The preacher and sermon as sacrament

“… He [the preacher] is to preach to the Church from the Gospel so that with the Church he may preach the Gospel to the world. He is so to preach to the church that he shall also preach from the church. That is to say, he must be a sacrament to the Church, (p79) that with the Church he may become a missionary to the world.

… The preacher’s place in the Church is sacramental. It is not sacerdotal, but it is sacramental. He mediates the word to the Church from faith to faith, from his faith to theirs, from one satge of their common faith to another…. He is a living element in Christ’s hands (broken, if need be) for the distribution and increment of Grace. He is laid on the altar of the Cross…[he is to feed men]” (p80)

…

“We spend our polemic upon the Mass, and fitly enough in proper place. But the Catholic form of worship will always have a vast advantage over ours so long as people come away from its central act with a sense of something done in the spirit world, while they leave ours with the sense only of something said to the present world. In true preaching, as in a true sacrament, more is done than said…. He [the preacher] is a man of action. He is among the men who do things. That is why I call him a sacramental man, not merely an expository, declaratory man. In a sacrament is there not something done, not merely shown, not merely recalled? It is no mere memorial…. (p81) in a sacrament there is something effected.” (p82)

The cross the real sacrament; Christ the actor.  

“The preacher, in reproducing this Gospel word of God, prolongs Christ’s sacramental work. The real presence of Christ crucified is what makes preaching.” (p82)

“All teaching about the truth as it is in Jesus culminates in the preaching of the truth which is Jesus, the self-reproduction of the word of reconciliation in the Cross. Every true sermon, therefore, is a sacramental time and act. It is God’s Gospel act reasserting itself in detail. The preacher’s word, when he preaches the gospel and not only delivers a sermon, is an effective deed, charged with blessing or with judgement. We eat and drink judgement to ourselves as we hear…. It [preaching] is a sacramental act, done together with the community in the name and power of Christ’s redeeming act and our common faith. It has the real presence of the active Word whose creation it is.” (p83)

Known to be real by faith (p83)

“To be effective our preaching must be sacramental. It must be an act prolonging the Great Act [of Christ and specially his saving death], mediating it, and conveying it. Its energy and authority is that of the Great Act.” (p84)

The preacher is merely the sacramental element, the power is not his (p84-5)

“Nothing but the Word made Sacrament can make a Sacrament out of elements, and keep it in its proper place.” (p85)

Objective power, sermons as life giving (p85) 

P.T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind: The Lyman Beecher Lecture on Preaching, Yale Univerity, 1907 (Hodder and Stoughton, MCMVII)