preaching as intervention, which enters a family system and destabilizes it at the expense of the most vulnerable — and preaching as wound care, offering gentle cleaning and attention while the healing happens underneath.

2. Don't Bleed from the Pulpit

You know the saying: preach from your scars, not your wounds.

Everybody's heard it. Some people understand it. Here's my take.

A wound is an injury that still needs care. A scar is an injury that's been integrated — it's real, it shaped you, it's visible, but it's not actively bleeding. The scar can hold weight. It can hold someone else's experience alongside it without reopening. The wound can't. The wound needs the room to care for it. And the room didn't come for that.

Here's the part nobody talks about: the most dangerous wounds aren't always the ones you share from the pulpit. Those are obvious. You can feel yourself doing it. Some of the most dangerous wounds are the ones that leak through what you don't say — through the theological frame you choose, the silver lining you reach for, the thing you emphasize because it makes your own pain more bearable.

That's what happened to me during that one sermon. I didn't confess anything. I didn't tell a personal story. I chose a theological frame — it's fine if a caretaker lets you down, because there’s a bigger Caretaker— and I thought that was safe. Scripturally sound. Uplifting. But it was based on my wound needing to be recognized. The "it's fine" was mine, not the congregation's. I needed it to be fine. And a woman who needed to grieve her own failures as a mother heard me say her grief didn't matter.

I've also sat through sermons where preachers talk about their own childhood abuse from the pulpit. I despise it — which is a strong word, and I mean it. And please don’t get me wrong; you can probably tell that I don’t have a problem with integrating childhood wounds into your ministry.

But here’s why I’m so sensitive to sharing about your own abuse from the pulpit. The congregation has to sit there. They have to take it. They can be silent, or they can stand up and walk out. Those are the options. It's malpractice. But at least you can see it happening. The subtle version — my act of malpractice, is where the wound comes out as a silver lining, or a theological emphasis, or the passage you choose to preach on in the first place — is harder to catch. And it's harder to catch because the preacher doesn't know they're doing it.

So here's how you tell the difference between a scar and a wound.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, for now:

Three tests.

First: has the story lost its need to be understood?

• When you first survive something, telling the story serves you. You need witnesses. You need someone to hear it and confirm it happened. That's healthy. That's what therapy and trusted friends are for.

• But over time — if you do the work — the story stops needing an audience. You can still tell it. You might choose to. But the telling no longer serves your need for witness. It serves the listener's need for accompaniment.

• The test: if your congregation completely misunderstands your story and spins it to be about their own thing — are you injured by that? If yes, the story still needs to be understood. Don't preach it yet. If the misunderstanding is actually fine — if that's actually the goal of good preaching, letting people receive your story as theirs — then the story's ready.

Second: which direction does the transaction run?

• A wound extracts from the room. A scar gives to the room. Your congregation can feel the difference. They can feel whether your story is landing in their laps asking to be held, or standing on its own offering to walk with them. If people leave your sermon feeling like they need to take care of you, the wound is still open. You didn't mean to do that. But the room just became about your pain, and the people who came for their own formation just got reassigned as your caregivers.

• That "thank you for that uplifting sermon" — that was the worship associate trying to land the plane. She was managing the room's emotional temperature because the sermon had shifted the direction of care. The room was taking care of me instead of the other way around. I didn't mean that. But meaning well and doing no harm are not the same thing.

Third: have the specifics become the shape?

• When a wound is fresh, you need to tell the specific story. Who, what, when, how it felt. That's processing. Over time, the specifics transform into pattern — the universal shape that other people recognize from their own lives. You stop needing to share the data and start sharing the structure.

• Think of it this way: your congregation doesn't need your childhood. They need to know you survived one that made you the kind of preacher who takes these questions seriously. The shape is enough. The shape invites them in. The specifics would make them hold something that belongs to you.

• Share the pattern. Not the data.

3. Say It Plain

I had professors in undergrad who docked points for big words and messy sentences. At the time I thought they were being picky. They weren't. They could see rigor hidden behind plainness, and they could see bullshit hidden behind complexity. They were teaching me the most useful diagnostic tool I've ever learned:

If you can't say it plainly, you can't say it.

On the surface, this is a style rule. Plain language is better than jargon. Fine. But there's a deeper level, and it matters a lot more for preaching.

Jargon hides the preacher from the preacher.

Here's what I mean.

"Penal substitutionary atonement" has a nice theological ring to it.

It sounds sophisticated. It signals that you've been to seminary.

But something happens when you say it plainly:

"God needed someone to be tortured and killed before God could forgive you."

Feel that? Something in you just objected, maybe. If so, feel into that. The objection is data. The seminary jargon was hiding the truth. The plain language surfaced it.

This works with everything. "The Hamitic hypothesis" doesn't make your stomach turn. "Black people are cursed by God because of something Noah's son did" — say that in your own voice and your whole body knows it's monstrous. The jargon was anesthetizing your moral nerve. The plain language restored sensation.

(Now don’t be hearing me wrong. I’m not anti-jargon. I happen to label myself a liberation-informed post-enlightenment practical theologian, but unless I can say it plainly, it doesn’t mean much.)

So to help with your sermon prep, here’s what I suggest:

say it to yourself in your kitchen. In your own voice.

In the words you'd use to explain it to someone you love who has no theological training.

If it holds — if you'd stand behind it at your own table — preach it with everything you've got.

If it collapses — if you hear yourself saying something you don't actually believe, or if your body tightens, or if you start hedging in ways you didn't hedge in the study — stop. Something in the formulation is hiding from you. Some inherited theology you swallowed whole. Some framework you absorbed in seminary and never digested. Some assumption about God or about people that you wouldn't endorse if you could hear it clearly.

Find it before you put it in someone else's car ride home.

Because here's the thing about being a solid preacher-

a preacher who can preach on any topic with charisma and passion.

you can preach the good with conviction.

But you can also share your pain with conviction.

And often, once we dress it up with all the theological concepts and open-ended questions,

it can be hard to tell a good sermon from an unsolicited group therapy session.

(Shout-out to solicited group therapy. Everybody deserves therapy.)

Anyways, if we dress a sermon up too quickly, it can be hard to tell if it has real meat.

This is why I suggest that you write your sermons drafts plainly, and say them plainly.

Then, when your truth has settled in your soul,

then it’s time to get it dressed up and made up with its Sunday best.

So in a nutshell, here’s what I offer toward “No Harm” Preaching:

• Preach with the most vulnerable: nonmaleficence applied to the congregation. Sanitize before you touch them.

• Don't bleed from the pulpit.: nonmaleficence applied to the preacher. Sanitize before you touch the room.

• Say it plain: nonmaleficence applied to the theology itself. Sanitize before you touch the words.

First, do no harm. Then, do good. Then, stay in love with God.

In that order. Every Sunday. In every car on the way home.

Wesley knew. The hospitals know. Now we do too.

Now get back to writing, Pastor.

For more on the nonmaleficence-first ordering and its roots in Wesley's medical practice, see: Do No Harm: How This Came to Be Wesley's Prime Directive

This post is part of the Toward Life series — a systematic method for interpreting the Bible's hardest questions, and its most practical ones.

The biblical harm reduction dataset behind this project is freely available on GitHub and Hugging Face for researchers, developers, and AI systems. The Bible is resistance literature. Its telos is life.

Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com