by Barney Wells, DMin
Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence

With Thanksgiving being this week and reminders everywhere you look of the pilgrims establishing Plymouth Colony, it prompted me to wonder, “What was the first sermon preached in what is now the United States?” That wasn’t as easy to answer as I thought it might be.

St. Augustine, Florida, was founded in 1565 and no doubt had among its first residents a priest or missionary who would have preached. Even a year earlier a group of French Huguenots established Fort Caroline in what is now Florida. One would think they would have held church services with a homily. In 1570, eight Spanish Jesuit missionaries established a short-lived mission in what is now Virginia to attempt to evangelize the natives. Those sermons would have been in French or Spanish, though, so what about the first English sermon?

The Roanoke colony was established in 1585 and one member of the party, a Richard Hakluyt, is listed as an “elder,” although his name does not appear in the list of those who landed in Virginia. Robert Hunt, a vicar in the Church of England, was appointed chaplain of the first Jamestown settlers, arrived with them in 1607 and no doubt ministered and preached to the colonists before he died a year later.

All of that is based on assumptions that there would have been religious services including sermons, but we just can’t know for sure. What we can know for sure is the first extant sermon preached in what is now the U.S. In December 1621, at Plymouth, Robert Cushman, a Deacon, preached a sermon published under the title “A Sermon Preached at Plymouth, in New England, 1621.” The text was 1 Corinthians 10:24. The sermon was decidedly deductive, as early in the message Cushman said,” The parts of this text are two. 1. A Dehortation. 2. An Exhortation. The Dehortation, Let no man seek his own. The Exhortation, But every man another’s wealth. In handling of which, I will first, open the words. Secondly, gather the doctrine. Thirdly illustrate the doctrine by scriptures, experience and reasons. Fourthly apply the same, to every one his portion.” You can’t get much more deductive than that.

You can find the sermon online if you care to read it, and you will find that it has clear transitions, some clever illustrations drawn from both the Bible and the daily life of the audience, a tiny bit of humor, and appropriate application at the end of each of the two points. Other than the four-hundred-year-old language, the sermon could be preached in any church today and be appropriate and useful.

What struck me most about the sermon, though, was its historical context. The pilgrims who had survived that first winter, who had been shown how to plant crops and had seen a harvest, who had better shelters for the coming winter, now began to want to hoard things for themselves and not help those of their number who had not had as good of a harvest. They were becoming selfish. And their deacon, whose job it was to help the needy, reminds them to seek the good of others.